There were few well-to-do farmers in the community. The distance was too great from the railroads for the injection of much social life. The winters were filled with days when life was grim. Had it not been for the telephone and the mail, the life of that back-road would have been without any great attractions. But the very isolation of the villages, and the absence of many social opportunities through the winter, like a church and preaching, made these farmers the prey of traveling fanatics, who imported here and there the most fanciful conceptions of religion and sought, by all manner of persuasion, to turn people into Mormons and “New Lights,” “Holy Ghosters” and “Disciples.” It did not take long to see that some of these perversions had taken root in some homes, and I found myself having to attempt the feat of constructing a positive and less fanatical doctrine: a feat which at the time I did poorly enough, but which I took pleasure in attempting. But it was not formal doctrine or intellectual discriminations which those parishes needed as much as it was a social man, to impart into their midst, after the austere winter, a joke, a song, a story, and a friendly hand-clasp. If I had preached no sermon, but merely gone from home to home, from field to field, telling men and women and children that I was their friend, I believe that I should have accomplished the major part of the needed ministry. The meetings were held in the upper rooms of two very solidly constructed schoolhouses four miles apart. Our meetings had to be announced in two kinds of time, for some set their clocks by the sun, while others set them by the Standard, sent over the telephone wires. The dim, chalky atmosphere of the rooms was always colored by rich green ferns and assortments of wild flowers. Even though the flowers were bunched in the necks of mustard bottles, tumblers, and cream jugs, and not always arranged according to Japanese art, yet the thought that the sense of beauty in religion found expression even in wild flowers apologized for all else. When the hob-nailed boot and the plow, year in and out, are uprooting and crushing field flowers, it marks the high tide of esthetic appreciation when the wearers of the hob-nailed boot and guiders of the plow take pains to pick those flowers and add them to their hymns, their prayers, and sermons in praise to God. No small, narrow opportunity was mine, such as in my gloomier moments I had ascribed to a country pastor. Preaching a sermon formed but a fraction of my duty. There were young men and women who sought advice about the outside world, and their business chances in it. There were business colleges, academies, hospitals, and mills to propose to the restless ones, who, like young birds, were to try life on their own wings.