I’ve broken the Sabbath by travelling all day. In town I hired a buggy to bring me home. Our hacks do not run on Sunday. It is raining. It has rained all the way. I had a silent driver who never spoke to me, seldom to his horses. I was glad that it was raining; glad that my driver was silent. My thoughts were as vague, as blurred as the dim mountain forms seen through the rain. We drove through Marsville without meeting a soul. As we passed the Duckett houses that forever watch each other like antagonists, I saw that poor old lady slipping home from doing up his work; I saw him rocking on his front porch in placid content. A sudden rage against this man-made world seized me. I scrambled in my bag for the little gift to her, leaped out, and sent the man on home with my baggage. He greeted me jauntily. He was just sitting there counting his blessings. He could eat three as hearty meals a day as he had ever et, and when night come sleep sound as a mouse in a shuck pen—the Lord had been good to the old man. I wasn’t hypocrite enough to take the hand extended. I wanted to shake the life out of his smiling old body. “Has he been good to the old lady?” I asked. He only stared at me. “Do you know you told me you swam your horse through swollen streams once to get to a little log church because you knew your congregation would be waiting for you there? You wanted to preach that sermon that day that some soul might be saved that you might never reach again. You said you didn’t want the devil to get anybody. Do you remember?” “Yes,” he quavered, “I remember.” “Well,” I stormed, “it’s my honest belief that he will get you. I wonder what the God you have preached all these years means to do with men like you who are mean to their wives and cloak their meanness to poor feeble old women under smooth-sounding texts.” He stood up, his faded blue eyes flashed, his pallid lips under the straggly white moustache worked. When he dropped back in his chair, having uttered no word, I thought maybe I had killed him. But I did not care. He would have gone to his Maker with a little preparation he would otherwise not have had. I stood over him silent, inexorable. “She got mad because——” “Never mind what she got mad about,” I said. “For fifty-nine years and six months she didn’t get mad. And she’s not mad now. I saw her slipping out of the back of your house just a minute ago. She’s been doing up your night work. You ought to go over there and get down on your knees—the knees you have worn out praying the Lord to make you the sort of a man you have not desired to be—and ask her to forgive you, and bring her home.”