kshed in the yard. Three very young children were sitting half
under our bed examining our shoes and other articles of apparel, and as
many older heads stared at us from the opposite beds. My anguish can
be better imagined than described, and the nonchalance with which
William arose and assumed his trousers did not add to my opinion of
him. I afterward learned that nothing was more common than this
populous way of entertaining guests, and that he had long since become
hardened to the indelicacies of such situations.

CHAPTER III

THE REVIVAL AT REDWINE

But this was only the beginning of social and spiritual surprises
through which I passed. There was no culture among the people. They
looked like the poor kin of the angels in Heaven, and they really did
live so far out of the world that no bishop had ever seen them. I was
divided between horror and admiration at their soul-stretching
propensities, and it is difficult to describe the shock with which I
faced the perpetual exposure of their spiritual nakedness. It was a
naive kind of religious indelicacy, like the unguarded ways of very
young children.

Brother Jimmie Meadows would confess to the most private faults in an
experience meeting, and, if he did not, Sister Meadows would do it for
him. They lacked the sense of humor, which, being interpreted, is a
part of the sense of proportion. They shrank from the illuminating
quality of wit as if it were a sacrilege--this auto-seriousness was
even an important part of William's character. He put on solemnity
like a robe when he was in the throes of thought.

The deadly monotony of Christian country life where there are no
beggars to feed, no drunkards to credit, which are among the moral
duties of Christians in cities, leads as naturally to the outvent of
what Methodists call "revivals" as did the backslidings of the people
in those days. So it came to pass, that year at Redwine, when the
"crops were laid by" William faced his first revival, and I faced
William. Spiritually speaking, we parted company. He passed into a
praying and fasting trance, and my heart was nearly broken with the
loneliness, for praying and fasting did not agree with me, and William
seemed to recede in some mystical sense hard to define, so that I
became a sort of unwilling grass-widow.

The revival was to begin at Redwine, when suddenly the rumor reached us
that Brother Tom Pratt, a prominent member, had back-slided, and tha