The postmaster looked infinitely more important all in a second. It is but seldom in this world that a man can tell a bit of news to an assembled crowd; and in an inland town, before the day of the omnipresent telegraph pole, the chances were proportionately fewer than elsewhere. The postmaster had a generous heart, however, and at the risk of losing his importance he opened his treasure-house all at once: “He’s been pretty high on whiskey for two or three days,” said he, “and they say he’s got snakes in his boots now; anyhow, he’s made a sudden break for Louisville; he started on foot, an hour or two ago, for Brown’s Landing, seven miles below here, to catch a down-river steamboat; he was clear-headed enough to find out first that it wasn’t likely that the _Excellence_, that’s about due, wouldn’t have any freight to stop for here. His wife’s half wild about it, but there’s nothing the poor thing can do.” “Poor, misguided man!” sighed Parson Wedgewell, who had arrived just in time to hear the story. “The ways of Providence are undoubtedly wise, but they are indeed mysterious. Judging according to our finite capacities, it would be natural to suppose that capabilities so unusual as those of Mr. Wainright would be divinely guided.” “I saw him coming down the walk,” observed Squire Tomple, “and I thought he looked rather peculiar, so I just stepped across the street; I don’t like to get into a row with men in that fix.” “Of course getting into a row was the only thing that could be done,” said Crupp, who had apparently been carefully reading a posted notice of a sheriff’s sale. The Squire did not enjoy the tone in which Crupp’s remark was delivered; but before he could reason with the new reformer, the Reverend Timotheus Brown dashed into the fray in defense of a beloved idea, which the rival pastor had seemed covertly to assail. “The reason such natures aren’t divinely guided,” said he, in a voice which suggested nutmeg-graters to the acute sensibilities of Parson Wedgewell, “is that they don’t implicitly submit themselves to the Divine will.” “A man can do nothing unless the Spirit draw him,” said Parson Wedgewell valiantly. “That’s rather hard on a fellow, though, isn’t it?” soliloquized Fred Macdonald. “Not a bit of it,” spoke out Father Baguss, who had been scenting the battle from an inner room. “Bless the Lord! the parables of the lost sheep that the shepherd left the rest of the flock to look for, and the lost coin that the woman hunted for, wasn’t told for nothin’. The Lord knows how to ’tend to his own business.” “And nobody else can do a thing to help the Lord along, can he?” said Crupp, passing his arm through the postmaster’s window, and extracting from his box a copy of the Louisville _Journal_ (then the only paper of prominence in a large section of Western country); “all that men have to do in such cases is just to talk.”