The bell ceased, and the bell-ringer, sexton, precentor, beadle—whatever he was—having made the rope fast where it hung on the gable outside, came in and took his place at the desk under the pulpit, and the Psalm was given out— “I to the hills will lift mine eyes, From whence doth come mine aid, My safety cometh from the Lord, Who heav’n and earth hath made.” But the only person who attempted to sing was the factotum at the clerk’s desk, and he rendered the entire Psalm alone from beginning to end, in slow, loud, wavering, twangy tones that took small account of a semi-tone higher or lower, and left the tune, when he had finished, still a matter of conjecture to the uninitiated. As the service proceeded a few more people came in, dropped into pews here and there, and stared at the unwonted sight of a lovely English face and fresh London millinery. But when Macpherson rose, and gave out his text, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” reading it twice or thrice in his curious foreign accent, every eye was fixed upon his face, and each man placed his arms on the table or shelf in front of him and bent forward to listen. It was a thin, plain face, with a low, broad brow, high cheekbones and irregular features, that showed against the dull light-blue of the old pulpit; but the dark eyes lit up with intense eagerness as he leaned forward to preach in his fashion the old, oft-repeated lesson, and every line of the slight, wiry figure was instinct with energy and life. His sermon was short, and his language strong and simple—so simple that to at least one listener it had the force almost of a new revelation. The hearers could not know what that simplicity cost him, though some of them might have remembered a time when they could not understand him; there was nothing to tell how each plain, homely phrase came out victorious over eloquent words and symbolic imagery and high intellectual reasonings that were always thronging there within him; nothing to reveal how hard he was trying to live in them and out of himself, that he might realise their need, and feel how the message he so burned to deliver might best wake echoes in those poor dull hearts that were so slow to respond. Very earnestly he set forth the nothingness of all the things that “grossly close us in” and bar the way that leads to life. Passionately he pleaded for the great single purpose that opens and makes plain that way and guides unerringly the feet that find it.