and _still_ more, and him a burning up and a roasting up, and his tongue
a lolling out, all of a _sizzle_. Now wasn't that fine--because folks said
he'd likely gone crazy about religion!"

Other times his captor would declare himself to be John the Baptist
making straight the paths in the wilderness. Again he would quote passages
of scripture, some of them hideous mockeries to the tortured prisoner,
some strangely soothing and suggestive.

But a search had been made for the missing man and, quite by accident,
they had found him, at a time when it seemed to him his mind must go with
his captor's. His recovery from the physical blight of this captivity had
been prompt; but there were those who sat under him who insisted that
ever after he had been palpably less insistent upon the feature of divine
retribution for what might be called the merely technical sins of
heterodoxy. Not that unsound doctrine was ever so much as hinted of him;
only, as once averred a plain parishioner, "He seemed to bear down on hell
jest a _lee-tle_ less continuously."

As for his young wife, she had ever after professed an unconquerable
aversion for those sermons in which God's punishment of sinners was set
forth; and this had strangely been true of their daughter, born but a
little time after the father's release from the maniac's cabin. She had
grown to womanhood submitting meekly to an iron rule; but none the less
betraying an acute repugnance for certain doctrines preached by her
father. It seemed to the old man a long way to look back; and then a
long way to come forward again, past the death of his girl-wife while
their child was still tender, down to the amazing iniquity of that
child's revolt, in her thirty-first year. Dumbly, dutifully, had she
submitted to all his restrictions and severities, stonily watching her
girlhood go, through a fading, lining and hardening of her prettiness.
Then all at once, with no word of pleading or warning, she had done the
monstrous thing. He awoke one day to know that his beloved child had
gone away to marry the handsome, swaggering, fiddle-playing
good-for-nothing who had that winter given singing lessons in the
village.

Only once after that had he looked upon her face--the face of a withered
sprite, subdued by time. The hurt of that look was still fresh in him,
making his mind turn heavily, perhaps a little remorsefully, to the two
little boys asleep in the west bedroom. Had the seed of revolt been