Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/308

 supervised a Junior Epworth League—the juvenile department of that admirable association of young people whose purpose is, it has itself announced, to "take the wreck out of recreation and make it re-creation."

He had a note from Bishop Toomis hinting that the bishop had most gratifying reports from the district superintendent about Elmer's "diligent and genuinely creative efforts" and hinting that at the coming Annual Conference, Elmer would be shifted to a considerably larger church.

"Fine!" glowed Elmer. "Gosh, I'll be glad to get away. These rubes here get about as much out of high-class religion, like I give them, as a fleet of mules!"

Ishuah Rogers was dead, and they were holding his funeral at the Methodist Church. As farmer, as store-keeper, as postmaster, he had lived all his seventy-nine years in Banjo Crossing.

Old J. F. Whittlesey was shaken by Ishuah's death. They had been boys together, young men together, neighbors on the farm, and in his last years, when Ishuah was nearly blind and living with his daughter Jenny, J. F. Whittlesey had come into town every day to spend hours sitting with him on the porch, wrangling over Blaine and Grover Cleveland. Whittlesey hadn't another friend left alive. To drive past Jenny's now and not see old Ishuah made the world empty.

He was in the front row at the church; he could see his friend's face in the open coffin. All of Ishuah's meanness and fussiness and care was wiped out; there was only the dumb nobility with which he had faced blizzard and August heat, labor and sorrow; only the heroic thing Whittlesey had loved in him.

And he would not see Ishuah again, ever.

He listened to Elmer, who, his eyes almost filled at the drama of a church full of people mourning their old friend, lulled them with Revelation's triumphant song:

These are they that come out of the great tribulation, and they washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of