How Miss Nancy and the preacher conspired together, and how they managed to bring Mrs. Thomson’s case up at the time of the “Sacramental Service” in the afternoon of that Sunday in Lewisburg, and how the preacher made a touching statement of it just before the regular “Collection for the Poor” was taken, and how the warm-hearted Methodists put in dollars instead of dimes while the Presiding Elder read those passages about Zaccheus and other liberal people, and how the congregation sang

     “He dies, the Friend of sinners dies”

more lustily than ever, after having performed this Christian act—­how all this happened I can not take up the reader’s time to tell.  But I can assure him that the nearly blind English woman did not room with blasphemous old Mowley any more, and that the blue-drilling pauper frock gave way to something better, and that grave little Shocky even danced with delight, and declared that God hadn’t forgot, though he’d thought that He had.  And Mrs. Matilda White remarked that it was a shame that the collection for the poor at a Methodist sacramental service should be given to a woman who was a member of the Church of England, and like as not never soundly converted!

And Shocky slept in his mother’s arms and prayed God not to forget Hannah, while Shocky’s mother knit stockings for the store day and night, and day and night she prayed and hoped.

CHAPTER XXV.

BUD WOOING.

The Sunday that Ralph spent in Lewisburg, the Sunday that Shocky spent in an earthly paradise, the Sunday that Mrs. Thomson spent with Shocky instead of old Mowley, the Sunday that Miss Nancy thought was “just like heaven,” was also an eventful Sunday with Bud Means.  He had long adored Miss Martha in his secret heart, but, like many other giants, while brave enough to face and fight dragons, he was a coward in the presence of the woman that he loved.  Let us honor him for it.  The man who loves a woman truly, reverences her profoundly and feels abashed in her presence.  The man who is never abashed in the presence of womanhood, the man who tells his love without a tremor, is a shallow egotist.  Bud’s nature was not fine.  But it was deep, true, and manly.  To him Martha Hawkins was the chief of women.  What was he that he should aspire to possess her?  And yet on that Sunday, with his crippled arm carefully bound up, with his cleanest shirt, and with his heavy boots freshly oiled with the fat of the raccoon, he started hopefully through fields white with snow to the house of Squire Hawkins.  When he started his spirits were high, but they descended exactly in proportion to his proximity to the object of his love.  He thought himself not dressed well enough He wished his shoulders were not so square, and his arms not so stout.  He wished that he had book-larnin’ enough to court in nice, big words.  And so, by recounting his own deficiencies, he succeeded in making himself feel weak, and awkward, and generally good-for-nothing, by the time he walked up between the rows of dead hollyhocks to the Squire’s front door, to tap at which took all his remaining strength.