of the summer night, he went again to walk upon the veranda.  In the darkness he could not see the hands and they became quiet.  Although he still hungered for the presence of the boy, who was the medium through which he expressed his love of man, the hunger became again a part of his loneliness and his waiting.  Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum washed the few dishes soiled by his simple meal and, setting up a folding cot by the screen door that led to the porch, prepared to undress for the night.  A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity.  In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church.  The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.

PAPER PILLS

He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands.  Long before the time during which we will know him, he was a doctor and drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg.  Later he married a girl who had money.  She had been left a large fertile farm when her father died.  The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful.  Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor.  Within a year after the marriage she died.

The knuckles of the doctor’s hands were extraordinarily large.  When the hands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods.  He smoked a cob pipe and after his wife’s death sat all day in his empty office close by a window that was covered with cobwebs.  He never opened the window.  Once on a hot day in August he tried but found it stuck fast and after that he forgot all about it.

Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the seeds of something very fine.  Alone in his musty office in the Heffner Block above the Paris Dry Goods Company’s store, he worked ceaselessly, building up something that he himself destroyed.  Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.

Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten years.  It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at the knees and elbows.  In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper.  After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls, and when the pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the floor.  For ten years he had but one friend, another old man named John Spaniard who owned a tree nursery.  Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor Reefy took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nursery man.  “That is to confound you, you blathering old sentimentalist,” he cried, shaking with laughter.