eary look after
his superannuation, like that of a man who has made a long journey in
vain. This is always the last definition the itinerancy writes upon
the faces of its superannuates. They are unhappy, mortified, like
honorable men who have failed in a business. They no longer pretend to
have better health than they really have, which is the pathetic
hypocrisy they all practice toward the last when they are in annual
fear of superannuation.

So, I looked at our deficit and knew that something was wrong. Still,
I went about the little old house and garden, trying to reconstruct the
memory of happiness and planning to spend our last days unharassed by
salvation anxieties. I have never doubted the goodness of God, but,
things being as they are, and we being what we are, it takes a long
time for Him to work it out for us, especially in any kind of a church.
Meanwhile, I tried to find some of our old friends, only to discover
that most of them were dead. I planted a few annuals, set some hens
and prepared to cultivate my own peace. But William was changed. He
had lost his courage. Whenever the rheumatism struck him he gave in to
it with a groan. Then he took up with Job in the Scriptures, and
before we had been back long enough for the flowers to bloom he just
turned over on his spiritual ashheap and died.

[Illustration: Then He Took Up with Job in the Scriptures.]

He is buried in the little graveyard behind Redwine Church, along with
most of the men and women to whom he preached in it thirty years ago.

I can feel that I am not setting things down right, not making the
latitude and longitude of experience clearly so that you may see as I
can when I close my eyes the staggering tombstones in the brown shadows
behind the little brown church. But when one has been in the Methodist
itinerancy a lifetime one cannot do that.

I used to wonder why Paul, passing through all the grandest cities and
civilizations of his times, never left behind him a single description
of any of their glories, only a reference to the altar to An Unknown
God that he found in Athens; but now I know. Paul lost the memory of
sight. He had absent-minded eyes to the things of the world. So it is
with the itinerant. The earth becomes one of the stars. I cannot
remember roads and realities. I recall most clearly only spiritual
facts, like this: Timothy Brown was a bad man, soundly converted under
William's ministry; but how he looke