To come to the second pertikeler, which is the first in the order of my text, my attentive congregation.  She didn’t look at you in meetin’.  Now, I ‘spose you don’t know nothin’ of her mother’s heart-disease.  Heart-disease is trumps with Abigail Anderson.  She plays that every turn.  Just think of a young gal who thinks that ef she looks at her beau when her mother’s by, she might kill her invalooable parient of heart-disease.  Fer my part, I don’t take no stock in Mrs. Abby Anderson’s dyin’ of heart-disease, no ways.  Might as well talk about a whale dyin’ of footrot.”

“Well, Jonas, what counsel do you give our young friend?  Your sagacity is to be depended on.”

“Why, I advise him to speak face to face with the angel of his life.  Let him climb into my room to-night.  Leave meetin’ jest afore the benediction—­he kin do without that wunst—­and go double-quick acrost the fields, and git safe into my stoodio.  Ferther pertikelers when the time arrives.”

CHAPTER XVII.

THE WRONG PEW.

August’s own good sense told him that the advice of Jonas was not good.  But he had made many mistakes of late, and was just now inclined to take anybody’s judgment in place of his own.  All that was proud and gentlemanly in him rebelled at the thought of creeping into another man’s house in the night.  Modesty is doubtless a virtue, but it is a virtue responsible for many offenses.  Had August not felt so distrustful of his own wisdom, nothing could have persuaded him to make his love for Julia Anderson seem criminal by an action so wanting in dignity.  But back of Jonas’s judgment was that of Andrew, whose weakness was Quixotism.  He wanted to live and to have others live on the concert-pitch of romantic action.  There was something of chivalry in the proposal of Jonas, a spice of adventure that made him approve it on purely sentimental grounds.

The more August thought of it, and the nearer he was to its execution, the more did he dislike it.  But I have often noticed that people of a rather quiet temperament, such as young Wehle’s, show vis inertiae in both, ways—­not very easily moved, they are not easily checked when once in motion.  August’s velocity was not usually great, his momentum was tremendous, and now that he had committed himself to the hands of Jonas Harrison and set out upon this enterprise, he was determined, in his quiet way, to go through to the end.

Of course he understood the house, and having left the family in meeting, he had nothing to do but to scale one of the pillars of the front-porch.  In those Arcadian days upper windows were hardly ever fastened, except when the house was deserted by all its inmates for days.  Half-way up the post he was seized with a violent trembling.  His position brought to him a confused memory of a text of Scripture:  “He that entereth not by the door ... but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.”