“Mrs. Gilchrist appeased my anxiety by saying that yours was a passing indisposition. I was the more solicitous because I have suffered all day from the onslaught of my constitutional enemy, ‘the rash’ and crucial headache which my mother gave me. It is more than malady. It is _affliction_! requiring pagan fortitude and Christian resignation. There is some occult connection between it and the course of the natural sun in the heavens. It seized me this morning with the rising of the god of day and left me at the going down of the same. Mrs. Wayt will have it that it is the penalty for much study which, if not weariness to the flesh, occasionally revenges itself in neuralgic pangs. I know no fatigue while the oracular rage of composition is upon me. Last night it _possessed_ me! I wrote the entire sermon to which you listened this morning between the hours of half-past nine Saturday night and four o’clock this morning. In all that time I did not leave my desk. The thunder-storm wrought strange, glorious excitement in my brain. It was as if seven thunders uttered their voices to the ears of my spirit.” The Rev. Mr. Wayt prodded holes in the turf with his cane while speaking, holding it in his right hand almost at arm’s length, in a straight line from his body. His face showed chalky-white in the moon rays, his brows and hair very black; his eyes glittered, the smile upon his thin, wide-lipped mouth was apparent in the clearing radiance. He was disposed to be affably loquacious to the heir of a rich parishioner, and the pastor’s “influence with young men” was one of his specialties. This important member of an important class did not interrupt him, and the intent expression of his figure—his back was to the moon—was pleasantly provocative to continued eloquence. “The Sabbath has been superb—truly superb!” resumed the orator, pulling out the cane after an unusual artesian feat in jabbing it into the earth. “I could think of nothing as I looked out at daybreak upon the brightening face of nature but Mrs. Barbauld’s ‘rose that’s newly washed by the shower.’ My spirit put on wings to meet the new morning. I said, aloud, in a sort of divine transport: ‘This is the day the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it!’” “Do you ever preach extemporaneously, Mr. Wayt?” asked March. The sentence passed his lips almost unawares. In his perplexity and disdain, he spoke at random. He could not stand here all night, the victim of the modern Coleridge. He recollected, while the flowing periods went over him, that the Rev. Percy’s admirers likened him to the long-winded poet. The girl of his heart _in esse_ and of his home _in posse_ might be Mr. Wayt’s wife’s sister, but Mr. Wayt himself was an imposing liar and hypocrite, who disgraced the coat on his back. The sooner she was removed from his house the better. He credited poor Tony with more sense than he was reputed to possess, in that he doubted, inferentially, his employer’s powers as an exorcist.