orth
Georgia Conference at the same time. William had that devotion for him
one often sees in a good man for just a smart one. He placed an
extravagant value upon his gifts, and he was one of the heroes of our
younger married years, about whom he talked with affectionate blindness.

And there is no doubt that Horace Pendleton had a gift, the gift of
rising. You might have thought he was in the world instead of the
church, he went up so fast. He had been ordained scarcely long enough
to become a deacon before he was well enough known to be preaching
commencement sermons at young ladies' seminaries and delivering
lectures everywhere. He had that naive bravery of intelligence which
enabled him to accept with dignity an invitation to lecture on any
subject from "Sunshine" to the "Psychology of St. Paul."

I remember him very well in those days, a thin, long, young man with a
face so narrow and tight and bright that when he talked in his high
metallic voice one received the impression of light streaming in up his
higher nature through a keyhole. I specify higher nature, because
Pendleton never addressed himself to any other part of the spiritual
anatomy. I always had the feeling when I heard him that he inflated
each word, so that some of the weightiest and most ancient verbs in the
Scriptures floated from his lips as lightly as if they had been the
cast-off theological tail-feathers of a growing angel. His grandest
thoughts (and he was as full of them as an egg is of meat) seemed to
cut monkeyshines and to make faces back at him the moment he uttered
them. Personally, I never liked him. He talked too much about
sacrifice and was entirely too fortunate himself. Maybe I was jealous
of him.

The contrast between his career in the ministry and that of William was
certainly striking. He had been made a Doctor of Divinity and was
filling the best churches in his Conference, while William and I were
still serving mountain circuits. And it was not long before none of
the churches in our Conference were good enough for him, so he had to
be transferred to get one commensurate with his ability. Even then he
had enough surplus energy to run a sideline in literature. I have
always thought that if he had been a land agent, instead of a preacher,
he could have sold the whole of Alaska and the adjacent icebergs in one
quadrennium.

And I reckon I may as well admit that there was an invincible streak of
meanness in me wh