seem like some days don't belong to any month, but just whim
along, doin' as they please?" Calliope said. "Months that might be
snowin' an' blowin' the expression off our face hev days when they sort
o' show summer hid inside, secret an' holy. That's the way with lots o'
things, ain't it? That's the way," she added thoughtfully, "Abel feels
about the Lord, I guess. Abel Halsey,--you know."

They had told me how Abel, long ordained a minister of God, had
steadfastly refused to be installed a pastor of any church. He was a
devout man, but the love of far places was upon him, and he lived what
Friendship called "a-gypsyin'" off in the hills, now to visit a sick
man, now to preach in a country schoolhouse, now to marry, or bury, or
help with the threshing. These lonely rides among the hills and his
custom of watching a train come in or rush by out of the distance were
his ways of voyaging. Perhaps, too, his little skill at the organ gave
him, now and then, an hour resembling a journey. But in his first youth
he had meant to go away in earnest--far away, to the City or some other
city. Also, though Calliope did not speak of it again, and I think that
the others kept a loyal silence because of my strangerhood, I had known,
since the home coming of Delia More, that Abel Halsey had once had
another dream.

"You wasn't here when the new church was built," Calliope said, looking
up at the building proudly. "That was the time I mean about Abel. You
know, before it was built we'd hed church in the hall over the
Gekerjeck's drug store; an' because it was his hall, Hiram Gekerjeck, he
just about run the church,--picked out the wall paper, left the stair
door open Sundays so's he could get the church heat, till the whole
service smelt o' ether, an' finally hed church announcements printed as
a gift, _but_ with a line about a patent medicine o' his set fine along
at the bottom. He said that was no differ'nt than advertisin' the
printin'-offices that way, like they do. But it was that move made Abel
Halsey--him an' Timothy Toplady and Eppleby Holcomb an' Postmaster
Sykes, the three elders, set to to build a church. An' they done it too.
An' to them four I declare it seemed like the buildin' was a body
waitin' for its soul to be born. From the minute the sod was scraped off
they watched every stick that went into it. An' by November it was all
done an' plastered an' waitin' its pews--an' it was a-goin' to be
dedicated with special doin