we went together up and down and around our little world, William offering his Lord's salvation without any wisdom of

any years in the itinerancy I began to take on the look of it-that is to say, I had faded; and although I still wore little decorative fragments of my wedding finery, my clothes in general had the peculiar prayer-meeting set that is observable in the garments of every Methodist preacher's wife at this s

last "rise" that much in the church: he occasionally became the pastor in a village with a salary of at most five hundred dollars. The wife at this time always looks like a poor little lady Rip Van Winkle in the congregation. And her husband invariably

have spent much of his time licking his paws and washing his face. Besides, like all preachers' wives, I was anxious that he should look well in the pulpit, and therefore ready to sacrifice my own needs that he might buy new clothes, because he must appear so publicly eve

me out of the fashion of the times. This was the change in the quality of spi

t preachers had told about God to scare the people forty years before had come up and flowered into heresies and unbelief in their children. William actually had to quit preaching about Jonah and the whale. He had an excellent sermon on the

consult the pastor between times about their spiritual symptoms. They are almost without exception the victims of the same epidemic of moral inertia and emotional heavings. They do not rise to the dignity of being sinners, and personally I would

through such complicated intellectual processes to deceive themselves and others; they took narrow, almost persecuting views of right and wrong. But these te

playful kittens do to their tails. They were always chasing them and never really finding them. But the most dangerous of them all is the one who refuses to take up her bed and walk spir

him with the four walls of moral destruction and invite it for him. The place for a minister's study is in his own home, with his wife passing in and out, if he has female spiritual invalids calling on him.) She is perfectly innocent in that she has not considered her moral responsibility to the preacher she is about to victimize. She is very modest, really and truly modest. He is a little on his guar

ive her some advice? He can. He is so full of real, honest, truthful kindness he almost wants to hold her hands while he bestows it. Nothing is further from his mind

ing them, and he is deeply moved at the almost childish innocency of what she calls her temptations. No honest woman could possibly regard them as such, if he only knew it. But he doesn't know it. He sees her reduced to t

pretty woman who wants to consult him privately about her

only her Heavenly Father can locate it from day to day. And I have observed that the really good women are never guilty of the sacrilege of showing their immortality to preachers. I lived with William for thirty years, and had more than my share of spiritual difficulties. But I wo

an expression of pretty, pink piety that was irresistible. She was "not happy at home" and candidly confessed it. The lack of congeniality grew out of the fact that her husband was a straightforward business man who to

door as simply as if I had been his office-boy. And William was always cheered and invigorated by her visits. He would come out of his study to te

rnoons of the week with him in his study, with nobody but the dead-and-gone Second Samuel to chaperon them, and when William began to neglect his pastoral visiting on this accou

she had chosen her chair. "William is out this afternoon, but possibly I can help you with the kind of

a change now and stay at home some and try to interpret your own Samuel. Your husband's given name is Sam, isn't it? He seems to me

pen door and disappeared down the shady street. William never knew, or even suspected, why she discontinued so interestin

wisdom of a serpent and as much harmlessness of the dove as will not interfere with her duty to him in protecting him from such women-whose souls are merely mortal and who are to be found in so many congregations-may have a damaged priest on her han

minded rogues, the primitive murderers, but the real rotters of honor and destroyers of salvation. Then we should have a very different class of people in the penitentiar