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King's Son) lay opened The Glories of Mary , and there underlined, —There is no mysticism without Mary. Behind the yew trees, whose thickly conspired branches and poison berries guarded the windows, night after night passed over him, over the acts of Pilate, Coptic narratives, the Pistis Sophia , Thomas's account of the child Jesus turning his playmates into goats; but the book most often taken from its place was Obras Completas de S Juan de la Cruz , a volume large enough to hold a bottle of schnapps in the cavity cut ruthlessly out of the Dark Night of the Soul . 
    In church his congregation attended his sermons out of stern habit, and occasionally with something uncomfortably like active interest they were swayed. They even permitted him to regale them in Latin, and later, with growing incidence as years passed, he dashed their petrous visages with waves from distinctly pagan tongues, voluptuous Italian, which flowed over their northern souls like sunlit water over rocks. They had not much use for that slovenly race. He exhorted them to breathe out when they prayed, ... or was it breathe in? No one, alone with God afterward, was certain. And when unrest showed on those gray shoals, he put them at dis-mal ease once more by reminding them that they were, even at that moment, being regarded from On High as a stiff-necked and un-circumcised generation of vipers: they found such reassurances comforting. 
    He even managed to re-institute wine for the grape juice prescribed by temperate elders in the celebration of the Eucharist, rousing his flock one sunny morning with the words, —Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities. That upset Aunt May, and though she could not presume to argue with Saint Paul the Apostle, it was at moments like this that she suspected him of never having really got over being Saul the Jew of Tarsus, with a nose like Saint Edmund, and those dirty intemperate habits Jews are famous for. Unlike her charity and that of her Societies, which never ventured south of the sixtieth parallel except for forays into darkest Africa, Gwyon's troubled everyone by reaching no further than the sound of his own voice for objects worthy of mercy. Janet, a girl with a tic which drew her head to one side in bright affirmative inclinations of idiocy, exemplar of a lapse from Puritan morality on the part of her mother (done in by a surgical belt salesman from New York), was found sharing a slap and tickle with the church janitor behind the organ one night after choir practice. Janet had been born a number of minutes after her mother's death, which some including Aunt May regarded as a bad sign from the start. The incident behind the organ proved it, and Aunt May said something about the stocks and the pillory, a shame they'd gone out of fashion. —A shame to deprive us all of that satisfaction, Gwyon agreed. She was wary. —What do you mean? —The great satisfaction of seeing someone else punished for a deed of which we know ourselves capable. —But I ... —What is more gratifying than this externalizing of our own evils? Another suffering in atonement for the vile-ness of our own imaginings . . . —Stop it! cried Aunt May, —I'm sure I have never had such thoughts. —Then how can you judge her crime, if you have never been so tempted? he asked quietly. —You . . . you are speaking like a heretic, Aunt May brought out, —a heretic from your church and your . . . and from your family . . . ! and she left the room. 
    The text for the following Sunday's sermon was taken from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7:1), and Janet became kitchen girl in Reverend Gwyon's household. 
    There were a few, of an intuitive nature seldom bred in such a community, who suspected his charity to be a mask behind which he dissembled a sense of humor to mock them all. The Town Carpenter was one of these. He commenced to appear regularly on Sunday mornings in the dimmer sections of the