"Ha! ha! good morning, Morton!" said the Captain. "You've been keeping Patty down at the spring-house when she should have been at the loom by this time. In my time young men and women didn't waste their mornings. Nights and Sundays are good enough for visiting. Now, see here, Patty, there's one of them plagued Methodist preachers brought into the settlement by Wheeler. These circuit riders are worse than third day fever 'n' ager. They go against dancing and artificials and singing songs and reading novels and all other amusements. They give people the jerks wherever they go. The devil's in 'em. Now I want you to go to work and get up a dance to-night, and ask all you can get along with. Nothing'll make the preacher so mad as to dance right under his nose; and we'll keep a good many people away who might get the jerks, or fall down with the power and break their necks, maybe." Patty was always ready to dance, and she only said: "If Morton will help me send the invitations." "I'll do that," said Morton, and then he told of the discomfiture he had wrought in a Methodist meeting while he was gone. And he had the satisfaction of seeing that the narrative greatly pleased Captain Lumsden. "We'll have to send Wheeler afloat sometime, eh, Mort?" said the Captain, chuckling interrogatively. Morton did not like this proposition, for, notwithstanding theological, differences about election, Mrs. Wheeler was a fast friend of his mother. He evaded an answer by hastening to consult with Patty and her mother concerning the guests. Those who got "invites" danced cotillions and reels nearly all night. Morton danced with Patty to his heart's content, and in the happiness of Morton's assured love and of a truce in her father's interruptions she was a queen indeed. She wore the antique earrings that were an heir-loom in her mother's family, and a showy breast-pin which her father had bought her. These and her new dress of English calico made her the envy of all the others. Pretty Betty Harsha was led out by some one at almost every dance, but she would have given all of these for one dance with Morton Goodwin. Meantime Mr. Magruder was preaching. Behold in Hissawachee Bottom the world's evils in miniature! Here are religion and amusement divorced--set over the one against the other as hostile camps. Brady, who was boarding for a few days with the widow Lumsden, went to the meeting with Kike and his mother, explaining his views as he went along.