476	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
CHAPTER MY.
PAST   AND   PRESENT.
being left to myself, np there, I went on picking out old houses in
the distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the
mouldy past. Among them I presently recognised the house of the
father of Lem Hackett (fictitious name). It carried me back more
than a generation in a moment, and landed me in the midst of a
time when the happenings of life were not the natural and logical
results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted
with very precise and distinct purposes—partly punitive in intent,
partly admonitory; and usually local in application*
"When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned—on a
Sunday.    He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing.
Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil.    He -was
the only boy in the village who slept that night.    We others all lay
awake, repenting.    We had not needed the information, delivered
from the pulpit that evening, that Lem's was a case of special judg-
ment—we knew that, already.   There was a ferocious thunder-storm,
that nighty and it raged continuously until near dawn.    The winds
blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof in pelting
sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness of the night
vanished, the houses over the way glared out white and blinding for
a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut down again and a
splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed to rend everything
in the  neighbourhood to shreds and splinters.    I sat up in bed
quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the world,
and expecting it.    To me there was nothing strange or incongruous
in heaven's malring such an uproar about Lem Hackett.   Apparently