I deplore the necessity, but I will be pardoned if I pause here to become somewhat personal, to explain who and what I am and how I came to be a pastor in Appleboro. To explain myself, then, I shall have to go back to a spring morning long ago, when I was not a poor parish priest, no, nor ever dreamed of becoming one, but was young Armand De Rancé, a flower-crowned and singing pagan, holding up to the morning sun the chalice of spring; joyous because I was of a perishable beauty, dazzled because life gave me so much, proud of an old and honored name, secure in ancestral wealth, loving laughter so much that I looked with the raised eyebrow and the twisted lip at austerities and prayers. If ever I reflected at all, it was to consider that I had nothing to pray for, save that things might ever remain as they were: that I should remain me, myself, young Armand De Rancé, loving and above all beloved of that one sweet girl whom I loved with all my heart. Young, wealthy, strong, beautiful, loving, and beloved! To hold all that, crowded into the hollow of one boyish hand! Oh, it was too much! I do not think I had ever felt my own happiness so exquisitely as I did upon that day which was to see the last of it. I was to go a-Maying with her who had ever been as my own soul, since we were children playing together. So I rode off to her home, an old house set in its walled inclosure by the river. At the door somebody met me, calling me by my name. I thought at first it had been a stranger. It was her mother. And while I stood staring at her changed face she took me by the hand and began to whisper in my ear ... what I had to know. Blindly, like one bludgeoned on the head, I followed her into a darkened room, and saw what lay there with closed eyes and hair still wet from the river into which my girl had cast herself. No, I cannot put into words just what had happened; indeed, I never really knew all. There was no public scandal, only great sorrow. But I died that morning. The young and happy part of me died, and, only half-alive I walked about among the living, dragging about with me the corpse of what had been myself. Crushed by this horrible burden which none saw but I, I was blind to the beauties of earth and deaf to the mercies of heaven, until a great Voice called me to come out of the sepulcher of myself; and I came--alive again, and free, of a strong spirit, but with youth gone from it. Out of the void of an irremediable disaster God had called me to His service, chastened and humbled. "_Who is weak and I am not weak? who is offended and I burn not?_" And yet, although I knew my decision was irrevocable, I did not find it easy to tell my mother. Then: "Little mother of my heart," I blurted, "my career is decided. I have been called. I am for the Church."