profane manner.

"Like enough it was somebody visitin' at the Walton's, and I've made
a--fool of myself after all. What's worse, that poor little Miss Eulie
will hear I've been swearin' agin, and there'll be another awful
prayin' time. What a cussed old fool I be, to promise to quit
swearin'! I know I can't. What's the good o' stoppin'? It's inside,
and might as well come out. The Lord knows I don't mean no disrespect
to Him. It's only one of my ways. He knows well enough that I'm a good
neighbor, and what's the harm in a little cussin'?" and so the strange
old man talked on to himself in the intervals between long pulls at
his pipe.

By the time Gregory reached the top of the hill his strength was quite
exhausted, and, panting, he sat down on the sunny side of a thicket of
cedars, for the late afternoon was growing chilly. Beneath him lay the
one oasis in a desert world.

With an indescribable blending of pleasure and pain, he found himself
tracing with his eye every well-remembered path, and marking every
familiar object.

Not a breath of air was stirring, and it would seem that Nature was
seeking to impart to his perturbed spirit, full of the restless
movement of city life and the inevitable disquiet of sin, something of
her own calmness and peace. The only sounds he heard seemed a part of
nature's silence,--the tinkle of cowbells, the slumberous monotone of
water as it fell over the dam, the grating notes of a katydid,
rendered hoarse by recent cool nights, in a shady ravine near by, and
a black cricket chirping at the edge of the rock on which he sat--