“You don’t say so! How?”
“Well, I thought they were cold-blooded and inhospitable. I never made a more foolish mistake. I have never been more at home, or been treated more graciously in the South. To tell you the truth, they seem like our most cultured people at home, warm-hearted, cordial, sensible and neighbourly. Mama is so pleased she’s trying to claim kin with the Puritans, through her Scotch Covenanter ancestry.”
“After all, I believe you are right. I never preached in my life to so sensitive an audience. There’s an atmosphere of solid comfort, good sense, and intelligence that holds me in a spell here. This is the place in which I’ve dreamed I’d like to live and work.”
“Then you will accept, Doctor?”
“Now listen to you, child! Don’t you think I’ve a heart too? My brain and body longs for such a home, but my heart’s down South with mine own people who love and need me.”
The committee did their best to bring the Preacher to a favourable decision at once, but he smiled a firm refusal. They refused to report it to the church, and sent Deacon Crane, now a venerable man of seventy-six, the warmest admirer of the Preacher among them all to Hambright. They authorised him to make an amazing offer of salary, if that would be any inducement, and they felt sure it would.
When the Deacon reached Hambright and saw its poverty and general air of unimportance he felt encouraged.
“A man of such power stay a lifetime in this little hole! Impossible!” he exclaimed under his breath, when he looked out of the bus along the wide deserted looking streets with a straggling cottage here and there on either side.
He stopped at the same hotel with the Preacher and became his shadow for a week. He was seated with him under the oak in the square, threshing over his argument for the hundredth time, in the most good-natured, but everlastingly persistent way.
“Doctor, it’s perfect nonsense for a man of your magnificent talents, of your culture and power over an audience, to think of living always in a little village like this!”