The preacher often is a jack-of-all-trades--sometimes a doctor, getting his degree from the family medicine-book; and strange to say, though an ardent believer in faith-cure, and with marvellous accounts of cures in answer to prayer, yet prescribing a liver invigorator when that organ is in trouble. Some of these men are natural orators, and with their bursts of eloquence often hush their hearers to holy awe and inspiration. They have one book, and believe it. No doubts trouble them. Higher criticism has never reached them. Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch is unquestioned. Moses and no other, to them, wrote the five books, including the account of his own burial. They know nothing of pre-exilic Psalms or Greek periods of Daniel; but all preach Jesus, no matter whence they draw their text. In an instant they make a short cut for Calvary. One brother, over eighty years of age, walks fifteen miles, and preaches three times. Some of his sermons take two hours in delivery, without the aid of a scrap of note; and the talk for days after is on the sermon. No quarterlies, monthlies, or weeklies lie at home to divert. No lecturer strays to that region. Here and there is a village house with an organ or a piano, and, of course, a paper. I am speaking of the rural South,--and nearly all the South is rural, nearly all American, even the cities, with few exceptions, and the operatives are Southern, and mostly from the farms; so that one may find a city whose operatives live in another State, across a river, in a community numbering nearly seven thousand souls, and most of them keeping pigs and a cow (or, rather, not keeping them, for they roam at their own sweet will down grassy, ungraded streets). In such a place one meets old ladies of quite respectable appearance, with the little snuffing-stick in their mouths, or a pipe; and here one small grocery shop may sell two hundred dozen of little tin snuff-boxes in a month! There are cities in the South where you will find as fine hotels and stores as any on the continent. But from any such city it is only a step to the most primitive conditions. Let me describe a characteristic night scene near a large city. My friend met me at the depot with his little light wagon and diminutive mule, and we started for the homestead. Our road lay between banks of honeysuckle that saturated the air with its rich perfume; wild-goose plum, persimmon, bullice, and chinquapin (the latter somewhat like a chestnut, but smaller), huckleberries on bushes twelve feet high, called currants there, lined the road on either side. The house was surrounded by the _débris_ of former corn-cribs and present ones; stables were scattered here and there in picturesque confusion. One end of the house was open, and had been waiting for years for its chimney; there was shrubbery of every kind all about. I had the usual hearty welcome and supper, and then attended the inevitable meeting in the grove.