ought of our sins surrounding our
deathbeds and lying down with us in our graves--but the book contains
something more profound and terrible still!

For, in addition to the grave of Benjamin Grimshaw, from which we have
just turned sadly away, there are two other graves in the book. The one
is a felon's grave--the grave of Amos Grimshaw. And what sins are these
that are lying down with him in the dust? They are some of them his own;
and they are some of them his father's; and they are some of them the
sins of Roving Kate, the Silent Woman. Yes, they are some of them the
woman's sins. For when Amos was but an impressionable boy, Kate had
supplied him with literature by which she hoped to pollute and ruin him.

Out of the deathless hatred that she bore to the father, she longed to
destroy the son, body and soul. She gave him tales that would inflame
his fancy and excite his baser instincts, tales that glorified robbery,
murder and villainy of every kind. If Amos Grimshaw had been a good
man's son, and if ennobling influences had been brought to bear upon
him, he might have lived to old age and gone down at last to an honored
grave. But his father's example was always before him, and Kate's books
did their dreadful work only too well. He became a highway robber; he
shot a stranger on a lonely road. It came out in evidence that the deed
had been perpetrated under circumstances identical with those described
in one of the sensational stories found in the Grimshaw barn--the
stories Kate had given him!

'It's the same with the books you read,' the schoolmaster had said, when
Bart sought from him an explanation of the text in the sealed envelope;
'they go down into your bones and you can't get them out.'

And Kate's books had gone down into Amos Grimshaw's bones; and thus her
sins and his father's sins lay down in the dust of the felon's grave and
mingled with his own. No exposition of Silas Wright's text could be more
arresting or alarming than that. My sins may overflow from my grave and
lie down in the dust with my children!

VI

And, on the very last page of _The Light in the Clearing_, we have an
even more striking presentment of the same profound truth. For I said
that, in the book, there is yet one other grave. It is a lonely grave up
among the hills--the grave of the stranger who was shot by Amos Grimshaw
that dark night; and this time it is old Kate who sits weeping beside
it. For who was the stranger murdered