Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 16.pdf/207

 164

devil and the deep blue—. Shades of Blackstone!" he cried when he suddenly be came entangled in the raft which had pre viously occasioned the loss of his cat-fish. "Help! help!" Now it happened that the Reverend Jonas Biddle had candidates to baptize that day. and hearing the squire's cries of distress, he hurried to the rescue. "The wicked stand in slippery places," ob served the parson, carefully perching him self on the log, and opening his bible at the forty-first chapter of Job. "Listen, oh son of Belial, to the patience of Job: 'Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? . . . Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? ("No, sah, "cried the squire, with an uneasy glance at the alligators). . . Behold, the hope of him is in vain, shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? ("Heaven forbid it!" ejaculated the squire). . . Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. ("For humanity's sake, stop preaching and get me out of here!" shouted the squire.) ... He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood. . . He beholdeth all high things.'" The squire crouched lower in the water, which at that point was something over waist-deep. "Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth; let him that standeth take heed lest he fall," he cried desperately. "I never—." "Do you believe in immersion?" inter rupted the preacher. "It seems so." "Do you believe in the final preservation of the saints, and the final persecution of the wicked?"

"I believe in the final persecution of the saints and the final perseverance of the wicked," averred the squire. "Then work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," said the preacher with a decisive ring in his voice. "My candidates are waiting yonder. I must be going." "Stay!" cried the squire. "I subscribe to that." "Do you promise, if admitted to the church, to love the brethren and sisters?" continued the preacher. The squire demurred at this (he had never been an admirer of the sisters), but glancing at the alligators, which seemed to be manceuvering to foreclose their mortgage, he gave vent to a weak affirmative. "One more brief question," said the preacher, securely tying a rope, which he carried for use in baptismal emergencies, to the log. "Do you, here and now, henceforth and forever renounce, denounce, decry, deny, and despise the world, flesh and the devil— and fishing on the Sabbath?" "I d-d-d-do," shiveringly admitted the squire, with an egg-blue look about his lips. "Then, brother Berry Todd, I cast you the rope of salvation." The rope fell within easy reach. The squire seized it eagerly, and pulled with such force that the log suddenly went asunder with the Reverend Jonas Biddie on the broken end. But it served to scare off the saurians and to set the squire adrift. A few moments later he and the par son were pulled ashore by the candidates, but the main participants in this serio-comic (or religio-comic) event have never troubled each other about religion since.