Trotting on, hardly needing his hickory stick, Adam could see the little brown shop yonder on the creek-bank.  All dark:  but did you ever see anything brighter than the way the light shone in the sitting-room, behind the Turkey-red curtains?  Such a taste that little woman had!  Two years ago the cobbler finished his life-work, he thought:  he had been mother and father both to the orphans left with him, faithful to them, choking down the hungry gnawing within for something nearer than brother or sister.  Two years ago they had left him, struck out into the world for themselves.

“Then, you see,” Adam used to say, “I was settlin’ down into an old man; dryin’ up, d’ ye see? thinkin’ the Lord had forgotten me, when He said to other men, ‘Come, it’s your turn now for home and lovin’.’  Them young ones was dear enough, but a man has a cravin’ for somethin’ that’s his own.  But it was too late, I thought.  Bitter; despisin’ the Lord’s eyesight; thinkin’ He didn’t see or care what would keep me from hell.  I believed in God, like most poor men do, thinkin’ Him cold-blooded, not hearin’ when we cry out for work, or a wife, or child. I didn’t cry. I never prayed.  But look there.  Do you see—­her?  Jinny?” It was to the young Baptist preacher Adam said this, when he came to make a pastoral visit to Adam’s wife.  “That’s what He did.  I’m not ashamed to pray now.  I ask Him every hour to give me a tight grip on her so that I kin follow her up, and to larn me some more of His ways.  That’s my religious ’xperience, Sir.”

The young man coughed weakly, and began questioning old Craig as to his faith in immersion.  The cobbler stumped about the kitchen a minute before answering, holding himself down.  His face was blood-red when he did speak, quite savage, the young speaker said afterward.

“I don’t go to church, Sir.  My wife does.  I don’t say now, ’Damn the churches!’ or that you, an’ the likes of you, an’ yer Master, are all shams an’ humbugs.  I know Him now.  He’s ’live to me.  So now, when I see you belie Him, an’ keep men from Him with yer hundreds o’ wranglin’ creeds, an’ that there’s as much honest love of truth outside the Church as in it, I don’t put yer bigotry an’ foulness on Him.  I on’y think there’s an awful mistake:  just this:  that the Church thinks it is Christ’s body an’ us uns is outsiders, an’ we think so too, an’ despise Him through you with yer stingy souls an’ fights an’ squabblins; not seein’ that the Church is jes’ an hospital, where some of the sickest of God’s patients is tryin’ to get cured.”

The preacher never went back; spoke in a church-meeting soon after of the prevalence of Tom Paine’s opinions among the lower classes.  Half of our sham preachers take the vague name of “Paine” to cover all of Christ’s opponents,—­not ranking themselves there, of course.