mbers, except
Candace. I think all we can do is to persuade them to go to meeting and
Sabbath school, or give money for the hearse, or the new horse sheds.
Now let's all think quietly for a minute or two who's the very most
heathenish and reperrehensiblest person in Riverboro."

After a very brief period of silence the words "Jacob Moody" fell from
all lips with entire accord.

"You are right," said the president tersely; "and after singing hymn
number two hundred seventy four, to be found on the sixty-sixth page,
we will take up the question of persuading Mr. Moody to attend divine
service or the minister's Bible class, he not having been in the
meeting-house for lo! these many years.

'Daughter of Zion, the power that hath saved thee
Extolled with the harp and the timbrel should be.'

"Sing without reading, if you please, omitting the second stanza. Hymn
two seventy four, to be found on the sixty-sixth page of the new hymn
book or on page thirty two of Emma Jane Perkins's old one."

II

It is doubtful if the Rev. Mr. Burch had ever found in Syria a person
more difficult to persuade than the already "gospel-hardened" Jacob
Moody of Riverboro.

Tall, gaunt, swarthy, black-bearded--his masses of grizzled, uncombed
hair and the red scar across his nose and cheek added to his sinister
appearance. His tumble-down house stood on a rocky bit of land back of
the Sawyer pasture, and the acres of his farm stretched out on all sides
of it. He lived alone, ate alone, plowed, planted, sowed, harvested
alone, and was more than willing to die alone, "unwept, unhonored, and
unsung." The road that bordered upon his fields was comparatively little
used by any one, and notwithstanding the fact that it was thickly set
with chokecherry trees and blackberry bushes it had been for years
practically deserted by the children. Jacob's Red Astrakhan and Granny
Garland trees hung thick with apples, but no Riverboro or Edgewood boy
stole them; for terrifying accounts of the fate that had overtaken one
urchin in times agone had been handed along from boy to boy, protecting
the Moody fruit far better than any police patrol.

Perhaps no circumstances could have extenuated the old man's surly
manners or his lack of all citizenly graces and virtues; but his
neighbors commonly rebuked his present way of living and forgot the
troubled past that had brought it about: the sharp-tongued wife, the
unloving and disloyal sons, the daughter'