"I tell you, you must repent or die. I can see the great judgment angel now!" he said, stopping suddenly and pointing above the stove-pipe. "I can see him as he stands weighing your souls as a man 'ud weigh wheat and chaff. Wheat goes into the Father's garner; chaff is blown to hell's devouring flame! I can see him _now_! He seizes a poor, damned, struggling soul by the _neck_, he holds him over the flaming forge of _hell_ till his bones melt like wax; he shrivels like thread in a flame of a candle; he is nothing but a charred husk, and the angel flings him back into _outer darkness_; life was not in him." It was this astonishing figure, powerfully acted, that scared poor Tom Dixon into crying out for mercy. The effect on the rest was awful. To see so great a sinner fall terror-stricken seemed like a providential stroke of confirmatory evidence, and nearly a dozen other young people fell crying. Whereat the old people burst out into amens with unspeakable fervor. But the preacher, the wild light still in his eyes, tore up and down, crying above the tumult: "The Lord is come with _power_! His hand is visible _here_. Shout _aloud_ and spare _not_. Fall before him as _dust_ to his feet! Hypocrites, vipers, scoffers! the _lash_ o' the _Lord_ is on ye!" In the intense pause which followed as he waited with expectant, uplifted face--a pause so deep even the sobbing sinners held their breath--a dry, drawling, utterly matter-of-fact voice broke the tense hush. "S-a-y, Pill, ain't you a bearun' down on the boys a _leetle too_ hard?" The preacher's extended arm fell as if life had gone out of it. His face flushed and paled; the people laughed hysterically, some of them the tears of terror still on their cheeks; but Radbourn said, "Bravo, Bacon!" Pill recovered himself. "Not hard enough for _you_, neighbor Bacon." Bacon rose, retaining the same dry, prosaic tone: "I ain't bitin' that kind of a hook, an' I ain't goin' to be _yanked_ into heaven when I c'n _slide_ into hell. Waal! I must be goin'; I've got a new-milk's cow that needs tendin' to." The effect of all this was indescribable. From being at the very mouth of the furnace, quivering with fear and captive to morbid imaginings, Bacon's dry intonation had brought them all back to earth again. They saw a little of the absurdity of the whole situation. Pill was beaten for the first time in his life. He had been struck below the belt by a good-natured giant. The best he could do, as Bacon shuffled calmly out, was to stammer: "Will some one please sing?" And while they sang, he stood in deep thought. Just as the last verse was quivering into silence, the full, deep tones of Radbourn's voice rose above the bustle of feet and clatter of seats: "And all _that_ he preaches in the name of Him who came bringing peace and good-will to men."