the crumbs from our tables.  I’ve proved that we’re rich, instead of being too poor to provide for missions.  And it’s all our Father’s, you know.  When we pay him our tithe we admit that in the only practical way,’ Funny thing was the whole business had been so queer, nobody got mad over his plain talk.  Some of us have begun to tithe, and to enjoy it.  Yes; that young feller is quite a go-ahead young feller.”

J.W. rather admired the tale of the truck; it was like Marty, right enough, to get his tithing talk illustrated with a load of produce; but there was more than a hint of a new Marty, with a new directness and confidence.

So he asked, “What else is he doing that’s making a difference?”

And the floodgates were lifted.  The Bellamy gift of utterance had a congenial theme.  For an hour the stream ran strong and steady, and when it would have stopped none could tell.  But J.W. remembered he had promised to be back with Marty for dinner, and so, in the midst of a story about Marty’s Saturday afternoon outings with the boys, highly reminiscent of their own old-time Saturdays in the Deep Creek timber, J.W. made his excuses and hurried away.

In that hour he had heard of the observing of special days, Thanksgiving and Christmas particularly; of the rage for athletic equipment on every farm which had youngsters, so that the usual anaemic croquet outfit had given place to basketball practice sets, indoor-outdoor ball, volley-ball nets, and other paraphernalia.  Some of it not much used now, since winter had come, but under Marty’s leadership, a skating rink construction gang had thrown up a dirt embankment in a low spot near the creek and then cut a channel far enough upstream to flood about four acres of swamp.  Mr. Bellamy told about the skating tournaments every afternoon of the cold weather for the school children, and Saturday afternoons for the older young folks.  More people went than skated too, the garrulous farmer asserted.  It was just another of that young preacher’s sociability schemes, and there was no end to ’em, seemed like to him.

There was even more on the business side of country life:  how Marty had joined forces with the Grange and the county agent and the cooperators of the creamery and the elevator and the school teachers.  And so on, and so on.

J.W. would be the last to worry about such a program; it just fitted his ideas.  But it made him a little more interested in the Sunday services.  Would Marty’s preaching match his community work?

But before Sunday morning came J.W. had other questions to ask.  He put them to Marty in intervals of the skating races; and again after supper, before going over to the church to meet a little group of Sunday-school folk—­“my teacher-partners” Marty called them—­who were learning with him how to adapt Sunday school science and the teaching art to the conditions of the open country.