ascend into the Mountains of Temptation and be tested,
before he could be pronounced fit for companionship with Martyrs.
Therefore, a weary climb heavenward was before him, and a great trial
of his fidelity. On his patience, daring and fortitude depended all
his future in the Order. He was marched to a ladder and bidden to
ascend.

"I," said the Deacon Militant, "upon this companion stair will
accompany you."

But there was no other ladder and the Deacon Militant had to stand upon
a chair.

Up the ladder labored Stevens, but, though he climbed manfully, he
remained less than a foot above the floor. The ladder went down like a
treadmill, as Stevens climbed--it was an endless ladder rolled down on
Stevens' side and up on the other. The Deacon Militant, from his perch
on the chair, encouraged Stevens to climb faster so as not to be
out-stripped. With labored breath and straining muscles he climbed,
the Martyrs rolling on the floor in merriment all the more violent
because silent. Amidon himself laughed to see this strenuous climb, so
strikingly like human endeavor, which puts the climber out of breath,
and raises him not a whit--except in temperature. At the end of
perhaps five minutes, when Stevens might well have believed himself a
hundred feet above the roof, he had achieved a dizzy height of perhaps
six feet, on the summit of a stage-property mountain, where he stood
beside the Deacon Militant, his view of the surrounding plain cut off
by papier-mache clouds, and facing a foul fiend to whom the Deacon
Militant confided that here was a candidate to be tested and qualified.
Whereupon the foul fiend remarked "Ha, ha!" and bade them bind him to
the Plutonian Thunderbolt and hurl him down to the nether world. The
thunderbolt was a sort of toboggan on rollers, for which there was a
slide running down presumably to the nether world, above mentioned.

The hoodwink was removed, and Stevens looked about him, treading
warily, like one on the top of a tower; the great height of the
mountain made him giddy. Obediently he lay face downward on the
thunderbolt, and yielded up his wrists and ankles to fastenings
provided for them.

"They're not going to lower him with those cords, are they?"

It was a stage-whisper from the darkness which spake thus.

"Oh, I guess it's safe enough!" said another, in the same sort of
agitated whisper.

"Safe!" was the reply. "I tell you, it's sure to break! Some one stop
'em----"