I told her I wasn't. That there eighty acres is good land, and they ain't no mortgages on it, nor nothin', but the thought of bein' added to that collection in amongst the hazel brush and hickory sprouts is enough for to hold a man back. And the Widder Watson, she don't seem to realize she orter fix herself up a little mite. But I'm sorry for her, jist the same. There she sets and mourns, sayin' that name over and over to herself, and a-grievin' and a-hopin', and all the time she knows it ain't much use to hope. And a sadder sight than you will see over there to Hickory Grove ain't to be found in the whole of the State of Illinois. “That is a mighty sad picture you have drawed,” said the stranger, when Ben Grevis had finished, “but I'm a sadder man for a man than that there woman is for a woman.” He wrinkled all over, he almost grinned, if one could think of him as grinning, when he mentioned “that there woman.” It was as if he tasted some ulterior jest, and found it bitter, in connection with “that there woman.” After a pause, in which he sighed several times, he remarked in his tired and gentle voice: “There's two kinds of sadness, gentlemen. There is the melancholy sadness that has been with you for so long that you have got used to it and kind o' enjoy it in a way. And then there's the kind o' sadness where you go back on yourself, where you make your own mistakes and fall below your own standards, and that is a mighty bitter kind of sadness.” He paused again, while the skin wreathed itself into funeral wreaths about his face, and then he said, impressively: “Both of them kinds of sadness I have known. First I knowed the melancholy kind, and now I know the bitter kind.” The first sadness that I had lasted for years (said the stranger with the strange skin). It was of the melancholy kind, tender and sort o' sweet, and if I had been the right kind of a man I would 'a' stuck to it and kept it. But I went back on it. I turned my face away from it. And in going back on it I went back on all them old, sad, sweet memories, like the songs tell about, that was my better self. And that is what caused the sadness I am in the midst of now. It's the feelin' that I done wrong in turnin' away from all them memories that makes me as sad as you see me to-day. I will first tell you how the first sadness come on to me, and secondly I will tell you how I got the sadness I am in the midst of now. Gentlemen, mebby you have noticed that my skin is kind o' different from most people's skin. That is a gift, and there was a time when I made money off'n that gift. And I got another gift. I'm longer and slimmer than most persons is. And besides them two gifts, I got a third gift. I can eat glass, gentlemen, and it don't hurt me none. I can eat glass as natural and easy as a chicken eats gravel. And them three gifts is my art.