Category: Novels

A Circuit Rider's Wife

If you will look back over the files of the "Southern Christian Advocate," published at the time in Macon, Georgia, you will find the following notice--by a singular coincidence on the page devoted to "obituaries": "Married--Mary Elizabeth Eden to William Asbury Thompson. The...

Chapters

1. Chapter 1

If you will look back over the files of the "Southern Christian Advocate," published at the time in Macon, Georgia, you will find the following notice--by a singular coincidence...

2. Chapter 2

As Sister Glory White had predicted, I "came down to it" at once and soon learned to perform the usual feminine miracles in the bread-tray and skillets. Our happiness did not di...

3. Chapter 3

But this was only the beginning of social and spiritual surprises through which I passed. There was no culture among the people. They looked like the poor kin of the angels in H...

4. Chapter 4

For spiritual beings we do take with singular heartiness to the soil and spoils of this present world. The hope of immortality is more a fear than a hope with many of us. We do...

5. Chapter 5

But the dying are not the only ones who suffer most from the sickness of their hopes. There are men with beautiful souls born with little devil seeds in them somewhere that grow...

6. Chapter 6

This is the wonderful thing about the pure in heart--they do see God. And that was William's distinction. In spite of his own faults and of ethical errors in some of his preachi...

7. Chapter 7

On this circuit, in a house nearly as open as a barn, on a freezing winter night, our baby was born. The gaunt, dark room, the roaring fire upon the wide hearth, the ugly little...

8. Chapter 8

So far, the circuit rider has been the hero of these letters, but in this one his wife shall be the heroine, behind the throne at least, for scarcely any other woman looks or fe...

9. Chapter 9

I do not know if I make you understand that all this time the years were passing--five, ten, fifteen, twenty--and in them we went together up and down and around our little worl...

10. Chapter 10

William never made but two long journeys away from home. One was to visit a brother minister; the other was a sort of involuntary excursion he made away from God in his own mind...

11. Chapter 11

It is curious what things are revealed to us as we go along. I used to wonder, because William wondered, where, in what year, Paul did this or that which is recorded in Acts. I...

12. Chapter 12

The fact that I had a worldly mind was in some ways very fortunate for William. For, when all is said, this is the world we live in, not the Kingdom of Heaven. And while I never...

13. Chapter 13

I have had little to say about the joy of William, although he was one of the most joyful men I have ever known. The reason is I never understood it. His joy was not natural lik...

14. Chapter 14

What we call history is a sorry part of literature, confined to a few great wars and movements in national life and to the important events in the lives of a few important peopl...

15. Chapter 15

I have often wondered what a writer of fiction would have made out of such a story. As a matter of fact, the woman is living to-day, highly respected, serenely proud of her two...

16. Chapter 16

William was too dazed by the misfortune of his superannuation to think or plan for the future. For him there was no future. He sat in the chimney corner, following me about the...

17. Chapter 17

The carnal man never dies in us, nor the carnal woman, either, for that matter. We only say so in our prayers and rituals because we do not know yet how to be spiritually truthf...

18. Chapter 18

I had thought that these letters were finished, but I am adding this postscript to say that I leave New York to-morrow for the little house between the hills on the Redwine Circ...