The Bishop sat down by the bedside and took out a paper. “It'll be an hour or so I can spend,” he said to the mother—“maybe you'd like to be doin' about a little.”
“Come to think of it, I'm pow'ful obleeged to you,” she said. “I've all my mornin' washin' to do yit, only I was afraid to leave her alone.”
“You do yo' washin'—I'll watch her. I'm a pretty good sort of a hoss doctor myse'f.”
The child had nodded off to sleep, the Bishop was reading his paper, when a loud voice was heard in the hallway and some rough steps that shook the little flimsily made floor of the cottage, and made it rock with the tramp of them. The door opened suddenly and Jud Carpenter, angry, boisterous, and presumptuous, entered. The child had awakened at the sound of Carpenter's foot fall, and now, frightened beyond control, she trembled and wept under the cover.
There are natural antipathies and they are God-given. They are the rough cogs in the wheel of things. But uneven as they are, rough and grating, strike them off and the wheel would be there still, but it would not turn. It is the friction of life that moves it. And movement is the law of life.
Antipathies—thank God who gave them to us! But for them the shepherd dog would lie down with the wolf.
The only man in Cottontown who did not like the Bishop was Jud Carpenter, and the only man in the world whom the Bishop did not love was Jud Carpenter. And many a time in his life the old man had prayed: “O God, teach me to love Jud Carpenter and despise his ways.”
Carpenter glared insolently at the old man quietly reading his paper, and asked satirically. “Wal, what ails her, doctor?”
“Mill-icious fever,” remarked the Bishop promptly with becoming accent on the first syllable, and scarcely raising his eyes from the paper.
Carpenter flushed. He had met the Bishop too often in contests which required courage and brains not to have discovered by now that he was no match for the man who could both pray and fight.