Even now he could hear the words maundered through the chinks: "Never got another drop of water for a million years and _still_ more, and him a burning up and a roasting up, and his tongue a lolling out, all of a _sizzle_.

Now wasn't that fine--because folks said he'd likely gone crazy about religion!" Other times his captor would declare himself to be John the Baptist making straight the paths in the wilderness.

Again he would quote passages of scripture, some of them hideous mockeries to the tortured prisoner, some strangely soothing and suggestive.
But a search had been made for the missing man and, quite by accident, they had found him, at a time when it seemed to him his mind must go with his captor's.

His recovery from the physical blight of this captivity had been prompt; but there were those who sat under him who insisted that ever after he had been palpably less insistent upon the feature of divine retribution for what might be called the merely technical sins of heterodoxy.

Not that unsound doctrine was ever so much as hinted of him; only, as once averred a plain parishioner, "He seemed to bear down on hell jest a _lee-tle_ less continuously." As for his young wife, she had ever after professed an unconquerable aversion for those sermons in which God's punishment of sinners was set forth; and this had strangely been true of their daughter, born but a little time after the father's release from the maniac's cabin.