Once, at a camp-meeting, I did preach
a sermon; and I tell you, the old people looked mighty sober, and the
younger and more susceptible of my auditors covered their faces with
their hands and seemed to shake with grief and contrition. But, pshaw,
pshaw; people don't go to hear either witty agnostics lecture, or
preachers preach, to get something for their brain-boxes to reason
about. Believe me "--tapping the volume, still in his hand--"this sort
of thing won't make anybody reason. After all, the question is one of
swapping off Christ for an Illinois lawyer."
The EIGHTH Chapter
It lacked half an hour of nine o'clock as we drove up before the Loomis
House, where I alighted, and ran up to my rooms. I had scarcely more
than made a hasty toilet, when Arthur came in. After telling me who had,
during my absence, called to see me, and after attending to some
trifling wants which I expressed, he shuffled his feet in a style that I
had learned to recognize as indicating a desire to say something not
within the compass of our purely business relationship--a liberty which
the precedents of our first two days of acquaintanceship in connection
with later events had solidified into a vested right.
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