rifle over one shoulder and the fiddle over the other. He disapproved of
secular songs and idle stories, and the settlement questioned his taste;
for it was the delight of the stationers, old and young, to gather
around the hearth, and, while the chestnuts roasted in the fire for the
juniors, and the jovial horn, as it was called, circulated among the
elders, the oft-told story was rehearsed and the old song sung anew. He
even disapproved of the jovial horn--and the settlement questioned his
sincerity.

This man Anxley looked his ascetic character. He had a hard pragmatic
countenance, and one of those noses which though large and bony come
suddenly short and blunted. His eyes, small, gray, and inscrutable,
seemed unfriendly, so baffling, introspective, unnoting was their
inattentiveness. His hair was of a sort of carrot tint, which color was
reproduced in paler guise in his fringed buckskin shirt and leggings,
worn on a sturdy and powerful frame. His mouth was shut hard and fast
upon his convictions, as if to denote that he could not be argued out of
them, and when the lips parted its lines were scarcely more mobile, and
his words were usually framed to doubt one's state of grace and to
contravene one's tenets as to final salvation. He rode much of the time
with the reins loose on his horse's neck, and perhaps no man in the
saddle had ever been so addicted to psalmody since the days of
Cromwell's troopers. His theological disputations grated peculiarly upon
Emsden's mood, and he always laid at his door the disaster that
followed.

"If I hadn't been so traveled that day,--dragged through hell and
skirting of purgatory and knocking at the gates of heaven,--I wouldn't
have lost my wits so suddenly when I came back to earth with a bounce,"
Emsden afterward declared.