Once to Every Man

hing ready for them to say. For once the tongues of the hillsfolk were sobered into silence.

It was like her--that slim little white statue--so like her in its pallor and frailty of feature and limb that they only gasped and then fell to whispering behind their hands at the resemblance. And somehow, too, as they stared, their faces failed to harden as they had always hardened before, whenever they rebuked her slim, elfish untidiness, for upon the face of stone, which was the face of his wife, John Anderson's chisel had left a fleeting, poignantly wistful smile that seemed touched with the glory of the Virgin Mother herself.

They merely stood and stared--the townsfolk--and yet they only half understood, for when it was noised about the street a few days later that John Anderson had given up forever his occupation of chiseling tombstones for the bleak Boltonwood cemetery--an occupation which at least had yielded him a bare living--and had locked himself up in that back room to "putter with lumps o