floodgates were lifted. The Bellamy gift of utterance had a
congenial theme. For an hour the stream ran strong and steady, and when
it would have stopped none could tell. But J.W. remembered he had
promised to be back with Marty for dinner, and so, in the midst of a
story about Marty's Saturday afternoon outings with the boys, highly
reminiscent of their own old-time Saturdays in the Deep Creek timber,
J.W. made his excuses and hurried away.

In that hour he had heard of the observing of special days, Thanksgiving
and Christmas particularly; of the rage for athletic equipment on every
farm which had youngsters, so that the usual anaemic croquet outfit had
given place to basketball practice sets, indoor-outdoor ball,
volley-ball nets, and other paraphernalia. Some of it not much used now,
since winter had come, but under Marty's leadership, a skating rink
construction gang had thrown up a dirt embankment in a low spot near the
creek and then cut a channel far enough upstream to flood about four
acres of swamp. Mr. Bellamy told about the skating tournaments every
afternoon of the cold weather for the school children, and Saturday
afternoons for the older young folks. More people went than skated too,
the garrulous farmer asserted. It was just another of that young
preacher's sociability schemes, and there was no end to 'em, seemed like
to him.

There was even more on the business side of country life: how Marty had
joined forces with the Grange and the county agent and the cooperators
of the creamery and the elevator and the school teachers. And so on, and
so on.

J.W. would be the last to worry about such a program; it just fitted
his ideas. But it made him a little more interested in the Sunday
services. Would Marty's preaching match his community work?

But before Sunday morning came J.W. had other questions to ask. He put
them to Marty in intervals of the skating races; and again after supper,
before going over to the church to meet a little group of Sunday-school
folk--"my teacher-partners" Marty called them--who were learning with
him how to adapt Sunday school science and the teaching art to the
conditions of the open country.

All of J.W.'s questions were really one big question: "Say, Marty, boy,
I always knew you had something in you that didn't show on the surface,
but I never thought it was exactly the stuff they need to make
up-to-date country preachers. How does it happen that you've blossomed
out in t