How shall the savage resist the lure of civilization's wonders? Open-mouthed, wide-eyed, he followed the clumsy movements of my fingers. He drew nearer to me, away from my spouse. I showed him how to do the cork trick, and I showed him how to do the string tricks. My wife reminded me of a handkerchief trick. I exhibited it. Pepe learned the handkerchief trick. He now stood with his back to my wife. He had lost all interest in her. I begged him to show me again how to manipulate his flint and steel. Swelling with pride, he obliged me. I expressed a desire to be possessed of the apparatus. We made a bargain. It became mine for a peseta. I showed him how to pull his nose and ears so that they made loud cracking sounds. This is done, as every one knows, with the tongue and the palate; but Pepe had not known it. When we left the garden to go back for luncheon, Don Pepe had not for thirty minutes directed so much as a glance or a whisper toward my wife. He followed me-me, please understand-to the hotel, and at the door received one last lesson in a string trick of which he had not become completely the master. We bade him good-by, and as I looked back from the door I saw him racing down the street in the direction of the Court of the Orange-trees and the assembly of his mates. Only once again did we see Pepe, and that was on our sixth and last day in Cordoba. We came upon him at a street corner, standing in front of a lad of his own age under whose bulging eyes he manipulated two corks. To love is great, but to excite envy is better. I mean when one is twelve years old. S Realization By HELEN VIOLETTE TOOKER O thou art gone, though still I feel thee here. Thy laughter lingers in each woodland place But habit turns me toward that window-space Of shifting nights and days, pleasures and ruth, Imperfect, we must pass perfection by: And gaze into the pool to watch the sky. By WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS Author of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," "A Modern Instance," etc. Illustrations by Henry Raleigh SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS I-VIII IN the third decade of the nineteenth century Joseph Dylks, who was to become famous in the history of the region as the Leatherwood God, made his spectacular appearance at a camp-meeting on Leatherwood Creek. In their remoteness from the large cities of the country, the people of the region gave to religion their chief interest, and Dylks was received as one sent by God. He passed his first night with David Gillespie, whose sister he had married. He had left her, and in time, thinking him dead, she had married Laban Billings and had come to Leatherwood Creek. Gillespie knew Dylks as a scoundrel, but though he was assured that Dylks would not now trouble her, on religious grounds he demands that his sister send Billings away. Though she is now happy, after years of unhappiness, she yields to the demand. Having refused to live with her second husband, and permitted her young son by her first marriage to go to hear Dylks preach, Nancy Billings stays that night at her brother's house. He and his daughter Jane are estranged through her desire to become a follower of Dylks. Indeed, the whole neighborhood has become divided. Dylks has gradually reached the point where he claims to be God. Many believe him; a few oppose. Among the latter Matthew Braile, the justice of the peace and a reputed agnostic, is the most important, though his opposition is not active. AVID GILLESPIE woke later than Dhis his daughter, and when he had put away the shadow of his unhappy dreams, he took up the burden of waking thoughts, which weighed more heavily on him. The sight of his child groveling at the feet of that blasphemous impostor and adoring him as her God pitilessly realized itself to him as a thing shameful past experience. and beyond credence, and yet as undeniable as his pulse, his breath, his seeing and hearing. The dread which a less primitive spirit would have forbidden itself as something too abominable possessed him as wholly possible. He had lived righteously, and he had kept evil from those dear to him, both the dead and the quick, by the force of his strong, unselfish will; now he had seen his will without power upon the one who was dearest, and whom he seemed to hold from evil only by the force of his right hand. But his hand could not be everywhere and at all times; and then? The breakfast which the girl had got IX for him and left on the hearth was warm yet when he put it on the table, and she could not have been gone more than a few minutes; but she had gone, he did not know where, without waiting to speak with him after the threats and defiances which they had slept upon. When he had poured the coffee after the mouthfuls he forced down, he acted on the only hope he had, and crossed the woods-pasture to his sister's cabin. She understood the glance he gave within from the threshold, where he paused, and she said, "She ain't here, David." Nancy had cleared her breakfast away and was ironing at the shelf where she had eaten; the baby was playing on the floor. Gillespie looked down at it. "I did n't know but what she 'd come over to dress it; she cares so much for it." "It cares for her, too. But what brings you after her?" "She 's gone somewhere without her breakfast. We had high words last night He said there was boys and girls kneelin' after I brought her home." "I'm afraid you 'll have higher words. yet, David. Joey was at the Temple." "Nancy, I don't know what to do about. her." "You knew what to do about me, David." She gave her stab, and then she pitied him, not for the pain she was willing he should feel from it, but for the pain he was feeling before. "I know it is n't. like that. I'm sorry for you both. You have n't come to the end of your troubles." "I can't understand the girl," he said desolately. "Up to a year ago she was like she had always been, as biddable as a child, and meek and yielding every way. All at once she 's got stiff-necked and wilful." "She could n't tell you why, herself, David. We are all that way-good little girls, and then all of a sudden wilful women. I don't know what changes us. It's harder on us than it is on you. It came on me like a thief in the night and stole away my sense. It gave Joseph Dylks his chance over me; if it had been sooner or later, I should have known he was a power of darkness as far as I could see him. But my eyes were holden by my self-conceit, and I thought he was an angel of light." "He's got past being an angel now," Gillespie said, forcing himself to the real matter of his errand, far from the question of his daughter's estrangement from her old self. "Did Joey tell you about-last night?" Nancy did not quit the psychological question at once. "Up to that time we think our fathers and brothers are something above the human; then we think they 're not even up to the common run of men. We think other men are different because we don't know them. Yes," she returned to his question with a sigh,-"Joey told me something about it-enough about it. I suppose it is n't right to let him be a spy on his father, but I have to. If I did n't, he might want to go, from the talk of those fools, and get to believin' with them. with the rest-little children, almost, and shoutin' and prayin' to Joseph. Did you see 'em?" "Yes; it was dreadful, Nancy. But it was worse to see the women, the grown-up girls and the mothers of the children. It looked like they had been drinking. It fairly turned me sick. And my own daughter groveling on her knees with the worst! If I did n't know Dylks for the thing he is, without an idea beyond victuals and clothes, I might ha' thought he had thrown a spell on 'em just for deviltry. But they done it all themselves; he just gave them the chance to play the fool." Nancy resumed from her own more immediate interest: "Well, I let Joey go; and I don't know whether it helps or hurts to have him come home feelin' about him, and all the goin's on, just like I would myself. He always says he 's glad I was n't there, and he pities the poor fool women more than he despises his father. Or I ort n't to say. despise. Joey don't despise anybody; he 's all good, through and through; I don't know where he gets it. He 's like Laban, and yet he ain't any kin to Laban." "It must be hard on you, Nancy. I don't know how you can bear up the way you do. It is like a living streak of fire in me." "That 's because there's some hope left in you. I can bear what I 've got to because the feeling is all burnt out of me. It's like as if my soul was dead." "You must n't say that, Nancy." "I say anything I please now, anything I think. I'm not afraid any more; I hain't got anything left to be afraid of." "Well, I have," David returned. "Something I'm ashamed to be afraid of-his hold on Jane. I don't understand it. We 've always thought alike and believed alike, and now to see her gone crazy after a thief and liar like that! It's enough to drive me mad the other way. I don't only want to kill him; I want to kill-" "David!" She stopped him, and in his pause she added: "You 're worse than "Where is her religion? I raised her to fear God, the Bible God that I've prayed to for her since she was a little babe; but now, since she 's turned to this heathen image, I begin to turn from Him. What 's He been about, if He 's all-seeing and all-powerful, to let loose such a devil on a harmless settlement like this, where we were all brethren and dwelt together in unity, no matter whether we believed in dipping or sprinkling? We loved one another, in the Scripture sense, and now look! Families broken up, brothers not speaking, wives and husbands parting, parents cursing the day their children. were born, and children flying in the face of their parents. Did you hear about Christopher Mills, how he come crying to his father and mother and tried to make them believe in Dylks, and when his father said it was all a snare and a delusion, Christopher went away, telling them their damnation was sealed?" "No," the woman said, with bitter pleasure in the mockery, "but I heard how our new Saint Paul Enraghty went over to his uncle's the other day, and said he should never see corruption, and should never die, and told his uncle he could n't shoot him. Them that was there say the old man just reached for his rifle, and was goin' to shoot Saint Paul in the legs, and then Paul begged off and pretended that he was only in fun!" She laughed, but David Gillespie looked sadly at her. United Brethren, and now preaches Dylks! First he would n't hardly go into the same house, and then he would n't leave it till he could come with Dylks. I don't know how they do it! Sometimes I think the decentest man left in the place is that red-mouthed infidel Matthew Braile. Sometimes I 'm a mind to go to his house and get him to tell me what Tom Paine would do in my place." "You are pretty far gone, David. But I don't wonder at it; and I don't believe I think so badly of Matthew Braile, either. He may be an infidel, but he believes in some kind of a God that wants people to do right; he don't believe in mortal sin, and maybe that 's where he 's out; and I hear tell he don't think there's going to be any raisin' of the body or any Last Day or any hell: but he keeps it to himself unless folks pester him. I was afraid once to have Joey talk with him, before the plow went over me; but now I let Joey go to him all he wants to. He lets Joey come and pet the coon Joey give him because he heard that the squire's little boy used to want one. From all I can make out they don't do much but talk about the little boy; he seems to take comfort in Joey because Joey 's like him, or the squire thinks so." "If Jane had died when she was his little boy's age, I would n't feel as if I had lost her half as much as I do now." Nancy lifted herself from her ironingboard and looked at her brother. "You told me what the duty of a woman was that found out she had two hus "I don't believe I like to hear you laugh, bands. Don't you know what the duty Nancy." "Why, are you turning believer, too, David? It'll be time for me next," she mocked. "I could n't laugh at Joseph, maybe, but Saint Paul Enraghty is a bigger rascal or a bigger fool than he is. Some say that Joseph is just crazy, and some that he 's after money, and that Enraghty 's put him up to everything." "Yes," David moodily assented to the general tenor of her talk. "The way they 've roped in between 'em that poor fool Davis, who 'd been preaching for the of a man is that has a daughter turned idolater?" "No, I don't, Nancy," David answered doggedly. "Then why don't you wrestle with the Lord in prayer? Perhaps He'd make you some sign.' "Oh, prayer! The thought of it makes me sick since I saw them fools wallowing round at Dylks's feet, and beseeching that heathen image to save them." "Then if you hain't got any light of yourself, and you don't believe the Lord |