'The Lord lifts me up,' he said, 'ter dash me on the groun'!'
No more in Judæa, in the holy mountains; no more among the disciples. Drearily along the valley road, glaring and yellow in the sun, the book closed, the inspiration fled, journeyed the ignorant man, who would fain lay hold on a true and perfected sanctity.
He despatched his errand in the valley—a secular matter, relating to the exchange of a cow and a calf.
The afternoon was waning when he was again upon the slopes of the Big Smoky; for the roads were rough, and he had travelled slowly, always prone to 'favour the beastis.' He stopped in front of Cayce's house, where he saw Dorinda spinning on the porch, and preferred a request for a gourd of water.
The old woman heard his voice, and came hastily out with hospitable insistence that he should dismount and 'rest his bones, sence he hed rid fur, an' tell the news from the Settlemint.' There was a cordial contrast between this warm esteem and his own unkind thoughts, and he suffered himself to be persuaded.
He sat under the hop-vines, and replied in monosyllables to the old woman's animated questions, and gave little news of the excitements at the Settlement which they had not already heard.
Dorinda, her wheel awhirl, one hand lifted holding the thread, the other poised in the air to control the motion, her figure thrown back in a fine, alert pose, looked at him with a freshened pity for his downcast spirit, and with intuitive sympathy. He sorrowed not because of the things of this world, she felt. It was some high and spiritual grief, such as might pierce a prophet's heart. Her eyes, full of the ideality of the sentiment, dwelt upon him reverently.
He marked the look. With his overwhelming sense of his sins, he was abased under it, and he scourged himself as a hypocrite.
'Thar air goin' ter be preachin' at the meetin'-house Sunday, I hearn,' she observed presently, thinking this topic more meet for his discussion than the 'gaynder-pullin'' and the escape, and such mundane matters.
The tempered green light fell upon her fair face, adding a delicacy to its creamy tint; her black hair caught a shifting golden flake of sunshine as she moved back and forth; her red lips were slightly parted. The grasshoppers droned in the leaves an accompaniment to the whirr of her wheel. The 'prince's feathers' bloomed in great clumsy crimson tufts close by the step.