By Shore and Sedge | Page 5

at the prayer-meeting overflowed them
here; the words that had choked his utterance an hour ago now rose to
his lips. He threw himself from his horse, and kneeling in the withered
grass--a mere atom in the boundless plain--lifted his pale face against
the irresponsive blue and prayed.
He prayed that the unselfish dream of his bitter boyhood, his
disappointed youth, might come to pass. He prayed that he might in
higher hands become the humble instrument of good to his fellow- man.
He prayed that the deficiencies of his scant education, his self-taught
learning, his helpless isolation, and his inexperience might be
overlooked or reinforced by grace. He prayed that the Infinite
Compassion might enlighten his ignorance and solitude with a
manifestation of the Spirit; in his very weakness he prayed for some
special revelation, some sign or token, some visitation or gracious
unbending from that coldly lifting sky. The low sun burned the black
edge of the distant tules with dull eating fires as he prayed, lit the
dwarfed hills with a brief but ineffectual radiance, and then died out.
The lingering trade winds fired a few volleys over its grave and then
lapsed into a chilly silence. The young man staggered to his feet; it was
quite dark now, but the coming night had advanced a few starry
vedettes so near the plain they looked like human watch-fires. For an
instant he could not remember where he was. Then a light trembled far

down at the entrance of the valley. Brother Gideon recognized it. It was
in the lonely farmhouse of the widow of the last Circuit preacher.
II
The abode of the late Reverend Marvin Hiler remained in the
disorganized condition he had left it when removed from his sphere of
earthly uselessness and continuous accident. The straggling fence that
only half inclosed the house and barn had stopped at that point where
the two deacons who had each volunteered to do a day's work on it had
completed their allotted time. The building of the barn had been
arrested when the half load of timber contributed by Sugar Mill
brethren was exhausted, and three windows given by "Christian
Seekers" at Martinez painfully accented the boarded spaces for the
other three that "Unknown Friends" in Tasajara had promised but not
yet supplied. In the clearing some trees that had been felled but not
taken away added to the general incompleteness.
Something of this unfinished character clung to the Widow Hiler and
asserted itself in her three children, one of whom was consistently
posthumous. Prematurely old and prematurely disappointed, she had all
the inexperience of girlhood with the cares of maternity, and kept in her
family circle the freshness of an old maid's misogynistic antipathies
with a certain guilty and remorseful consciousness of widowhood. She
supported the meagre household to which her husband had contributed
only the extra mouths to feed with reproachful astonishment and weary
incapacity. She had long since grown tired of trying to make both ends
meet, of which she declared "the Lord had taken one." During her two
years' widowhood she had waited on Providence, who by a pleasing
local fiction had been made responsible for the disused and cast-off
furniture and clothing which, accompanied with scriptural texts, found
their way mysteriously into her few habitable rooms. The providential
manna was not always fresh; the ravens who fed her and her little ones
with flour from the Sugar Mills did not always select the best quality.
Small wonder that, sitting by her lonely hearthstone,--a borrowed stove
that supplemented the unfinished fireplace,-- surrounded by her
mismatched furniture and clad in misfitting garments, she had
contracted a habit of sniffling during her dreary watches. In her weaker
moments she attributed it to grief; in her stronger intervals she knew
that it sprang from damp and draught.

In her apathy the sound of horses' hoofs at her unprotected door even at
that hour neither surprised nor alarmed her. She lifted her head as the
door opened and the pale face of Gideon Deane looked into the room.
She moved aside the cradle she was rocking, and, taking a saucepan
and tea-cup from a chair beside her, absently dusted it with her apron,
and pointing to the vacant seat said, "Take a chair," as quietly as if he
had stepped from the next room instead of the outer darkness.
"I'll put up my horse first," said Gideon gently.
"So do," responded the widow briefly.
Gideon led his horse across the inclosure, stumbling over the heaps of
rubbish, dried chips, and weather-beaten shavings with which it was
strewn, until he reached the unfinished barn, where he temporarily
bestowed his beast. Then taking a rusty axe, by the faint light of the
stars, he attacked one of the fallen trees with