As summer came on, Samuel Anderson, borne away on the tide of his own and his wife’s fanatical fever of sublimated devotion, discharged Jonas and all his other employes, threw up business, and gave his whole attention to the straightening of his accounts for the coming day of judgment.  Before Jonas left to seek a new place he told Cynthy Ann as how as ef he’d met her alrlier ’twould a-settled his coffee fer life.  He was gittin’ along into the middle of the week now, but he’d come to feel like a boy since he’d been a livin’ where he could have a few sweet and pleasant words—­ahem!—­he thought December’d be as pleasant as May all the year round ef he could live in the aurora borealis of her countenance.  And Cynthy Ann enjoyed his words so much that she prayed for forgiveness for the next week and confessed in class-meeting that she had yielded to temptation and sot her heart on the things of this perishin’ world.  She was afeared she hadn’t always remembered as how as she was a poor unworthy dyin’ worm of the dust, and that all the beautiful things in this world perished with the usin’.

And Brother Goshorn, the class-leader at Harden’s Cross-Roads, exhorted her to tear every idol from her heart.  And still the sweet woman’s nature, God’s divine law revealed in her heart, did assert itself a little.  She planted some pretty-by-nights in an old cracked blue-and-white tea-pot and set it on her window-sill.  Somehow the pretty-by-nights would remind her of Jonas, and while she tried to forget him with one half of her nature, the other and better part (the depraved part, she would have told you) cherished the memory of his smallest act and word.  In fact, the flowers had no association with Jonas except that along with the awakening of her love came this little sentiment for flowers into the dry desert of her life.  But one day Mrs. Anderson discovered the old blue broken tea-pot with its young plants.

“Why, Cynthy Ann!” she cried, “a body’d think you’d have more sense than to do such a soft thing as to be raisin’ posies at your time of life!  And that when the world is drawing to a close, too!  You’ll be one of the foolish virgins with no oil to your lamp, as sure as you see that day.”

As for Julia’s flowers, Mrs. Anderson had rudely thrown them into the road by way of removing temptation from her and turning her thoughts toward the awful realities of the close of time.

But Cynthy Ann blushed and repented, and kept her broken tea-pot, with a fearful sense of sin in doing so.  She never watered the pretty-by-nights without the feeling that she was offering sacrifice to an idol.

CHAPTER XXVI.

A NICE LITTLE GAME.

It was natural enough that the “mud-clerk” on the old steamboat Iatan should take a fancy to the “striker,” as the engineer’s apprentice was called.  Especially since the striker know so much more than the mud-clerk, and was able to advise him about many things.  A striker with so much general information was rather a novelty, and all the officers fancied him, except Sam Munson, the second engineer, who had a natural jealousy of a striker that knew more than he did.