ual utterances were acquiring.
He had long enjoyed the distinction of being considered a miraculous
convert; his rescue from the wily enticements of Satan had been
celebrated with much shaking and clapping of hands, and cries of
"Glory," and muscular ecstasy.

His religious experiences thenceforth, his vacillations of hope and
despair, had been often elaborated amongst the brethren. But his was a
conventional soul; its expression was in the formulae and platitudes of
the camp-meeting. They sank into oblivion in the excitement attendant
upon Purdee's wild utterances from the mystic script of the rocks.

As Grinnell talked, he often paused in his work to imitate the
gesticulatory enthusiasms of the saints at the camp-meeting. He was
a thickset fellow of only medium height, and was called, somewhat
invidiously, "a chunky man." His face was broad, prosaic, good-natured,
incapable of any fine gradations of expression. It indicated an
elementary rage or a sluggish placidity. He had a ragged beard of a
reddish hue, and hair a shade lighter. He wore blue jeans trousers
and an unbleached cotton shirt, and the whole system depended on one
suspender. He was engaged in skimming a great kettle of boiling sorghum
with a perforated gourd, which caught the scum and strained the liquor.
The process was primitive; instead of the usual sorghum boiler and
furnace, the kettle was propped upon stones laid together so as to
concentrate the heat of the fire. His wife was continually feeding the
flames with chips which she brought in her apron from the wood-pile.
Her countenance was half hidden in her faded pink sun-bonnet, which,
however, did not obscure an expression responsive to that on the man's
face. She did not grudge Purdee the salvation he had found; she only
grudged him the prestige he had derived from its unique method.

"Why can't the critter elude Satan with less n'ise?" she asked,
acrimoniously.

"Edzackly," her husband chimed in.

Now and then both turned a supervisory glance at the sorghum mill down
the slope at some little distance, and close to the river. It had been
a long day for the old white mare, still trudging round and round the
mill; perhaps a long day as well for the two half-grown boys, one of
whom fed the machine, thrusting into it a stalk at a time, while the
other brought in his arms fresh supplies from the great pile of sorghum
cane hard by.

All the door-yard of the little log cabin was bedaubed with the