The new Northwest. [volume] (Portland, Or.) 1871-1887, 1877-06-29
CHAPTER ].

bargains, hard in his religion, hard in
his family, and equally hard upon him
self He was an angular man-one of
S. the fast receding race of old-style Puri-
tans with whom and whose household
the Blue Laws were as rigidly enforced
as it was possible for the tyranny of a
bigot to enforce, when aided by the9aws
of Commonwealth that places the sole
arbitration of domestic destiny in the
legal keeping of the "head of the fam
ily," and allows him to be at once the
interpreter and executor of every do
mestic regulation in his realm.
Major Marblehead was a conscientious
mana religionist of the straight-jack ct
order, who was as equally determined
to compel everybody else to see through
his peculiar creedal spectacles as he was
rigid in requiring himself to look
through no others.
Why John Marblehead had earned
and carried the sobriquet of Major, no.
body in Galestown could conjecture.
He had been a deacon of the devoutest
order of Old-line Baptists for half a cen
tury, and so fixed was he in his relig-
ious tenets that he would not have scru-
pied to burn Servetus at the stake for
holding contrary opinion to his own,
had the laws of the country perm lifted,
any more than he failed to scruple, at
every meeting of the board, to sit in
Judgment upon the real or fancied con-
version of any and every repentant
sinner that offered himself as a candi-
date for immersion within the pale of
the little church of which he was the
acknowledged head.
There was a revival in GaIestown, and
its exciting waves had reached the GIrs
and rippled in the hearts of all the
young people of all the churches.
Major Marblehead was fuller than
usual of the divine afflatus. He sang
with more than accustomed JUNCTION the
fear-inspiring words,
Sinner, hell is deep and yawning.
Quenchless fires are raging there;
Not one beam of hope is dawning
On those regions of despair.
Like some vast, volcanic crater,
Burning waves of lava swell,
Rage and toss and moan and labor,
Such, oh sinner, such is hell."-
The Major was not an average success
in the musical line, and the air, 'From
Greenland's Icy Mountains" which lie
attempted to twist into such a shape as
to compel it to accommodate itself to
the meter of the lines quoted, was so
obstinate as to construe his attempts at
harmony into sort of sonorous failure,
which made the young people litter
during service, and caused more than
one applicant for salvation to be refused
admission to the church because of his
levity over so awfully solemn a reality
as the good Majors Gehenna, whittier,
according to his devout understanding,
they were all tending, except they
should walk the straight and narrow
path to which he held the only author
lied entrance in Galestown.
1t was a marvel to some of the more
incredulous as to how he could reconcile
~ w lis COIoGlCLlCC W COuuEulu SO udDV
aspirants to Immortality to the "broader
road that leads to DEATH" but certain it
was that he did thus sit in judgment
upon quite a number during the prog
ress of the revival, among them being a
prominent young lawyer of the town,
whom everybody suspected of cherish
ing matrimonial intentions toward the
Majors dignified and intelligent daugh-
ter.
HenryKingston Greensborougb, whom
everybody called King, and generally
failed to remember that he had another
cognomen, was the greatest "cateh" in
Galestown. He had fallen heir to the
Kingston estate upon the death of his
maternal grandfather, an estate of broad
acres and magnificent elms that skirted
the classic village, and overlooked, from
its square, second-story windows, the
pretentious country college, of which
the great West boasts so many. 1t had
long been shrewdly suspected by the
village folk that Kingston Greensbor-
ough would marry Martha Marbehead.
There seemed to be no reasonable obiec-
tion to the prospective union, and all
was going well till the revival came,
bringing every young person into seri-
GUS consideration of the means of grace
that everywhere abounded.
Conspicuous among the first array of
new converts were King and Martha.
Both attended regularly upon the min
istratiOns at Major Marblehead's ebu,cb.
the latter because she would have con-
sidered it sacrilege to 90 otherwise. and
the former because his inclin ltion
prompted him to go where the latter
went.
Religious fervor was at an unusual
height when the young couple received
the "blessing." If the joy in heaven
over repentant sinners could have been
measured by the joy on earth on that
occasion, there would have been no lack