Bowtown was an ugly little streaked mountain village that followed the windings of the country road for half a mile and then gave out. The last house was not a house at all, but an old box car. And this was the home of Sal Prout. But she denied that it was a box car, with a hundred fanciful deceptions. First, it was whitewashed within and without; second, it was covered with house vines; third, the dooryard smiled at you from the face of a thousand flowers, like a Heavenly catechism of color. But go as often as we would we never found Sal at home. She was busy with the wicked. She could do anything from pulling fodder to nursing a teething baby, and all you had to do to get her was to need her. This was how we came to meet her at last. William's health was failing fast now, and he got down with sciatica that spring. He had been in bed a month; the people on the circuit began to show they were disappointed in not having an active man who could fill his appointments, and I was tired and discouraged with being up so much at night and with anxiety for fear William would have to give up his work. A preacher in our church cannot get even the little it affords from the superannuate fund until he has been on the superannuate list a year; and if he gives up his work in the middle of the previous year that means he must go, say, eighteen months without resources. That is a long time when you have not been able to save anything, and when you are old and sick. So, I was sitting in the kitchen door of the parsonage one morning after William had had a particularly bad night, wondering what God was going to do about it, for I knew we could not expect help from any other source. The agnostics may say what they please, but if you get cornered between old age and starvation you will find out that there is a real sure-enough good God who numbers the remaining hairs of your head and counts the sparrows fall. William and I tried Him, and we know. There were terrible times toward the last, when we never could have made it if it had not been for just God. And I reckon that morning was one of the times, for as I was sitting there wondering sadly what would happen next, an immense woman came around the corner of the house and stood before me on the doorstep. She was past fifty years of age, and had the appearance of a dismantled woman. Nothing of youth or loveliness remained. I have never seen a face so wrecked with wrinkles, so marred with frightful histories--yet there was a kind of fairness over all her ruins. "I am Sal Prout," she said, and it was so deep and rich a voice that it was as if one of the bare brown hills of the earth had spoken to me. "And I've come to git breakfast," she added, spreading peace over her dreadful face with an ineffable smile. An hour later she was in possession of William and me and the parsonage. She was clearing up the breakfast things when she said: