ession based upon a profound sense of mortal weakness and
very mystifying to his young wife, who had cheerfully said her orisons
from a book night and morning with an easy Canterbury conscience.

The Saturday after our marriage I accompanied him to Redwine, his
regular appointment. It was the custom then to have preaching Saturday
and Sunday. The church was withdrawn from the road into a dim forest
of pines, black and mournful. Here and there, horses and mules bearing
saddles or dangling harness stood slipshod in the shade, switching
their tails at innumerable flies. Near the door was the group of men
one always sees about a country church on meeting days. They are
farmers who have an instinct for the out-of-doors and who, for this
reason, will not go in till the last moment. Beyond the church, in the
thicker shadows, lay its dead beneath a colony of staggering gray
stones. Upon one grave, I remember, where the clay was freshly turned,
there was a bouquet of flowers--love's protest against the sonorous
sentence--"earth to earth and dust to dust"--which the other graves
confirmed. The pine needles lay thick above them, and not a flower
distinguished them from the common sod. They had the look of deeper
peace, the long, untroubled peace of sleepers who have passed out of
the memory of living, worrying men. These churchyards for the dead
were characteristic features in country circuits, and I mention this
one because ever after it seemed to me to be just inside the gateway of
the Methodist itinerancy, and because, in the end, it came to be the
home place of my heart.

I had never before been in a Methodist church. A certain Episcopalian
conceit prevented my straying into the one at Edenton. And I was
shocked now at the Old Testament severity of this one. There was no
compromise with human desires in it, not a touch of color except the
brown that time gives unpainted wood, not an effort anywhere to appeal
to the imagination or suggest holy imagery. Only the semicircular
altar rail about the narrow box pulpit suggested human frailty, prayer
and repentance. On the men's side--for the law of sex was observed to
the point of segregation in all our churches--there was a sprinkling of
men with red, strong, craggy faces who appeared to have the Adam clod
highly developed in them, a world-muteness in expression that seemed to
set them back in the garden and to hide them from God on account of
their sins. On the oth