What I have suffered morally from them cannot be put into words. Within a week of our arrival on a new work one of them would be sure to call. There was Sister Weekly, for example, on the Gourdville Circuit, and the parsonage here was in the little village of Gourdville. William was out making his first pastoral visits when there came a gentle knock at the door. I untied my kitchen apron, smoothed my hair, sighed--for I knew from past experience it would be the church's arch gossip--and opened the door. A round old lady tied up in a sanctified black widow's bonnet stood on the step. "I am Mrs. Weekly," she explained, "and I reckon you are Sister Thompson, the new preacher's wife. Both my sons are stewards. And I thought I'd come over and get acquainted and give you a few p'inters. It's so hard for a stranger in a strange place to know which is which." "I am glad to see you. Won't you come in?" I said pleasantly. She settled herself in the rocker before the fire in our "front room," looked down at the rug and exclaimed: "My! ain't this rug greasy! Our last pastor's wife was a dreadful careless housekeeper." She had a white, seamless face, sad, prayerful blue eyes too large for the sockets, a little piquant nose that she had somehow managed to bring along with her unchanged from a frivolous girlhood, and a quaint old hymnal mouth. Looking up from the rug she took on an expression of pure and undefiled piety and began in the strident, cackling tones of an egg-laying hen: "Your husband's goin' to have an awful hard time here, Sister Thompson. The church is split wide open about the organ. Old man Walker wants it on the right-hand side of the pulpit, and my sons have put it on the left-hand side, where the light is good and the choir can see the music better. It ain't decent, the way Walker makes himself prominent in the church, nohow. They say he killed a man in Virginia before he came here. I might as well tell you, for you are bound to hear it anyhow. My sons say they are going to pull out and go to the Presbyterian church if Walker don't quit carryin' on so about the organ. Their father was Presbyterian, and I wouldn't be surprised if it cropped out in them. But it'll be bad for our church if they do. They pay half of the preacher's salary, and Walker scarcely pays at all. Seems to me he ought to keep his mouth shut. And Richard Brown has took the homestead law to keep from paying his debts. Now maybe he'll drop behind in his subscription, too. He was a right smart help in the church, though I never thought much of him morally. They say he drinks and cusses both when he goes off to Augusta. And it's a plumb shame that his wife's president of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society. She's all right now, I reckon, but folks 'talked' about her when she was a girl." She paused to get her second wind, folded her hands as if in prayer, turned her divine old eyes up to the ceiling and continued: