best to think of him in
relation to the bare and awful sorrows that show so nakedly in the
lives of poor, simple folk. I can see him now in the dismal twilight
of one winter evening, as he started on that strange mission to Mrs.
Martin, looking like an old, weatherbeaten angel breasting a storm.
The wide brim of his black hat flared up from his face in the wind, his
long, gray beard was blown over the shoulders of his greatcoat. He had
started without his muffler. I ran out to fetch it and, winding it
about his neck, I saw the blue bloom of Heaven in his eyes, that always
turned young when he was on his way to roll the stones away from the
door of some sinner's heart.

"William," I cried, "it's going to be an awful night; don't go--she is
not a member of your church."

[Illustration: "It's Going To Be an Awful Night; Don't Go--She Is Not a
Member of Your Church."]

"Nor of any other; but she is all the more in need of help," he
replied, putting his foot in the stirrup to mount his horse.

Mrs. Martin was a vague little woman, superstitious about dreams, a
widow, who lived with her two small children in a thickly-populated
neighborhood about a stone quarry. The day before, the community had
been shocked to learn from some one who happened in just in time to
prevent the tragedy that Mrs. Martin had gone suddenly insane and had
tried to murder both of her children. She must go to the asylum, of
course; but pending the preliminary trial for lunacy she lay silent on
her bed with staring, horrified eyes, surrounded by watchful neighbors.
Suddenly toward night she had grown restless and had implored them to
send for the Methodist preacher. To quiet her the messenger had come,
and William made haste to go to her.

He found her sitting the very figure of desolation in the midst of her
bed, with her face thinned and whitened to the little white hull of a
prayer. The moment she was alone with him she poured forth such a tale
of degradation as rarely passes the lips of a woman. Since a year
after her husband's death she had been the mistress of the manager of
the quarry. She had lived in the most atrocious debauchery for years;
no one had suspected, and she had not suffered a qualm. But two nights
since she had gone to the bed where her two little girls lay asleep,
and suddenly it had come upon her that she was to be discovered, now
very soon, not by strangers, but by her own children growing old enough
to observe