"It kept your husband awake this time, I should think," said the Kyrkegrim.
"Heighty teighty!" cried the farmer's wife. "I'd have you to know my good man is as decent a body as any in the parish, if he does take a nap on Sundays! He is no sinner if he is no saint, thank Heaven, and the parson knows better than to preach at him."
"Next Sunday," said the Kyrkegrim to the priest, "preach about something which concerns everyone; respectable people as well as others."
So the preacher preached of Death—whom tears cannot move, nor riches bribe, nor power defy. The uncertain interruption and the only certain end of all life's labors! And as he preached, the women sitting in their seats wept for the dead whose graves they had been tending, and down the aged cheeks of the Kyrkegrim there stole tears of pity for poor men, whose love and labors are cut short so soon.
But the farmer slept as before.
"Do you expect to die?" asked the Kyrkegrim.
"Surely," replied the farmer, "we must all die some day, and one does not need a preacher to tell him that. But it was a funeral sermon, my wife thinks. There has been bereavement in the miller's family."
"Men are a strange race," thought the Kyrkegrim; but he went to the priest and said—"The farmer is not afraid of death. You must find some subject of which men really stand in awe."
So when Sunday came round again, the preacher preached of Judgment—that dread Avenger who dogs the footsteps of trespass, even now! That awful harvest of whirlwind and corruption which they must reap who sow to the wind and to the flesh! Lightly regarded, but biding its time, till a man's forgotten follies find him out at last.
But the farmer slept on. He did not wake when the preacher spoke of judgment to come, the reckoning that cannot be shunned, the trump of the Archangel, and the Day of Doom.