discontented. But she has fairly married rheumatism. It has been to her
as a husband and children. I tell you, young man, one has to have his
little footstool of elevation among his fellows, even if it is a mighty
queer one, or he loses his self-respect, and self-respect is the best
jewel we have."

They were now out in the road again, the team plodding heavily through
the red shale. "It's a damned soil," said the doctor for the second
time. He looked down at the young man beside him, and James again felt
that resentful sense of youth and inexperience. "I don't know how you've
been brought up," said the elder man. "I don't want to infuse heretic
notions into your innocent mind."

James straightened himself. He tried to give the other man a knowing
look. "I have been about a good deal," he said. "You need not be afraid
of corrupting _me_."

Doctor Gordon laughed. "Well, I shall not try," he said. "At least, I
shall not mean to corrupt you. I am a pessimist, but you are so young
that you ought not to be influenced by that. Lord, only think what may
be before you. You don't know. I am so far along that I know as far as I
am concerned. I did not know but you had been brought up to think that
whatever the Lord made was good, and that in saying that this red, gluey
New Jersey soil was darned bad, I was swearing the worst way. I don't
want to have millstones and that sort of thing about my neck. I was
quite up in the Scriptures at one time."

"You need not be afraid," said James with dignity; "I think the soil
darned bad myself." He hesitated a little over the darned, but once it
was out, he felt proud of it.

"Yes, it is," said Doctor Gordon, "and if the Lord made it, he did not
altogether succeed, and I see no earthly way of tracing the New Jersey
soil back to original sin and the Garden of Eden."

"That's so," said James.

Doctor Gordon's face grew sober, his jocular mood for the time had
vanished. He was his true self. "Did it ever occur to you that disease
was the devil?" he asked abruptly. "That is, that all these infernal
microbes that burrow in the human system to its disease and death, were
his veritable imps at work?"

James shook his head, and looked curiously at his companion's face with
its gloomy corrugations.

"Well, it has to me," said the doctor, "and let me ask you one thing.
You have been brought up to believe that the devil's particular
residence was hell, haven't you?"

James replied in a be