The old men in town seem always to have been old, and though the middle-aged do sometimes step across the old-age line, the young men remain perennially young, and when they grow fat or dry up, and their hair thins and whitens, they are still called by their diminutive names, and to most of us they are known as sons of the old men. Here a new house goes up, and there a new store is built, but they rise slowly, and everyone in town has time to go through them and over them and criticise the architectural taste of the builders, so that by the time a building is finished it seems to have grown into the original consciousness of the people, and to be a part of their earliest memories. We send our children to Sunday-school, and we go to church and learn how God's rewards or punishments fell upon the men of old, as they were faithful or recreant; but we don't seem to be like the men of old, for we are neither very good nor very bad--hardly worth God's while to sort us over for any uncommon lot. Only once, in the case of John Markley, did the Lord reach into our town and show His righteous judgment. And that judgment was shown so clearly through the hearts of our people that very likely John Markley does not consider it the judgment of God at all, but the prejudice of the neighbours. When we have been talking over the case of John Markley in the office we have generally ended by wondering whether God--or whatever one cares to call the force that operates the moral laws, as well as those that in our ignorance we set apart as the physical laws of the world--whether God moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing or chastisement, through human nature as it is, in the ordinary business of the lives of men. But we have never settled that in our office any more than they have in the great schools, and as John Markley, game to the end, has never said what he thought of the town's treatment of him, it will never be known which side of our controversy is right.