d, was carried out by a straggling fringe of boys and
half-grown men on the outskirts of the encampment, acrimonious with
disappointed curiosity, lazy without the careless ease of vagrancy, and
vicious without the excitement of dissipation. For the coarse poverty
and brutal economy of the larger arrangements, the dreary panorama of
unlovely and unwholesome domestic details always before the eyes, were
hardly exciting to the senses. The circus might have been more
dangerous, but scarcely more brutalizing. The actors themselves, hard
and aggressive through practical struggles, often warped and twisted
with chronic forms of smaller diseases, or malformed and crippled
through carelessness and neglect, and restless and uneasy through some
vague mental distress and inquietude that they had added to their
burdens, were scarcely amusing performers. The rheumatic Parkinsons,
from Green Springs; the ophthalmic Filgees, from Alder Creek; the
ague-stricken Harneys, from Martinez Bend; and the feeble-limbed
Steptons, from Sugar Mill, might, in their combined families, have
suggested a hospital, rather than any other social assemblage. Even
their companionship, which had little of cheerful fellowship in it,
would have been grotesque but for the pathetic instinct of some mutual
vague appeal from the hardness of their lives and the helplessness of
their conditions that had brought them together. Nor was this appeal
to a Higher Power any the less pathetic that it bore no reference
whatever to their respective needs or deficiencies, but was always an
invocation for a light which, when they believed they had found it, to
unregenerate eyes scarcely seemed to illumine the rugged path in which
their feet were continually stumbling. One might have smiled at the
idea of the vendetta-following Ferguses praying for "justification by
Faith," but the actual spectacle of old Simon Fergus, whose shot-gun
was still in his wagon, offering up that appeal with streaming eyes and
agonized features was painful beyond a doubt. To seek and obtain an
exaltation of feeling vaguely known as "It," or less vaguely veiling a
sacred name, was the burden of the general appeal.

The large tent had been filled, and between the exhortations a certain
gloomy enthusiasm had been kept up by singing, which had the effect of
continuing in an easy, rhythmical, impersonal, and irresponsible way
the sympathies of the meeting. This was interrupted by a young man who
r