“_Yes_, sir!” he would often cry out with animated confirmation, and in a voice rendered even more emphatic by a sort of chronic hoarse wheeze, when his father sat by the fire, and shook his head, and foretold vengeance already poised to alight on those who cared not to hear, and who would not repent while yet there was time. “Dander on, sing sir, do they, play kyerds, an’ da-ance! An’ Satan have gyirded him up, an’ air kemin’ up the valley, sir,—kemin’ up the valley like a black cloud in which thar be no promise o’ peace; like a whurlwind ez holds no pity; like the yearthquake, when men may turn this-a-way an’ that-a-way, an’ find no escape!” “Yes, _sir_,” Jube would filially echo, his eyes distended with some mental vision of Satan expressed in these natural terrors. The trouble with Jube was a singular lack of pliability in application. It never occurred to him to look upon himself as one of the hopeless and the possibly damned. On the contrary, there are few people in this world who take so much pleasure in it as did Jube Donnard, despite all the restrictions of his narrow circumstances. Few people can walk on their heads and hands with such joy in sheer inversion. Few people can sing so hilariously false, old songs, so oft sung, antedating, perhaps, Broomsedge Cove itself, and still find them fresh and full of delight. Few people can lose their little all at play with such cheerful equanimity. “I never see sech a comical run o’ kyerds, noways,” he would console himself, with a laugh at some ludicrous sequences. Few people can on occasion drink so deeply, and yet be consciously so little drunk. If the parson suspected his son’s occupations and amusements to be vain and frivolous, and unbeseeming mortality endowed with that large contract of preparing for immortality, and, with a desire to induce him to look upon himself as among those spiritually threatened, spoke with a secret admonitory intent, his finesse was poorly rewarded by the adaptable Jube, who would straightway respond with plastic, earnest sincerity, “_Yes_, sir! Yes, _sir_!”