as he spoke he struck the Bible repeatedly with
his clenched fist, "by the Almighty, I will build a church of my own to
Him! To Him! do you hear? not to your opinions of Him nor mine nor any
man's! I will cut off a parcel of my farm and make a perpetual deed of
it in the courts, to be held in trust forever. And while the earth
stands, it shall stand, free to all Christian believers. I will build a
school-house and a meeting-house, where any child may be free to learn
and any man or woman free to worship."

He put the Bible back with shaking arms and turned on them again.

"As for you, my brethren," he said, his face purple and distorted with
passion, "you may be saved in your crooked, narrow way, if the mercy of
God is able to do it. But you are close to the jaws of Hell this day!"

He went over into a corner for his hat, took his wife by the hand and
held it tightly, gathered the flock of his children before him, and
drove them out of the church. He mounted his horse, lifted his wife to
her seat behind him, saw his children loaded on two other horses, and,
leading the way across the creek, disappeared in the wilderness.

II

Some sixty-five years later, one hot day of midsummer in 1865--one
Saturday afternoon--a lad was cutting weeds in a woodland pasture; a
big, raw-boned, demure boy of near eighteen.

He had on heavy shoes, the toes green with grass stain; the leather so
seasoned by morning dews as to be like wood for hardness. These were to
keep his feet protected from briers or from the bees scattered upon the
wild white clover or from the terrible hidden thorns of the
honey-locust. No socks. A pair of scant homespun trousers, long
outgrown. A coarse clean shirt. His big shock-head thatched with yellow
straw, a dilapidated sun-and-rain shed.

The lanky young giant cut and cut and cut: great purple-bodied poke,
strung with crimson-juiced seed; great burdock, its green burrs a
plague; great milkweed, its creamy sap gushing at every gash; great
thistles, thousand-nettled; great ironweed, plumed with royal purple;
now and then a straggling bramble prone with velvety berries--the
outpost of a patch behind him; now and then--more carefully, lest he
notch his blade--low sprouts of wild cane, survivals of the
impenetrable brakes of pioneer days. All these and more, the rank,
mighty measure of the soil's fertility--low down.

Measure of its fertility aloft, the tops of the trees, from which the
call of the