Nothing could be further from our purpose than to injure that excellent person, either in the eyes of his contemporaries or of that posterity which he was wont to invoke so confidently from the more thrilling promontories of his discourse; but a decent regard for the "proprieties" of this narrative compels us to state that the reverend orator observing, or fancying that he observed, something mandatory, and withal personal in the terms of this refrain, at once inaugurated the "tramp" exercise over the heads of the assembly, and reaching _terra firma_, one mile from the point of embarkation, and seeing nothing in the homogeneity of a mob particularly attractive to a man of genius, proceeded to divest himself of his surroundings in the best executed "lonesome" since the days of Ahimaaz, the son of Zadok. This movement, moreover, possessed a striking appropriateness, inasmuch as it rendered him _practically_ the leader of his flock, and perhaps on no former occasion of his extended ministry did he ever discharge the duties of the "relation" with the same yearning solicitude for the success of the issue, even admitting, in extenuation of the past, that the most lukewarm of his constituency did their whole duty on this memorable occasion. As the writer has never been successful at equating distances since he was gobbled by the greyhound in connection with his more legitimate prey in the good old days of "academicia," he declines to state just how many furlongs the panic-stricken multitude had traversed, when a gloaming of red in the east warned them that they had nothing further to fear from the "nocturnal beasts," who had obtruded their heathenish "doxullumgy" on the late exercises, and will not commit himself as to the sequel, further than to say that the results of the "great awakening" were soon after visible in a certain rejoicing tendency of the cotton plant and pumpkin vine of that fertile region. CHAPTER XVIII. K. K. K. AS A FACTOR IN POLITICS.