And all the time there was something in Tom’s mind. Well he had seen a thing. One day when he was walking alone through a strip of wood, coming back barefooted from town to the farm he had seen—he never told anyone what he had seen. The minister was in the wood, sitting alone on a log. There was something. Some rather nice sense of life in Tom was deeply offended. He had crept away unseen. And now he was lying on the bed in the half darkness upstairs in his father’s house, shaken with a chill, and downstairs his father was praying and there was one sentence always creeping into his prayers. “Give me the gift, O God, give me the great gift.” Tom thought he knew what that meant—“the gift of the gab and the opportunity to exercise it, eh?” There was a door at the foot of Tom’s bed and beyond the door another room, at the front of the house upstairs. His father slept in there with the new woman he had married and the three children slept in a small room beside it. The baby slept with the man and woman. It was odd what terrible thoughts sometimes came into one’s head. The baby wasn’t very well and was always whining and crying. Chances were it would grow up to be a yellow-skinned thing, with dull eyes, like the mother. Suppose ... well suppose ... some night ... one did not voluntarily have such thoughts—suppose either the man or woman might, quite accidentally, roll over on the baby and crush it, smother it, rather. Tom’s mind slipped a little out of his grasp. He was trying to hold on to something—what was it? Was it his own life? That was an odd thought. Now his father had stopped praying and downstairs the family were eating the evening meal. There was silence in the house. People, even dirty half-ill children, grew silent when they ate. That was a good thing. It was good to be silent sometimes. And now Tom was in the wood, going barefooted through the wood and there was that man, the minister, sitting alone there on the log. Tom’s father wanted to be a minister, wanted God to arbitrarily make him a minister, wanted God to break the rules, bust up the regular order of things just to make him a minister. And he a man who could barely make a living on the farm, who did everything in a half slipshod way, who, when he felt he had to have a second wife, had gone off and got one with four sickly kids, one who couldn’t cook, who did the work of his house in a slovenly way. Tom slipped off into unconsciousness and lay still for a long time. Perhaps he slept. When he awoke—or came back into consciousness—there was his father’s voice still praying and Tom had thought the grace-saying was over. He lay still, listening. The voice was loud and insistent and now seemed near at hand. All of the rest of the house was silent. None of the children were crying.