a wistful anxiety into the faces of the Christians to see what were the visible signs of being one of the elect.  John put on a good deal of a manner that he “did n’t care,” and he never admitted his disquiet by asking any questions or standing up in meeting to be prayed for.  But he did care.  He heard all the time that all he had to do was to repent and believe.  But there was nothing that he doubted, and he was perfectly willing to repent if he could think of anything to repent of.

It was essential he learned, that he should have a “conviction of sin.”  This he earnestly tried to have.  Other people, no better than he, had it, and he wondered why he could n’t have it.  Boys and girls whom he knew were “under conviction,” and John began to feel not only panicky, but lonesome.  Cynthia Rudd had been anxious for days and days, and not able to sleep at night, but now she had given herself up and found peace.  There was a kind of radiance in her face that struck John with awe, and he felt that now there was a great gulf between him and Cynthia.  Everybody was going away from him, and his heart was getting harder than ever.  He could n’t feel wicked, all he could do.  And there was Ed Bates his intimate friend, though older than he, a “whaling,” noisy kind of boy, who was under conviction and sure he was going to be lost.  How John envied him!  And pretty soon Ed “experienced religion.”  John anxiously watched the change in Ed’s face when he became one of the elect.  And a change there was.  And John wondered about another thing.  Ed Bates used to go trout-fishing, with a tremendously long pole, in a meadow brook near the river; and when the trout didn’t bite right off, Ed would—­get mad, and as soon as one took hold he would give an awful jerk, sending the fish more than three hundred feet into the air and landing it in the bushes the other side of the meadow, crying out, “Gul darn ye, I’ll learn ye.”  And John wondered if Ed would take the little trout out any more gently now.

John felt more and more lonesome as one after another of his playmates came out and made a profession.  Cynthia (she too was older than John) sat on Sunday in the singers’ seat; her voice, which was going to be a contralto, had a wonderful pathos in it for him, and he heard it with a heartache.  “There she is,” thought John, “singing away like an angel in heaven, and I am left out.”  During all his after life a contralto voice was to John one of his most bitter and heart-wringing pleasures.  It suggested the immaculate scornful, the melancholy unattainable.

If ever a boy honestly tried to work himself into a conviction of sin, John tried.  And what made him miserable was, that he couldn’t feel miserable when everybody else was miserable.  He even began to pretend to be so.  He put on a serious and anxious look like the others.  He pretended he did n’t care for play; he refrained from chasing chipmunks and snaring suckers; the songs of birds and