e sought to find texts to bolster up his preaccepted tenets, but
as the weeks went by, and he grew more and more absorbed in the search,
he began to study the Bible impartially and comprehensively; and,
instead of being satisfied with fragments of truth taken here and there
from disconnected texts, he studied the different passages with
reference to their connected meaning. Reading, studying, pondering
thus, his reason and judgment could not but admit the force of what
Barton Stone and the other "New Light" ministers were teaching. Yes,
his reason and judgment were at last convinced; yet this did not
produce submission and a desire to acknowledge his error, but rather a
feeling of resistance and defiance.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE CUP OF COLD WATER

In August of that same summer, Hiram Gilcrest, the man of strong nerve
and iron constitution, whose boast it had been that he had never known
a day's real sickness, was stricken down with disease, and after a few
days of wasting illness, he was muttering in the delirium of typhus
fever.

He had never forgiven his daughter and her husband their runaway
marriage. True, since the partial reconciliation of five years before,
which had removed the ban of total non-communication between the two
households, Betsy had occasionally visited her mother; but always, when
at Oaklands, her father's manner, cold, distant, formal, had made her
feel that not as a child of the house, nor even as an honored guest,
but merely as a stranger, would she ever again be received in the home
of her childhood. This was a great sorrow to her, the one dark cloud in
the otherwise serene sky of her married happiness; and Logan, although
he cared little on his own account for the cold looks and haughty
demeanor of his father-in-law, loved his young wife too tenderly not to
sorrow at her sorrow.

Now that Major Gilcrest was ill, however, Abner and Betty forgot all
his harsh injustice, and hurried to the bedside where he lay battling
for life against the fire that filled his veins, sapped his strength
and consumed his flesh. Mason Rogers, too, although he and Gilcrest had
not spoken to each other since their stormy interview eight years
before, now hearing of his old friend's illness, forgot all harsh words
and thoughts, and hurried to Oaklands to offer assistance. Of
Gilcrest's six children, only Betsy and Matthew, the first-born and the
youngest, were there. Silas and Philip were in Massachusetts,