petites, because, he himself--the
young man aforesaid--could keep from such evil practices easily enough,
and if he could, "Dodd" could.

Certainly!

"Dodd" acted on the advice of the minister, and went home and shut
himself up alone in his room to pray. He tried, but the words seemed
to go no higher than his head. Did you ever think that when the Master
received his severest temptation it was when he was alone? Let a man
who is tempted beware of trying to win a victory shut up in a room by
himself. The devil has him in a hand to hand fight, in such case, and
thereby increases several fold the probability of winning the battle.

"Dodd" tried to pray. He strove alone, as in an agony. He besought
the power that he had been told to invoke, to take from him the
horrible thirst that was gnawing within him. He wept, he pleaded, he
begged.

The gnawing kept on.

There was once one who prayed "If it be possible, let this cup pass
from me." It did not pass.

Then, indeed, the clouds did grow dark. "Dodd's" doubts left the
earth, and reached even to heaven. He not only doubted the men who had
led him to the promised relief; he doubted even the power of religious
experience to save a tempted man, and the reality of religion itself.

From this point it is but a step to the supreme doubt of all!

If only the boy had expected a storm, he might have weathered it. If,
in this hour of his trial, some faithful soul could have lived with
him, day and night, and never left him for an hour, till the storm was
over, he might have come through. Neither of these things happened,
however.

He struggled on for several days. He gave up finally. He came home
one night drunk, almost to the verge of insanity. There had been a
cyclone in the land of promised eternal sunshine. "Dodd" Weaver's bark
lay upon its beam ends, and the jagged rocks of infidelity pierced its
battered frame.

You have seen such wrecks by the score, have you not, good friends?

CHAPTER XIX.

And now the victim of these adventures was
in a worse case than ever. Up to this time
neither religion nor its lack had played any
particular part in his being. He had been a
bad boy, truly, but in his former low estate
he had thought little of anything that
pertained to another world, or to the future in
this. Now he disbelieved all things--man,
immortality, heaven, God.

It is a condition which few fail to experience,
in a greater or less degr