rought a peevish frown to his thin face and a higher,
even more querulous note to his shrill falsetto voice, which, while
they hardly understood it, nevertheless resulted in an even
profounder hush in those respectful ranks. He couldn't even
revisualize it clearly enough for his own private edification--for the
joy of seeing himself as others had seen him.

Nothing remained but a picture of Dryad Anderson's face--the face that
had tried so hard to smile--which she had lifted to him that first
morning when he entered the front room of the little drab cottage at
the edge of town. That was limned upon his brain in startlingly
perfect detail still--that and one other thing. The memory of John
Anderson's pitifully wasted form huddled slack upon the high stool,
arms outstretched and silvered head bowed in a posture of utter
weariness, remained with him, too, clinging in spite of every effort
to dislodge it.

That whole week had not served to wipe it out. Day after day, as Old
Jerry drove his route with the reins taut in his nervous hands, it
floated up before him. And even when he wound the lines about the
whipstock, letting the old mare take her own pace, and leaned back,
eyes closed, against the worn cushions, the interior of that back-room
shop with its simple, terribly inert occupant and countless rows of
tiny white statues, all so white and strangely alike, crept in under
the lids.

Old Jerry's mail route suffered that week; his original "system" of
mail distribution, of which he had always been so jealously proud,
went from bad to very, very bad, and from that to an impossible worse;
and yet, while it became a veritable lottery for the hillsfolk who
were dependent upon him whether they would receive the packet of mail
which really belonged to a two-mile distant neighbor or none at all,
in one respect the rural service improved immensely, and the
improvement--and strangely enough, too--was as directly a result of
that stubborn image of John Anderson's bowed head which persisted in
haunting the mind of the servant of the Gov'mint as was the alarming
growth of his lack of dependability.

Day by day Old Jerry grew less and less prone to let the leisurely
white mare take her own pace. Instead, he sat stiffly erect a great
portion of the time, driving with one eye cocked calculatingly upon
the course of the sun, and his mind running far ahead of him, to the
end of the day's route, when he would have to turn in at the
cr