Holding as he did such puritanical ideas, it is not to be wondered that he viewed with bitter hostility the coming of an Episcopal clergyman to West Salem. He had offered no objection when Samuel Marsden, who owned nearly all the land surrounding the village, married a woman from the city, but when that young autocrat turned the United Presbyterians out of the building where they had worshiped for a century and had an Episcopal minister come from down the river to hold weekly services there, the blood of all the Huckins boiled and Eben felt called upon to protest. At first these protests took the form of long discourses, delivered on the store porch and touching on the evil of introducing “ceety notions an’ new-fandangled idees” into the spiritual life of the community. They continued in this strain until one fine April day when the sun was shining with sufficient warmth to allow Eben and his cronies to move from the darkness within the store to the old hacked bench without, where they could bask in the cheering rays. The green shoots on the tall maple by the hitching rail, the shouts of the boys fishing in the creek below the rumbling mill, the faint “gee haw” of the man who was plowing in the meadow across the stream, the contented clucking of a trio of mother hens, wandering up and down the village street with a score of piping children in their wake--these and a hundred other things told that spring was at hand. After their long winter of imprisonment the shoemaker, the squire and the blacksmith would have been contented to enjoy themselves in silence, but Eben was in one of his talkative moods. That very morning his niece had announced her intention of forsaking the church in which her fathers had worshiped, and becoming an Episcopalian. His cup of woe was overflowing. He had been able to view with complacence such defections in other families. They had afforded him splendid illustrations with which to enliven his discourses on the weakness of the generality of mankind. He had set the Huckins above the generality. It had seemed to him impossible that one could err who boasted the blood of men who had gone to church with the Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. He had always laid particular stress on that point. He was a firm believer in heredity and had long contended that the descendants of those who first settled the valley were blessed with strong characters. Yet one of the blood had become an Episcopalian! And he had met the rector! “The first I knowd of it was this mornin’ at breakfast,” said Eben, adjusting his steel-rimmed spectacles that he might look over their tops so sternly as to check any hilarity on the part of his auditors. “Mary sais to me, ‘Uncle, I wish you’d spruce up a leetle this afternoon ez the rector’s comin’.’ “‘Mary,’ sais I, thinkin’ I’d cod her jest a leetle, ‘a miller runs a mill, a tinner works in tin, a farmer farms, but what in the name of common sense does a rector do?’