People who hate trouble generally get a good deal of it. It’s all very well for a gentle, acquiescent spirit to be carried through life by _one_ bearer. But when half a dozen bearers quarrel and insist on carrying one opposite ways, the more facile the spirit, the greater the trouble. * * * * * [Sidenote: Righteousness through repentance.] Perhaps there is never a time when man or woman has a better chance, with suitable help, of building a good character, than just after a humiliating fall which has taught the sinner his own weakness, and given him a sad experience of the bitterness of sin. Nobody wants to be sold under sin, and go the whole length in iniquity; and when one has gone just far enough in wrong living to perceive in advance all its pains and penalties, there is often an agonized effort to get back to respectability, like the clutching of the drowning man for the shore. The waters of death are cold and bitter, and nobody wants to be drowned. * * * * * [Sidenote: “I told you so.”] “Whence is the feeling of satisfaction which we have when things that we always said we knew turn out just as we predicted? Had we really rather our neighbor would be proved a thief and a liar than to be proved in a mistake ourselves? Would we be willing to have somebody topple headlong into destruction for the sake of being able to say, ‘I told you so’?” * * * * * [Sidenote: Gossip.] In fact, the gossip plant is like the grain of mustard-seed, which, though it be the least of all seeds, becometh a great tree, and the fowls of the air lodge in its branches, and chatter mightily there at all seasons. CHAPTER III. WOMAN. THE MINISTER’S WOOING. [Sidenote: Woman as a Gospel.] “You girls and women don’t know your power. Why, Mary, you are a living Gospel. You have always had a strange power over us boys. You never talked religion much, but I have seen high fellows come away from being with you as still and quiet as one feels when he goes into a church. I can’t understand all the hang of predestination and moral ability, and natural ability, and God’s efficiency, and man’s agency, which Dr. Hopkins is so engaged about; but I can understand _you_,—_you_ can do me good.” * * * * * [Sidenote: Holiness of woman.]