everything else in proportion. Fortunately, I sat near a tangle of vines in which I discovered a dog was hiding, a hound who gazed imploringly at me through the leaves with the forlorn, backslidden-sinner expression peculiar to his species, as much as to say: "Don't tell I am here; maybe then I'll get a few crumbs later on." I not only did not tell, but I fed him eight of the biscuit, five slices of ham, and nearly everything else in reach of me except the cucumber pickles. I never saw a dog eat more furtively or so well.

Meanwhile, I was raising for myself a monument more enduring than brass in the hearts of my husband's people, as a hardy woman who could make herself one of them. William, who did not suspect the presence of the dog, grew faintly alarmed, but I persevered till the last man staggered surfeited from the feast. It was my first and, I may add, almost my only triumph as a minister's wife on a backwoods circuit.

After the night service it was arranged that we should go home with the Salters to spend the night. Sister Salter was the woman who had received the blessing. Brother Salter was not a brother at all—he was still in the world, a little, twopenny man with a thin black beard, sad black eyes and a perch mouth. But he was not proud of his godless state, especially as it compared with his wife's radiant experience; he was literally an humble sinner and showed it. We took our places behind them in split-bottom chairs in the one-horse wagon. Sister Salter was still in her baptismal mood and, as we rumbled on into the deepening twilight through the sweeting spring woods, she continued to sing snatches from the old hymns. Higher and higher her fine treble voice arose till the homing birds answered and every living thing in the forest felt the throb of the poignant melody—everything except the baby on her breast. It slept on as soundly as if it breathed her peace into its soft little body.

Night had fallen when we reached the house, a one-room log cabin.

"Light and go in," said Brother Salter. "I reckon the children air all in bed. You 'uns kin ondress and git in while me and Sally unhitches the horse."

We "lit" and entered the large room flooded with moonshining. There was a bed in each corner, and all occupied save one. This was evidently the "company bed." We knew by its opulent feather paunch, by the white-fringed counterpane and by the pillow-shams bearing soporific mottoes worked in turkey-red thread. One could not tell the age of or how many persons were already asleep in the other beds; but, judging from the number and varying sizes of the shoes that staggered and kicked up on the floor beside them, there must have been a hearty dozen, ranging all the way from adolescence down to infancy.

It is needless to add that we were apparently asleep and the covers over my horrified head when the elder Salters entered. Where they slept is still a mystery. But we were awakened very early the next morning by the sound of Sister Salter's voice singing, "His loving kindness, oh, how good!" as she rattled the stove doors beneath the cookshed in the yard. Three very young children were sitting half under our bed examining our shoes and other articles of apparel, and as many older heads stared at us from the opposite beds. My anguish can be better imagined than described, and the nonchalance with which William arose and assumed his trousers did not add to my opinion of him. I afterward learned that nothing was more common than this populous way of entertaining guests, and that he had long since become hardened to the indelicacies of such situations.

CHAPTER III

THE REVIVAL AT REDWINE

But this was only the beginning of social and spiritual surprises through which I passed. There was no culture among the people. They looked like the poor kin of the angels in Heaven, and they really did live so far out of the world that no bishop had ever seen them. I was divided between horror and admiration at their soul-stretching propensities, and it is difficult to describe the shock with which I faced the perpetual exposure of their spiritual nakedness. It was a naïve kind of religious indelicacy, like the unguarded ways of very young children.

Brother Jimmie Meadows would confess to the most private faults in an experience meeting, and, if he did not, Sister Meadows would do it for him. They lacked the sense of humor, which, being interpreted, is a part of the sense of proportion. They shrank from the illuminating quality of wit as if it were a sacrilege—this auto-seriousness was even an important part of William's character. He put on solemnity like a robe when he was in the throes of thought.

The deadly monotony of Christian country life where there are no beggars to feed, no drunkards to credit, which are among the moral duties of Christians in cities, leads as naturally to the outvent of what Methodists call "revivals" as did the backslidings of the people in those days. So it came to pass, that year at Redwine, when the "crops were laid by" William faced his first revival, and I faced William. Spiritually speaking, we parted company. He passed into a praying and fasting trance, and my heart was nearly broken with the loneliness, for praying and fasting did not agree with me, and William seemed to recede in some mystical sense hard to define, so that I became a sort of unwilling grass-widow.

The revival was to begin at Redwine, when suddenly the rumor reached us that Brother Tom Pratt, a prominent member, had back-slided, and that nothing could be done there in a spiritual way until he was reclaimed. He was a large, fair, goat-lipped man with a long straw beard hanging under his chin, and he was said to be mightily gifted in prayer. But his besetting sin was strong drink, and he had recently been drunk. The simplicity with which William went about reclaiming him as a part of the preparation for the coming revival seemed to me almost too premeditatedly spiritual.

Brother Tom Pratt, a Prominent Member, Had Backslided.

The revival proceeded, at first with awful chilliness, at length with flickering warmth. At last, after a very moving sermon on the prodigal son, the altar suddenly filled with penitents. I have often thought of it, the tenderness with which the good God founded our Scriptures for us, so they would fit the human heart to the uttermost generations of men. That story of the prodigal is the eternal love message from Him to us. Preach it anywhere, and the aching, shamed, dissolute rebel in us trembles and wants to come home. Here in this hill settlement, where scarcely any man had been ten miles from where he was born, it seemed that a hundred had been secret vagabonds in the terrible "far country." When the altar was full to suffocation William called on Brother Tom Pratt to "lead us in prayer." And he led us through a long night into the very morning of God. I wish it were the fashion to call oftener on outbreaking sinners to pray in church. Usually they have a stronger sense of the immediateness of the Lord than the long-winded saints do; and many a time since that night have I listened to the Heaven-turning eloquence of better men in prayer, but never have I heard a nobler petition for the forgiveness of sin.

The church was a darkened space rimmed with light from tallow candles standing on wooden brackets around the walls, and the space was filled with the bowed forms of men and women. Near the pulpit there was more light falling upon the dejected figures of the penitents clinging to the altar rail. Within the rail, kneeling facing them, William's face gleamed like the death mask of prayer.

There was a silence; then a voice