“Bosh! All bosh! The country church will always be of little account. It gets culls for ministers--it always has; it always will. Just as I left the farm for the city to improve my lot, so every country minister who can will leave the country parish for the city parish to improve his lot.” That I suffered a shock as if by lightning may easily be imagined. The steel-blue tone of this man did something to my heart; did something to my faith in human nature hard to define. This captain of industry--and I suspect that this is what did the damage--never seemed to question the legitimacy of the preacher’s flight. Representing, as he did, the leading laymen of his denomination, quietly accepting the exodus of country preachers as perfectly normal--because running true to the economics of good business instinct--he appalled me with his cynicism. And it took me many a month, I confess, to get back my belief in humankind. But it came back, and came back strong in the following manner: _Around the Glover’s Cot_ By accident, one summer, I made a find; in one of the 30,000 pastorless parishes, a man lying prone on a cot; the cot standing on a stone-boat; the stone-boat lying close to a deep pool in the bend of a little river, in the shade of a great elm-tree; the man all alone, flat on his back, silently whipping the trout-pool with his fly. I came to believe in this helpless fisherman, and again all things good and beautiful seemed possible. I got the story from his sister, but can give only hints of it here. As a boy on the farm he had made up his mind to get an education. At sixteen he was looking forward impatiently to beginning his courses of study, when one day in the woods a tree which the men folks were cutting down fell on him and broke his back. He never walked again, nor, in fact, ever again sat up. Doomed to lie on his back, all his hopes blighted, he asked for something to do with his hands. They gave him needle and thread, shears and a piece of buckskin. He made a pair of clumsy buckskin gloves. He made a less clumsy pair. He made pair after pair, better and still better. Then dozens of pairs, until his skill built up a small business. But his ambition mounted with success, and he asked whether he couldn’t study something. “Can’t I study law?” he pleaded.