g
faith. He didn't know how much would stand when the sloughing ended.

Andrew Pill had been a variety of things, a farmer, a dry-goods
merchant, and a traveling salesman, but in a revival quite like this of
his own, he had been converted and his life changed. He now desired to
help his fellow-men to a better life, and willingly went out among the
farmers, where pay was small. It was not true, therefore, that he had
gone into it because there was little work and good pay. He was really
an able man, and would have been a success in almost anything he
undertook; but his reading and thought, his easy intercourse with men
like Bacon and Radbourn, had long since undermined any real faith in the
current doctrine of retribution, and to-night, as he rode into the
night, he was feeling it all and suffering it all, forced to acknowledge
at last what had been long moving.

The horse took the wrong road, and plodded along steadily, carrying him
away from his home, but he did not know it for a long time. When at last
he looked up and saw the road leading out upon the wide plain between
the belts of timber, leading away to Rock River, he gave a sigh of
relief. He could not meet his wife then; he must have a chance to think.

Over him, the glittering, infinite sky of winter midnight soared,
passionless, yet accusing in its calmness, sweetness and majesty. What
was he that he could dogmatize on eternal life and the will of the Being
who stood behind that veil? And then would come rushing back that scene
in the school-house, the smell of the steaming garments, the gases from
the lamps, the roar of the stove, the sound of his own voice, strident,
dominating, so alien to his present mood, he could only shudder at it.

He was worn out with the thinking when he drove into the stable at the
Merchants' House and roused up the sleeping hostler, who looked at him
suspiciously and demanded pay in advance. This seemed right in his
present mood. He was not to be trusted.

When he flung himself face downward on his bed, the turmoil in his brain
was still going on. He couldn't hold one thought or feeling long; all
seemed slipping like water from his hands.

He had in him great capacity for change, for growth. Circumstances had
been against his development thus far, but the time had come when growth
seemed to be defeat and failure.

VI.

Radbourn was thinking about him, two days after, as he sat in his friend
Judge Brown's law office