The Rev. Hyler, minister, farmer, father of seven sons, was himself a seventh son, and had he been examined at his birth with that closeness of scrutiny given to first-born babies, I’m positive the word “failure” could have been found plainly stamped upon his small person. He was a tall, gray, narrow man, and seemed always to have a bitter taste in his mouth. Black-coated, white-tied and pale, he seemed to have been pressed between the leaves of some old volume of sermons and left there till all the color and sap had dried out of him as it might dry out of a pressed violet or pansy. Perpetual ill-humor had stamped to the very bone the three-lined frown he wore between his eyebrows. He was an educated man and full of information--that was of no use to him. He could give statistics as to the number of the inhabitants of Palestine, but he could not tell whether an unsatisfactory field required topdressing or under-draining. He had been an instructor, a teacher; had, in fact, been at the head of one of the State colleges, but failed and came back, much embittered, to the small church he had left with such high hopes; but finding he had provided himself with more mouths than his salary could well fill he had taken to farming, at which he seemed to be the greatest failure of all. Narrow and cold by nature, soured by disappointment, he loved but one person on earth, and that person was his first-born child, his only daughter, Linda. He admired her, he was proud of her, he loved her, truly and tenderly, beyond a doubt; but, alas, as surely beyond a doubt, his was a jealous and a selfish love, and she, with eyes whose power and penetration fully equalled their rare beauty of coloring, read him through and through, as she might have read a book! Saw the dry, gray man’s weakness of resolve, his bitter temper, his small tyrannies, and worse--far worse, because that was a most repellant sin--his hypocrisy; saw all these things and with no touch of sympathy for any one of them, but, with what seemed almost divine compassion, she gave him reverent service and such tender, loyal love as many a better father fails all his life to win.