“How clearly you reason about other people’s duty!” said the Philosopher.  “If you had seen your own duty half so clearly, some of us would have been better off, and your account would have been straighter.”

Here Mrs. Anderson grew very angry, and vented her spleen in a solemn exhortation to Andrew to get ready for the coming of the Master, not three weeks off at the farthest, and she warned him that the archangel might blow his trumpet at any moment.  Then where would he be? she asked in exultation.  Human meanness is never so pitiful as when it tries to seize on God’s judgments as weapons with which to gratify its own spites.  I trust this remark will not be considered as applying only to Mrs. Anderson.

But Mrs. Anderson fired off all the heavenly small-shot she could find in the teeth and eyes of Andrew, and then, to prevent a rejoinder, she told him it was time for her to go to secret prayer, and she only stopped upon the threshold to send back one Parthian arrow in the shape of a warning to “watch and be ready.”

I wonder if a certain class of religious people have ever thought how much their exclusiveness and Pharisaism have to do with the unhappy fruitlessness of all their appeals!  Had Mrs. Anderson been as blameless as an angel, such exhortations would have driven a weaker than Andrew to hate the name of religion.

But I must not moralize, for Mr. Humphreys has already divulged his plan of disposing of the property.  He has a friend, one Thomas A. Parkins, who has money, and who will buy the farm at two hundred dollars.  He could procure the money in advance any day by going to the village of Bethany, the county-seat, and drawing on Mr. Parkins, and cashing the draft.  It was a matter of indifference to him, he said, only that he would like to oblige so good a friend.

This arrangement, by which the Anderson farm was to be sold for a song to some distant stranger, pleased Mrs. Abigail.  She could not bear that one of her unbelieving neighbors should even for a fortnight rejoice in a supposed good bargain at her expense.  To sell to Mr. Humphreys’s friend in Louisville was just the thing.  When pressed by some of her neighbors who had not received the Adventist gospel, to tell on what principle she could justify her sale of the farm at all, she answered that if the farm would not be of any account after the end of the world, neither would the money.

Mr. Humphreys went down to the town of Bethany and came back, affecting to have cashed a draft on his friend for two hundred dollars.  The deeds were drawn, and a justice of the peace was to come the next morning and take the acknowledgment of Mr. and Mrs. Anderson.

This was what Jonas learned as he sat in the kitchen talking to Cynthy Ann.  He had come to bring some message from the convalescent August, and had been detained by the attraction of adhesion.

“I told you it was fox-and-geese.  Didn’t I?  And so Thomas A. Parkins is his name.  Gus Wehle said he’d bet the two was one.  Well, I must drive this varmint off afore he gits his chickens.”