Now, upon the vestry there chanced at that time to be one man who was "different." One does find such people even among the officers of fashionable churches. This man (he was, by the way, a grand-nephew of the old lady who built the church when Saint Agatha's was an unendowed experiment) had occasional views not wholly in harmony with the policy of his brother officers; and, being himself a heavy rate-payer, was allowed, sometimes, by the courtesy of the majority,--when his notion was not really in bad form, you know,--to have his way. He did not get it so often but that he was glad to make the most of it when he did; and when his turn came to control the supply for that Sunday with which this narrative has to do, he asked the privilege of being intrusted with the details of the business. This request, as from a useful man of certain eccentricities, was indulgently granted; and thus there occurred the events which I am privileged to relate. It was just before Lent, and the winter had been a cold one. One Friday evening in early March there came up, or came down, a drifting snow-storm. It was bad enough in town, but in the suburbs it was worse, and in the country it was little less than dangerous to passengers through the wide, wind-swept streets, the choking lanes, and bitter moors. An old clergyman, the pastor of a scattered parish, sat in his study on that Friday night, and thanked God that the weekly evening service was over, and his day's work done. He would have regretted being called out again that night, for he had got quite wet in walking to church and back, and the cold from which he had been suffering for a week past might not be benefited thereby. This fact in itself was a matter of no concern, under ordinary conditions, to the old clergyman, who, being a lonely man in a forlorn country boarding-house, with nobody to take care of him, was accustomed to live under the shadow of a "common cold," and who paid no more attention to his own physical discomforts in the face of daily duty than he paid to the latest fashion in sable trimmings in the front pews at Saint Agatha's. There was no fur trimming on his overcoat, which was seven years old and pitiably thin. But he had been invited to supply at Saint Agatha's next Sunday, and to that unexampled honor and opportunity he gave the pathetic attention--half personal pleasure, half religious fervor--of an overlooked and devout man. In the course of a forty-years' ministry he had not been asked to preach in a city pulpit. The event was tremendous to him. He had been agitated by the invitation, which ran in some such way as this: [Illustration: "_He had been invited to supply at St. Agatha's_."]