y
with so little to show for its earthly journey.

When one considers it, one finds that Joe Nevison wasted his life most
miserably. There was nothing to his credit to say in his obituary--no
good deed to recount and there were many, many bad ones. Moreover, the
sorrow and bitterness that he brought into his father's last days, and
the shame that he put upon his mother, who lived to see his end, made it
impossible for our paper to say of him any kind thing that would not
have seemed maudlin.

Yet at Joe Nevison's funeral the old settlers, many of them broken in
years and by trouble, gathered at the little wooden church in the hollow
below the track, to see the last of him, though certainly not to pay him
a tribute of respect. They remembered him as the little boy who had
trudged up the hill to school when the old stone schoolhouse was the
only stone building in town; they remembered him as he was in the days
when he began to turn Marshal Furgeson's hair grey with wild pranks.
They remembered the boy's childish virtues, and could feel the remorse
that must at times have gnawed his heart. Also these old men and women
knew of the devil of unbridled passion that the child's father had put
into Joe's blood. And when he started down the broad road they had seen
his track beyond him. So as the little gathering of old people filed
through the church door and lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the
mourners to come out, we heard through the crowd white haired men
sighing: "Poor Joe; poor fellow." Can one hope that God's forgiveness
will be fuller than that!

XIII

A Pilgrim in the Wilderness

A few years ago we were getting out a special edition of our paper,
printed on book-paper, and filled with pictures of the old settlers, and
we called it "the historical edition." In preparing the historical
edition we had to confer with "Aunt" Martha Merrifield so often that
George Kirwin, the foreman, who was kept trotting to her with
proof-slips and copy for her to revise, remarked, as he was making up
the last form of the troublesome edition, that, if the recording angel
ever had a fire in his office, he could make up the record for our town
from "Aunt" Martha's scrapbook. In that big, fat, crinkly-leafed book,
she has pasted so many wedding notices and birth notices and death
notices that one who reads the book wonders how so many people could
have been born, married and died in a town of only ten thousand
inhabitants.