ur town and show His righteous judgment. And that
judgment was shown so clearly through the hearts of our people that very
likely John Markley does not consider it the judgment of God at all, but
the prejudice of the neighbours.

When we have been talking over the case of John Markley in the office we
have generally ended by wondering whether God--or whatever one cares to
call the force that operates the moral laws, as well as those that in
our ignorance we set apart as the physical laws of the world--whether
God moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing
or chastisement, through human nature as it is, in the ordinary business
of the lives of men. But we have never settled that in our office any
more than they have in the great schools, and as John Markley, game to
the end, has never said what he thought of the town's treatment of him,
it will never be known which side of our controversy is right.

Years ago, perhaps as long ago as the drought of seventy-four, men began
calling him "Honest John Markley." He was the fairest man in town, and
he made money by it, for when he opened his little bank Centennial year,
which was the year of the big wheat crop, farmers stood in line half an
hour at a time, at the door of his bank, waiting to give him their
money. He was a plain, uncollared, short-whiskered man, brown-haired and
grey-eyed, whose wife always made his shirts and, being a famous cook in
town, kept him round and chubby. He referred to her as "Ma," and she
called him "Pa Markley" so insistently that when we elected him State
Senator, after he made his bank a National bank, in 1880, the town and
county couldn't get used to calling him Senator Markley, so "Pa Markley"
it was until after his Senatorial fame had been forgotten. Their
children had grown up and left home before the boom of the eighties
came--one girl went to California and the boy to South America;--and
when John Markley began to write his wealth in six figures--which is
almost beyond the dreams of avarice in a town like ours--he and his wife
were lonely and knew little what to do with their income.

They bought new furniture for the parlour, and the Ladies' Missionary
Society of the First Methodist Church, the only souls that saw it with
the linen jackets off, say it was lovely to behold; they bought
everything the fruit-tree man had in his catalogue, and their five acres
on Exchange Street were pimpled over with shrubs that never