e rock in pieces?"

I stood and looked at him a moment. I suppose no one man is stranger
than any other, but at that moment it seemed to me I had never met a
more curious person. And I was consumed with a desire to know why he was
what he was.

"Do you always paint the same sign?" I asked.

"Oh, no," he answered. "I have a feeling about what I should paint. When
I came up the road here this morning I stopped a minute, and it all
seemed so calm and nice"--he swept his arm in the direction of the
fields--"that I says to myself, 'I will paint "God is Love."'"

"An appropriate text," I said, "for this very spot."

He seemed much gratified.

"Oh, you can follow your feelings!" he exclaimed. "Sometimes near towns
I can't paint anything but 'Hell yawns,' and 'Prepare to meet thy God.'
I don't like 'em as well as 'God is Love,' but it seems like I had to
paint 'em. Now, when I was in Arizona----"

He paused a moment, wiping his brushes.

"When I was in Arizona," he was saying, "mostly I painted 'Repent ye.'
It seemed like I couldn't paint anything else, and in some places I felt
moved to put 'Repent ye' twice on the same rock."

I began to ask him questions about Arizona, but I soon found how little
he, too, had taken toll of the road he travelled: for he seemed to have
brought back memories only of the texts he painted and the fact that in
some places good stones were scarce, and that he had to carry extra
turpentine to thin his paint, the weather being dry. I don't know that
he is a lone representative of this trait. I have known farmers who, in
travelling, saw only plows and butter-tubs and corn-cribs, and preachers
who, looking across such autumn fields as these would carry away only a
musty text or two. I pity some of those who expect to go to heaven: they
will find so little to surprise them in the golden streets.

But I persevered with my painter, and it was not long before we were
talking with the greatest friendliness. Having now finished his work, he
shook out his bit of carpet, screwed the tops on his paint cans, wrapped
up his brushes, and disposed of them all with the deftness of long
experience in his small black bag. Then he stood up and looked
critically at his work.

"It's all right," I said; "a great many people coming this way in the
next hundred years will see it."

"That's what I want," he said eagerly; "that's what I want. Most people
never hear the Word at all."

He paused a moment and the