It was a tropical text and William preached a burning sermon from it. As he grew older the vision of hell seemed to fade and he laid the scenes of his discourses nearer and nearer the fragrant outskirts of Heaven, but he was now in his hardy old age, and occasionally took a severely good man's obtuse pleasure in picturing the penitentiary pangs of sinners. I shall always retain a vivid memory of that service--William standing in the little yellow pine-box pulpit with his long gray beard spread over his breast, and his blue eyes shadowed with his dark thoughts of Dives's torment. I can still see, distinctly enough to count them, the rows of sallow-faced men and women with their hacking concert cough, casting looks of livid venom at Sears sitting by the open window on the front bench, a great red-jowled man who was regarding the figure in the pulpit with such a blaze of fury one might have inferred that he had already swallowed a shovelful of live coals. Nevertheless William went on like an inspired conflagration. There proceeded from his lips a sulphurous smoke of damaging words with Dives's face appearing and reappearing in the haze in a manner that was frightfully realistic. I longed to leap to my feet and exclaim: "William, stop! You are hurting Brother Sears's feelings and appealing to the worst passions in the rest of your congregation!" But it was too late. Suddenly Sears arose and strode out of the house. Five minutes later William closed with a few leaping flame sentences and sat down, so much carried away with the sincerity of his own performance that he had not even noticed Sears's departure. When he discovered the sensation he had created and the enormity of his chief steward's indignation, he was far from repentant. He simply withdrew and devoted an extra hour a day to special prayer for Brother Sears. It was no use to advise him that he might as well cut off the electric current and then try to turn on the light as to pray for a man like Sears. He had a faith in prayer that no mere reasoning could obstruct or circumvent. And the nearer I come to the great answer to all prayers, the more I am convinced that he was right. But in those days I almost suspected William of cheating in the claims he made for the efficacy of prayer. Thus, in the case of Brother Sears, to all appearances it was I who brought about a reconciliation by readjusting one of the little short circuits of his perverse nature. Brothers Sears was a man who loved to excel his fellow-man even in the smallest things. He not only felt a first-place prominence in the little society of the village, he strove to surpass the least person in it if there was any point of competition between them. It would have been a source of mortification to him if the shoemaker had grown a larger turnip than he had grown.