The simple Quaker hymn told of a great home of rest far away, yet very near.
The tumult had attracted the frequenters of the Red Lion, and some of these had stepped out on to the causeway. Two or three of them were already drunk. Among them was Garth, the blacksmith. He laughed frantically, and shrieked and crowed at every address and every hymn. When the preachers shouted “Hallelujah,” he shouted “Hallelujah” also; shouted again and again, in season and out of season; shouted until he was hoarse, and the perspiration poured down his crimsoning face. His tipsy companions at first assisted him with noisy cheers. When one of the men in the ring lifted up his voice in the ardor of prayer, Garth yelled out yet louder to ask if he thought God Almighty was deaf.
The people began to tremble at the blacksmith's blasphemies. The tipsiest of his fellows slunk away from his side.
The preacher spoke at one moment of the numbers of their following.
“You carry a bottle of liquor somewhere,” cried Garth; “that's why they follow you.”
Wearied out by such a shrieking storm of discord, one of the three Quakers—a little man with quick eyes and nervous lips—made his way through the crowd to where the blacksmith stood at the outskirts of it. Garth propped his back against the wall of the inn and laughed hysterically at the preacher's remonstrance: “Woe to thee and such as thee when God's love passes away from thee.”
Garth replied with a mocking blasphemy too terrible for record. He repeated it, shouted it, screamed it.
In sheer horror the Quaker dropped on his knees in front of the blacksmith and muttered a prayer that was almost inaudible:—
“God grant that the seven devils, yea seven times seven, may come out of him!”
Then Garth was silent for a moment.