modern society were unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest and
the seriousness which they had inherited from their Presbyterian,
Methodist, Lutheran, and Moravian ancestry was expressed in their orderly
and diligent lives; but the general prosperity had so far relaxed the
stringency of their several creeds that their distinctive public rite had
come to express a mutual toleration. The different sects had their
different services; their ceremonies of public baptism, their revivals,
their camp-meetings; but they gathered as one Christian people under the
roof of the log-built edifice, thrice the size of their largest dwelling,
which they called the Temple.



I


A storm of the afternoon before had cleared the mid-August air. The early
sun was hot, but the wind had carried away the sultry mists, and infused
fresh life into the day. Where Matthew Braile sat smoking his corncob pipe
in the covered porchway between the rooms of his double-log cabin he
insensibly shared the common exhilaration, and waited comfortably for the
breakfast of bacon and coffee which his wife was getting within. As he
smoked on he inhaled with the odors from her cooking the dense rich smell
of the ripening corn that stirred in the morning breeze on three sides of
the cabin, and the fumes of the yellow tobacco which he had grown, and
cured, and was now burning. His serenity was a somewhat hawklike repose,
but the light that came into his narrowed eyes was of rather amused
liking, as a man on a claybank horse rode up before the cabin in the space
where alone it was not hidden by the ranks of the tall corn. The man sat
astride a sack with a grist of corn in one end balanced by a large stone