Every now and then, however, the Reverend Mr.Fairweather let off a polemic discourse against his neighbor opposite, which waked his people up a little; but it was a languid congregation, at best,--very apt to stay away from meeting in the afternoon, and not at all given to extra evening services.
The minister, unlike his rival of the other side of the way, was a down-hearted and timid kind of man.

He went on preaching as he had been taught to preach, but he had misgivings at times.

There was a little Roman Catholic church at the foot of the hill where his own was placed, which he always had to pass on Sundays.

He could never look on the thronging multitudes that crowded its pews and aisles or knelt bare-headed on its steps, without a longing to get in among them and go down on his knees and enjoy that luxury of devotional contact which makes a worshipping throng as different from the same numbers praying apart as a bed of coals is from a trail of scattered cinders.
"Oh, if I could but huddle in with those poor laborers and working-women!" he would say to himself.

"If I could but breathe that atmosphere, stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient litanies, and cloudy with the smoke of hallowed incense, for one hour, instead of droning over these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!" The intellectual isolation of his sect preyed upon him; for, of all terrible things to natures like his, the most terrible is to belong to a minority.