"I feel faint at my stomach, mother." "You can keep on feelin' faint." "Can't I have a piece of pie, mother?" "You can't have another mouthful of anything to eat to-night." Ephraim clapped his hand to his side again and sighed, but his mother took no notice. "Have you got a pain, sonny?" asked Caleb. "Yes, dreadful. Oh!" "Hadn't he ought to have somethin' on it?" Caleb inquired, looking appealingly at Deborah. "He can have some of his doctor's medicine if he don't feel better," she replied, in a hard voice. "Set your chair back now, Ephraim, and get out your catechism." "I don't feel fit to, mother," groaned Ephraim. "You do jest as I tell you," said his mother. And Ephraim, heaving with sighs, muttering angrily far under his breath lest his mother should hear, pulled his chair back to the window, and got his catechism out of the top drawer of his father's desk, and began droning out in his weak, sulky voice the first question therein: "What is the chief end of man?" "Now shut the book and answer it," said his mother, and Ephraim obeyed. Ephraim was quite conversant with the first three questions and their answers, after that his memory began to weaken; either he was a naturally dull scholar, or his native indolence made him appear so. He had been drilled nightly upon the "Assembly's Catechism" for the past five years, and had had many a hard bout with it before that in his very infancy, when his general health admitted--and sometimes, it seemed to Ephraim, when it had not admitted. Many a time had the boy panted for breath when he rehearsed those grandly decisive, stately replies to those questions of all ages, but his mother had been obdurate. He could not understand why, but in reality Deborah held her youngest son, who was threatened with death in his youth, to the "Assembly's Catechism" as a means of filling his mind with spiritual wisdom, and fitting him for that higher state to which he might soon be called. Ephraim had been strictly forbidden to attend school--beyond reading he had no education; but his mother resolved that spiritual education he should have, whether he would or not, and whether the doctor would or not. So Ephraim laboriously read the Bible through, a chapter at a time, and he went, step by step, through the wisdom of the Divines of Westminster. No matter how much he groaned over it, his mother was pitiless. Sometimes Caleb plucked up courage and interceded. "I don't believe he feels quite ekal to learnin' of his stint to-night," he would say, and then his eyes would fall before the terrible stern pathos in Deborah's, as she would reply in her deep voice: "If he can't learn nothin' about books, he's got to learn about his own soul. He's got to, whether it hurts him or not. I shouldn't think, knowin' what you know, you'd say anything, Caleb Thayer."