e went every evening--at first just to
kill time, and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement
and general racket of the thing. After it was all over each of us found
that the other had been mighty near going up to the rail and joining the
mourners. And another thing had occurred to each of us, too--that is,
what tremendous improvements there were possible in the way that amateur
revivalist worked up his business. This stuck in our crops, and we
figured on it all through the winter.--Well, to make a long story short,
we finally went into the thing ourselves."

"Tell me one thing," interposed Theron. "I'm anxious to understand
it all as we go along. Were you and he at any time sincerely
converted?--that is, I mean, genuinely convicted of sin and conscious
of--you know what I mean!"

"Oh, bless you, yes," responded Sister Soulsby. "Not only once--dozens
of times--I may say every time. We couldn't do good work if we weren't.
But that's a matter of temperament--of emotions."

"Precisely. That was what I was getting at," explained Theron.

"Well, then, hear what I was getting at," she went on. "You were talking
very loudly here about frauds and hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes
ago. Now I say that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows.
Now take him, for example. There isn't a better citizen in all
Chemung County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor, or a better or more
charitable man. I've known him to stay up a whole winter's night in
a poor Irishman's stinking and freezing stable, trying to save his
cart-horse for him, that had been seized with some sort of fit. The
man's whole livelihood, and his family's, was in that horse; and when it
died, Soulsby bought him another, and never told even ME about it. Now
that I call real piety, if you like."

"So do I," put in Theron, cordially.

"And this question of fraud," pursued his companion,--"look at it in
this light. You heard us sing. Well, now, I was a singer, of course, but
Soulsby hardly knew one note from another. I taught him to sing, and he
went at it patiently and diligently, like a little man. And I invented
that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd didn't know, and so
couldn't break in on and smother. I simply took Chopin--he is full of
sixths, you know--and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes
and mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby just to sing
those sixths so as to make the harmony, and there you a