And he couldn't pack up his goods and move away from that place. For he had come there to live with a married daughter and his son-in-law, and if he left there he would have to get a steady job working at somethin' and support himself. And Bud didn't want to risk that. For that wild run he made the time he saved the country left him strained clean down to the innards of his constitution, he says, and he wa'n't fit to work. But the thing that put the finishing touches on to him was when a single daughter that he had fell into love with Zeke Humphreys, who was a widower, and married herself to him. His own flesh and blood has disowned him, Bud says. So he turns sad, and he was the saddest man 1 ever seen. He was sadder than you look to be, stranger. The stranger with the educated skin breathed a gentle sigh at the conclusion of Hennery's tale of the Deciding Vote and the Centre of Population, and then he said: “I don't doubt Bud Peevy was a sad man. But there's sadder things than what happened to Bud Peevy. There's things that touches the heart closer.” “Stranger,” said Ben Grevis, “you've said it! But Hennery, here, don't know anything about the heart bein' touched.” Hennery McNabb seemed to enjoy the implication, rather than to resent it. Ben Grevis continued: “A sadder thing than what happened to Bud Peevy is goin' on a good deal nearer home than Indianny. “I ain't the kind of a feller that goes running to Indianny and to Kentucky and all over the known earth for examples of sadness, nor nothin' else. We got as good a country right here in Illinois as there is on top of the earth and I'm one that always sticks up for home folks and home industries. Hennery, here, ain't got any patriotism. And he ain't got any judgment. He don't know what's in front of him. But right here in our home county, not five miles from where we are, sets a case of sadness that is one of the saddest I ever seen or knowed about. “Hennery, here, he don't know how sad it is, for he's got no finer feelin's. A free thinker like Hennery can't be expected to have no finer feelin's. And this case is a case of a woman.” “A woman!” sighed the stranger. “If a woman is mixed up with it, it could have finer feelin's and sadness in it!” And a ripple of melancholy ran over him from head to foot. This here woman (said Ben Grevis) lives over to Hickory Grove, in the woods, and everybody for miles around calls her Widder Watson. Widder Watson, she has buried four or five husbands, and you can see her any day that it ain't rainin' settin' in the door of her little house, smokin' of her corn-cob pipe, and lookin' at their graves and speculatin' and wonderin'. I talked with her a good deal from time to time durin' the last three or four years, and the things she is speculatin' on is life and death, and them husbands she has buried, and children. But that ain't what makes her so sad. It's wishin' for somethin' that, it seems like, never can be, that is makin' her so sad.