ing at one stroke knocked all the beauty
and joy out of his poor life. So he journeyed with a case of samples as
one dazed, and his eyes took no pleasure in anything that he saw. In his
despair he had withdrawn himself to his religion,--he was a
Baptist,--and spoke of its consolation with the artless freedom that an
American generally exhibits when he is talking about his most sacred
private affairs. There was a desert beyond Utah, hot and barren as Mian
Mir in May. The sun baked the car-roof, and the dust caked the windows,
and through the dust and the glare the man with the biscuits bore
witness to his creed, which seems to include one of the greatest
miracles in the world--the immediate unforeseen, self-conscious
redemption of the soul by means very similar to those which turned Paul
to the straight path.

"You must experi_ence_ religion," he repeated, his mouth twitching and
his eyes black-ringed with his recent loss. "You must experi_ence_
religion. You can't tell when you're goin' to get, or haow; but it will
come--it will come, Sir, like a lightning stroke, an' you will wrestle
with yourself before you receive full conviction and assurance."

"How long does that take?" I asked reverently.

"It may take hours. It may take days. I knew a man in San Jo who lay
under conviction for a month an' then he got the sperrit--as you _must_
git it."

"And then?"

"And then you are saved. You feel that, an' you kin endure anything," he
sighed. "Yes, anything. I don't care what it is, though I allow that
some things are harder than others."

"Then you have to wait for the miracle to be worked by powers outside
yourself. And if the miracle doesn't work?"

"But it _must_. I tell you it must. It comes to all who profess with
faith."

I learned a good deal about that creed as the train fled on; and I
wondered as I learned. It was a strange thing to watch that poor human
soul, broken and bowed by its loss, nerving itself against each new pang
of pain with the iterated assurance that it was safe against the pains
of Hell.

The heat was stifling. We quitted the desert and launched into the
rolling green plains of Colorado. Dozing uneasily with every removable
rag removed, I was roused by a blast of intense cold and the drumming of
a hundred drums. The train had stopped. Far as the eye could range the
land was white under two feet of hail--each hailstone as big as the top
of a sherry-glass. I saw a young colt by the side of