It began thus: "New Hampshire is a pretty place, I did go there to see The maple-sugar being boiled By one that's dear to me." Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza-- "I loved to hear the banjo hum, It sounds so very calmly; If a happy home you wish to find, Visit the Thompson family." After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her voice-- "At lovers' promises fates grow merrilee; Some are made on land, Some on the deep sea.
Love does sometimes leave Streams of tears." He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.
Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself.

He even sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own: "For her dear sake whom he did pity, He took her back to Jersey City." But the Sabbath came inexorably to bring his sinful nature before him, just as the door of the Front Room was opened each week to remind him of the awful joys of Heaven.

And then his mind was like the desert of shifting sands.

There were so many things to be done and not done if one were to avert the wrath of this God that made the Front Room a cavern of terror, that rumbled threateningly in the prayer of his grandfather and shook the young minister to a white passion each Sabbath.
There was being good--which was not to commit murder or be an atheist like Milo Barrus and spell God with a little g; and there was Coming to the Feet--not so simple as it sounded, he could very well tell them; and there was the matter of Blood.

There were hymns, for example, that left him confused.