argely. He prided himself on being able to handle bees as so many
flies. On a cool, drizzly day we cut a bee tree on the farm. I was
wearing a brown jeans sack coat. This I laid aside while chopping. When
the tree fell the bees swarmed forth in great numbers, and my father
stalked in with his axe, chipping and cutting the limbs, preparatory to
chopping for the honey, and was as indifferent as if surrounded only by
gnats. We stood at a safe distance. Soon he came out with a trifle less
indifference than he went in with, picking the bees out of his hair
with both hands. They had literally settled on his head and were
stinging him furiously. He came running to us to fight them off. I
grabbed up my coat, and with both hands struck him over the head. A
large jack knife, very heavy, was in one of the pockets, and this
struck him on the opposite side of the head and came near felling him
to the ground. We fought the bees off the best we could, but he was
terribly stung. This was the last of his working with bees as with
flies.

My father was a firm believer in the doctrine of justification by faith
alone. All those passages of Scripture that connect justification or
salvation with faith, without mentioning anything else as a condition,
he had at his tongue's end. His argument was, whatever may be mentioned
elsewhere, here salvation is promised on the condition of faith, and
nothing else is in the text. With all this I had become perfectly
familiar, and always had a suspicion that there was a fallacy in it
some where, though I could not exactly expose it. We were clearing a
piece of new ground in April, about the time the spring fever sets in,
and my younger brother and I always "had it bad." It was a Monday
morning, and father was going to La Grange to attend court. At
breakfast he gave us very particular instructions about our work--what
to do and how to do it--and a feature emphasized was that we were to
keep at it. It was getting quite dry, and when he had started to town
he hallooed back and said, "Boys, I want you to watch the fire to-day
and not let it get out." "All right," we responded. His two directions,
perhaps not an hour apart, reminded me of his theology, and I resolved
at once to test its validity when weighed in his own scales. So we went
out to the clearing, lay down under the shade of a tree, and "watched
the fire" all day! Having returned, he asked us how we had got along.
We replied, "Finely," that we had d