ng the Lord. The minister commenced at firstly
and ran up to about twenty-fourthly, and then he divided it up again;
and then he made some concluding remarks, and then he said lastly, and
when he said lastly he was about half through. Then we had what we
called the catechism--the chief end of man. I think that has a
tendency to make a boy kind of bubble up cheerfully.

We sat along on a bench with our feet about eight inches from the
floor. The minister said, "Boys, do you know what becomes of the
wicked?" We all answered as cheerfully as grasshoppers sing in
Minnesota, "Yes, sir." "Do you know, boys, that you all ought to go to
hell?" "Yes, sir." As a final test: "Boys, would you be willing to
go to hell if it was God's will?" And every little liar said, "Yes,
sir." The dear old minister used to try to impress upon our minds
about how long we would stay there after we got there, and he used to
say in an awful tone of voice--do you know I think that is what gives
them the bronchitis--that tone--you never heard of an auctioneer having
it--"Suppose that once in a billion of years a bird were to come from
some far, distant clime and carry off in its bill a grain of sand, when
the time came when the last animal matter of which this mundane sphere
is composed would be carried away," said he, "boys, by that time in
hell it would not be sun up." We had this sermon in the morning and
the same one in the afternoon, only he commenced at the other end.
Then we started home full of doctrine--we went sadly and sole solemnly
back. If it was in the summer and the weather was good and we had been
good boys, they used to take us down to the graveyard, and to cheer us
up we had a little conversation about coffins, and shrouds, and worms,
and bones, and dust, and I must admit that it did cheer me up when I
looked at those sunken graves those stones, those names half effaced
with the decay of years. I felt cheered, for I said, "This thing can't
last always." Then we had to read a good deal. We were not allowed to
read joke books or anything of that kind. We read Baxter's "Call to
the Unconverted;" Fox's "Book of Martyrs;" Milton's "History of the
Waldenses," and "Jenkins on the Atonement." I generally read Jenkins;
and I have often thought that the atonement ought to be pretty broad in
its provisions to cover the case of a man that would write a book like
that for a boy.

Then we used to go and see how the sun was getti