“Why shouldn’t I understand, Davy? Listen—ye hain’t for these hills. Ye’re a throw-back somehow, ye don’t belong here. I say that, though yore daddy is my own son. Don’t I know him—he’d skin us alive if he found us two here fiddlin’ on Sunday atternoon. He certainly would shake us out over hell fire, boy! When he gits started to exhortin’ and damnin’ around here, he certainly is servigerous. Ye know that. Hist, now!” The young man himself now heard the sound of heavy footsteps slopping on the sodden earth, the slam of the slat gate’s wooden latch as someone entered. There followed the stamp of heavy feet on the broken gallery, where evidently someone was stopping for an instant to kick off the mud. Before the newcomer could enter the young man arose, and with one stride gained the opening that led up to the loose-floored loft of the single-storied log house. He reached up a long arm and laid the offending fiddle back out of sight upon the floor. Just as he turned there entered the person against whose advent he had been warned—a tall man, large of frame, bushy and gray-white of hair and as to a beard whose strong, close-set growth gave him a look of singular fierceness. As he stood he might have seemed fifty years old. In reality he was past seventy. The young man who faced him now—his son—was twenty-eight. A stalwart breed this, housed here in this cabin in a cove of the ancient Cumberlands. The old dame who stood now, her eyes turning from one to the other, would never see her ninetieth birthday again. Andrew Joslin, commonly known through these half-dozen mountain communities where he rode circuit as “Preacher Joslin,” stood now in the door of his own home and looked about him with his accustomed sternness—a sternness always more intense upon the Lord’s Day. A somber, dour nature, that of this mountain minister, whose main mission in life was to proclaim the wrath of God. A man of yea, yea, and nay, nay, one must have said who saw him standing now, his gray eyes looking out fiercely, searchingly, beneath his bushy brows. “What ye been doin’?” he asked suspiciously now, indifferently of the old woman, his mother, and the stalwart young man, his own son. “What ye doin’ here, David? Why hain’t ye home? Why hain’t ye at church to-day, like ye’d orter be?” “Thar’s no sarvices nowhars near here, an’ ye know it, Andrew,” said the old woman somewhat querulously. “Thar kin be sarvices anywhar whar a few is gethered together in the name of the Lord. Ye two right here could hold sarvices for the glory of God, if so as ye wanted to.” Neither made answer to him, and he went on: “David, have ye read all of that thar book I give ye? Ye’d orter git some good outen Calvin’s Institutes. Ye’ll maybe be a preacher some time like yore daddy.”