title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'gaged'">gagged. At eighteen he had been known as the terror of the creek. Without avail old Jasper had argued with him, with fresh scalps dangling at his own belt. One night Jim turned a revival meeting into a fight with bench legs, beat a hard-hearted money lender until he was taken home almost a mass of pulp. At nineteen he turned a hapless school teacher out of the school house, nailed up the door, and because the teacher muttered against it, threw the pedagogue into the creek. At twenty he seemed to hear a voice coming from afar. A man going to mill said that he saw Jim beside a log on his knees in the woods, praying; he was called a liar, knocked down his insulter and went on with his grist. He had spoken the truth, for on the night following, Jim arose in the congregation, renounced his reckless ways, and with a defiance of the world that among the righteous awaked applause, he came forward and knelt at the mourners' bench. His religion "took," they said, as if speaking of vaccination, and before long he entered the pulpit, ready gently to crack the irreligious heads of former companions still stubborn in the ways of iniquity. From behind a plum bush, in the corner of the fence, he had seen Mrs. Mayfield and had blinked, as if dazzled by a great light. Nor was it till the close of day that he had the courage to come into her presence, and then for a moment he gazed—and vanished. Old Jasper found him mumbling beneath the moon.

"Lost anythin', Jim?"

"Nothing that I ever thought I had, Uncle Jasper."

"Look like a man that is huntin' fur his terbacker."

"I've quit tobacco long ago, Uncle Jasper."

"Huh, give that up, too? Then you have been hit hard. But atter all, my boy, a lick that ain't hard don't count fur much. Understand I believe in yo' Book all right, but not as the most of 'em reads it. The most of 'em reads it so as to make you do the things you don't want to do, and what they want you to do. A good many of 'em think it was writ fur them ag'in you. Findin' new picturs on the moon, Jim? I don't see nuthin' new; same old feller a burnin' of his bresh, allus a puttin' 'em on the fire an' never gittin' through."

"I'm thinking, that's all, Uncle Jasper."

"Comes from readin' them books up on the hill-top, I reckon. They make me think, too, when I git a holt of 'em, 'specially them about the war—looks like it's a mighty hard matter for a man to tell the truth the minit he grabs holt of a pen. Don't see why a pen is such a liar, but it is. And yit, the biggist liar I ever seed couldn't more than write his name. What do you think of them folks in thar, Jim?"

Jim strode off, came back and standing with one hand resting on the rail fence that surrounded the old man's door yard, hung his head and replied: "Old Satan sometimes puts good clothes on his temptations, Uncle Jasper."

"Why, you don't think that young feller's a nosin' round to—"

"I don't see anything mysterious in him, Uncle Jasper. It's the woman that—that strikes so hard."

"Huh. I didn't think you cared anythin' about women, Jim."

"Oh, I don't and you musn't think I do. Did you ever have a feller catch a spear out of the sun with a lookin' glass and shoot it through yo' eyes? That's the way she done me, as she was a standing there at the door."

"Wall, as game a feller as you are ain't afeared of a woman."

"I don't know about that. The gamer a feller is among men the fearder he is among women, it seems like. But what am I talking about? She won't take any notice of me and in fact it won't make any difference if she does. I tell you, though, I don't like to be treated that way by a woman."

"Why, how did she treat you?"

"Looked something at me that made me dissatisfied