d his voice broke down into a whisper. But Bud was
perfectly cool, and doubtless it was the strong coolness of Bud that
made Walter, who shuddered at a shadow, come to him for sympathy and
unbosom himself of one of his guilty secrets.

"Let's go and hear Brother Sodom preach to-night," said Bud.

"No, I don't like to."

"He don't scare you?" There was just a touch of ridicule in Bud's voice.
He knew Walter, and he had not counted amiss when he used this little
goad to prick a skin so sensitive. "Brother Sodom" was the nickname
given by scoffers to the preacher--Mr. Soden--whose manner of preaching
had so aroused Bud's combativeness, and whose saddle-stirrups Bud had
helped to amputate. For reasons of his own, Bud thought best to subject
young Johnson to the heat of Mr. Soden's furnace.

Peter Cartwright boasts that, on a certain occasion, he "shook his
brimstone wallet" over the people. Mr. Soden could never preach without
his brimstone wallet. There are those of refinement so attenuated that
they will not admit that fear can have any place in religion. But a
religion without fear could never have evangelized or civilized the
West, which at one time bade fair to become a perdition as bad as any
that Brother Sodom ever depicted. And against these on the one side, and
the Brother Sodoms on the other, I shall interrupt my story to put this
chapter under shelter of that wise remark of the great Dr. Adam Clark,
who says "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the terror of God
confounds the soul;" and that other saying of his: "With the _fear_ of
God the love of God is ever consistent; but where the _terror_ of the
Lord reigns, there can neither be _fear, faith_, nor _love_; nay, nor
_hope_ either." And yet I am not sure that even the Brother Sodoms were
made in vain.

On this evening Mr. Soden was as terrible as usual. Bud heard him
without flinching. Small, who sat farther forward, listened with pious
approval. Mr. Soden, out of distorted figures pieced together from
different passages of Scripture, built a hell, not quite, Miltonic, nor
yet Dantean, but as Miltonic and Dantean as his unrefined imagination
could make it. As he rose toward his climax of hideous description,
Walter Johnson trembled from head to foot and sat close to Bud. Then, as
burly Mr. Soden, with great gusto, depicted materialistic tortures that
startled the nerves of everybody except Bud, Walter wanted to leave, but
Bud would not let him. For