o had
blessed them when they first saw the light of day, had baptized them
when first his kindly teachings had awakened their aspirations to walk
in the straight and narrow way. It was he who married them when they
found each the _alter ego_, to whom they could say:

"Thou art all to me love for which my heart did pine
A green isle in the sea love, a fountain and a shrine."

It was he who had lifted their souls on the breath of prayer, when
their loved ones had "fallen asleep in Jesus, blessed sleep, from
which none ever wake to weep."

They loved him though they gave him from their scanty earnings but
$400 a year, and half the fish he could catch, yet they liberally
supplied his larder with their sweetest butter, freshest eggs, and the
choicest cuts from their flocks. When a city minister once said to
him: "You have a poor salary, brother," he at once replied: "Ah, but I
give them mighty poor preaching, you know."

Grand old man, he followed closely in the footsteps of his Master, and
accomplished much more good than many famous ones who wander far from
the precepts of the lowly Nazarene, and deliver featureless sermons
to unresponsive, gaily-attired Dives under the arches of great
cathedrals.

But the trail of the serpent is everywhere found, even in this
sequestered spot. There was, in the outskirts of the town, the
inevitable rumshop, fed, it was said, by an illicit still in the
woods, and there as usual Satan held high carnival among families
dead in trespasses and sins. There we assayed to hold temperance
prayer-meetings, but they loved darkness rather than light, and we
cast our pearls before swine, who turned and rent us.

On one occasion we tried to hold services in the little old deserted
schoolhouse, and found it, much to our surprise, packed with the
inhabitants of Sodom; a more villainous looking crowd I never saw not
even in darkest New York. Beetle-browed, mop-haired men, whose faces,
if tapped, would apparently give forth as much fire-water as a rum
barrel.

For a short time they listened to the singing: but when the aged
minister attempted with earnest words to inspire to a better life it
seemed as if all the fiends from heaven that fell, had pealed the
banner cry of hell. Then a decayed cabbage struck him full in the
face, ancient and unfragrant turnips and potatoes filled the air, our
little band crowded around to shield him, but unmercifully assailed,
we were obliged to wield the chairs