gested Champion, but Jeff-Jack quietly replied, "Father
Tombs," and five or six others repeated the call. The pastor rose.

"I'm most afraid, my dea' friends an' brethren, I oughtn't to try to
speak to this crowd. I'm a man of words and not of deeds, an' yet I'm
'fraid I shan't evm say the right thing. I belong to the past. I've been
thinkin' of the past every minute I've been a-sitt'n' here. Yo' faces ah
all turned to the future an' ah lighted"--he lifted his arm and waggled
his hand--"by the beams of a risin' sun reflected from the structu'es o'
yo' golden dreams. As I look back down the long an' shining stair-steps
o' the years I count seventy-two of 'em in the clear sight o' memory's
eye besides fo' or five that lie shrouded in the silve'y mist of
earliest childhood." The pastor, ceased and his hearers were very still.

"I don't tell my age to brag of it, but if I remind you-all that I've
baptized mo' Suez babies than there are now Suez men an' women alive,
an' have seen jest about eve'y cawnehstone laid in this town that's ever
been laid, I needn't say my heart's in yo' fawtunes whether faw this
world aw the next.

"An' I don't doubt you goin' to be prospe'd. What I'm bound to tell you
I've my private fears of, an' yet what I'm hopin' an' trustin' and
prayin' the Lord will deliveh you fum--evm as a cawp'ate company--is the
debasin' sin o' money greed. Gentle_men_, an' dea' friends an' breth'en,
may Gawd save you fum that as he saved the two Ezra Jaspehs, the foundeh
o' Suez an' his cousin, the grantee of Widewood, fum the folly o' Ian'
greed. For I tell you they may not 'a' managed either tract as well as
some otheh men think they might 'a' done it, but they were saved the
folly whereof I speak. They's been some talk an' laugh here this mawnin'
about John March a-partin' with so much o' his lan'. Well, if that makes
him a fool, he's a fool by my advice! Faw when he come to me with his
plans all in the bud, so to speak, I said to him there an' then, an'
he'll remembeh: Johnnie, s'I, I've set on the knees of both Ezra
Jaspehs, an' I'm tellin' you what I know of the one that was yo'
fatheh's grand-fatheh, as you say you know it of yo' own sainted fatheh:
that if the time had eveh come in his life when paht'n' with Widewood
tract would of seemed any ways likely to turn it into sco'es an'
hund'eds o' p'osp'ous an' pious homes he would 'a' givm ninety-nine
hund'edths away faw nothin' rather than not see that change; yes