My father probably shared the narrow-mindedness of his particular pedigree, but he certainly hewed to the line like a prophet of old. His crop of young converts came usually in winter; but the snow and ice had no deterring chill for him. He never thought of postponing the baptismal rite till summer. He had a large hole cut through in the little river near by, for water helped mightily in his system of doctrine. He didn’t spare me either. At eleven years of age, he led me, as he did my country playmates, out of the sleigh, down the snowbank, into this ice-water. There was no softening of the ideals of life in that parish, I can tell you. And the God of Daniel was known and acknowledged there in fear and trembling. When, in after years it fell to my fortune to live on the Skims and to woo sleep with logging, stumping, and “scratching” the land, I saw what a real Sunday-school would do even in a submarginal community for the children of the pine cut-over. There was the farmer widow woman with the man’s hands. What would have been her chances of rearing her seven children to usefulness and self-respect without that weekly community-school under good leadership? I hear again her breezy, cheery call to her brood as she drives up to the little church. “Pile out.” “Pile in,” when Sunday-school is over. A slap of the lines, and a piece of rural America goes back to its cabin, minds sprayed with race lore. A mighty wholesome sight in a community of tools with broken handles, of harnesses toggled with hay-wire, of fortunes “busted”, of the blind, and of those who could not sleep. There was the old retired farmer, Scotch McDugle, too, eighty years old. He would come over from next door of an evening and swap Skims stories for a cheery welcome and a listening ear. It would be midwinter. The sheet-iron stove showed red. “Come in, Mr. McDugle,” my wife would say. “Take off your hat and mittens.” “Oh, no, no,” he would reply, “just stepped in to say ‘howdy.’ Can’t stay a minute.” Then McDugle would settle down for the evening close to the red-hot stove, mittens drawn tight, Scotch cap pulled close down over his ears. As he got limbered in memory, he would go through a set of queer antics with his lips and tongue--little dry, staccato sputters. He reminded me in this of a courtly neurasthene I once met who said, as he went through similar tongue motions, “I beg your pardon, but I have a hair on the tip of my tongue which I seem never able to get off.” Farmer McDugle’s favorite theme was the making of great American men out of “hard knocks” and “a good pinch of God.” He reveled in Lincoln, whom he had known; and he never got tired of weaving the people he knew in with the race-heroes of all time. As I think of McDugle and his ilk in these later days, I can not help suspecting that bleak little Scotland and God in the life, despite the stain of the “wee drap o’rye,” account for many of America’s man-making rural communities.