Down at the bottom of his heart John Dent was a little sentimental. His father and mother had come to the small farm before him. They were dead now, as well as certain sisters and brothers, and they were buried in a little private graveyard on the farm, around which the beeches grew thickly and from which the ground sloped gently into a laughing creek. There was not much surplus left at the end of each year of the product of John Dent's farming, and the surplus had more channels for immediate and demanding distribution than it could supply, still John Dent thought that some day he would put up a neat little brick monument in that graveyard--a somewhat unusual form of monument--but that was Dent's idea. He was going to have a pyramidical thing about fifty feet high. The spire of the church at Maxonville was of brick, hollow of course, welded solidly in its weather-hardened cement, as if it were a monolith of stone. The cyclone had passed. A preacher had gone down a lane thinking the thoughts which come to a clean Christian man in a surprising and dispiriting emergency. A fair young woman had gone home crying over what was where her heart was, and Mr. John Dent had seen a cyclone come and miss his place by about forty rods, and had also seen an out-flinging and eccentric wing of that same cyclone deposit, just in the proper place in the burying-ground of his family, a perfect pyramid monument, such as he had been dreaming of for the last quarter of a century. It was all queer and out of the common, and was hard to explain; it is not attempted here, for this is only the story of what happened within an hour or two on a certain afternoon in Iowa. This is going back to the preacher. He walked fast and he walked far, and found himself deep in the country. He was at least honest in all he thought; he was a good man, yet he was troubled to the depths of his being. "I have prayed to God," he said to himself, "and He has refused me. The cyclone didn't turn away from the church! Is the woman I love right, and am I wrong? Is there a broader and greater scheme of being wherein I should be a trusting and unquestioning instrument rather than one who demands as a special suppliant? I will see Jane," he said in his great strait. "I feel that she may aid me."