lden knelt by the
bedside and groaned. And then he thought of Job's God and of the
Christ he talked about: thought of the little Testament he cherished.
He would call on Him, he would beg Him to spare Job. He knelt near the
lad; he started to say, "Oh, God, spare my boy! spare my boy!" when a
sense of his wickedness, his hard heart, his selfish life, his sin,
came over him; and instead he cried from the depths of his soul, "God
have mercy on me a sinner!"

The daylight was struggling through the shutters when Job turned and
opened his eyes, to see an anxious face look into his own and to hear
a familiar voice out of which had gone all anger, say:

"Oh, Job, my boy, I knew He'd hear me, I prayed so long! Job, God has
forgiven me! Won't you? Oh, tell me you will! I am a different man! I
read it in the Book while you lay here so still: 'Though your sins be
as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.' And Job, it's true!"

The fever stayed with Job many a day after that, and it was June
before the natural color came back into his white cheeks. But the old
ranch seemed like a new place to him; and when one morning Mr. Malden
read at family devotions, "All things work together for good to them
that love God," he broke down in the prayer he tried to make, and
rushed out of doors to hide the tears of joy that choked him, while he
heard Tony singing as he went about his toil:

"Oh, dar's glory, yes, dar is glory,
Oh, dar is glory in my soul!
Since I touched de hem of His garment,
Oh, dar is glory in my soul."

CHAPTER XII.

SQUIRE PERKINS.

Of all the queer families in the mountains, not one, surely, equalled
that of Squire Perkins, a real down-east Yankee, whose house was not
more than a mile west of Malden's Mill, on the Frost Creek road. A
little weazened old man, who, while he had always been staunch to his
political creed, and had been Republican supervisor of the town ever
since people could remember, yet had drifted religiously till he was
now a typical Spiritualist. The neighbor boys who used to go past his
house evenings and see him with the "Truth Seeker" in his hands,
wandering among the trees and gazing blankly into space, often took
him for a genuine ghost.

His wife was quite unlike him. She was born in a house-boat on the
Pearl River near Canton, and, with hair plaited down her forehead and
cheeks, slanting eyes and wooden shoes and a silk robe, had landed at
San Francisco w