"Go to your places at once!" screamed the minister, stretching out his
hand for his cane.

There was a momentary silence during which the minister tried to think
of a way of having the sash raised without a fight.

"You," he said at last to a timid little fellow, "go and open the
window!"

The small boy went to the window and tried to disentangle the window
cord. The others looked on in breathless silence, when suddenly a big
lad, in sailor's clothes, who had just come home on the brig _Carl
Johan_, lost patience.

"The devil take me if I don't show you what a lad can do," he shouted,
throwing off his coat and jumping on the window sill; there was a
flash from his cutlass and the rope was cut.

"Cable's cut!" he laughed, as the minister with a hysterical cry,
literally drove him to his seat.

"The rope was so entangled that there was nothing for it but to cut
it," he assured him, as he sat down.

The minister was furious. He had come from a small town in the
provinces and had never conceived the possibility of so much sin, so
much wickedness and immorality. He had never come into contact with
lads so far advanced on the road to damnation. And he talked at great
length of the precious blood of Christ.