“Blamed if there isn’t a feller a-prayin’ right out in the road; if he wants anything _that_ bad, I hope he’ll get it. Travel, Selim--_get_ up, Bill!--let’s see who he is.” CHAPTER X. BRINGING HOME THE SHEEP. Speaking after the manner of the flesh, the Reverend Timotheus Brown had found only plain sailing on the river; spiritually, he had a very different experience. “As stubborn as a mule” was the most common of the current estimates of Pastor Brown’s character; and if the conscientious old preacher had ever personally heard this opinion of himself, the verbal expression thereof would have given him but slight annoyance, compared with that which he experienced from his own inner man as he paddled down the stream. To forcibly resist something so satisfied the strongest demand of his nature that neither shortening breath nor blistering hands caused him to slacken the speed with which he forced his paddle against the water. But another contest was going on, and in this the consistent theologian was not so triumphant as he liked always to be. Harry Wainright was one of the ungodly; that he owned (and frequently occupied) a high-priced pew in Mr. Brown’s own church was only another reason why the preacher should quote concerning him, “He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck----”--what if the conclusion of the same passage--“shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy,” should apply? What could prevent its doing so, if Wainright had fulfilled the description in the first half? Had not the same God inspired the whole passage? If so, what right had any man, least of all a minister of the Gospel, to try to set at naught the Divine will? Harry Wainright was, according to the decrees of an unchangeable God, one of the lost--as much so as if he were already in the bottomless pit. And still the old man’s paddle flew; once on the trip he had felt as if the weakness of the arm of flesh would decide the case for him, and in favor of the Word whose expounder he was; he found himself wishing that it might, so that he could feel that although God had overruled him, he might have comfort in the assurance that he had not proved indifferent to his sudden emotion of yearning for his fellow man. But that mysterious physical readjustment, known in animals as “second breath,” came to the rescue of his fainting frame, and then it seemed as if no watery torrent could prevail against the force of his arm. Oh! if he might but talk to some one of the fathers of the church; that he might be, even for ten minutes, back in his own library! But no father of the church resided along the Reverend Brown’s nautical course, nor was there a theological library nearer than his own, and there he was, actually bent upon saving one whom the Eternal pronounced lost! Lost? Hold! “For the Son of Man is come into the world to save them that are lost.” If Christ had a right to save the lost, had not an ambassador of Christ the same privilege? was not an