SHERWOOD ANDERSON He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long before the time during which we will know him he was a doctor, and drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg, Ohio. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left a large fertile farm when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she died. The knuckles of the doctor’s hands were extraordinarily large. When the hands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob pipe, and after his wife’s death sat all day in his empty office close by a window that was covered with cobwebs. He never opened the window. Once, on a hot day in August, he tried but found it stuck fast, and after that he forgot all about it. Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the seeds of something. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner block, above the Paris Dry Goods Company’s store, he worked ceaselessly, building up something that he himself destroyed. Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids. Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten years. It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at the knees and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls and when the pockets were filled with these he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he had but one friend, another old man named John Spaniard, who owned a tree nursery. Sometimes in a playful mood old Doctor Reefy took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nurseryman. “That is to confound you, you blithering old sentimentalist,” he cried, shaking with laughter.