The Seven arts Author:James Oppenheim Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Saints of San Atoll By Allen Upward I HAD been reading a story, a very beautiful and improving story, by a lady, Miss Emmeline Faith Summers, of Upcott... more », Mass. It was a story, evidently quite true and real, of the early days in California, when good men and women were scarce in those parts, scarcer than they are now, and churches scarcer still. The story was called The Sinners of Hell-Fire Gulch, and it made you feel that you knew all about the place; and that the authoress had been there herself and studied the folks, and written down nothing she couldn't have proved on oath in a court of law. According to this lady, the inhabitants of Hell-Fire Gulch were simply the worst ruffians that ever disgraced their Creator; just the sort that would have been wiped out by a flood, or an earthquake, or a spout of fire and brimstone, a few thousand years ago, in the ordinary course without any one being surprised. They swore and drank and played cards and assassinated their friends pretty much all the time; and it was as likely as not that they did other things that Miss Summers had been compelled to leave out by the editor; it being a Sunday magazine that I read the story in. Well, into the midst of this double-distilled Gomorrah there stumbled one day a strange creature, as strange and unbelievable to those men as if he had just dropped down off the moon. He was, as of course the reader guessed beforehand he would be, a Son of Christian Parents. Every oneknows what a Son of Christian Parents is bound to be like; there is no need to describe him any more; it has been done pretty often. This S. C. P. was exactly like all the others, and had all the frills that they have. He not only never did wrong, never drank nor cursed nor gambled nor took human life himself, but he couldn...« less