d saint had indeed one
misgiving, for Lionel was very high church, and if he reverted to Rome,
the religious education of any children--my father has found peace in a
land where there are no doctrinal worries. But for his daughter he would
pray still, lest she be yoked with an unbeliever. For my father's sake I
asked Jesse about his religious convictions.

"Wall," he explained, "my old mother was a Hard-Shell Baptist, and
father was Prohibition, so if them two forms of ignorance came to be
used around here, I'd be a sort of mongrel."

"Surely you don't think the churches mere forms of ignorance?"

"Ignorance," he took the word up thoughtfully. "It's a thing I
practises, and am apt to recognize by the way it acks. It ain't so
scarce in them churches as you'd think. Maybe, knowin' more than me, you
can tell me about that Sermon on the Mount. Was it a Catholic Mount, or
Baptist, or Episcopalian?"

"Surely a hill, or mountain."

"And Jesus took his people away from the smell of
denominations--Scribes, Pharisees, and such, to some place outdoors?"

The idea struck me full in the face like a sudden lash of spray, but
before I could clear my eyes, the man had followed his thought to a
weird conclusion.

"The more they build churches and chapels to corral Him, the more He
takes to the woods. I sort of follow."

This only left me to wonder what my dear old white saint would have
said.

Certainly he could never have accepted that American citizenship, and
Jesse's nationality is vague. "Thar's God," he would say quite
reverently, "and Mother England, and Uncle Sam, but beyond that I ain't
much acquainted. The rest seems to be sort of foreigners. The Labrador?
Oh, that's just trimmings."

Whatever he is, I love him,--primitive, elemental, kin of the woodland
gods, habitant of the white sierras, the august forest, and the sweet
wild pastures. My doubts fluttered away from the main issue to settle
down on very twigs of detail. I had not courage to imagine what a fright
he would look in civilized clothes, how awkward he would feel among folk
and houses, or how such dear illusions would be shattered if ever my
cynical relations saw him eat. He is a Baptist, and by his convictions
liable to wed in store clothes, with a necktie like a bootlace, and
number twelve kid gloves, taking his honeymoon as a solemnity at the
very loudest hotel in San Francisco. Preferring plague, pestilence,
famine, battle, murder, and sudden death,