eeling.
Always an orator, with a strangely declamatory style he launched into a
detailed account of the late colonel's life and services, his wounds,
his long sufferings and final death in poverty, winding up with a vivid
word picture of a battle (Antietam), in which the colonel had gallantly
captured a rebel flag and come by his injury.

When he was through there was great excitement in the Post and much
feeling in his favor, but he rather weakened the effect by at once
demanding that the traitorous words be withdrawn, and failing to compel
this, preferred charges against the man who had uttered them and
attempted to have him court-martialed.

So great was the bitterness engendered by this that the Post was now
practically divided, and being unable to compel what he considered
justice he finally resigned. Subsequently he took issue with his former
fellow-soldiers in various ways, commenting satirically on their church
regularity and professed Christianity, as opposed to their indifference
to the late colonel, and denouncing in various public conversations the
double-mindedness and sharp dealings of the "little gods," as he termed
those who ran the G.A.R. Post, the church, and the shipyards.

Not long after his religious affairs reached a climax when the minister,
once a good friend of his, following the lead of the dominant star, Mr.
Palmer, publicly denounced him from the pulpit one Sunday as an enemy of
the church and of true Christianity!

"There is a man in this congregation," he exclaimed in a burst of
impassioned oratory, "who poses as a Christian and a Baptist, who is in
his heart's depth the church's worst enemy. Hell and all its devils
could have no worse feelings of evil against the faith than he, and he
doesn't sell tobacco, either!"

The last reference at once fixed the identity of the person, and caused
Burridge to get up and leave the church. He pondered over this for a
time, severed his connections with the body, and having visited Graylock
one Sunday drove there every Sabbath thereafter, each time going to a
different church. After enduring this for six months he generated a
longing for a more convenient meeting-place, and finally allied himself
with the Baptist Church of Eustis. Here his anchor might possibly have
remained fast had it not been that subtle broodings over his wrongs, a
calm faith in the righteousness of his own attitude, and disgust with
those whom he saw calmly expatiating upon the