"Is you got religion, honey boy, aw is you on'y got de sickness? Tell me, honey, which you got? Is you got bofe?"
The lad moaned, shook his head, and suddenly sat up, and cried to his kneeling and gazing sister: "Neither! Great God, I'm not ready for either!"—his words, like old Joy's, cutting squarely across the hymn as it continued:
"'Death like a nor-rah streabm di-vi-dns
This heab'-mly ladnd frobm ow-ehs.'"
Ramsey stood. "Well, don't be alarmed or distressed!" she half laughed, half wept, while the nurse crooned:
"Honey boy, ef you ain't yit got de sickness——"
"I don't know!" he cried, so loudly that only the Methodists and Baptists sang on. He sprang up and glanced round to the judge, the general, the squire, the senator, exclaiming: "I've been right in it!—to get back that infernal petition of yours when I dropped it! I've all but touched the dying and the dead! I've been handled all over by men who'd been handling them! Whatever I've caught from them I'll know is a judgment! For at last I've got a sense of sin! Right down under here behind this boat's engines I got it! I want you-all people to pray for me! I've been an awful sinner for years!"
"So have I!" wept Ramsey aloud.
"Praise de Lawd!" said Joy, from her knees.
Mrs. Gilmore drew Ramsey backward and shared a chair with her. The exhorter and a stout few hung to the hymn—