nd the love will keep them together, strong
to bear the trials and labors of life. I think love is a kind of wages
that God pays to men and women for living on His earth."

"Um!... Does He send love sort of helter-skelter and hit-or-miss, or
does He aim it at certain folks?"

"I have often preached that marriages were made in heaven."

"Then it's a kind of a command, hain't it?"

"Yes."

"Which d'ye calculate is the wust disobedience? To refuse to obey an
order sich as this, or to disobey a parent that runs counter to the
wants of the Almighty?"

The young man's face was alight with happiness. "Mr. Baines," he said,
"I'm grateful to you. I shall marry Selina."

"Maybe," said Scattergood. "It runs in my mind you got to have dealin's
with Deacon Pettybone, and the deacon always figgers that the news he
gits from heaven is fresher and more dependable than what anybody else
gits. Might ask him and see."

A few days after that Coldriver knew that Parson Hooper had asked the
hand of Selina from her father and had been rejected with language and
almost with violence. Then a strange thing took place. If Jason had
married Selina without opposition, his congregation would have been
enraged. He might have been forced from his pulpit. Now it regarded him
as a martyr, and with clacking tongues and singleness of purpose it
espoused his cause and declared that their minister was good enough to
marry any girl alive, and that Deacon Pettybone was a mean,
narrow-minded, bigoted, cantankerous old grampus. The thing became a
public question, second in importance only to the sidewalk.

"Hold your hosses," Scattergood advised Jason. "Let's see what a mite
of dickerin' and persuasion'll do with the deacon. Then, if measures
fails, my advice to you as a human bein' and a citizen is to git Seliny
into a buckboard and run off with her. But hold on a spell."

So Jason held on, and the town meeting approached, and Scattergood
continued to sit in idleness on the piazza of his store and twiddle his
bare toes in the sunshine. Deacon Pettybone was a busy man, organizing
the forces of the Baptists, and seeking diligently to round up the votes
of neutrals. Elder Hooper, the leader of the Congregationalist party,
was equally occupied, and no man might hazard a guess at the outcome of
the affair.

"This here is a great principle," said Deacon Pettybone, "and men gives
their lives and sacrifices their families for sich. I'm a-goin' to fight
t