“You’re right, John Wesley, about that.  I don’t budge, if I can make myself big enough for the job.  It’s too interesting.  And things are happening.  There’s no danger of this church being abandoned.”

“But what do you do, Marty, to make things happen?  I know they don’t just happen.  I’m from the country too, remember that.”

“What do I do?  Not ‘I’ but ‘we.’  Well, we work with our heads first, and our hearts.  Then we get out and go at it.  Take our very first social difficulty; in Delafield you have a dozen places to go to.  Here it’s either the church or the schoolhouse—­that’s all the choice there is.  And the schoolhouse has its limitations.  So our folks have decided to make the church, both here and at Valencia, the center of the community.  That explains the social hall; we call it ‘Community House.’  Everything that goes on, except the barn dances over east that we can’t do much with so far, goes on in the church, or starts with the church, or ends at the church.  That’s the first scheme we put over.  It was fairly easy, you know, because all our country people are pretty much one lot.  We have no rich, and no really poor.  And they’re not organized to death, either, as you are in Delafield.”

“Do you try to have something going on every night, and nearly every day, as Brother Drury does with us?” J.W. asked.

“Not quite,” replied Marty; “we can’t.  We’re too busy growing the food for you town folks.  But we keep up a pretty stiff pace, for the preacher; I have no time hanging on my hands.”

“I should think not,” J.W. commented, “if you try to run everything.  Mr. Drury always seems to have lots of time, just because he makes the rest of us run the works in Delafield First.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” said Marty, shortly, who knew something of the older minister’s strategy.  “That’s according to how you look at it.  I’m not above learning from him, and I don’t run everything, either.  But I’m there, or thereabouts, most of the time.”

“How do you get time for your study and your sermons, then,” queried J. W., “if you’re on the go so much?”

Marty turned a quizzical look at J.W.  “My beloved chum, how did you and I get time for our studies at Cartwright?” he said.  “Besides, I’m making one hand wash the other.  The social life here, for instance, used to be pretty bad, before Henderson came—­that’s the preacher whose place I took.  It was pulling away from the church; now it draws to the church.  Henderson started that.  The people who are my main dependence in the other affairs are mostly the same people I can count on in the Sunday school and League and the preaching service.  The more we do the better it is for what we do Sundays.”

“Then, there’s another Because these people and I know one another so well, I couldn’t put on airs in the pulpit if I wanted to.  I’ve just got to preach straight, and I won’t preach a thing I can’t back up myself.  I use country illustrations; show them their own world.  It’s one big white mark for the Farwell farm, as you might suppose, that I know the best side of country life, though I don’t advertise your real estate.”