a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station,
boarded a 12.55 commuter's train, rode four hours with her
burnt-umber head bobbing against the red-plush back of the seat,
and landed during a fresh, stinging, glorious sunrise at a deserted
station, the size of a peach crate, called Crocusville.

She walked a mile and clicked the latch of a gate. A bare, brown
cottage stood twenty yards back; an old man with a pearl-white,
Calvinistic face and clothes dyed blacker than a raven in a
coal-mine was washing his hands in a tin basin on the front porch.

"How are you, father?" said Mary timidly.

"I am as well as Providence permits, Mary Ann. You will find your
mother in the kitchen."

In the kitchen a cryptic, gray woman kissed her glacially on the
forehead, and pointed out the potatoes which were not yet peeled for
breakfast. Mary sat in a wooden chair and decorticated spuds, with a
thrill in her heart.

For breakfast there were grace, cold bread, potatoes, bacon, and
tea.

"You are pursuing the same avocation in the city concerning which
you have advised us from time to time by letter, I trust," said her
father.

"Yes," said Mary, "I am still reviewing books for the same
publication."

After breakfast she helped wash the dishes, and then all three sat
in straight-back chairs in the bare-floored parlor.

"It is my custom," said the old man, "on the Sabbath day to read
aloud from the great work entitled the 'Apology for Authorized and
Set Forms of Liturgy,' by the ecclesiastical philosopher and revered
theologian, Jeremy Taylor."

"I know it," said Mary blissfully, folding her hands.

For two hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the
notes of an oratorio played on the violoncello. Mary sat gloating
in the new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden
chair brought her. Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect
as the martyr's. Jeremy's minor chords soothed her like the music of
a tom-tom. "Why, oh why," she said to herself, "does some one not
write words to it?"

At eleven they went to church in Crocusville. The back of the pine
bench on which she sat had a penitential forward tilt that would
have brought St. Simeon down, in jealousy, from his pillar. The
preacher singled her out, and thundered upon her vicarious head
the damnation of the world. At each side of her an adamant parent
held her rigidly to the bar of judgment. An ant crawled upon her
neck, but she dared not mov