The next Sunday morning came, and Jenny dressed herself in the flowered tabby, with a pink bow on her muslin tippet. With a gratified sense of pride, she passed Fortune and Dolly Campion on her way up the churchyard; not less gratified to hear their respective whispers. "Well, it wasn't a make-up, then!" said Dolly, in a rather disappointed tone. "Dear heart! isn't she fine?" responded Fortune. Little did Jenny Lavender think, as she passed up the aisle to her father's pew, that the Jenny who entered that church was never to leave it again. There was a stranger in the pulpit that day--a man of a very different sort from the usual preacher. He was an old man, and the style of his sermon was old-fashioned. Instead of being a learned and closely-reasoned discourse, seasoned with scraps of Latin, or a political essay on the events of the day, it was a sermon such as had been more common in the beginning of the century--simple, almost conversational, striking, and full of Gospel truth. Such a sermon Jenny Lavender had never heard before. The text was Genesis, chapter 32, verse 26: "I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me." The preacher told his hearers in a plain fashion, without any learned disquisitions or flowery phrases, what blessing meant; that for God to bless a man was to give him, not what he wished, but what he really needed for his soul's welfare; that many things which men thought blessings, were really evils, and that all which did not help a man towards God, only hurried him faster on the road to perdition. He told them that Christ was God's greatest blessing, His unspeakable gift; and that he who received Him was in truth possessed of all things. When he came near the end of his sermon, he bent forward over the pulpit cushion, and spoke with affectionate earnestness to his hearers.