The Great Union Camp-Meeting was held in the first half of August on the Timber Creek camp-ground, only a mile and a half from the Grayson place. The mother and Barbara went every evening and came back with accounts of the attendance, of the old friends encountered, and of the sermons of favorite preachers. They told how "powerfully" the elder had preached, and how the eloquent young preacher, who was junior on the next circuit, had carried all before him in a pathetic exhortation. But Tom showed no desire to attend. He was slowly sinking into a depression quite unusual with him. He had been accustomed to the excitement of the town, and the prospect of a life of dull routine on a farm ate into his spirit like a biting rust. Barbara amused him with stories of the camp-meeting; she told him of the eccentric German exhorter whose broken English she mimicked, and of the woman she had heard relate in a morning "speaking-meeting" that, when convinced of the sin of wearing jewelry, she had immediately taken off her ear-rings and given them to her sister. These things lightened his spirit but for a moment; he would relapse soon into the same state of mental lassitude, or more acute melancholy. Barbara endeavored to cheer him with projects; he could take a school the next winter, and with the money earned pay his board somewhere in town and take up the study of law again. But all of Barbara's projects were moderate and took full account of difficulties. Tom had little heart for a process that demanded plodding and patient waiting; nor did any of Barbara's suggestions hold out any prospect of his recovering his ground with Rachel, which was the thing he most desired. One evening, as he finished a supper which he had eaten with little relish and in silence, he pushed back his chair and sat moodily looking into the black cave of the kitchen fire-place, where the embers were smoldering under the ashes. Then when his mother had left the kitchen, and Barbara was clearing away the plates, he said: "The more I think of it, the worse I feel about George Lockwood. The tricky villain got me into that scrape and then told all about it where he knew it would do me the most harm. I'd just like to shoot him." "You'd better shoot him and get yourself hanged!" said Barbara with impatience. "_That_ would mend matters, wouldn't it?" "'T wouldn't matter much to me," said Tom. "This country life doesn't suit me; I'd just as well be out of it, and they do say hanging is an easy way of dying." This last was spoken with a grim smile. "I suppose you don't think of _us_," said Barbara. "I'm more trouble than good to you and mother."