"It is a lovely plant--a _lovely_ plant, indeed!" rejoined the minister, for a moment setting down his glass to wipe his brow. "I remember now detecting the same fragrance when I watered my horse at that spring. But I did not dream that it--I wonder--" he broke off, taking up his glass--"that its virtues are not more widely apprehended. I have never heard that an acceptable beverage might be made from it." "Not every one can make a mint julep as Clem can," said his hostess. A moist and futile splutter from the bottom of the minister's glass was his only reply. He set the glass back on the table with a pleasant speculation showing in his eyes. The talk became again animated. Chiefly the minister talked, and his hostess found him most companionable. "Let me offer you another julep," she said, after a little, noting that his eyes had swept the empty glass with a chastened blankness. The minister let her. "If it would not be troubling you--really? The heat is excessive, and I find that the mint, simple herb though it be, is strangely salutary." The minister was a man of years and weight and worth. He possessed a reliant simplicity that put him at once close to those he met. Of these, by his manner, he asked all: confidence without reserve, troubles, doubts, distresses, material or otherwise. And this manner of his prevailed. The hearts of his people opened to him as freely as his own opened to receive them. He was a good man and, partly by reason of this ingenuous, unsuspicious mind, an invaluable instrument of grace. When he had talked to Miss Caroline through the second julep,--digressing only to marvel briefly again that the properties of mint should so long have been Nature's own secret in Little Arcady,--telling her his joys, his griefs, his interests, which were but the joys and griefs and interests of his people, he wrought a spell upon her so that she in turn became confiding. She was an Episcopalian. Her line had been born Episcopalians since a time whereof no data were obtainable; and this was, of course, not a condition to meddle with in late life, even if one's mind should grow consenting. For that matter, Miss Caroline would be frank and pretend to no change of mind. She was an old woman and fixed. She could not at this day free herself of a doubtless incorrect notion that the outside churches--meaning those not Episcopal--had been intended for people other than her own family and its offshoots. Clem had once been a Baptist, and it was true that he was now a Methodist. He had told her that his new religion was distinguished from the old by being "dry religion". But these were intricacies with which a woman of Miss Caroline's years could not be expected to entangle herself. This she would say, however, that during her residence in Little Arcady she would fling aside the prejudice of a lifetime and worship each Sabbath at the minister's Methodist church.