THE RANDALL FAMILY 6 J
ious instruction and remained a good Unitarian, attending regularly the preaching of the Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and cherishing, at least in the days when our two families first became intimate, a sweet sisterly hope that her brother might yet be won from strange opinions she could not understand. One evening, she said, there had been visitors in the parlor, and some religious conversation, in the course of which her brother, rendered impatient by dull argumentative opposition, had as usual given utter- ance to his heterodoxies in coruscations of wit, not without sarcasms perilously bold. After the visitors had gone, he walked rapidly up and down the rooms for a long time in evident agitation, but in complete silence. Suddenly he stopped, took his seat by her side on the sofa, leaned towards her with his hands on his knees and with his great blue eyes deep with feeling, and exclaimed very slowly, but in a low tone that was full of suppressed excitement : " Belinda ! I am a religious man — a most religious man ! " Those were his exact words, emphasis and all ; she re- peated them on several occasions in precisely the same manner, and evidently remembered them with a glow of satisfaction. She could not follow his trains of thought, but those words of deep impassioned feeling she under- stood, and "pondered them in her heart."
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