“When he concluded the verse he raised his half-closed eyes and saw Jonas standing in the door.

“Mr. Persidin’ Elder,” said Jonas, trying in vain to speak with some seriousness and veneration, “I come to ax your consent to marry one of your flock—­the best lamb you’ve got in the whole fold.”

“Bless you, Mr. Harrison,” said Father Williams, the old elder, laughing, “bless you, I haven’t any right to consent or forbid.  Ask the lady herself!”

“Ax the lady!” said Jonas.  “Didn’t I though!  And didn’t Mr. Goshorn forbid the lady to marry me, under the pains and penalties pervided; and didn’t Mr. Hall set his seal to the forbiddin’ of Goshorn!  An’ I says to her, ‘I won’t take nothin’ less than a elder or a bishop on this ’ere vital question.’  When I want a sheep, I don’t go to the underlin,’ but to the boss; and so I brought this appeal up to you on a writ of habeas corpus, or whatever you may call it.”

The presiding elder laughed again, and looked closely at Jonas.  Then he stepped to the door and called in the circuit preacher, Mr. Hall, and the class leader, Mr. Goshorn, both of whom happened to be in the next room engaged in an excited discussion with a brother who was a little touched with Millerism.

“What’s this Mr. Harrison tells me about your forbidding the banns in his case?”

“He’s a New Light,” said Brother Hall, showing his abhorrence in his face, “and it seemed to me that for a Methodist to marry a New Light was a sin—­a being yoked together unequally with an unbeliever.  You know, Father Williams, that New Lights are Arians.”

The old man seemed more amused than ever.  Turning to Jonas, he asked him if he was an Arian.

“Not as I knows on, my venerable friend.  I may have caught the disease when I had the measles, or I may have been a Arian in infancy, or I may be a Arian on my mother’s side, you know; but as I don’t know who or what it may be, I a’n’t in no way accountable fer it—­no more’n Brother Goshorn is to blame fer his face bein’ so humbly.  But I take it Arian is one of them air pleasant names you and the New Light preachers uses in your Christian intercourse together to make one another mad.  I’m one of them as goes to heaven straight—­never stoppin’ to throw no donicks at the Methodists, Presbyterians, nor no other misguided children of men.  They may ride in the packet, or go by flat-boat or keel-boat, ef they chooses.  I go by the swift-sailin’ and palatial mail-boat New Light, and I don’t run no opposition line, nor bust my bilers tryin’ to beat my neighbors into the heavenly port.”

Brother Goshorn looked vexed.  Brother Hall was scandalized at the lightness of Jonas’s conversation.  But the old presiding elder, with keen common-sense and an equally keen sense of the ludicrous, could not look grave with all his effort to keep from laughing.

[Illustration:  BROTHER GOSHORN.]

“Are you an unbeliever?” he asked.