My father's death, which occurred the March following, came suddenly, wholly fortuitous to the outward eye, and I have heard my mother say, in its inconsequence, its failure to line up with any conceivable moral occasion, did much to shake her faith in a controlling Providence; but affects me still as then, as the most incontrovertible of evidences of Powers moving at large among men, occupied with other affairs than ours. A little while ago, as I sat writing here on my veranda, looking riverward, an ant ran across my paper, which I blew out with my breath into space, and I did not look to see what disaster. It reminded me suddenly of the way I felt about my father's taking off. He was, he must have been, in the way of some god that March morning; that is one of the evidences by which you know that there are gods at all. You play happily about their knees, sometimes they play with you, then you stumble against a foot thrust out, or the clamour of your iniquity disturbs their proper meditations, and suddenly you are silenced. My mother was doubtless right; it would have been better if he had stayed with her and the children, certainly happier, but he got in the way of the Powers. It is curious that until I began just now to reconstruct the circumstances in which the news of his death came to me, I never realized that I might have been looking on, but high above it, at the very instant and occasion, for, from the window of my room in the second story of the Taylorville grammar school I could see the unfinished walls of the Zimmern block aglimmer with the light which the wind heaped up and shattered against their raw pink surfaces, and a loose board of the scaffolding allowed to remain up all winter, flacking like a torn leaf in the mighty current in which the school building, all the buildings, shook with the steady tremor of reeds in a freshet. Between them the tops of the maples, level like a shorn hedge, kept up an immensity of tormented motion that invaded even the schoolroom with a sense of its insupportable fatigues. I remember there were few at their desks that day, and all the discipline relaxed by the confusion of the wind. At the morning recess there had been some debate about dismissing the session, and one of the young teachers on the third floor had grown hysterical and been reprimanded by the principal.