like hot,
dammed fires in her withered face. William sprang out of the buggy,
raised his hat and extended his hand.

"My wife and I have come to take dinner with you," he said.

"Not with me! Oh, not with sech as me!" she murmured vaguely. Then,
seeing me descend also, she ran forward to meet me, softly crying.

We stayed to dinner, a poor meal of corn hoecake, fried bacon and
sorghum, spread upon a pine table without a cloth. But of all the food
I ever tasted that seemed to me the most nearly sanctified. It was
with difficulty that we persuaded the lost Mary to sit down and partake
of it with us. She was for standing behind our chairs and serving us.
After that she sat, a tragic figure, through every service at Redwine,
even creeping forward humbly to the communion. She was not received,
however, in any of the homes of the people. She might "go in
peace"--whatever peace her loneliness afforded--that the Scriptures
might be fulfilled, and that was all. They would have none of her.
This was not so bad as it seemed. She was free, indeed. Having no
reputation to win or lose she could set herself to the simple business
of being good, and she did. The time came when the field changed into
a garden and the cabin whitened and reddened beneath a mass of blooms.

But there was one man whom William could never lead when hope fell
forlorn and the way seemed suddenly rough and dark. That was himself.
This is why I cannot get over grieving about him wherever he is.
Nothing that comes to him of light now can lighten those other days far
down the years when he lost his way and had no one to preach to him nor
lead him. For the one tragedy that marked the course of our lives in
the itinerancy was not the poverty and hardships through which we
passed, it was the periodic backsliding of William. This is a pathetic
secret that I never mentioned during his lifetime. I did not even know
for many years that all Methodist preachers who are not hypocrites have
these recurrent down-sittings before the Lord when they become sorry
penguin saints with nerves. It grows out of Nature's protest against
the stretched spiritual perpendicularity with which they live, never
relaxing their prayer tension on Heaven, rarely taking any normal
diversion, losing their life purchase upon the objective through too
much subjective thinking. Ministers of other denominations are
probably not so often the victims of this reaction.

The symptoms