rsing a teething baby, and all you had to do to get
her was to need her.

This was how we came to meet her at last. William's health was failing
fast now, and he got down with sciatica that spring. He had been in
bed a month; the people on the circuit began to show they were
disappointed in not having an active man who could fill his
appointments, and I was tired and discouraged with being up so much at
night and with anxiety for fear William would have to give up his work.

A preacher in our church cannot get even the little it affords from the
superannuate fund until he has been on the superannuate list a year;
and if he gives up his work in the middle of the previous year that
means he must go, say, eighteen months without resources. That is a
long time when you have not been able to save anything, and when you
are old and sick. So, I was sitting in the kitchen door of the
parsonage one morning after William had had a particularly bad night,
wondering what God was going to do about it, for I knew we could not
expect help from any other source. The agnostics may say what they
please, but if you get cornered between old age and starvation you will
find out that there is a real sure-enough good God who numbers the
remaining hairs of your head and counts the sparrows fall. William and
I tried Him, and we know. There were terrible times toward the last,
when we never could have made it if it had not been for just God.

And I reckon that morning was one of the times, for as I was sitting
there wondering sadly what would happen next, an immense woman came
around the corner of the house and stood before me on the doorstep.
She was past fifty years of age, and had the appearance of a dismantled
woman. Nothing of youth or loveliness remained. I have never seen a
face so wrecked with wrinkles, so marred with frightful histories--yet
there was a kind of fairness over all her ruins.

"I am Sal Prout," she said, and it was so deep and rich a voice that it
was as if one of the bare brown hills of the earth had spoken to me.

"And I've come to git breakfast," she added, spreading peace over her
dreadful face with an ineffable smile. An hour later she was in
possession of William and me and the parsonage. She was clearing up
the breakfast things when she said:

"You looked fagged; go and git some rest. I'll take care of him,"
nodding her head toward the door of William's room.

When I awakened in the middle of the