In fifteen years David had come to love Riverbank, even to having a half-quizzical and smilingly philosophical love for the Wiggetts, Grims-bys and others who had once been thorns in his flesh. Their simple closefistedness, generosity based on ambition and transparent, harmless, hypocrisy were, after all, human traits, and while not exactly pleasant neither more nor less than part of the world in which David had his work to do. Wherever one went, or whatever work one undertook, there were Wiggetts and Hardcomes and Grimsbys. They were part of life. They were irritants, but it rested with David whether he should feel their irritation as a scratch or a tickle. Until he was thirty he had often smarted; now he smiled. In the self-centered little town there were good people and bad and, as is the case everywhere, fewer actively vicious than we are pleased to assume. David cherished a philosophy of pity for these. If old Wiggett had so much good in him, and 'Thusia, who was now as faithful a wife and mother as Riverbank could boast, had once been on the verge of being cold-shouldered into a life of triviality, if not of shame, no doubt all these others, if they had been properly guided in the beginning, might have been as normal as old Mrs. Grelling, or the absolutely colorless Mr. Prell. With all this willingness to make allowances for the sinner, David had a hard, uncompromising, Presbyterian hatred for the sin. In one of his sermons he put it thus: “To sin is human; the sin is of the devil.” It was in this spirit David began his long fight against Mac-dougal Graham's personal devil. When David Dean came to Riverbank Mack Graham had been a bright-eyed, saucy, curly-haired little fellow of five or six; a “why!” sort of boy--“Why do you wear a white necktie? Why do you have to stand in the pulpit! Why did Mr. Wiggett get up and go out! Why's that horse standing on three legs!” Certain ladies of the church made a great pet of Mack and helped spoil him, for he was as handsome as he was saucy. An only son, born late in his parents' lives, they prepared the way for his disgrace. It may be well enough, as Emerson advises, to “cast the bantling on the rocks,” but leaving an only son to his own devices on the theory that he is the finest boy in creation and can do no wrong does not work out as well. At nineteen Mack was wild, unruly and drinking himself to ruin.