find the thing that they kept for a soul.

But Jack Stark, our Redwine annual, was too much the other way. His
soul was not enough inside of him. It was the wind in his boughs that
blows where it listeth. Periodically, he went on a "spree"; it was his
effort to raise himself to the tenth power, because he had an instinct
for raising himself one way and another. If, at the end of a week, he
did not appear at the parsonage door, sober, dejected and in a proper
mood for repentance, William went after him, plucked him up from
somewhere out of the depths and proceeded at once to transplant him
again in the right garden.

In all the years of his ministry I never knew him to lose hope in his
annuals. He was always expecting them to become evergreens of glory.
In dealing with them he had a patience a little like the patience of
God, never reproaching them or threatening them with the time limits of
salvation in this world; no man ever had a sublimer skill in dealing
with the barren fig-tree elements in human nature.

Years after this time John Stark became Congressman from his district.
And William died in the belief that he also became a "total abstainer."
He probably was at the moment he told him so, but having studied the
nature of spiritual annuals I may be pardoned my doubts. However, he
will have his nursery place in Heaven, if for no other purpose than to
furnish congenial employment to saints like William.

I have often wondered what would have happened if the prodigal son had
been a daughter. Would the father have hurried out to meet her, put a
ring on her finger and killed the fatted calf? I doubt it. I doubt if
she would ever have come home at all, and if she had come the best he
could have done would have been to say: "Go, and sin no more."

But "go," you understand. And all over the world you can see them,
these frailer prodigals, hurrying away to the lost places.

In a rotting cabin, in an old field five miles from Redwine, lived one
of them. Once a week she walked fourteen miles to the nearest large
town to get plain sewing, and with this she supported herself and
child. The field was her desert. For eight years no respectable woman
had crossed it or spoken to her till the day William and I and the
red-headed horse arrived at her door. She stood framed in it, a gaunt
figure hardened and browned and roughened out of all resemblance to the
softness of her sex; her clothes were rags, and her eyes