“Oh, the old Deacon is so dignified you can’t never see no change in him, he haint one of the kind to squirm. He said in a conference meetin’ that week, that it was dretful consolin’ to think he had always done his duty by Jont, sot his sinful state before him day and night, and been a pattern before him from his youth. He was thankful and happy that his sin didn’t lay on _his_ coat-skirts. But it jest killed the old lady; she didn’t live only a few weeks after Jont left.”
“Then Aunt Patience is dead?” says Josiah sithin’.
“Yes, she had been in a kind of a melancholly way for sometime, had kind o’ crazy spells, and when Jont left home that used her completely up.”
“It seems to me there was another boy, but I can’t call him by name this minute.”
“Oh, Absolom stole a cow and was sent to jail. He said he’d always been called ungodly, and if he had the name, he’d have the game; so he stole a cow and was shet up.”
“I was a thinkin’ I heerd that Aunt Patience’es neice’s boy was a goin’ to live with him,—the one that never had no father in particular.”
“Yes,” says Elam Pitkins, “he did go to live there, but the old Deacon was so tarnal good that the boy couldn’t stand it with him.”
“Well, the old Deacon bein’ sot so firm onto the docterines himself, thought the boy ort to think as he did, and be willin’, if it was for heaven’s glory, to be burnt up root and branch. The old Deacon worked at that boy eight months night and day to make him willin’ to go to hell; and the boy, bein’ a master hand for tellin’ the truth, and not bein’ good enough to be willin’ to go, wouldn’t say that he was. But the old Deacon had ‘got his back up,’—as a profane poet observes—and he was bound to carry the day, and he’d argue with him powerful, so they say, as to why he ort to be willin’. He’d tell him he was a child of wrath, and born in sin; and the boy, bein’ so mean, would sass him right back again, and tell him that he didn’t born himself; that it wasn’t none of his doin’s and he wasn’t to blame for it; and that if he had had _his_ way, and been knowin’ to it at the time, he’d drather give ten cents than to have been born at all.
“And the Deacon couldn’t stand no such wicked talk as that, and he’d lay to and whip him, and then he’d try again to make him willin’ to go to hell.