A Circuit Rider's Wife

herb tea steaming on the live coals, and the old mountain midwife, bending with her hideous scroll face over me, are all a part of the memory of an immortal pain. At the end of a dreadful

right. I reckon s

came and sat around the awful bed and would not pass, nor let even midnight come. Now and again the old scroll face peeped down at me with an ex

corner, with her hands hanging down, her head thrown back, and her warped mouth gaping wide at the rafters above. Over a little table by the door a fine white tablecloth was spread. I wondered at it dimly and what it concealed. I felt William's shaggy head bowed upon the bed and a peace in my body akin to the peace of death. Laboriously my eyes traveled back to the fine white cloth over the table. I knew all about it, b

nk G

doctor bending above me, with his warm fingers on my wrist. But now a great emergency confro

red, and felt his kiss answe

ad, my darlin

somewhere or I cannot bear it, and I cannot

n under the very eave of Heaven, swinging deep in his brown cradle of earth, the mother angels will find him, the little itinerant, with his dust properly baptized

whom some other preacher would contend later. We never asked why it was that they were invariably the first to come to the altar when invitations were extended to sinners during revival season. But it w

racter that they loved him. Whenever I have seen a particularly good person whom children avoided I have always known that there was something rancid

e children knew nothing of happy anticipations, and, as is so often the case with the very poor, they sustained only the inevitable natural relations to their elders. There were no tender intimacies. They were really as wild as young rabbits. If we met one in

even in Santa Claus moved him to desperation. A week before Christmas he visited more than a score of families and carried the news with him to every child he could find in the mountains that there was a Santa Claus, and that Santa had discovered them and would surely bring something to them if t

the village for gifts for his children. He had old women, who had not thought a frivolous thought in fifty years, teetering over dressin

he brought home this last t

appy and the next time I tell them anything, though it

s known as Crow's Mountain, we found a very handsome healthy boy, four months old, clad in a stocking leg and the sleeve of an old coat, that had been cunningly cut and sewed to fit him as close as a squirrel's skin. In another place William

o have experienced a miracle. They entered immediately into full fellowship with William. They loved him with a kind of wide-eyed stolidity that would have tried the nerves of some people. They were prepared to believe anything he said to the uttermos

reverent comment. It proceeded from the same incip

was indiscree

eat that many children it wou

showing wide unblinking eyes turned up in coldly rational interrogative stares, wit

nced, leaving the bear-expositor mystified, b

he sun was shining on it, looking at us, believing in us from far down the years. And it has helped, often more than the recollection of older, wiser saints. Our ex

rals. Some years the weddings would have it. Then again, the dead got the better of it. As a rule, the poorer the people we served the

here was a furious rap at the door of the parsonage. William stuck his head out of the window overhead and beheld a red-faced young farmer st

ed the groom. "You ain't got time to

moonlight, after having examined the license the young man handed in through the parlor window. And he l

ivorce dust in society nowadays. Part of their dissatisfaction comes from bad temper and bad training, and a good deal of it comes from getting foolish notions out of books about the way husbands do or do not love their wives. I

ngly confessed that he was too poor to

as he swung his bride up behind him upon

rson. I'll Pay as

o an appointment, he met a man and woman in a buggy. The woman had a baby at her breast, and th

pulling up his horse; "ai

es

s ten dollar

lding back from the extended han

time I couldn't pay you for the greatest service one man ever done another. We ain't pr

ntain farmer paid his wife that day. I never hear the love of a man for his wife misnamed by the new disillusioned thinkers