intangibility that had fallen around the minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight. When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester’s face —

“Mother,” said she, “was that the same minister that kissed me by the brook?”

“Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother.

“We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.”

“I could not be sure that it was he — so strange he looked,” continued the child. “Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now, before all the people, even as he did yonder among the