attached to each establishment and each person in sight the pronouncement of his father's judgments. Lekkin's hall was a place of idleness, gambling and vileness; David's father would, if he could, shut the hall and burn its furniture. The picture theater did much more harm than good, though it might be made only an instrument for good. Mr. Harder was a God-fearing Christian and generous, if easy-going; Cullen drank in secret. . . .
David looked past the fronts of the stores and up the road which reached away in a pleasant vista of trees between which showed the roofs of homes; the home of Henry West, whom David always had been told to respect; of Theodore Lorber, whose first wife had divorced him for scriptural sin and who brazenly had married again. On a rise of ground appeared the big, red brick house of Mr. Fuller from whom—in defiance of his father—David had borrowed the ten thousand dollars with which he had bought his partnership in the Hamilton Agency.
He turned his eyes to the left and he sought and immediately found a tall, tapered, solitary steeple. He could not see his home; he could not see even the church building below the steeple but, almost as vividly as though he stared upon it, there formed before him the wide, grassy lot of the church enclosure, surrounded by a picket fence which ran around both the plain, poor, white clapboard church and the plainer, poorer, white clapboard cottage beside it.
Often when he thought of the church and of his home, the soul of them seemed to be his mother, his gentle, loving, patient and dutiful mother who was busy
