CHAPTER IX.
Reynolds Bartram was greatly annoyed by the results of the several interviews he had imposed upon the new assistant cobbler at Bruceton.
He had silenced, if not conquered, all the other religious controversialists of the town, and found the weak spots in the armor of many good people not given to controversy, whom he had beguiled into talking on religious themes.

Why he should want to converse at all upon such subjects puzzled the people of the town, all of whom had known him from boyhood as a member of a family so entirely satisfied with itself that it never desired any aid from other people, to say nothing of higher powers.

Sometimes the Bartrams went to church for social purposes, but always with an air of conferring a favor upon the power in whose honor the edifice was erected.
But Bartram had good enough reasons for his sudden interest in religion.

He was in love with Eleanor Prency, and, after the manner of his family regarding everything that interested them, he was tremendously in earnest with his wooing.

Like a judicious lawyer, he had endeavored to make his way easier by prepossessing the girl's parents in his favor; but when he began to pass the lines of pleasing civility, within which he had long known the judge and his wife, he was surprised to find an undercurrent of seriousness, the existence of which in the Prency family he never had suspected.