A Circuit Rider's Wife

ess of other young married people except that it was abashed morning and evening with family prayers-occasions when Thomas, the cat, invariably arose with an air of outraged good-breeding and withd

the man resembled both that of the cavalier and the saint. Also, I was to learn that it was no light matter for one's husb

it is certain that he will impart a wrestling-Jacob disposition to his descendants which nothing can change. So it was with William; he was often without "the witness of the Spirit," but I never knew him to let his angel go. He had a genius for wrestling in prayer as another man might have for writing great poetry. His words flew together int

world. We should have been scattered like the fine dust of a too great destiny. But presently, when nothing adequate to them happened during the night, I learned to have more confidence in the wisdom of God and less in William's. Wit

days. They are farmers who have an instinct for the out-of-doors and who, for this reason, will not go in till the last moment. Beyond the church, in the thicker shadows, lay its dead beneath a colony of staggering gray stones. Upon one grave, I remember, where the clay was freshly turned, there was a bouquet of flowers-love's protest against the sonorous sentence-"earth to earth and dust to dust"-which the other graves confirmed. The pine needles lay thick a

to the imagination or suggest holy imagery. Only the semicircular altar rail about the narrow box pulpit suggested human frailty, prayer and repentance. On the men's side-for the law of sex was observed to the point of segregation in all our churches-there was a sprinkling of men with red, strong, craggy faces who appeared to have the Adam c

nding there behind the high pulpit in the darkened church with his eyes lifted, as if he saw angels above our heads, has never faded from my memory, nor have the faces of the old women in their black sunbonnets upturned to hi

e floor with careful deliberation, took off her black calico bonnet, stepped into the aisle, slapped her hands together and began to spin around and around upon her toes with incredible celerity. Her homespun skirt ballooned about her, the ruffle of her

erwise shrinking country woman which could cause her to rise, take the service out of the preacher's hands as serenely as if she had been sent from God. And this

h gives the Methodists the chief reputation for emotional religion, and it is certainly cheating the Episcopalians. For every time the service is read in an Episcopal church the congregation shouts th

speaking, all the best people in the community were present; the real best people, you understand. Spiritually, it was an occasion hallowed by grave conversation; for were we not within the shadow of God's house, in the sacred presence of the dead? It was gruesome if you had an Episcopalian temperamen

the size of saucers and of the thickness of bread loaves, hams, baked hens, roasted pigs, more biscuit, cucumber pickles six inches

rtunately, 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 he

make herself one of them. William, who did not suspect the presence of the dog, grew faintly alarmed, but I persevered till the last ma

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 sprin

we reached the house

the children air all in bed. You 'uns kin ondress

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

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 descr