ce, there is a moving Force
which commands events.

I suppose if I were writing a mere story I should tell how Old Toombs
was miraculously softened at the age of sixty-eight years, and came into
new relationships with his neighbours, or else I should relate how the
mills of God, grinding slowly, had crushed the recalcitrant human atom
into dust.

Either of these results conceivably might have happened--all things are
possible--and being ingeniously related would somehow have answered
a need in the human soul that the logic of events be constantly and
conclusively demonstrated in the lives of individual men and women.

But as a matter of fact, neither of these things did happen in this
quiet community of ours. There exists, assuredly, a logic of events, oh,
a terrible, irresistible logic of events, but it is careless of the span
of any one man's life. We would like to have each man enjoy the sweets
of his own virtues and suffer the lash of his own misdeeds--but it
rarely so happens in life. No, it is the community which lives or dies,
is regenerated or marred by the deeds of men.

So Old Toombs continued to live. So he continued to buy more land, raise
more cattle, collect more interest, and the wonderful hedge continued
to flaunt its marvels still more notably upon the country road. To what
end? Who knows? Who knows?

I saw him afterward from time to time, tried to maintain some sort of
friendly relations with him; but it seemed as the years passed that he
grew ever lonelier and more bitter, and not only more friendless, but
seemingly more incapable of friendliness. In times past I have seen
what men call tragedies--I saw once a perfect young man die in his
strength--but it seems to me I never knew anything more tragic than the
life and death of Old Toombs. If it cannot be said of a man when he dies
that either his nation, his state, his neighborhood, his family, or at
least his wife or child, is better for his having lived, what CAN be
said for him?

Old Toombs is dead. Like Jehoram, King of Judah, of whom it is terribly
said in the Book of Chronicles, "he departed without being desired."

Of this story of Nathan Toombs we talked much and long there in the
Ransome home. I was with them, as I said, about two days--kept inside
most of the time by a driving spring rain which filled the valley with
a pale gray mist and turned all the country roads into running streams.
One morning, the weather having cleared, I swu