University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV.
A CHAPTER OF BETWEENS.

DID you ever move? And, in moving, did you
ever happen to notice how many little things there
are to be picked up? Now that I am about to
shift the scene of my story from Clark township,
the narrow stage upon which it has progressed
through two dozen chapters, I find a great number of little
things to be picked up.

One of the little things to be picked up is Norman Anderson.
Very little, if measured soul-wise. When his father had
read the proclamation of Andrew and divined that Norman
was interested in the riot, he became thoroughly indignant; the
more so, that he felt his own lack of power to do anything
in the premises against his wife. But when Mrs. Abigail
heard of the case she was in genuine distress. It showed
Andrew's vindictiveness. He would follow her forever with his
resentments, just because she could not love him. It was not her
fault that she did not love him. Poor Norman had to suffer all
the persecutions that usually fall to such innocent creatures.
She must send him away from home, though it broke her

mother's heart to do it; for if Andrew didn't have him took up,
the old Dutchman would, just because his son had turned out a
burglar. She said burglar rather emphatically, with a look at
Julia.

And so Samuel Anderson took his son to Louisville, and got
him a place in a commission and produce house on the levee,
with which Mr. Anderson had business influence. And Samuel
warned him that he must do his best, for he could not come
back home now without danger of arrest, and Norman made
many promises of amendment; so many, that his future seemed
to him barren of all delight. And, by way of encouraging himself
in the austere life upon which he had resolved to enter, he
attended the least reputable place of amusement in the city, the
first night after his father's departure.

In Clark township the Millerite excitement was at white heat.
Some of the preachers in other parts of the country had set one
day, some another. I believe that Mr. Miller, the founder, never
had the temerity to set a day. But his followers figured the
thing more closely, and Elder Hankins had put a fine point
on the matter. He was certain, for his part, that the time was
at midnight on the eleventh of August. His followers became
very zealous, and such is the nature of an infection that scarcely
anybody was able to resist it. Mrs. Anderson, true to her excitable
temper, became fanatic — dreaming dreams, seeing visions,
hearing voices, praying twenty times a day,[1] wearing a sourly
pious face, and making all around her more unhappy than ever.

Jonas declared that ef the noo airth and the noo heaven was
to be chockful of sech as she, 'most any other place in the
universe would be better, akordin' to his way of thinkin'. He
said she repented more of other folkses' sins than anybody he
ever seed.

As summer came on, Samuel Anderson, borne away on the
tide of his own and his wife's fanatical fever of sublimated
devotion, discharged Jonas and all his other employes, threw up
business, and gave his whole attention to the straightening of
his accounts for the coming day of judgment. Before Jonas
left to seek a new place he told Cynthy Ann as how as ef he'd
a met her airlier 'twould a-settled his coffee fer life. He was gittin'
along into the middle of the week now, but he'd come to
feel like a boy sence he'd been a livin' where he could have a
few sweet and pleasant words—ahem!—he thought December'd
be as pleasant as May all the year round ef he could live in the
aurora borealis of her countenance. And Cynthy Ann enjoyed
his words so much that she prayed for forgiveness for the next
week and confessed in class-meeting that she had yielded to
temptation and sot her heart on the things of this perishin'
world. She was afeared she hadn't always remembered as how
as she was a poor unworthy dyin' worm of the dust, and that
all the beautiful things in this world perished with the usin'.

And Brother Goshorn, the class-leader at Harden's Cross-Roads,
exhorted her to tear every idol from her heart. And
still the sweet woman's nature, God's divine law revealed in her
heart, did assert itself a little. She planted some pretty-by-nights
in an old cracked blue-and-white tea-pot and set it on her window-sill.
Somehow the pretty-by-nights would remind her of
Jonas, and while she tried to forget him with one half of her

nature, the other and better part (the depraved part, she would
have told you) cherished the memory of his smallest act and
word. In fact, the flowers had no association with Jonas except
that along with the awakening of her love came this little sentiment
for flowers into the dry desert of her life. But one day
Mrs. Anderson discovered the old blue broken tea-pot with its
young plants.

“Why, Cynthy Ann!” she cried, “a body'd think you'd have
more sense than to do such a soft thing as to be raisin' posies at
your time of life! And that when the world is drawing to a
close, too! You'll be one of the foolish virgins with no oil to
your lamp, as sure as you see that day.”

As for Julia's flowers, Mrs. Anderson had rudely thrown
them into the road by way of removing temptation from her and
turning her thoughts toward the awful realities of the close of
time.

But Cynthy Ann blushed and repented, and kept her broken
tea-pot, with a fearful sense of sin in doing so. She never watered
the pretty-by-nights without the feeling that she was offering
sacrifice to an idol.