——­To this day I think of death as a valley:  a dark shadowy valley:  the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  So persistent are the impressions of boyhood!  As I sat in the church I could see, as distinctly as though I were there, the church of my boyhood and the tall dyspeptic preacher looming above the pulpit, the peculiar way the light came through the coarse colour of the windows, the barrenness and stiffness of the great empty room, the raw girders overhead, the prim choir.  There was something in that preacher, gaunt, worn, sodden though he appeared:  a spark somewhere, a little flame, mostly smothered by the gray dreariness of his surroundings, and yet blazing up at times to some warmth.

As I remember it, our church was a church of failures.  They sent us the old gray preachers worn out in other fields.  Such a succession of them I remember, each with some peculiarity, some pathos.  They were of the old sort, indoctrinated Presbyterians, and they harrowed well our barren field with the tooth of their hard creed.  Some thundered the Law, some pleaded Love; but of all of them I remember best the one who thought himself the greatest failure.  I think he had tried a hundred churches—­a hard life, poorly paid, unappreciated—­in a new country.  He had once had a family, but one by one they had died.  No two were buried in the same cemetery; and finally, before he came to our village, his wife, too, had gone.  And he was old, and out of health, and discouraged:  seeking some final warmth from his own cold doctrine.  How I see him, a trifle bent, in his long worn coat, walking in the country roads:  not knowing of a boy who loved him!

He told my father once:  I recall his exact, words: 

“My days have been long, and I have failed.  It was not given me to reach men’s hearts.”

Oh, gray preacher, may I now make amends?  Will you forgive me?  I was a boy and did not know; a boy whose emotions were hidden under mountains of reserve:  who could have stood up to be shot more easily than he could have said:  “I love you!”

Of that preacher’s sermons I remember not one word, though I must have heard scores of them—­only that they were interminably long and dull and that my legs grew weary of sitting and that I was often hungry.  It was no doubt the dreadful old doctrine that he preached, thundering the horrors of disobedience, urging an impossible love through fear and a vain belief without reason.  All that touched me not at all, save with a sort of wonder at the working of his great Adam’s apple and the strange rollings of his cavernous eyes.  This he looked upon as the work of God; thus for years he had sought, with self-confessed failure, to touch the souls of his people.  How we travel in darkness and the work we do in all seriousness counts for naught, and the thing we toss off in play-time, unconsciously, God uses!