Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/76



T began at a camp-meeting; and the odd thing was that John Bassett should have been at a camp-meeting at all. He had no more respect for such means of grace than Epictetus or any other stoical pagan would have had. He had no antagonism toward the Methodists; nor, for that matter, toward any of the five so-called religious sects which had places of worship in his native town, Deerway. If the whole truth could have been known, it would have been seen that he classed them all together, and favored them alike with his heartiest but most good-natured contempt. Luckily he was a silent and reticent man, and his townsmen never suspected in what low esteem he held their sectarian bonds,—their spiritual ecstasies and depressions. They only thought that he was "queer," and some of the more zealous Christians among them feared he might be an infidel, or at best a pantheist, though as to what that latter manner of man might be, there were very vague ideas