becomin’ to fools as a shet mouth,” has added quite an original store to America’s already proverbial literature. * * * * * THE CONFESSION.¹ (FROM “THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS.”) ¹ Copyright, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. THE congregation composed itself to listen to the sermon. There was an expectant pause. Kelsey remembered ever after the tumult of emotion with which he stepped forward to the table and opened the book. He turned to the New Testament for his text,――and the leaves with a familiar hand. Some ennobling phase of that wonderful story which would touch the tender, true affinity of human nature for the higher things,――from this he would preach to-day. And yet, at the same moment, with a contrariety of feeling from which he shrank aghast, there was sulking into his mind that gruesome company of doubts. In double file they came: fate and free agency, free-will and fore-ordination, infinite mercy and infinite justice, God’s loving kindness and man’s intolerable misery, redemption and damnation. He had evolved them all from his own unconscious logical faculty, and they pursued him as if he had, in some spiritual necromancy, conjured up a devil――nay, a legion of devils. Perhaps if he had known how they had assaulted the hearts of men in times gone past; how they had been combated and baffled, and yet have risen and pursued again; how in the scrutiny of science and research men have passed before their awful presence, analyzed them, philosophized about them, and found them interesting; how others, in the levity of the world, having heard of them, grudged the time to think upon them,――if he had known all this, he might have felt some courage in numbers. As it was, there was no fight left in him. He closed the book with a sudden impulse, “My frien’s,” he said, “I stan’ not hyar ter preach ter day, but fur confession.” There was a galvanic start among the congregation, then intense silence.