Here were two elements of Barton society with which Mr. Crupp had not been so successful as he had hoped; these were the doctors, and that elastic body known as “the boys.” Individually, the physicians had promised well at first; all of them but one were members of the Barton Division of the Sons of Temperance, and the Division rooms afforded the only floor upon which Dr. White, the allopathist, Dr. Perry, the homeopathist, and Dr. Pykem, the water-cure physician, ever could meet amicably, for they belonged to separate churches. Old Dr. Matthews, who had retired from practice, was not a “Son,” only because he was a conscientious opponent of secret societies; but he had signed every public pledge ever circulated in Barton, and he had never drunk a drop of liquor in his life. All the physicians freely admitted to Mr. Crupp that alcohol was a never-failing cause of disease, or at least of physical deterioration; all declared that no class of maladies were so incurable, and so depressing to the spirits of the medical practitioner, as those to which habitual drinkers, even those who were never drunk, were subject; but—they really did not see what more they, the physicians of Barton, could do than they were already doing. Crupp discussed the matter with Parson Wedgewell, and the parson volunteered to preach a sermon to physicians from the text, “Give wine unto those that be of heavy hearts,” a text which had suggested itself to him, or, rather, had been providentially suggested to him on the occasion of his very first interview with Crupp, and which was outlined in his mind in a manner suggestive of delightful subtleties and a startling application. But when Crupp sounded the doctors as to whether such a discourse would be agreeable, Dr. White said he would be glad to listen to the eloquent divine; but he was conscientiously opposed to appearing, even by the faintest implication, to admit that the homeopathist was a physician at all. Dr. Perry felt his need, as a partaker in the fall of Adam, to being preached to from any portion of the inspired Word; but he could not sit in an audience to which such a humbug as Pykem could be admitted in an official capacity; while Dr. Pykem said that he would rejoice to encourage the preacher by his presence, if he thought any amount of preaching would do any good to a remorseless slaughterer like White, or an idiotic old potterer like Perry. Then Mr. Crupp tried another plan: he himself organized a meeting in which the exercises were to consist of short addresses upon the physical bearing of intemperance, the addresses to be made by “certain of our fellow-citizens who have had many opportunities for special observation in this direction.” Even then Drs. White and Perry objected to sitting on the same platform with Dr. Pykem, who had never attended any medical school of any sort, and who would probably say something utterly ridiculous in support of his own senseless theories, and thus spoil the effect of the physiological facts and deductions which Drs. Perry and White each admitted that the other might be intellectually capable of advancing. Crupp arranged the matter amicably, however, by having Pykem make the first address, during which the other two physicians were to occupy back seats, where they might, while unobserved, take notes of such of Pykem’s heresies as they might deem it necessary to combat: he further arranged that, immediately after Pykem had concluded, he was to be called away to a patient, provided for the occasion. Still more—and great would have been the disgust of White and Perry had they known of it—Crupp laid so plainly before Pykem the necessities of the community, and the duty, not only Christian, but of the simplest manliness, also, that men of any intelligence owed to their fellow-men, that Pykem, who with all his hobbies was a man of Christian belief and humane heart, confined himself solely to the preventive efficacy of external applications of water, not unmixed with soap, in the case of persons who felt toward alcohol a craving which they could not logically explain; he thus delivered an address which might, with cause, be repeated in every community in the United States. Then Dr. Perry, whose forte was experimental physiology, read whole tables of statistics based upon systematic observations; and Dr. White unrolled and explained some charts and plates of various internal organs, naturally unhandsome in themselves, which had been injured by alcohol. It was declared by close observers that for a few days after this meeting the demand for sponges and toilet soap exceeded the experience of the old and single apothecary of the village, and that liquor-sellers looked either sober or savage, according to their respective natures.

But the boys! Crupp found himself in time really disposed to ask Pastors Wedgewell and Brown whether there wasn’t Scriptural warrant for the supposition that Job obtained his sons by marrying a widow with a grown-up family. “The boys” numbered about a hundred specimens, ranging in age from fourteen years to forty; no two were alike in disposition, as Crupp had long known; they came from all sorts of peculiar social conditions that warred against their physical and moral well-being; some of them seemed wholly corrupt, and bent upon corrupting others; many more exhibited a faculty for promising which could be matched in magnitude only by their infirmity of performance. By a vigorous course of individual exhortation, the burden of which was that everybody knew they drank because they were too cowardly to refuse, and that nobody despised them so heartily as the very men who sold them the rum, Crupp lessened the number of drinking boys by about one-fourth, thus rescuing those who were easiest to save and most worth saving, but the remainder made as much trouble as the collective body had done. Crupp scolded, pleaded, and argued; he hired some boys to drop liquor for at least a stated time; he importuned some of the more refined citizens to interest themselves socially in certain boys; he lent some of these boys money with which to buy clothing which would bring their personal appearance up to the Barton standard of respectability, and he covertly excited some of the merchants up to a genuine interest in certain boys, by persuading them to sell to said boys coats, boots, and hats on credits nominally short.

He enjoyed the hearty co-operation of the village pastors, all of whom preached sermons to young men and to parents; but his principal practical assistance came, quite unexpectedly, from old Bunley. Bunley had not yet succeeded in finding anything to do, and, as he had on his hands all of his time which was not needed at the family woodpile, he went around talking to the boys. Bunley had been, according to the Barton classification, a “boy” himself; he had drunk in a not remote day with any boy who invited him; he knew more jolly songs than any other half dozen inebriates in the village, and was simply oppressed with the load of good (bad) stories which he never tired of telling; he had been always ready to play cards with any boy, and had come to be regarded, among the youngsters, as “the best fellow in the village.” Now that he had reformed, his success in reforming boys was simply remarkable—so much so that Parson Wedgewell began to tremble over the thought that Bunley, by the present results of the experience of his sinful days, might demonstrate, beyond the hope of refutation, the dreadful proposition that it was better that a man should be a sinner in his youth, so as to know how to be a saint when he became old. This idea Parson Wedgewell laid, with much trepidation, before the Reverend Timotheus Brown, and the two old saints and new friends had a delightfully doleful time on their knees over it, until there occurred to the Reverend Timotheus Brown a principle which he proceeded to formulate as follows: The greater the capacity of a misguided faculty for evil, the greater the good the same faculty may accomplish when in its normal condition. To be sure, the discovery was not original with him; the same statement had been made by peripatetic phrenologists at Barton; indeed, it was visible, to one who could read rather than merely repeat words, in every chapter of the Bible so dear to this good old man; but the illusion under which Parson Brown was allowed to labor worked powerfully for his own good and for that of the community, for from that time forth both he and Parson Wedgewell displayed their greatest earnestness in work with cases apparently the most hopeless. These they found among “the boys,” and harder work no reformer ever laid out for himself. The ingenuity, the persistence, the determined brutality of some of the boys, the logical acuteness displayed in varied fits of deception, only stimulated the old man to greater industry, and slowly, after hard work, often after work that seemed more like hard fighting, but yet surely, Parson Brown reformed one after another of several hard cases. The villagers, most of whom considered that their whole duty consisted in critical observation, applauded handsomely, and Bunley was astonished, and felt considerably mortified at the marked success of his new rival, while Parson Wedgewell found it necessary to pray earnestly that unchristian jealousy might be banished from his own mind. But to Parson Brown the greatest triumph occurred when Crupp—Crupp, the literalist, the hard-headed, the man who trusted in the arm of flesh, the man of action, he who slightingly received any suggestions of special thank-offerings of prayer for special services received—Crupp came to him by night—it reminded Parson Brown of Nicodemus—and exclaimed, “It’s no use, Parson; I’ve done my best on Frank Pughger, but he’s a goner if God don’t put in a special hand. I’ll turn him over to you, I guess.”