were pale, his hair light and very straight, and he was short and stout. My brother, who was much older than I, looked like my mother, who had been a woman of beauty and spirit. Her education had been so slight that I doubt whether she knew how to write; but she sang in a voice so sweet, so clear and noble, that I used to think she had learned of the angels to whom she went when I was only nine years old. I looked more like my father, except for my eyes, which were brown, and in that I was tall and slender. But I was not like him in mind or disposition. I was not content to sit still and sigh. He deplored his fate, I laid strong hands on mine. Nature, he would say, meant him for a minister, but Providence had made him a wheelwright. This was foolishness to me, because Nature ought to be strong enough to force her way. I rather believed that whatever made my father a wheelwright, it was Nature that kept him one, and whatever energy and imagination he had was given to the Second Coming.
And he was not a good wheelwright. His best business was done in coffins, and in his shop stood boards of various lengths, ready for orders. All his ready money came from coffins, and to him a sickly season meant prosperity. He and my brother were both regenerate, and they would sit and talk of the Coming Life until my brother's wife would lose her temper. She thought they should be at work; but then she was not at all converted, nor did she desire to be. She looked upon heaven as an outing, and said if it meant staying forever in the village she had no use for it. My father listened to her in silence when she spoke her mind, and he must have thought that before a heaven of mildness could come to our house with Sophia there, she would have to be much changed. None of them troubled themselves about me. I, possibly, represented to them the legal amount of baggage to which each traveller is entitled, and they expected to carry me in.
The coming of the Master was talked about in our house as people talk of the return of a married daughter or of a student son. And as to us the Cross-Roads was the centre of existence, the millennium was to come direct to us. Any day or hour the Master might appear, and the faithful watched for him. He was to come to us as he did to the disciples who, walking with him ignorant of who he was, spoke of him, but we were to know him. He was to enter our houses, come into our congregation. The little path that ran by our garden fence up to our door was kept in perfect order by my father's own hands, and it was a curious proof of the impression created by his quiet persistence that close to it ran another made by the feet of people who laughed at him, but who forbore walking over the way kept ready for the Master. I used to stand inside the gate and watch these people. Most of them were "doomed to perish like the beasts of the field," and it seemed to me a pity that so few had souls. They looked alike. T never could tell from watching them which of them were conditioned for immortality, nor could I decide from their works. For the second birth we had to take a person's word., there being no other way of knowing. Most of the people who claimed to have souls, naturally went to our church, and I noticed that among the condemned was a large majority of Episcopalians. Mr. McMasters, our minister, was very sever
