couldn't on somebody else. It may only prove they was too hardened in their sins and their doubts to be worked on, at least, for the present. Then it may be the thing has happened, right before their eyes only when it comes to great things and spiritual facts they are more'n half blind.

"Raisin' from the dead I suppose would be considered the biggest miracle of all, and perhaps it's about the hardest to believe. But at some time or other, I have never been able to tell when, and I don't knows any one else can either, the Lord God puts a soul into every child of His. It is something that a father or a mother cannot put in of themselves, and it is something that can't be destroyed. A good many have tried to destroy their souls; but it's my belief they haven't succeeded, not any one of all that have tried. Now, if He is the only one that can put a soul into this earth house, He's the one that knows best when to take it out, and it might be very easy, on an important occasion, for Him to slip the soul back in again for a few days. He did that in the case of His Divine Son and the Son did it on several occasions, when He thought the soul ought to keep in its earth house a while longer."

"Did you ever hear anything about reincarnation, Jim?" I inquired.

"Big word, isn't it," said Jim, immediately giving full attention to my subject. "No, I don't know as ever I did. What is it, a doctrine or a medicine?"

"It's the belief, Jim, that souls return to the earth again in new bodies. Some believe that only in animals and lower forms does this happen and others that even when souls have been on this earth, they return again to complete their experiences. I was thinking that your idea of the ease with which God might slip in or out a soul might make it easy for you to believe in this rather strange doctrine of reincarnation. What do you think of it?"

"Sounds fairly sensible to me, on first thought. I don't remember anything in the Book about it, though I don't pretend to say I know all that's in that Book. It might explain some things that's hard to explain now with our present eye-sight. There's old lady Farrar, that I was a'telling you about, who cured herself of weakness and was about twenty years younger at eighty-five than eighty. She never had any real luck or any great blessings until she cured herself. She was one of the unfortunate kind, most always ailin' and when you went to see her she had some new misfortune to tell you about. She lost every one of her children and two husbands besides. Folks said it wasn't any great loss, so far as the husbands were concerned, but then they were hers and she took on considerable. Yet she has always been a decent woman, kept the commandments far as her neighbors could judge; paid her bills, when she could; went to church and said her prayers; and she had only a triflin' amount of good fortune. She had to wash and scrub for the neighbors to make ends meet and the splicin' was often poor.

"Just compare her life with the lives of other women folks whose husbands usually had a good catch and got good prices, whose children never died and who prospered thru the years and even handled the commands in a slippery fashion. It is hard to think justice has been done in both cases or perhaps in either case. But if this miracle of slipping a soul back into a body and sending it to school again is true, that you are telling me about, why it clears up a lot of the problems. Mrs. Farrar didn't pass the examinations the first or second time she was here and she was sent back to study more and she is getting about what she ought to have in His judgment.

"I think, however, that reincarnation idea that you mention, I would need to think a good deal about before I cared to tie too fast to it. I presume I'll end up in putting it into quite a big package of goods I am saving for shipping across the stream when I take passage. I've marked them 'For His Judgment' and when I get over there, I'll sort 'em and see if they're worth saving, and if I'm still doubtful about any on 'em I'll just get Him to pass judgment on them. That's seems to be a sensible thing to do.

"But we was talking about miracles here and now. To me the greatest miracles Christ worked were not in curing diseases, but in curing sins. I have always thought it a miracle that He could take Peter with his stubbornness and his habit of speaking up too quick and make him strong enough, sound enough, to be a real corner stone in His new church. I callate Peter was pretty well along in years when the Master called him and old folks ain't as easy to work on as those that are young and more pliable. I count it a miracle that He made over Peter so well.

"I have always been a good deal interested to find out what became of Judas Iscariot who betrayed Him. He wasn't a fisherman like Peter and he was harder still to work on. I know some of the ministers have got rid of him, by tossing him over board and letting him drown in perdition. But the Lord God that went after the sheep would a some day heared the moaning of Judas and a-gone to his rescue, seems though. If the Lord could work a miracle on Peter couldn't He some time, some how do it on Judas? He must a had some beginning points on him some wheres."

"I tell you the Lord has plenty a chances to work miracles if He wishes, right round here. There's Rascal Moore. He ain't been converted yet."

"Rascal Moore, did you say, Jim?" I interrupted.

"Well that wasn't the name his mother gave him, but she didn't know he would take all his father's bad points and add a few more evil ways. She named him, Pascal. But Rascal fits him better and everybody knows him by that name, and I have to think twice to remember he ever had another name.

"Rascal has done more to hurt the salt-fish business than any fisherman I know. He manages to get hold of the most ornery, two-cent fish there are in the sea. These fish have a hankering for Rascal, I guess, and they scoot straight for his nets. When he gets 'em, he never cleans well and he always hurries the curing, and he is none too particular about either counting or weighing. He'll sell a little cheaper or lie a little stronger and get rid of 'em, usually to an exporter and they go perhaps to Naples and they're so poor, the folks who buy them never want any more Newfoundland cod-fish. The government ought not to wait for the Lord to punish Rascal, they should get after him right away.

"Rascal has other sins to account for. Everybody feels, though they don't hardly dare say so, that he killed his wife, and he's so mean he's never married since. If there's been a piece of deviltry carried out anywheres within fifty miles of St. John's that he hasn't had a part in, I have yet to learn o' the fact.

"I say to convert Rascal Moore would be a real miracle. And it will be done and I would be glad to see it done on short order. I know it can be done, for I have seen other folks as mean, ornery and selfish as Rascal come meekly to the judgment seat, I have seen 'em rise outen their old selves and become new and clean as a sunshiny morning after the air has been washed in a fog. I have seen so much done by the Lord on His own account and working thru the hands of His servants that I never doubt that Rascal Moore will be made right.

"Yes, sir, I believe in miracles and I see them every day. Brown earth a-turning into blades and blossoms, in some wonderful way that He planned. No less wonderful I see bad men becoming good men; sick men becoming well men; and they that have been under the heels of sin and slavery standin' up on their own feet. When I can't explain something I still feel it is happening under the law and it's another of His