forever in hell? Well, well, my friend--our ideas of pleasure differ.' This is sophistical twaddle. It is not the Christian that suffers from a fear of hell--it is the sinner, through his guilty conscience. Conscience, conscience; the only barrier between us and hell on earth! Christians are comforted by the thought of a loving Christ--Christians, in my experience, do not suffer." "Why, sir," I said, "I cannot but wonder that you are not yourself a professed Christian." "Never mind me, young man.--But here we are on the edge of town. I could, if I wanted to, preach a sermon capable of converting every heathen within sound of my voice. Once, at a camp-meeting, I did preach a sermon; and I tell you, the old people looked mighty sober, and the younger and more susceptible of my auditors covered their faces with their hands and seemed to shake with grief and contrition. But, pshaw, pshaw; people don't go to hear either witty agnostics lecture, or preachers preach, to get something for their brain-boxes to reason about. Believe me "--tapping the volume, still in his hand--"this sort of thing won't make anybody reason. After all, the question is one of swapping off Christ for an Illinois lawyer." The EIGHTH Chapter It lacked half an hour of nine o'clock as we drove up before the Loomis House, where I alighted, and ran up to my rooms. I had scarcely more than made a hasty toilet, when Arthur came in. After telling me who had, during my absence, called to see me, and after attending to some trifling wants which I expressed, he shuffled his feet in a style that I had learned to recognize as indicating a desire to say something not within the compass of our purely business relationship--a liberty which the precedents of our first two days of acquaintanceship in connection with later events had solidified into a vested right. "Well, Arthur?" I said. "I read the whole book, sir--there it is, on the table. That book just did get me. But what did become of Pym and Peters? And is it true you've found that old soc-doligin' pirate?" I told him that Peters was found. "Well, now!" he continued. "I'd like to see the old four-foot-eighter. But if you love me, tell me what that white curtain reachin' down from the sky was, and what made the ocean bilin' hot? What made them ante-artic niggers so 'fraid of everything white, and what was the hiryglificks on the black marble meant to say? And, most of all, who was the female that stood in the way of the boat? Say--I don't blame anybody--but if Mr. Poe knowed he didn't know these points, what did he get our mouths waterin' for? Did you find out these points yet?" I explained to him that probably at that very moment Doctor Bainbridge was sitting on the edge of Dirk Peters' cot, drinking in the wonderful story; and that as soon as a certain gentleman had called to see me, I expected to return to Peters' house, and to remain until we knew all.