Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/77

Rh in Deerway. The truth was, that John Bassett was a pagan,—a New England pagan. There are a few of these in every New England county. They are the offspring of the Westminster Catechism. Apply enough of the Westminster Catechism to a meditative, clear-witted, logical, phlegmatic boy, in his youth; let him spend most of his days out on sunny hill-sides, thinking it over in silence, and asking nobody any questions, and the chances are that, when he is twenty-one, he will quit going to church, and be a high-minded pagan. He will have absorbed much that is grand and ennobling; but he will have thrown away, in his slow-growing hatred of the cruel husk, part of the sweet kernel also, and will be a defrauded and robbed man all his days, for lack of true comprehension of the Gospel of Christ, which is loving, and of Christ's Father, who is love.

It is evident that a camp-meeting was the last place one would expect to see John Bassett in. If pools had been the fashion in Deerway, one might have made a fortune betting against the chance of John Bassett's hearing Bishop Worrell's sermon on the last day of the Middleburg camp-meeting. But he did hear it, every word of it.

He had been that day to Northborough, ten miles above Middleburg, to look at a pair of prize oxen he had heard of, and had a mind to buy. If those oxen had not been sold the day before, John Bassett would have bought them, and this story would