And Osh Popham was right; for Reba Larrabee convinced the members of the rival church (the rivalry between the two being in rigidity of creed, not in persistency in good works) that there was room in heaven for at least two denominations; and said that if they couldn’t unite in this world, perhaps they’d get round to it in the next.  Finally, she saved Letitia Boynton’s soul alive by giving her a warm, understanding friendship, and she even contracted to win back the minister’s absent son some time or other, and convince him of the error of his ways.

“Let Dick alone a little longer, Luther,” she would say; “don’t hurry him, for he won’t come home so long as he’s a failure; it would please the village too much, and Dick hates the village.  He doesn’t accept our point of view, that we must love our enemies and bless them that despitefully use us.  The village did despitefully use Dick, and for that matter, David Gilman too.  They were criticized, gossiped about, judged without mercy.  Nobody believed in them, nobody ever praised them;—­and what is that about praise being the fructifying sun in which our virtues ripen, or something like that?  I’m not quoting it right, but I wish I’d said it.  They were called wild when most of their wildness was exuberant vitality; their mistakes were magnified, their mad pranks exaggerated.  If I’d been married to you, my dear, while Dick was growing up, I wouldn’t have let you keep him here in this little backwater of life; he needed more room, more movement.  They wouldn’t have been so down on him in Racine, Wisconsin!”

Mrs. Larrabee lighted her lantern, closed the door behind her, and walked briskly down the lonely road that led from the parsonage at Beulah Corner to Letitia Boynton’s house.  It was bright moonlight and the ground was covered with light-fallen snow, but the lantern habit was a fixed one among Beulah ladies, who, even when they were not widows or spinsters, made their evening calls mostly without escort.  The light of a lantern not only enabled one to pick the better side of a bad road, but would illuminate the face of any male stranger who might be of a burglarious or murderous disposition.  Reba Larrabee was not a timid person; indeed, she was wont to say that men were so scarce in Beulah that unless they were out-and-out ruffians it would be an inspiration to meet a few, even if it were only to pass them in the middle of the road.

There was a light in the meeting-house as she passed, and then there was a long stretch of shining white silence unmarked by any human habitation till she came to the tumble-down black cottage inhabited by “Door-Button” Davis, as the little old man was called in the village.  In the distance she could see Osh Popham’s two-story house brilliantly illuminated by kerosene lamps, and as she drew nearer she even descried Ossian himself, seated at the cabinet organ in his shirt-sleeves, practicing the Christmas anthem, his daughter holding a candle to the page