t" at once and
soon learned to perform the usual feminine miracles in the bread-tray
and skillets. Our happiness did not differ from the happiness of other
young married people except that it was abashed morning and evening
with family prayers--occasions when Thomas, the cat, invariably arose
with an air of outraged good-breeding and withdrew to the back yard.
William had long, active, itinerating legs in those days, a slim,
graceful body, a countenance like that of Sir Walter Raleigh and eyes
that must have been like Saint John's. They were blue and had in them
the "far, eternal look." And in the years to come I was to learn how
much the character of the man resembled both that of the cavalier and
the saint. Also, I was to learn that it was no light matter for one's
husband to have descended from an ecclesiastical family that had found
its way up through church history by prayer and fasting.

A Presbyterian may make the most abiding forefather, because his
doctrinal convictions are so strong they prenatally crimp the morals of
those who come after him; and it may be that a Methodist ancestor
counts for less in the third and fourth generation because his theology
is too genially elastic to take a Calvinistic grip upon posterity, but
it is certain that he will impart a wrestling-Jacob disposition to his
descendants which nothing can change. So it was with William; he was
often without "the witness of the Spirit," but I never knew him to let
his angel go. He had a genius for wrestling in prayer as another man
might have for writing great poetry. His words flew together into
coveys when he fell upon his knees, and rose like mourning doves to
Heaven, or they would be like high notes out of a black-Saul mood of
the soul, and then they thundered forth from his lips as if he were
about to storm the gates of Paradise. And sometimes, in the dramatic
intensity of his emotions, he would ask for the most terrifying things.

At first as we knelt together there in the quiet little house with no
one near for help but the hills, I was alarmed less Heaven should take
him at his word, for if half his petitions had been granted we could
not have lived in this world. We should have been scattered like the
fine dust of a too great destiny. But presently, when nothing adequate
to them happened during the night, I learned to have more confidence in
the wisdom of God and less in William's. With him prayer was simply a
spiritual obs