st sit there and grin, and
cut his heart to its core, for he knows you do not understand.

"It's rather up to you, Bub. In the next few months you will have to
decide whether or not you are going to hell. Of course the 'vilest
sinner may return' at any point along the road--but to what? To
shattered health; to a mother heart-broken in her grave; to a wife
damned to all eternity by your thoughtless brutality; and to children
who are always afraid to look up the alley, when they see a group of
boys, for fear they may be teasing you--you, drunk and dirty, lying in
the stable filth! To that you will 'return,' with your strength spent,
and your sportive friends, gone to the devil before you, and your chance
in life frittered away.

"Just sit down and figure it out, Bub. Of course there are a lot of good
fellows on the road to hell; you will have a good time going; but you'll
be a long time there. You'll dance and play cards and chase out nights,
and soak your soul in the essence of don't-give-a-dam-tiveness, and
you'll wonder, as you go up in the balloon, what fun there is in walking
through this sober old earth. Friends--what are they? The love of
humanity--what is it? Thoughtfulness to those about you? Gentility--What
are these things? Letteroll--letteroll! But as you drop out of the
balloon, the earth will look like a serious piece of landscape.

"When you are old, the beer you have swilled will choke your throat; the
women you have flirted with will hang round your feet and make you
stumble. All the nights you have wasted at poker will dim your eyes. The
garden of the days that are gone, wherein you should have planted
kindness and consideration and thoughtfulness and manly courage to do
right, will be grown up to weeds, that will blossom in your patches and
in your rags and in your twisted, gnarly face that no one will love.

"Go it, Bub! don't stop for your pa's sake; you know it all. Your pa is
merely an old fogy. Tell him you can paddle your own canoe. But when you
were a little boy, a very little boy, with a soft, round body, your pa
used to take you in his arms and rub his beard--his rough, stubby,
three-days' beard--against your face and pray that God would keep you
from the path you are going in.

"And so the sins of the father, Bub--but we won't talk of that."

Three months later, when the Methodists opened their regular winter
revival, Mehronay, becoming enraged at what he called the tin-horn
clothes of t