honest, sober, industrious citizen,--all this
was to make war upon Reynolds Bartram's constitutional opinions as to
the fitness of things.

A change of opinion somewhere was necessary: so it must occur in the
Prency family, and as soon as it could be brought about. This was
Bartram's first conclusion, after an hour of deep thought. He had
started upon a love-making enterprise, and he objected to a
complication of interests. If the Prencys chose to talk theology in the
privacy of their family life, they were welcome to do so, but he wished
none of it, and, unless his head had lost its cunning, he believed he
could devise a method of preventing further inflictions of it.

He convinced himself that his best method would be to discover and
expose the weakness, perhaps hypocrisy, of the wretched cobbler's
professions. Maybe Kimper meant all he said, and thought he believed
something which was essential to religion; but had not scores of other
common fellows in the town done likewise, during "revivals" and other
seasons of special religious effort, only to fall back into their old
ways soon afterwards? It was all a matter of birth and training, argued
Bartram to himself: the feeblest and most excitable intellects, the
world over, were the first to be impressed by whatever seemed
supernatural, whether it were called religion, spiritualism, mesmerism,
or anything else. It was merely a matter of mental excitement: the
stronger the attack, the sooner the relapse. Sam Kimper would lose
faith in his fancies sooner or later; it might be somewhat cruel to
hasten this result, but what was a little more or less of the life of
such a fellow, compared with the lifelong happiness of one of the
Bartrams,--the last of the family, and, as the young man fully
believed, the best? Should the cobbler's fall be hastened, Bartram
would make it right; indeed, he would volunteer in his defense the
first time he should again be arrested for fighting or stealing.

But his plan did not work. Day after day he had made excuses to drop
into the cobbler's shop and worry the ex-convict into a discussion, but
not once did he depart without a sense of defeat. As he said to
himself,--

"What can be done with a man who only believes, and won't argue or go
to the bottom of things? It's confoundedly ridiculous."

During his last visit, he said,--

"Sam, if the power you profess to believe in can really work such a
change as you think He has done in you, H