I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian connection. I was
settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one of the
finest water-powers in Maine. We used to call it a Western town in the
heart of the civilization of New England. A charming place it was and
is. A spirited, brave young parish had I; and it seemed as if we might
have all "the joy of eventful living" to our hearts' content.

Alas! how little we knew on the day of my ordination, and in those
halcyon moments of our first housekeeping! To be the confidential
friend in a hundred families in the town--cutting the social trifle,
as my friend Haliburton says, "from the top of the whipped-syllabub to
the bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation"--to keep
abreast of the thought of the age in one's study, and to do one's best
on Sunday to interweave that thought with the active life of an active
town, and to inspirit both and make both infinite by glimpses of the
Eternal Glory, seemed such an exquisite forelook into one's life!
Enough to do, and all so real and so grand! If this vision could only
have lasted.

The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a delusion, nor,
indeed, half bright enough. If one could only have been left to do his
own business, the vision would have accomplished itself and brought
out new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the original. The
misery was and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that,
besides the vision, and besides the usual human and finite failures in
life (such as breaking the old pitcher that came over in the
Mayflower, and putting into the fire the alpenstock with which her
father climbed Mont Blanc)--besides, these, I say (imitating the style
of Robinson Crusoe), there were pitchforked in on us a great
rowen-heap of humbugs, handed down from some unknown seed-time, in