-room.' Heavens to
Betsy! 'Peculiar style of beauty!' Oh, joy! 'Looked like a wood-nymph in
the morn.' Wouldn't that saturate you! 'The Apollo-like beauty of the
groom.'" Miss Larrabee groaned as she rose, and putting her raincoat on
the floor by her chair she exclaimed: "Do you people know what I am
going to do? I have got to lie right down here and have a fit!"

VII

"By the Rod of His Wrath"

Saturday afternoons, when the town is full, and farmers are coming in to
the office to pay their subscriptions for the _Weekly_, it is our habit,
after the paper is out, to sit in the office and look over Main Street,
where perhaps five hundred people are milling, and consider with one
another the nature of our particular little can of angle-worms and its
relation to the great forces that move the world. The town often seems
to us to be dismembered from the earth, and to be a chunk of humanity
drifting through space by itself, like a vagrant star, forgotten of the
law that governs the universe. Go where our people will, they find
change; but when they come home, they look out of the hack as they ride
through town, seeing the old familiar buildings and bill-boards and
street-signs, and say with surprise, as Mathew Boris said after a busy
and eventful day in Kansas City, where he had been marketing his
steers: "Well, the old town seems to keep right on, just the same."

The old men in town seem always to have been old, and though the
middle-aged do sometimes step across the old-age line, the young men
remain perennially young, and when they grow fat or dry up, and their
hair thins and whitens, they are still called by their diminutive names,
and to most of us they are known as sons of the old men. Here a new
house goes up, and there a new store is built, but they rise slowly, and
everyone in town has time to go through them and over them and criticise
the architectural taste of the builders, so that by the time a building
is finished it seems to have grown into the original consciousness of
the people, and to be a part of their earliest memories. We send our
children to Sunday-school, and we go to church and learn how God's
rewards or punishments fell upon the men of old, as they were faithful
or recreant; but we don't seem to be like the men of old, for we are
neither very good nor very bad--hardly worth God's while to sort us over
for any uncommon lot. Only once, in the case of John Markley, did the
Lord reach into o