e threshold he paused again to say, "Well, all I got to say to you,
Hayward, don' you nevah talk to me no mor' nuffin' 'bout doctrine!"

_Five_

OLD ABE'S CONVERSION

The Negro population of the little Southern town of Danvers was in a
state of excitement such as it seldom reached except at revivals,
baptisms, or on Emancipation Day. The cause of the commotion was the
anticipated return of the Rev. Abram Dixon's only son, Robert, who,
having taken up his father's life-work and graduated at one of the
schools, had been called to a city church.

When Robert's ambition to take a college course first became the subject
of the village gossip, some said that it was an attempt to force
Providence. If Robert were called to preach, they said, he would be
endowed with the power from on high, and no intervention of the schools
was necessary. Abram Dixon himself had at first rather leaned to this
side of the case. He had expressed his firm belief in the theory that if
you opened your mouth, the Lord would fill it. As for him, he had no
thought of what he should say to his people when he rose to speak. He
trusted to the inspiration of the moment, and dashed blindly into
speech, coherent or otherwise.

Himself a plantation exhorter of the ancient type, he had known no
school except the fields where he had ploughed and sowed, the woods and
the overhanging sky. He had sat under no teacher except the birds and
the trees and the winds of heaven. If he did not fail utterly, if his
labour was not without fruit, it was because he lived close to nature,
and so, near to nature's God. With him religion was a matter of emotion,
and he relied for his results more upon a command of feeling than upon
an appeal to reason. So it was not strange that he should look upon his
son's determination to learn to be a preacher as unjustified by the real
demands of the ministry.

But as the boy had a will of his own and his father a boundless pride in
him, the day came when, despite wagging heads, Robert Dixon went away to
be enrolled among the students of a growing college. Since then six
years had passed. Robert had spent his school vacations in teaching; and
now, for the first time, he was coming home, a full-fledged minister of
the gospel.

It was rather a shock to the old man's sensibilities that his son's
congregation should give him a vacation, and that the young minister
should accept; but he consented to regard it as of the new order