h that Pendleton regarded him with good-natured
derision. He thought him a stupid man bound down to the earth by a
meager theology. He even wrote an obituary notice of William that must
have made his guardian angel long to kick him--all a grand toot to show
the contrast between a preacher like himself and a foolish old
stutterer like William.

CHAPTER XI

FINANCES AND FASHIONS

It is curious what things are revealed to us as we go along. I used to
wonder, because William wondered, where, in what year, Paul did this or
that which is recorded in Acts. I remember how William used to get
down his commentaries and squint everywhere along margins for dates to
discover exactly where he was in the spring, say, of 54 A. D. At the
time it was passing strange to me that no exact record of dates was
taken concerning the doings of a man who occasionally turned the world
upside down as he went through it. But now it is perfectly clear.
Those who wrote never specified whether it was the first or second
Sunday that Paul said thus and so at Antioch. The record was merely of
the timeless truth he uttered, because Paul and the rest of them
engaged in this Scripture-making and doing back there were already out
of time in their consciousness. They were figures in Eternity making
the great journey by another calendar than ours.

Since I have been writing this poor record of William, it is not time
that matters to me. I forget to tell of his years in each chapter, or
to describe the changes in his appearance. The things he did, the
prayers he prayed, the faith he exercised, these crowd the memory--all
so much alike, as one day resembles another day, and as one prayer
resembles another prayer. But the dates have long since faded from my
mind. I cannot recall, for example, when his shoulders first began to
stoop, nor when he ceased to go clean-shaven, nor the year it was that
his hair and beard whitened, nor when the hollows deepened to stay
beneath his eyes. All I remember for certain was the changeless spirit
of him, and the unconquerable courage he showed about getting ready to
put off his mortality and the definite curious vividness with which he
anticipated immortality.

And in other ways I have unusual difficulty in telling here what he
said and did. The activities of a minister's life differ so widely
from the activities of any other life that even to set them down
requires a peculiar vocabulary. One cannot fin