"Just after I left college I made application through some parties at Washington for a foreign consulate. While I was waiting for the application to be passed on (it was finally unsuccessful), I came up here to visit my uncle, who was the rector of this parish. He was a widower, without any children, and the church was his hobby. It is a queer little affair, something like the old field-kirks or chapels of ease in some parts of England. It was built partly by my uncle and partly by a few New York families who have country places here, and who use it in the summer. This is all glebe land," he said, indicating, with a sweep of his hand, the twilight fields below the house sloping down toward the faintly glimmering river. "My uncle had a sort of prescription or lien by courtesy on the place. There's not much salary to speak of, but he had a nice plum of his own, and lived inexpensively. Well, that first summer I moped about here, got acquainted with the summer residents, read a good deal of the time, took long walks into the interior,--a rough, aboriginal country, where they still talk Dutch,--and waited for an answer to my application. When it came at last, I fretted about it considerably, and was for starting off in search of something else. I had an idea of getting a place as botanist on Coprolite's survey of the Nth parallel, and I wrote to New Haven for letters. I thought it would be a good outdoor, horseback sort of life, and might lead to something better. But that fell through, and meanwhile the dominie kept saying: 'My dear fellow, don't be in too much of a hurry to begin. Young America goes so fast nowadays that it is like the dog in the hunting story,--a _leetle_ bit ahead of the hare. Why not stay here for awhile and ripen--ripen?' The dominie had a good library,--all my old college favorites, old Burton, old Fuller, and Browne, etc., and it seemed the wisest course to follow his advice for the present. But in the fall my uncle had a slight stroke of paralysis, and really needed my help for awhile; so that what had been a somewhat aimless life, considered as loafing, became all at once a duty. At first he had a theological student, from somewhere across the river, come to stay in the house and read service for him on Sundays. But he was a ridiculous animal, whose main idea of a minister's duties was to intone the responses in a sonorous manner. He used to practice this on week days in his surplice, and I remember especially the cadence with which he delivered the sentence: 'Yea, like a broken _wall_ shall ye be and as a ruined _hedge_.'