"I'm right glad to git shed of a ugly job," said one of the party; and as the rest offered no objection, he cut the cords that bound Morton's arms and let him go. The landlord had stabled Dolly and fed her, hoping that some accident would leave her in his hands; the man from the other side of the creek had taken possession of the rifle as "his sheer, considerin' the trouble he'd tuck." The horse and gun were now reluctantly given up, and the party made haste to disperse, each one having suddenly remembered some duty that demanded immediate attention. In a little while Morton sat on his horse listening to some very earnest words from the minister on the sinfulness of gambling and Sabbath-breaking. But Mr. Donaldson, having heard of the Methodistic excitement in the Hissawachee settlement, slipped easily to that, and urged Morton not to have anything whatever to do with this mushroom religion, that grew up in a night and withered in a day. In fact the old man delivered to Morton most of the speech he had prepared for the Presbytery on the evil of religious excitements. Then he shook hands with him, exacted a promise that he would go directly home, and, with a few seasonable words on God's mercy in rescuing him from a miserable death, he parted from the young man. Somehow, after that he did not get on quite so well with his speech. After all, was it not better, perhaps, that this young man should be drawn into the whirlpool of a Methodist excitement than that he should become a gambler? After thinking over it a while, however, the logical intellect of the preacher luckily enabled him to escape this dangerous quicksand, in reaching the sound conclusion that a religious excitement could only result in spiritual pride and Pelagian doctrine, and that the man involved in these would be lost as certainly as a gambler or a thief.