Journeys end in lovers meeting Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing some new and great period in the Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself: what does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and, as his manner is, first to his Englishmen. In insisting that we can understand the New England Puritans only when we think of them as Englishmen profoundly interested in the great movement of their own day, we are not denying their influence in the development of American character. We are only saying that in order to trace that influence we must follow the main current of history rather than any parochial side channels. We have as our inheritance, which we share with our British brethren, the whole Puritan movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Physical geography has little to do in the transmission of thought. Ideas are not, like cats, attached to places. They follow persons. The man of the Pilgrim company best beloved and longest remembered was the pastor, John Robinson, who crossed the sea only in spirit. Hampden and Pym and Eliot and Baxter and Milton and Cromwell have left a deeper impress upon America than all the Mathers. To-day we are better able to appreciate the efforts of the Puritan than were our immediate predecessors. We cannot accept his answers, but we are beginning to ask the same kind of questions. We are less sure than we used to be that religion and politics can be kept in separate compartments. We are not altogether satisfied with purely secular solutions of social problems. We hear people talking again about a community church. In an amendment to the Constitution enforcing prohibition we have gone further than the Puritan Commonwealth did in looking after the morals of the people. The individual conscience is more and more reinforced by a social conscience that finds its expression in law. Our philosophers have been telling us that religion is loyalty to a beloved community. All this does not indicate a return to the Puritanism of the seventeenth century, but it makes seventeenth-century Puritanism more intellig!ble to us. "She wept as the rough cloth scratched her hands, and she thought how harsh it would be for the tender baby skin" The Drought By DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH Illustrations by Robert E. Johnston That people are but creatures of circumstance is the theme of this story. The heat or cold or the rainfall of a day may change the career or movements of a person's life. B ESSIE HICKSON gazed in despair at her little vegetable garden, which the drought had killed. She and Ed had planted it with eager pride in the early Texas spring, thinking that it would furnish their living through most of the summer, and that they could sell enough extra vegetables from it to provide for their other necessities until autumn. Ed would have no money coming in till he had sold his cotton in the autumn, for he was a tenant farmer, working a few acres "on shares," planting only cotton and wholly dependent on the success of that single crop. The garden had flourished flamboyantly at first, she and Ed tending it with the enthusiasm of very young and newly married folk who adore their first garden, and with the anxiety of those who realize that much depends upon its growth. But the drought had come with its hot days and dewless nights, and now the gay,,green plants were shriveled and dead, the corn-stalks standing like skeletons that rattled in the wind, the withered bean vines trailing from their rude sticks in disarray, and all the carefully tended beds full of dead leaves and sifting, powdery dust. As the young wife sat by the window of her house, looking at the ruined garden and the cotton-field beyond it, she permitted herself for the first time to face her situation squarely. Until now she had hidden the facts behind her, trusting with the unreasoning optimism of youth to some illogical reversal of events that would make her life again the easy, pleasant thing it had always been until recently. But now she took her thoughts out as from some dark closet into the light of day and considered them. She needed money desperately, and none was available. In September there would be a baby, and she must make its tiny clothes. She had already delayed too long, but now at last something must be done. "What am I going to do?" she asked herself querulously. "I don't see any way out-unless-" She shrank from that "unless." She would n't face that yet; perhaps there would be some other way. The house, a mere shanty set on the edge of the cotton-field, warped by sun and rain, its paint washed away save for a few cracked flakes, its porch lurching forward, and its shed-kitchen dragging back like a slattern's skirt that is hitched up in front and trailing in the rear, was obviously a house that had given up hope. She could see Ed in the field, "shopping cotton," his body, clad in faded blue overalls, bent over the hoe as he patiently cut the weeds from the rows, a red bandana handkerchief about his neck, and his serious young face shaded by a Mexican straw hat, with broad brim and peaked crown. The sturdy young cotton plants, not yet hurt by the drought that had killed less hardy growths, lifted proud leaves to the light, as in defiance of inimical forces of nature, as if daring the drought to touch that field. Surely rain would come before the cotton crop was ruined, Bess Hickson told herself. The autumn would bring them money, but she could not wait till then. "It 's middle o' June now," she whispered. "I can't wait no longer. There |