in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that
Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself. He even
sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own:

"For her dear sake whom he did pity,
He took her back to Jersey City."

But the Sabbath came inexorably to bring his sinful nature before him,
just as the door of the Front Room was opened each week to remind him of
the awful joys of Heaven. And then his mind was like the desert of
shifting sands. There were so many things to be done and not done if one
were to avert the wrath of this God that made the Front Room a cavern of
terror, that rumbled threateningly in the prayer of his grandfather and
shook the young minister to a white passion each Sabbath.

There was being good--which was not to commit murder or be an atheist like
Milo Barrus and spell God with a little g; and there was Coming to the
Feet--not so simple as it sounded, he could very well tell them; and there
was the matter of Blood. There were hymns, for example, that left him
confused. The "fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins"
sounded interesting. Vividly he saw the "sinners plunged beneath that
flood" losing all their guilty stains. It was entirely reasonable, and
with an assumption of carelessness he glanced cautiously over his own body
each morning to see if his guilty stains showed yet. But who was Immanuel?
And where was this excellent fountain?

Then there was being "washed in the blood of the lamb," which was
considerably simpler--except for the matter of its making one "whiter
than snow." He was doubtful of this result, unless it was only
poetry-writing which doesn't mean everything it says. He meant to try
this sometime, when he could get a lamb, both as a means of grace and as
a desirable experiment.

But plunging into the fountain filled with blood sounded far more
important and effectual--if it were only practicable. As the sinners came
out of this flood he thought they must look as Clytie did in her scarlet
flannel petticoat the night he was taken with croup and she came running
with the Magnetic Ointment--even redder!

The big white house of Grandfather Delcher and Clytie, in short, was a
house in which to be terrified and happy; anxious and well-fed. And if its
inner recesses took on too much gloomy portent one could always fly to the
big yard where grew monarch elms and maples and a row of formal spruces;
where the lawn on one side was bordere