interviews he had imposed upon the new assistant cobbler at Bruceton.
He had silenced, if not conquered, all the other religious
controversialists of the town, and found the weak spots in the armor of
many good people not given to controversy, whom he had beguiled into
talking on religious themes. Why he should want to converse at all upon
such subjects puzzled the people of the town, all of whom had known him
from boyhood as a member of a family so entirely satisfied with itself
that it never desired any aid from other people, to say nothing of
higher powers. Sometimes the Bartrams went to church for social
purposes, but always with an air of conferring a favor upon the power
in whose honor the edifice was erected.

But Bartram had good enough reasons for his sudden interest in
religion. He was in love with Eleanor Prency, and, after the manner of
his family regarding everything that interested them, he was
tremendously in earnest with his wooing. Like a judicious lawyer, he
had endeavored to make his way easier by prepossessing the girl's
parents in his favor; but when he began to pass the lines of pleasing
civility, within which he had long known the judge and his wife, he was
surprised to find an undercurrent of seriousness, the existence of
which in the Prency family he never had suspected. The judge appeared
to estimate everything from the stand-point of religion and
righteousness; so did his wife; so, though in less measure, did the
daughter.

Such nonsense, as the self-sufficient youth regarded it, was annoying.
To visit a pleasant family with the intention of making a general
conquest and find himself confronted by a line of obstacles which he
always had regarded as trifling, yet which he was unable to overcome,
and to be told that religion was a reality because it had changed Sam