"Trix, there is no need to pester yourself about Noel's soul. Old Amos Lea made sure of his safety when he baptized him the second time. Noel, tell her about it. How your poor father laughed that day!" "Being a rigid Baptist and an elder, Amos scouted my Presbyterian christening as totally inadequate to neutralize what he considered my unusually large share of original sin, and as his wife, Susan, was my nurse, they began to grieve over my reprobateness as soon as I was old enough to lay claim to moral responsibility. When I was about sixteen I was out yonder on the lake fishing. Two friends were with me, and we all swam well, or thought we did. A sudden squall capsized the boat, and I was caught and held under it in such a way that I could not extricate myself. The boys hovered around, trying unsuccessfully to help me, but just then Amos kicked off his boots, plunged in, and swam to the rescue. He was strong as a whale, raised the end of the boat with his shoulder and dragged me out. I was slightly stunned, and he swam with me into shallow water, where he could stand up. Then he lifted me horizontally, as if I had been a baby in long clothes, and repeating with triumphant fervor the baptismal formula of his Church, he immersed me so thoroughly that I regained consciousness, and he turned me over to Susan and hot blankets, as a 'brand snatched from the burning,' and properly baptized." Removing the ice from the yellow heart of his melon, Judge Kent glanced around the table. "Owning such a paradise as this home, do you not all share my amazement that Herriott can prefer to shut it up and wander contentedly over the continent, searching its rough crannies--Labna, Mitla, Casa Grande, and where not--for what he pedantically calls the 'primeval anthropological nidus'?" "Oh, bless you, Senator Kent, it is just in his blood, and he can no more keep still than a flea can stop hopping. His father was a surveyor--civil engineer--always roving, and Noel is exactly like him; which none of you will doubt when I assure you his mother really was an absolutely beautiful woman. He is a hopeless tramp. He gravitates to the wildest places of creation, as you and Mr. Hull to the cultivation of votes, and Dana to Wall Street kites, and this insecticide professor to picking the lock of God's workshop when He has closed the door and gone to His seventh day rest." "Aunt Trina refuses to believe that my ambition to become acquainted with our prehistoric family relatives is a laudable method of climbing the genealogical tree. She is not enthusiastic on ancestry."