moonlit road, and under the still, arched branches of the trees in the
wood that hid the starlight, came again and again the words of one who
had gone, who perhaps knew better now--"you are as God made you."




--XVI--

A FLY IN THE OINTMENT


The days passed. And with the days, morning, noon and night, they came
by almost every train, the sick and suffering, the lame, the paralytics
and the maimed--a steady influx by twos and threes and fours--from north
over the Canadian boundary line, from the far west, and from the
southernmost tip of the Florida coast. No longer on the company's
schedule was Needley a flag station--it was a regular stop, and its
passenger traffic returns were benign and pleasing things in the
auditor's office. And it was an accustomed sight now, many times a
day--what had once been a strange, rare spectacle--that slow procession
wending its way from the station to the town, some carried, some limping
upon crutches, all snatching at hope of life and health and happiness
again. Needley, perforce, had become a vast boarding house, as it
were--there were few homes indeed that did not harbor their quota of
those who sought the "cure."

But there were others too who came--who were not sick--who had not
faith--who came to laugh and peer and peek. Pleasure yachts dropped
their anchors in the cove around the headland from the Patriarch's