was glad to have every one notice and from which he
ceased reluctantly as they parted, finding no place to sit together. The
player and his wife, over-looking the throng, complacently discovered
standing-room only, and the meeting which Hayle's daughter had pledged
herself and them to "run" was running itself. For hardly had they
entered the saloon when, from a front seat and without warning, the
exhorter exploded the stalwart old hymn-tune of "Kentucky," and soon all
but a scant dozen of the company followed in full cry, though hardly
with the fulness of the leader's voice, that rolled through the cabin
like tropical thunder:

"'Whedn I cadn read my ti-tle cle-ah
Toe madn-shudns idn the-e ske-ies
I'll bid fah-wedl toe ev'-rye fe-ah
Adn wipe my weep-ign eyes.'"

From the chairman's seat the actor kept a corner of one eye on Ramsey
and as the hymn's last line rolled away he stood up. She had not sung,
but neither had she laughed. No one could have seen the moment's huge
grotesqueness larger, yet to the relief of many she had kept her poise.
In her mind was the bishop, overhead in the texas, consciously
imperilling his life to save her brother's soul, and in the face of all
drolleries she strenuously kept her ardor centred on the gravest
significancies of the hour, as if the bishop's success up there hung on
the efficiency with which this work of his earlier appointment should be
done, down here, in his absence. She saw in the exhorter a tragic as
well as comic problem. Nor was he her only perplexity. Another, she
feared, might easily arise through some clash of any two kinds of
worshippers each devoted to its own set forms. Certain main features,
she knew, had been carefully prearranged, yet as the actor stood silent
about to ask the Vicksburger to lead in prayer she tingled with all the
exhilaration a ruder soul might have felt in hunting ferocious game or
in fighting fire. Her soul rose a-tiptoe for the moment when the
Presbyterians, who also had not sung, should stand up to pray, while the
few Episcopalians, kneeling forward, and the many Baptists and
Methodists, kneeling to the rear, should find themselves face to
face--nose to nose, anxiously thought Ramsey--with only the open backs
of the chairs between. She was herself the last to kneel, kneeling
forward but doubting if she ought not to face the other way, hardly
knowing whether she was a Catholic or a Methodist; and she was much the