When the two men came into the house the children, from having been fussing at their mother because the meal was delayed, grew silent. With the quick intuition of children they sensed something wrong between father and son. Tom walked directly across the small dining room and opening a door entered a stairway that led up to his bedroom. “Ain’t you going to eat any supper?” his father asked. It was the first word that had passed between father and son for hours. “No,” Tom answered and went up the stairs. At the moment his mind was concentrated on the problem of not letting anyone in the house know he was ill and the father let him go without protest. No doubt the whole family were glad enough to have him out of the way. He went upstairs and into his own room and got into bed without taking off his clothes, just pulled off the torn shoes and crawling in pulled the covers up over himself. There was an old quilt, not very clean. His brain cleared a little and as the house was small he could hear everything going on down stairs. Now the family were all seated at the table and his father was doing a thing called “saying grace.” He always did that and sometimes, while the others waited, he prayed intermittently. Tom was thinking, trying to think. What was it all about, his father’s praying that way? When he got at it the man seemed to forget everyone else in the world. There he was, alone with God, facing God alone and the people about him seemed to have no existence. He prayed a little about food, and then went on to speak with God, in a strange confidential way, about other things, his own frustrated desires mostly. All his life he had wanted to be a Methodist minister but could not be ordained because he was uneducated, had never been to the schools or colleges. There was no chance at all for his becoming just the thing he wanted to be and still he went on and on praying about it, and in a way seemed to think there might be a possibility that God, feeling strongly the need of more Methodist ministers, would suddenly come down out of the sky, off the judgment seat as it were, and would go to the administrating board, or whatever one might call it, of the Methodist Church and say, “Here you, what are you up to? Make this man a Methodist minister and be quick about it. I don’t want any fooling around.” Tom lay on the bed upstairs listening to his father praying down below. When he was a lad and his own mother was alive he had always been compelled to go with his father to the church on Sundays and to the prayer meetings on Wednesday evenings. His father always prayed, delivered sermons to the other sad-faced men and women sitting about, under the guise of prayers, and the son sat listening and no doubt it was then, in childhood, his hatred of his father was born. The man who was then the minister of the little country church, a tall, raw-boned young man, who was as yet unmarried, sometimes spoke of Tom’s father as one powerful in prayer.