ole, and either that, or the knock on the
curbstone, had made him take the count. Since Springville wasn't
citified enough to have a hospital or an ambulance, I supposed we would
carry the wounded man to the nearest drug store. But my Good Samaritan
wasn't built that way. Hastily commandeering a passing dray, he made
me help him load the unconscious man into it, and the three of us were
trundled swiftly through a couple of cross streets to a--to a church, I
was going to say, but it was to a small house beside the church.

Here, with the help of the driver, we got the John Barleycorn victim
into the house and spread him out on a clean white bed, muddy boots,
sodden clothes, bloody head and all. I asked if I should go for a
doctor, but the Samaritan shook his head. "No," he said; "you and I
can do all that is necessary." Then he paid the dray driver and we
fell to work.

It was worth something to see that handsome, well-built young
theologue--it didn't seem as if he could have been more than a boy
freshly out of the seminary--strip off his coat and roll up his sleeves
and go to it like a veteran surgeon. In a few minutes, with such help
as I could render, he had the cut cleaned and bandaged, the red face
sponged off, and the worst of the street dirt brushed from the man's
clothing.

"That is about all we can do--until he gets over the double effects of
the hurt and the whiskey," he said, when the job was finished; and
then, with a sort of search-warrant look at me: "Are you very busy?"

I told him I was not.

"All right; you stay here with him and keep an eye on him while I go
and find out who he is and where he belongs." And with that he put on
his coat and left the house.

He was gone for over an hour, and during that time I sat by the bed,
keeping watch over the patient and letting my thoughts wander as they
would. Here was a little exhibition of a spirit which had been
conspicuously absent in my later experiences of the world and its
peopling. Apparently the milk of human kindness had not become
entirely a figure of speech. One man, at least, was trying to live up
to the requirements of a nominally Christian civilization, and if this
bit of rescue work were a fair sample, he was making a success of it.

I took it for granted that he was the minister of the next-door church,
and that the house was its parsonage or rectory. It was a simple
story-and-a-half cottage, plainly furnished but exquisitely n