s not possible that she should ever tremble at any
pulpit reasoning of temperance and judgment from the lips of her father.
Three things in every soul, he cried, must either be subdued in this
life or be forever ground to powder in a fiery hereafter; and these
three, if she knew them at all, were the three most utterly unsubdued
things that he embodied--will, pride, appetite. The word she vainly
longed for was coveted for one whose tardy footfall her waiting ear
caught the moment it sounded at the door, and before the turning of a
hundred eyes told her John March had come and was sitting in the third
seat behind her.

In the course of her father's sermon there was no lack of resonant Amens
and soft groanings and moanings of ecstasy. But Suez was neither Wildcat
Ridge nor Chalybeate Springs, and the tempering chill of plastered
ceiling and social inequalities stayed the wild unrestraint of those who
would have held free rule in the log church or under the camp-meeting
bower. The academic elegance of the speaker's periods sobered the ardor
which his warmth inspired, and as he closed there rested on the
assemblage a silence and an awe as though Sinai smoked but could not
thunder.

Barbara hoped against hope. At every enumeration of will, pride, and
appetite she saw the Pastor's gaze rest pleadingly on her, and in the
stillness of her inmost heart she confessed the evil presence of that
unregenerate trinity. Yet when he rose to bid all mourners for sin come
forward while the next hymn was being sung, she only mourned that she
could not go, and tried in vain not to feel, as in every drop of her
blood she still felt, there behind her, that human presence so different
from all others on earth. "This call," she secretly cried, "this hour,
are not for me. Father in Heaven! if only they might be for him."

Before the rising precentor could give out his hymn Uncle Jimmie Rankin
had sprung to his feet and started "Rock of Ages" in one of the wildest
minors of the early pioneers. At once the strain was taken up on every
side, the notes swelled, Uncle Jimmie clapped hands in time, and at the
third line a mountain woman in the gallery, sitting with her sun-bonnet
pulled down over her sore eyes, changed a snuff-stick from her mouth to
her pocket, burst into a heart-freezing scream, and began to thrash
about in her seat. The hymn rolled on in stronger volume. The Yankee
precentor caught the tune and tried to lead, but Uncle Jimmie's v