"The tunnel won't cost over two dollars a foot, with what I can do myself," maintained the little man, "and the professor says we'll strike water that'll drown us out before we've gone a hundred feet. Emeline here she's afraid of it because it sounds like a meracle, but I tell her it's pure science. It isn't any more wonderful than a needle traveling toward a magnet: the machine tells where the water is, and how far off it is, something like a compass--I don't understand it, but I can see that it ain't any more meraculous than a telegraph. It's science." "Oh, yes, I know," mourned Mrs. Dysart, who overflowed a small rocking-chair on the piazza; "there's folks that think the creation of the world in six days is nothin' but science, but they're not people for Christians to be goin' pardners with. If Gawd has put a hundred feet of dirt on top of that water, I tell Jawn he had his reasons, and I can't think it's right for anybody whose treasure ought to be laid up in heaven to go pryin' into the bowels of the earth huntin' for things that our heavenly Fawther's hid." "But there's gold, Emeline." "Oh, yes; I know there's gold, and I know 'the love of money is the root of all evil.' I don't say that the Lord don't reign over the inside of the earth, but I do say that people that get their minds fixed on things that's underground are liable to forget the things that are above." "Well, now, I'm sure they hadn't ought," protested Dysart. "I'm sure 'the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof,' Emeline." Mrs. Dysart sank slowly back in her chair at this unexpected thrust from her own weapon, and then rallied with a long, corpulent sigh. "Well, I don't know. You recollect that old man was up here last winter, hammerin' around among the rocks as if the earth was a big nut that he was tryin' to crack? I talked with him long enough to find out what he was; he was an _atheist_." Mrs. Dysart leaned forward and whispered the last word in an awe-struck tone, with her fat eyes fixed reproachfully upon her husband. "Oh, I guess not, Emeline," pleaded John. Mrs. Dysart shut her lips and her eyes very tight, and nodded slowly and affirmatively. "Yes, he was. He set right in that identical spot where Mr. Palmerston is a-settin', and talked about the seven theological periods of creation, and the fables of Jonah and the whale and Noah's ark, till I was all of a tremble. Mebbe that's science, Jawn, but _I_ call it blasphemin'." Dysart rested his elbows on his knees and looked over the edge of the porch as if he were gazing into the bottomless pit. "Oh, come, now, Mrs. Dysart," Palmerston broke in cheerfully; "I'm not at all afraid of Mr. Dysart losing his faith, but I'm very much afraid of his losing his money. I wish he had as good a grip on his purse as he has on his religion." Mrs. Dysart glanced at the young man with a look of relief to find him agreeing with her in spite of his irreverent commingling of the temporal and the spiritual.