always two or three sleigh loads from Sugar Hill. Joshua and Paul always went, and Mary whenever it was convenient.

Paul was now thirteen years old. For five years he had been "doin' duty" as a Christian. His father's preaching had lost all influence over him. When, however, the revivalist turned his attention to church members and told them that, unless they loved the service of the Lord better than anything earthly and found their chief delight in the worship of God and the reading of his Holy Word, they were not Christians but self-deceived sinners, Paul, already greatly wrought up, felt as though the charge were brought against him personally. He was consumed by no such absorbing devotion to God's service. And forthwith he entered upon a new spiritual struggle. He prayed and spoke at all the meetings, he read the Bible more, and he prayed at home more earnestly than ever, and tried by every approved method to get the evidence of genuine conversion. Finally he awoke to the fact that the thing he lacked was faith, firm and unyielding, that would take no denial. So one night he went home from the meeting, resolved to have the evidence before he slept. He went to his room, partially undressed, and knelt by his bed. There he prayed and wrestled till he grew numb with cold. He began to grow desperate. Something must be done at once, or he would have to get into bed without carrying out his purpose.

Suddenly it came to him that the fault was all his own. The revivalist had preached that night from the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel called Mark's:

"Therefore I say unto you, what things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."

Here, said Paul to himself, was the only way out. And so, bringing all his faith to bear, and putting forth all his mental strength, he worked himself up to as high a pitch of enthusiasm and excitement as his congealing blood permitted, and then, when he thought he had reached the right condition of mind, he prayed aloud with all the force he could muster:

"O God, I do believe. I claim the promise now, this very instant. I will be saved. I will have the blessing. I believe I have the blessing. I am saved. My sins are forgiven."

HIGLEY DOOM RETURNS FROM THE WAR

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Then he crawled shivering into bed. And thereafter he dated his true, genuine conversion from that hour. He was sure that he had done exactly as Christ instructed. He was careful to observe all the forms of Christian duty, such as praying privately and publicly, speaking in public for Christ, reading the Bible, and doing as nearly as he could as he saw other Christians do. And he enjoyed more peace of mind than ever before in regard to the condition of his soul. In the succeeding years he often searched his heart for evidence either that he was, or that he was not, an accepted child of God; and, while he passed through periods of coldness and spiritual depression, he saw no reason to doubt his conversion on that account. He knew that all Christians, even the most faithful and devout, suffered more or less in this way, and that it was regarded as one of the common methods of attack by Satan, with God's tacit approval, to try the Christian's faith. Paul heard and read a great variety of Christian experience, showing that while. some people seemed to have had clearer and more striking evidence than he of instantaneous conversion, others had even less satisfactory experience, some indeed being unable to tell exactly when they were converted. He felt sure, from all appearances, that he possessed more religious zeal and deeper religious feeling than many other church members who believed themselves Christians and were generally looked upon as safely within the fold. He could find no reasonable ground to doubt that his conversion at the age of thirteen years had been genuine and complete. When discouraged, distressed, perplexed, he found in the Bible and in prayer such comfort and strength as he had cause to expect, from the testimony of other Christians; and this surely was all the evidence of peace with God that he could wish.

One afternoon during the summer following the return of the Grangers to Sugar Hill there was a loud knock at the Granger back door. Somehow there was a familiar sound to the rap. Mary opened the door, and beheld a rare sight. On the step stood a man, ragged, dirty, his feet sticking out of the relics of a pair of army shoes, his beard long and unkempt, his matted and tangled hair pushing through the crown of an old army hat.

"Ah, Sister Granger, how-d'-do!" said the man after a moment.

"Who are you?" asked Mary, for the instant unable to recognize the man, despite the strangely familiar tones.

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So ye don't know me, Sister Granger-Brother Doom, Higley Doom, jes' comin' back f'm the war. It's rebel prisons thet's done all this fer me, Sister Granger," with a sweeping, awkward wave of his hand.

It was indeed Higley Doom. He had been reported "missing" after the first engagement of the regiment with which he had gone out four years before, and nothing farther had been heard of him until now. But now he had returned to the bosom of his family, and henceforth the haunts that had known him would know him again. During his absence his family had lived partly upon the charity of their neighbors and partly upon allowances from the public poor fund; and after his return they continued to live as they had while he was away. He had brought back something which he had not taken with him-an ungovernable thirst for strong drink. Nearly all that he earned now went over the bar of one or the other of the two groggeries at The Forks. His earnings, however, would hardly have sufficed to keep him comfortably full; but he had another source of whiskey supply. He spent most of his time loafing around The Forks, in order to be on hand whenever a crowd of idlers gathered there. On such occasions he stood a good chance of getting a series of drinks that would loosen his tongue, to the amusement of the loungers; for, once he had grown a little mellow, how he could exhort, and what tales of the horrors of rebel prisons and of hairbreadth escapes he could tell! Sometimes it was at Andersonville that he had suffered, sometimes in Libby, and sometimes he was unable to tell just where; and from the striking differences in the accounts that he gave, he must have escaped from rebel prisons upwards of a dozen times.

But Higley Doom did not neglect his religious duties. He frequently appeared at the meetings held at district schoolhouses in the surrounding country, and exhorted; often, indeed, with unsteady legs, thick tongue, and disjointed, incoherent speech, but always ready to "do duty," until "sung down." He always yielded gracefully when the singing began. It was noticed, too, that there was less hell in his exhortations than formerly, and more talk about forgiveness for "poor, weak human-natur'"-a fact that touched with pity even those who despised him most.

PAUL ADRIFT-AUNT SUE LECTURES ON TOBACCO AND THE REFORMATION OF HUSBANDS

BUT if Paul's religious life ran on in some degree satisfactorily, not so his intellectual and material progress. He continued to attend district school summer and winter, developing some streaks of misbehavior of which he would have been heartily ashamed to have Ned Gardner informed. The summer after Paul was fourteen years old he hired out to work on a farm by the month. It was not at Joshua's suggestion, however, that Paul took this step, nor did Joshua aid Paul in any way to get a place. The boy took the initiative on his own account, and made his own bargain with his employer.

Hard work was a new experience to Paul. It was a peculiarity of Joshua that he never called on his son to do anything about home. Even after Paul had grown to be a large boy and was doing nothing but going to school, while Joshua was working early and late, the father still cut all the family firewood, usually brought it in, built the fire in the morning, brought the water, and did practically everything about the house that commonly falls to the lot of the "men folks"; Paul lying abed till breakfast was ready, or more likely until he chose to get up, and possibly helping his mother a little about the indoor housework. Not that Paul was naturally any lazier than other boys and girls. With him as with most, idleness was a matter of habit, cultivated, directly or indirectly, actively or passively, by his parents. Paul had been a weak, puny child and this had influenced Joshua somewhat to his course; but, aside from all that, it had never occurred to Joshua to inquire whether it would not be better for the boy to train him in early childhood to habits of industry by giving him a regular routine of daily work, sufficient to insure his physical development as far as healthy bodily exercise could do it, and calculated to accustom him to do things systematically; as well as to cultivate in him the feeling that busy usefulness was the natural lot of man, and the

happiest possible lot when the kind and measure of labor were suited to the individual worker.

The fact was, the duty of saving souls occupied Joshua's mind too fully to leave much room for thoughts about the physical and mental development of his boy. Joshua found no practical instruction or rules for such training in the Bible, Clarke's Commentaries, or the Methodist Discipline, the only literature to which he gave any serious attention. He understood his chief duty to his son to be to bring him up in the fear of God. This he tried to do, and in the way he believed to be best for the boy's eternal welfare. Moreover, Paul's mental attitude toward physical labor was, as might be expected, the reflex of his father's. He learned to regard bodily toil as inherently repugnant to the soul of man, and to look upon it as the convicted criminal looks upon a life sentence to imprisonment at hard labor; for had not God expressly condemned the entire human race to labor just because of Adam's sin? And so, when Paul hired out and placed himself in a position where he must work steadily and hard, he found the task exceedingly repulsive. It took two or three years to get the habit of work well established and to bring him into the frame of mind in which persistent exertion loses its irksomeness and becomes not only endurable but agreeable.

The

After his first summer's work Paul returned home and staid during the winter, not going to school, but simply loafing around home, in the neighborhood, and at The Forks. He read a good deal, but mostly trashy stories that weakened his memory and still further abused his already diseased imagination. The following summer he worked on a farm again, but with no abatement of his discontent. chief cause of his dissatisfaction was that he could see nothing better ahead of him than a lifetime of such work as his father was doing. That was an outlook at which his whole nature rebelled; and yet, boy that he was, he could see no way of escape. The self-distrust, the dread of undertaking any large plan for worldly betterment, and the state of chronic mental inertia as to earthly things that characterized the father, were fast developing in the son.

In the matter of spending money it was also a case of "like father, like son. The money that Paul earned slipped away from him as easily as from his father. Hardly any of it went into the family fund, and yet Paul had almost noth