slowly killed his hopes. He saw the Faith going from his people. He
saw that they were ceasing to care. The town was then, as it is
to-day, McDermott's town, but McDermott had fallen away when his
riches came, and some terrible event, a quarrel with a former priest
who had attended Alta from a distant point, had left McDermott bitter.
He practically drove the pastor from his door. He closed his factory
to the priest's people and one by one they left. Only eighteen
families stayed. The dying priest counted them over in his dreams, and
sobbed as he told of the others who had gone. Then the bigotry that
McDermott's faith had kept concealed broke out under the encouragement
of McDermott's infidelity. The boys of the town flung insults at the
priest as he passed. The people gave little, and that grudgingly. I
could almost feel his pain as he told in his delirium how, day after
day, he had dragged his frail body to church and on the round of
duty. But every now and then, as if the words came naturally to bear
him up, he would say:

"'It's for God's sake. I am nothing. It will all come in His own good
time.'

"Then I knew the spirit that kept him to his work. He went over his
visit to me. How he had hoped, and then how his hopes were dashed to
the ground. Oh, dear Lord, had I known what it all meant to that
sensitive, saintly nature, I would have sold my ring and cross to give
him what he needed. But my words seemed to have broken him and he came
home to die. The night of his return he spent before the altar in his
log church, and, Saints of Heaven, how he prayed! When I heard his
poor, dry lips whisper over the prayer once more I bowed my head on
the coverlet and cried as only a child can cry--and I was only a child
at that minute in spite of my white hair and wrinkles. He had offered