hardly to be credited.

"And here I am on a nice summer morning riding with the minister and
with the whole country acting as if I'd always been decent."

Maybe it was Hank who first called him the minister. It may of course
have been that old Mrs. Rosenwinkle, who, not knowing his name for some
time, explained him to her daughter as "the new preacher of the lost."

At any rate, when Fanny Foster came to make her periodical report it
was found that to the lonely, the outcast and the generally unfit
Cynthia's son was "the new minister." And his influence was already
felt by those who as yet regarded him as just a Green Valley boy who
was helping out. Fanny Foster voiced this sentiment in Joe Baldwin's
shop when she was paying for the four patches Joe had just put on her
second best pair of shoes.

"Well--I shouldn't wonder if Green Valley hadn't got a minister to its
taste at last. He hasn't been regularly appointed and I guess he don't
realize himself that he's it but I'm pretty sure that the minute Parson
Courtney steps out that's just what's going to happen. Of course
there's them that says it can't. Mr. Austin says it would be a
terrible mistake, that he's too young; and Seth Curtis says no rich man
would be fool enough to pester himself with a dinky country church.
But I guess people like Seth and Mr. Austin ain't the kind of people
that have much to say. He's doing regular minister's work, comforting
the sick and picking up the fallen and pacifying the quarrelsome, and
it's work like that that'll elect him.

"And he's getting mighty popular, let me tell you, even with them that