eventh of August. His
followers became very zealous, and such is the nature of an infection
that scarcely anybody was able to resist it. Mrs. Anderson, true to her
excitable temper, became fanatic--dreaming dreams, seeing visions,
hearing voices, praying twenty times a day[2], wearing a sourly pious
face, and making all around her more unhappy than ever. Jonas declared
that ef the noo airth and the noo heaven was to be chockful of sech as
she, 'most any other place in the univarse would be better, akordin' to
his way of thinkin'. He said she repented more of other folkses' sins
than anybody he ever seed.

[Footnote 2: Mrs. Anderson was less devout than some of her
co-religionists; the wife of a well-known steamboat-clerk was accustomed
to pray in private fifty times a day, hoping by means of this praying
without ceasing to be found ready when the trumpet should sound.]

As summer came on, Samuel Anderson, borne away on the tide of his own
and his wife's fanatical fever of sublimated devotion, discharged Jonas
and all his other _employes_, threw up business, and gave his whole
attention to the straightening of his accounts for the coming day of
judgment. Before Jonas left to seek a new place he told Cynthy Ann as
how as ef he'd met her alrlier 'twould a-settled his coffee fer life. He
was gittin' along into the middle of the week now, but he'd come to feel
like a boy since he'd been a livin' where he could have a few sweet and
pleasant words--ahem!--he thought December'd be as pleasant as May all
the year round ef he could live in the aurora borealis of her
countenance. And Cynthy Ann enjoyed his words so much that she prayed
for forgiveness for the next week and confessed in class-meeting that
she had yielded to temptation and sot her heart on the things of this
perishin' world. She was afeared she hadn't always remembered as how as
she was a poor unworthy dyin' worm of the dust, and that all the
beautiful things in this world perished with the usin'.

And Brother Goshorn, the class-leader at Harden's Cross-Roads, exhorted
her to tear every idol from her heart. And still the sweet woman's
nature, God's divine law revealed in her heart, did assert itself a
little. She planted some pretty-by-nights in an old cracked
blue-and-white tea-pot and set it on her window-sill. Somehow the
pretty-by-nights would remind her of Jonas, and while she tried to
forget him with one half of her nature, the other and better part (the
de