How many people came up along the hillside road to sit and talk with Alonzo Berners! Were they sorry for him? At first I thought they were and then I saw they came to receive rather than to give. It was Alonzo who did the giving to all. What did he give? Among those I saw at the house was a local judge, son of that judge with whom his father had lived when he was a boy, a man named Marvin Manno, who lived in Chicago but who often came to the town and spent two or three days for the sake of talking with the invalid and who paid him a visit during my time there, two or three doctors who came, not in a professional way but for something unprofessional they wanted, a cripple of the town who made his living by taking people’s photographs, a man who bought and sold horses, and a tall silent boy who wore glasses and who had large protruding teeth so that he looked something like a horse when on rare occasions he smiled. Life in the Berners household--in reality presided over by the sick man, in a queer way absolutely controlled by him--was a revelation to me. Like that Judge Turner I had known a few years before, and for that matter like myself too, the man had read a great many books and was still constantly reading--he spent more than half his time with a book in his hands and told me once that but for books he thought he should have gone mad from the gnawing pains that were always eating at him--but in the single fact that we were all readers the similarity between Judge Turner, Alonzo and myself ceased. In this new man whose path I had unexpectedly crossed was a quiet kind of sanity unknown in any other I had seen. He was a giver. What did he give? The question amazed and startled me. He was loved by all who knew him and during the week I spent in his house, seeing him with other men and riding with him about town and out into the country, I was startled by the feeling of love and well-being that came into the eyes of people when he appeared among them. My own mind, always given to asking questions, unable to take anything for granted, raced like the stallion Peter Point carrying old Jim Berners to one of his victories. Was there a kind of power in pain to remake a man? My own conception of life was profoundly disturbed. The man before me had spent his entire life sitting in the dark house of pain. He sat there now looking out through the windows and into other houses that were alive and cheerful with health. Why had he health and sanity within himself while, almost without exception, the others including myself had not?