Thus, insensibly, do vanity and self-opinion, mingle with our highest duties. Had the Domine, satisfied with the testimony of a good conscience, gone on in the exercise of his duty, and been above allowing little personal resentments to mingle with his zeal for what he thought right, he might have felt himself far above an insult of this kind; but he found to his cost, that “a habitation giddy and unsure hath he, that buildeth on the fickle heart” of the unsteady, wavering multitude. ------- CHAP. XXXVI. Return of madame—The Domine leaves his people—Fulfilment of his predictions. MADAME now returned to town with the colonel, and finding this general disorder and division of sentiments with regard to the pastor, as well as to the adoption of new modes, endeavoured, with her usual good sense, to moderate and to heal. She was always of opinion that the increase of wealth should be accompanied with a proportionate progress in refinement and intelligence; but she had a particular dislike to peoples forsaking a respectable plainness of dress and manners, for mere imperfect imitation and inelegant finery. She knew too well the progress of society to expect, that, as it grew wealthy and numerous, it would retain its pristine purity; but then she preferred a gradual abolition of old habits, that people, as they receded from their original modes of thinking and living, might rather become simply elegant than tawdrily fine; and though she all along wished, in every possible way, to promote the comfort of the brave men to whom the country owed so much, she by no means thought an indiscriminate admission of those strangers among the youth of the place, so unpractised in the ways of the world, an advisable measure: she was particularly displeased with the person in whose house the colonel of the regiment lodged, for so entirely domesticating a showy stranger, of whose real character he knew so little.—Liberal and judicious in her views, she did not altogether approve the austerity of the Domine’s opinions, nor the vehemence of his language; and, as a Christian, she still less approved his dejection and concern at the neglect or rudeness of a few thoughtless young persons. In vain the colonel and madame soothed and cheered him with counsel and with kindness; night and day he mused on the imagined insult; nor could the joint efforts of the most respectable inhabitants prevent his heart from being corroded with the sense of imagined unkindness. At length he took the resolution of leaving those people so dear to him, to visit his friends in Holland, promising to return in a short time, whenever his health was restored, and his spirits more composed. A Dutch ship happened about this time to touch at New-York, on board of which the Domine embarked; but as the vessel belonging to Holland was not expected