What there was between Cousin Judd and me, with due allowance for the years, was the spark, the touch-and-go of vitality that rose in me to a hundred beckonings of running flood and waving boughs--music and movement; and only the moral enthusiasms of war and religion raised through his heavy farmer stuff. We should have loved one another had we known how; as it was, all our intercourse was marked on his part by the gracelessness of rusticity, and by the impertinence of adolescence on mine. I used regularly to receive his pious admonitions with what, for a Taylorville child, was flippancy; nevertheless there were occasions when we had set off of summer Sunday mornings together to early class, when the church was cool and dim and the smell of the honey locusts came in through the window, that I caught the thrill that ran from the pounding of his fist where he prayed at the other end of the long bench; and there was a kind of blessedness shed from him as with closed eyes and lifted chin he swung from peak to peak of the splendid measure of "How Firm a Foundation," that I garnered up and hugged to myself in place of Art and the Joy of Living. All of which was very good for me and might have answered if it had not come into Cousin Judd's head that he ought to overlook my reading. By this time I had worked through all my father's books and was ready to satisfy the itch of imagination even with the vicious inaccuracies of what was called Christian literature. The trouble all came of course of my not understanding the nature of a lie. Not that I couldn't tell a downright fib if I had to, or haven't on occasion, but a lie is to me just as silly a performance when it is about marriage or work as about the law of gravitation, and when it is presented to me in the form of human behaviour it makes me sick, like the smell of tuberoses in a close room; and I failed utterly to realize then that there are a great many people capable of living sincerely and at the same time blandly misrepresenting the facts of life in the interests of what is called morality. I do not think it probable that Cousin Judd accepted for himself the rule of behaviour prescribed by the books he recommended--I shall not tell you what they were, but if there are any Sunday-school libraries in Ohianna you will find them on the shelves--but I know that he and my mother esteemed them excellent for the young.