But my reward was near at hand. The summer arrived, and with it an inflow of wealth, honor, and leisure to my parish. A wonderful transformation came over the island--the Pleasure Island. Boards were unscrewed from cottage windows. The dead grass gave way to green carpets. Lifeless sticks budded with colored foliage. The dead sea and the listless waves became animated with restless energy. The sun kissed the roads into smoothness and lined the highways with flowers. Fresh painted steamers, with flying banners, whistled into the wharves and unloaded crowds of visitors. Steam yachts lay at anchor in the cove. The white wings of yawls and catboats were dipping in the breeze. The mountain paths had been re-charted and were filled with adventurers. The pine groves and the quiet cliffs lured tired men and women to their restful silences. Trout fishers rubbed oil of camphor over their faces to restrain the ambitious stings of flies and mosquitoes, and sought the brook pools where Walton’s classic trout waited to be played with. My little rustic church became filled with city people, who not only sat in the pews, but sang in the choir, decorated the pulpit with flowers and grasses, and served on responsible committees. Then, too, my rest and opportunity came, for we had a list of distinguished clergymen and professors who were to occupy my pulpit every Sunday morning, for the resort was very rich in clerical talent of a willing and gracious sort. We had so much professional talent indeed, that one morning near the post-office I beheld two bishops, two university presidents, two professors, and a world-famous author standing on less than two square yards of ground! We left the doors and the windows of the church open while the noted men preached, and their voices had to vie with the song birds who perched on the waving trees outside the windows. The sea tang blew across the church, the sweetest of summer incense. I had little enough to do, for the people were too busy with pleasure to be at home: they wanted me to sit on the cliffs with books and take a rest--on a salary. But there came calls to preach on some of the outlying islands to which I was carried on different Sunday afternoons in a launch. Then they all left us, tanned, virile, rested: the whole community took itself to the decks of the island steamers and was carried to the trains. The tennis courts were closed. The shutters were fastened over the display windows of the flower stand. Many pews were empty in my little, rustic church. The flowers and shrubs were bedded in straw. Soon the snow and frost and bleakness of winter would spread over the island. My second pastorate ended, too, for I had received a call to supply a larger church much nearer to the Seminary, a church where I intended to preach after my graduation from the Seminary. _Chapter XXVIII. How a Parsonage Suggests a Wife. The Convincing Revelations of a Phrenologist Who Examined the Students’ Bumps_