're prepared to die, do you?"

"I felt it a good many times, deacon, when I was in that jail; an'
sometimes I half wished I could die right away."

"Pshaw!" muttered the deacon. "You don't understand. You're groping in
darkness. You don't understand."

"That's so, deacon, if you mean I don't understand what you're drivin'
at."

"Don't you feel Christ in you the hope of glory?"

"I don't know what you mean, deacon?"

"Don't you feel that a sacrifice has been made to atone for your sins?"

"I can't follow you, deacon."

"I thought not. You haven't got things right at all. You haven't been
converted: that's what's the matter with you."

"Do you mean, Deacon," said Sam, after a moment, "that what I'm
believin' about Jesus is all wrong an' there ain't nothin' in it?"

"Why, no; I can't say that," the deacon replied, "but--but you've
begun wrong end first. What a sinner needs most of all is to know about
his hereafter."

"It's what's goin' on now, from day to day, that weighs hardest on me,
deacon. There's nothin' hard about dyin'; leastways, you'd think so if
you was built like me, an' felt like I have to feel sometimes."

"You're all wrong," said the deacon. "If you can't understand these
things for yourself, you ought to take the word of wiser men for it."

"S'posin' I was to do that about everythin': then when Judge Prency,
who's a square man an' a good deal smarter than I be, talks politics to
me, I ought to be a Republican instead of a Jackson Democrat."

"No," said the deacon, sharply, for he was a Jackson Democrat himself.
"I'll have to talk more to you about this, Samuel. Good night."

"Good night, deacon."

"He knows more'n you do about religion," said Mrs. Kimper, who had
followed closely behind, and who rejoined her husband as soon as the
deacon departed.

"He ought to, seein' his head-piece an' chances; an' yet I've heerd
some pooty hard things said about him."

When the couple reached home, Sam looked at the long heap of straw and
rags on which his children should have been sleeping, but which was
without occupant except the baby. Then, by the light of the coals still
remaining in the fire-place, he looked through some leaves of the
little book which the prison visitor had given him. When he arose from
the floor, he said to himself,--

"I'll stick to Him yet, deacon or no deacon,--stick to Him as if He was
Andrew Jackson."

CHAPTER V.

Sam Kimper spent several days in looking a