"When you are old, the beer you have swilled will choke your throat; the women you have flirted with will hang round your feet and make you stumble. All the nights you have wasted at poker will dim your eyes. The garden of the days that are gone, wherein you should have planted kindness and consideration and thoughtfulness and manly courage to do right, will be grown up to weeds, that will blossom in your patches and in your rags and in your twisted, gnarly face that no one will love.
"Go it, Bub! don't stop for your pa's sake; you know it all. Your pa is merely an old fogy. Tell him you can paddle your own canoe. But when you were a little boy, a very little boy, with a soft, round body, your pa used to take you in his arms and rub his beard--his rough, stubby, three-days' beard--against your face and pray that God would keep you from the path you are going in.
"And so the sins of the father, Bub--but we won't talk of that."
Three months later, when the Methodists opened their regular winter revival, Mehronay, becoming enraged at what he called the tin-horn clothes of the travelling evangelist conducting the meetings, began to make fun of him in the paper; and, as a revivalist in a church is a sacred person while the meetings are going on, we had to kill Mehronay's items about the revival; whereupon, his professional pride being hurt, Mehronay went forth into the streets, got haughtily drunk, and strutted up and down Main Street scattering sirs and misters and madams about so lavishly that men who did not appreciate his condition thought he had gone mad. That night he went to the revival, and sat upon the back seat alone, muttering his imprecations at the preacher until the singing began, when the heat of the room and the emotional music mellowed his pride, and he drowned out the revivalist's singing partner with a clear, sweet tenor that made the congregation turn to look at him. Mehronay knew the gospel hymns by heart, as he seemed to know his New Testament, and the cunning revivalist kept the song service going for an hour. When Mehronay was thoroughly sober there was a short prayer, and the singer on the platform feelingly sang "There Were Ninety and Nine" with an adagio movement, and Mehronay's face was wet with tears and he rose for prayers.