The document tells the story of a man who was unemployed and struggling to find a job 5 years ago. He had an interview at the hospital but his car broke down on the way. He arrived just in time by walking the rest of the way. At the hospital, he met a crying mother whose son had been seriously injured playing cricket despite her objections. This made him reflect on how children often disagree with their parents' decisions. He had a similar experience choosing his career path against his parents' wishes but later realized they were right.

3. 5 years ago, I was so upset about my job. I was applying for my job everywhere because
I need it. One day I got a letter from the hospital to arrive early in the morning so I just
started wake-up and get ready for my interview and started my car but unfortunately, after
reaching 5 km away from my hospital where I have my interview my car got stuck in and
no one was there to make me free of this so I just locked my car there and started walking
barefooted when I was passing by a school. Suddenly I was a mother with her child she
was shouting at her child and saying to him that you are so irresponsible about the school
tasks you haven’t done your work on time. And the child was looking at her mother like
he doesn’t even care about what her mom is asking from him. But at a certain time.
When her mother ask her about her cricket show he suddenly got excited, her expressions
changed and he told her that I was practicing for my show for almost about 3 and half
months and last night before the show I didn’t sleep I just repeated all my failures spots
of cricket and doing my practice as well.
Her mother got furious about two different things which were those that he was not paying
attention towards his study but he was showing full passion about her cricket show.
Her mother got some past clicks in her mind that when his child was only 5 years old he
was sitting in the backyard and staring at his older brothers playing cricket. Whenever
they hit the sixes at his 5 years old baby shout with the same noisy pitch. But her mother
and father always preferred their own choice of mind which was becoming a good
successful man by gaining the highest marks in the graduation degree. At that time her
mother makes a silent moment and starts thinking about what if I accept his request for
joining the cricket team. Should I give him a chance of getting a better person but not in
the field of study but field of game or extracurricular activity.
Of a sudden, when she was hiding in her thoughts. Her child started laughing, then she
got to know what was happening near her. Then I and she (child’s mother) both got to
All copy rights reserved

4. know that there was a monkey on the street showing a beautiful dance. There were so
many people gathered around the monkey and started making videos of the monkey
I was also a person who use social media so much so I just picked my phone up and
started making a video of the monkey all of a sudden the person who was parenting the
monkey asked everyone. For some monkey I also gave him money as well then I walked
out of there and now it's almost 10 min left of arrival time. I just walk fast and reached the
hospital at the exact arrival time. When I enter I saw a mother she was crying so heavily
and there was no one around there I just go near her and gave him a calm hand on her
back and ask her why are you crying? Is there anything I can help you out she just looked
at me and told me that her son who just joined the cricket team is injured so heavily that
doctors are now saying that it is very difficult to save him and she was crying and saying
I asked him so many times that you should not join a team you are not made for cricket
team but you didn’t agree with me son After hearing these words I realized that the child
I have seen in the morning was also stubborn like this child and but this child joined the
team by his stubbornness? And now her mother is facing more. I just started thinking
about the child I have seen in the morning that how a child disagrees with their parents
so easily if though we all know our parents always make a perfect decision. They have
more experience they have more skills. Anyhow, I just got into the room where my
interview is going to be held. In that room, there were 2 professors one was my looking
so strict and the other one has facial expressions so polite they started asking about me
and my passion after giving an interview to them I just got out of the room but deep down
I was thinking about the child who was passionate about cricket but the only thing was
his mother was against that activity. Far more I reached my home, I have a kitten her
name is Bella whenever I enter the home. Bella just started snoring near me showing love
with me I was tired so I just walked into my room. Turned off the lights and lay down on

5. bed. But again I was thinking of that child somehow we all have no idea that what we are
doing is good for our future. Same like this I have faced so many things in my own life
When I was in school I just got my metric result my parents was saying to join computer
but I have my interest in biology I just ignore them and got admission to the medical
college after few months when I feel the burden of books and study I just feel sad for
making biology as my first choice because my age fellows were joined computer and they
were easily getting marks plus they were also having joyful life but in medical we have
only studied the life and if we do show some interest in other subjects we will get bad
grades so medical students have studied as to their priority but after getting graduating I
realized that getting admission in medical college was a blessing for me because I have
seen so many people crying to get admission in medical colleges. So at that time
appreciated my own decision. But far away it was my destiny to be a medical student
among these it is my desire also and when these desires and destination. Joining it will
become a blessing. The story concerns three men in a house in a street. If I could say the
words I would sing the story. I would whisper it into the ears of women, of mothers. I would
run through the streets saying it over and over. My tongue would be torn loose--it would
rattle against my teeth. The three men are in a room in the house. One is young and
dandified. He continually laughs. There is a second man who has a long white beard. He
is consumed with doubt but occasionally his doubt leaves him and he sleeps. A third man
there is who has wicked eyes and who moves nervously about the room rubbing his hands
together. The three men are waiting - waiting. Upstairs in the house, a woman is standing
with her back to a wall, in half-darkness by a window. That is the foundation of my story
and everything I will ever know is distilled in it. I remember that a fourth man came to the
house, a white silent man. Everything was as silent as the sea at night. His feet on the
stone floor of the room where the three men were made no sound. The man with the
wicked eyes became like a boiling liquid - he ran back and forth like a caged animal. The

6. old grey man was infected by his nervousness - he kept pulling at his beard. The fourth
man, the white one, went upstairs to the woman. There she was - waiting. How silent the
house was - how loudly all the clocks in the neighborhood ticked. The woman upstairs
craved love. That must have been the story. She hungered for love with her whole being.
She wanted to create in love. When the white silent man came into her presence she
sprang forward. Her lips were parted. There was a smile on her lips. The white one said
nothing. In his eyes, there was no rebuke, no question. His eyes were as impersonal as
stars. Down stairs, the wicked one whined and ran back and forth like a little lost hungry
dog. The grey one tried to follow him about but presently grew tired and lay down on the
floor to sleep. He never awoke again. The dandified fellow lay on the floor too. He laughed
and played with his tiny black mustache. I have no words to tell what happened in my
story. I cannot tell the story. The white silent one may have been death. The waiting eager
woman may have been life. Both the old grey bearded man and the wicked one puzzle
me. I think and think but cannot understand them. Most of the time however I do not think
of them at all. I keep thinking about the dandified man who laughed all through my story.
If I could understand him I could understand everything. I could run through the world
telling a wonderful story. I would no longer be dumb. Why was I not given words? Why
am I dumb? I have a wonderful story to tell but know no way to tell it.
My name is buffer bings. I was born of honest parents in one of the humbler walks of life,
my father being a manufacturer of dog oil and my mother having a small studio in the
shadow of the village church, where she disposed of unwelcome babes. In my boyhood I
was trained to habits of industry; I not only assisted my father in procuring dogs for his
vats but was frequently employed by my mother to carry away the debris of her work in
the studio. In the performance of this duty, I sometimes needed all my natural intelligence
for all the law officers of the vicinity were opposed to my mother's business. They were
not elected on an opposition ticket, and the matter had never been made a political issue;

7. it just happened so. My father's business of making dog oil was, naturally, less unpopular,
though the owners of missing dogs sometimes regarded him with suspicion, which was
reflected, to some extent, upon me. My father had, as silent partners, all the physicians
of the town, who seldom wrote a prescription which did not contain what they were
pleased to designate as ol. Can. It is the most valuable medicine ever discovered. But
most persons are unwilling to make personal sacrifices for the afflicted, and it was evident
that many of the fattest dogs in town had been forbidden to play with me--a fact which
pained my young sensibilities, and at one time came near driving me to become a pirate.
Looking back upon those days, I cannot but regret, at times, that by indirectly bringing my
beloved parents to their death I was the author of misfortunes profoundly affecting my
future.
One evening while passing my father's oil factory with the body of a foundling from my
mother's studio I saw a constable who seemed to be closely watching my movements.
Young as I was, I had learned that a constable's acts, of whatever apparent character,
are prompted by the most reprehensible motives, and i avoided him by dodging into the
oilery by a side door which happened to stand ajar. I locked it at once and was alone with
my dead. My father had retired for the night. The only light in the place came from the
furnace, which glowed a deep, rich crimson under one of the vats, casting ruddy
reflections on the walls. Within the cauldron the oil still rolled in indolent ebullition,
occasionally pushing to the surface a piece of dog. Seating myself to wait for the
constable to go away, i held the naked body of the foundling in my lap and tenderly
stroked its short, silken hair. Ah, how beautiful it was! Even at that early age I was
passionately fond of children, and as I looked upon this cherub I could almost find it in my
heart to wish that the small, red wound upon its breast--the work of my dear mother--had
not been mortal.

8. It had been my custom to throw the babes into the river which nature had thoughtfully
provided for the purpose, but that night i did not dare to leave the oilier for fear of the
constable. "After all," I said to myself, "it cannot greatly matter if I put it into this cauldron.
My father will never know the bones from those of a puppy, and the few deaths which
may result from administering another kind of oil for the incomparable ol. Can. Are not
important in a population which increases so rapidly." in short, i took the first step in crime
and brought myself untold sorrow by casting the babe into the cauldron.
The next day, somewhat to my surprise, my father, rubbing his hands with satisfaction,
informed me and my mother that he had obtained the finest quality of oil that was ever
seen; that the physicians to whom he had shown samples had so pronounced it. He
added that he had no knowledge as to how the result was obtained; the dogs had been
treated in all respects as usual, and were of an ordinary breed. I deemed it my duty to
explain--which i did, though palsied would have been my tongue if i could have foreseen
the consequences. Bewailing their previous ignorance of the advantages of combining
their industries, my parents at once took measures to repair the error. My mother removed
her studio to a wing of the factory building and my duties in connection with the business
ceased; i was no longer required to dispose of the bodies of the small superfluous, and
there was no need of alluring dogs to their doom, for my father discarded them altogether,
though they still had an honorable place in the name of the oil. So suddenly thrown into
idleness, i might naturally have been expected to become vicious and dissolute, but i did
not. The holy influence of my dear mother was ever about me to protect me from the
temptations which beset youth, and my father was a deacon in a church. Alas, that
through my fault these estimable persons should have come to so bad an end!
Finding a double profit in her business, my mother now devoted herself to it with a new
assiduity. She removed not only superfluous and unwelcome babes to order, but went
out into the highways and byways, gathering in children of a larger growth, and even such

9. adults as she could entice to the oilery. My father, too, enamored of the superior quality
of oil produced, purveyed for his vats with diligence and zeal. The conversion of their
neighbors into dog-oil became, in short, the one passion of their lives--an absorbing and
overwhelming greed took possession of their souls and served them in place of a hope in
heaven--by which, also, they were inspired.
So enterprising had they now become that a public meeting was held and resolutions
passed severely censuring them. It was intimated by the chairman that any further raids
upon the population would be met in a spirit of hostility. My poor parents left the meeting
broken-hearted, desperate and, i believe, not altogether sane. Anyhow, i deemed it
prudent not to enter the oilery with them that night, but slept outside in a stable.
At about midnight some mysterious impulse caused me to rise and peer through a window
into the furnace-room, where i knew my father now slept. The fires were burning as
brightly as if the following day's harvest had been expected to be abundant. One of the
large cauldrons was slowly "walloping" with a mysterious appearance of self-restraint, as
if it bided its time to put forth its full energy. My father was not in bed; he had risen in his
night clothes and was preparing a noose in a strong cord. From the looks which he cast
at the door of my mother's bedroom i knew too well the purpose that he had in mind.
Speechless and motionless with terror, i could do nothing in prevention or warning.
Suddenly the door of my mother's apartment was opened, noiselessly, and the two
confronted each other, both apparently surprised. The lady, also, was in her night clothes,
and she held in her right hand the tool of her trade, a long, narrow-bladed dagger. She,
too, had been unable to deny herself the last profit which the unfriendly action of the
citizens and my absence had left her. For one instant they looked into each other's blazing
eyes and then sprang together with indescribable fury. Round and round, the room they
struggled, the man cursing, the woman shrieking, both fighting like demons--she to strike
him with the dagger, he to strangle her with his great bare hands. I know not how long i

10. had the unhappiness to observe this disagreeable instance of domestic infelicity, but at
last, after a more than usually vigorous struggle, the combatants suddenly moved apart.
My father's breast and my mother's weapon showed evidences of contact. For another
instant they glared at each other in the most unamiable way; then my poor, wounded
father, feeling the hand of death upon him, leaped forward, unmindful of resistance,
grasped my dear mother in his arms, dragged her to the side of the boiling cauldron,
collected all his failing energies, and sprang in with her! In a moment, both had
disappeared and were adding their oil to that of the committee of citizens who had called
the day before with an invitation to the public meeting.
Convinced that these unhappy events closed to me every avenue to an honorable career
in that town, i removed to the famous city of otumwee, where these memoirs are written
with a heart full of remorse for a heedless act entailing so dismal a commercial disaster.
The first church of tiverton stands on a hill, whence it overlooks the little village, with one
or two pine-shaded neighborhoods beyond, and, when the air is clear, a thin blue line of
upland delusively like the sea. Set thus austerely aloft, it seems now a survival of the day
when men used to go to meeting gun in hand, and when one stayed, a lookout by the
door, to watch and listen. But this the present dwellers do not remember. Conceding not
a sigh to the holy and strenuous past, they lament--and the more as they grow older--the
stiff climb up the hill, albeit to rest in so sweet a sanctuary at the top. For it is sweet indeed.
A soft little wind seems always to be stirring there, on summer sundays a messenger of
good. It runs whispering about, and wafts in all sorts of odors: honey of the milkweed and
wild rose, and a christmas tang of the evergreens just below. It carries away something,
too--scents calculated to bewilder the thrift-hunting bee: sometimes a whiff of peppermint
from an old lady's pew, but oftener the breath of musk and southernwood, gathered in
ancient gardens, and borne up here to embroider the preacher's drowsy homilies, and
remind us, when we faint, of the keen savor of righteousness.

11. Here in the church do we congregate from week to week; but behind it, on a sloping
hillside, is the last home of us all, the old burying-ground, overrun with a briery tangle,
and relieved by nature's sweet and cunning hand from the severe decorum set ordinarily
about the dead. Our very faithlessness has made it fair. There was a time when we were
a little ashamed of it. We regarded it with affection, indeed, but affection of the sort
accorded some rusty relative who has lain too supine in the rut of years. Thus, with
growing ambition came, in due course, the project of a new burying-ground. This we
dignified, even in common speech; it was always grandly "the cemetery." while it lay
unrealized in the distance, the home of our forbears fell into neglect, and nature marched
in, according to her lavishness, and adorned what we ignored. The white alder crept
farther and farther from its bounds; tansy and wild rose rioted in profusion, and soft
patches of violets smiled to meet the spring. Here were, indeed, great riches, "a little of
everything" that pasture life. Affords: a hardy bed of checkerberry, crimson strawberries
nodding on long stalks, and in one sequestered corner the beloved linnaea. It seemed a
consecrated pasture shut off from daily use, and so given up to pleasantness that you
could scarcely walk there without setting foot on some precious outgrowth of the spring,
or pushing aside a summer loveliness better made for wear.
Ambition had its fulfillment. We bought our cemetery, a large, green tract, quite square,
and lying open to the sun. But our pendulum had swung too wide. Like many folk who
suffer from one discomfort, we had gone to the utmost extreme and courted another. We
were tired of climbing hills, and so we pressed too far into the lowland; and the first grave
dug in our cemetery showed three inches of water at the bottom. It was in "prince's new
lot," and there his young daughter was to lie. But her lover had stood by while the men
were making the grave; and, looking into the ooze below, he woke to the thought of her
fair young body there.

12. "god!" they heard him say, "she sha'n't lay so. Leave it as it is, an' come up into the old
buryin'-ground. There's room enough by me."
The men, all mates of his, stopped work without a glance and followed him; and up there
in the dearer shrine her place was made. The father said but a word at her changed
estate. Neighbors had hurried in to bring him the news; he went first to the unfinished
grave in the cemetery, and then strode up the hill, where the men had not yet done. After
watching them for a while in silence, he turned aside; but he came back to drop a
trembling hand upon the lover's arm.
"i guess," he said miserably, "she'd full as lieves lay here by you."
And she will be quite beside him, though, in the beaten ways of earth, others have come
between. For years he lived silently and apart; but when his mother died, and he and his
father were left staring at the dulled embers of life, he married a good woman, who
perhaps does not deify early dreams; yet she is tender of them, and at the death of her
own child it was she who went toiling up to the graveyard, to see that its little place did
not encroach too far. She gave no reason, but we all knew it was because she meant to
let her husband lie there by the long-loved guest.
Naturally enough, after this incident of the forsaken grave, we conceived a strange horror
of the new cemetery, and it has remained deserted to this day. It is nothing but a meadow
now, with that one little grassy hollow in it to tell a piteous tale. It is mown by any farmer
who chooses to take it for a price; but we regard it differently from any other plot of ground.
It is "the cemetery," and always will be. We wonder who has bought the grass. "eli's got
the cemetery this year," we say. And sometimes awe-stricken little squads of school
children lead one another there, hand in hand, to look at the grave where annie prince
was going to be buried when her beau took her away. They never seem to connect that
heart-broken wraith of a lover with the bent farmer who goes to and fro driving the cows.
He wears patched overalls, and has sciatica in winter; but i have seen the gleam of youth

13. awakened, though remotely, in his eyes. I do not believe he ever quite forgets; there are
moments, now and then, at dusk or midnight, all his for poring over those dulled pages of
the past.
After we had elected to abide by our old home, we voted an enlargement of its bounds;
and thereby hangs a tale of outlawed revenge. Long years ago "old abe eaton" quarreled
with his twin brother, and vowed, as the last fiat of an eternal divorce, "i won't be buried
in the same yard with ye!"
The brother died first; and because he lay within a little knoll beside the fence, abe willfully
set a public seal on that iron oath by purchasing a strip of land outside, wherein he should
himself be buried. Thus they would rest in a hollow correspondence, the fence between.
It all fell out as he ordained, for we in tiverton are cheerfully willing to give the dead their
way. Lax enough is the helpless hand in the fictitious stiffness of its grasp; and we are not
the people to deny it holding, by courtesy at least. Soon enough does the sceptre of
mortality crumble and fall. So abe was buried according to his wish. But when necessity
commanded us to add unto ourselves another acre, we took in his grave with it, and the
fence, falling into decay, was never renewed. There he lies, in affectionate decorum,
beside the brother he hated; and thus does the greater good wipe out the individual
wrong.
So now, as in ancient times, we toil steeply up here, with the dead upon his bier; for not
often in tiverton do we depend on that uncouth monstrosity, the hearse. It is not that we
do not own one,--a rigid box of that name has belonged to us now for many a year; and
when sudleigh came out with a new one, plumes, trappings, and all, we broached the
idea of emulating her. But the project fell through after brad freeman's contented remark
that he guessed the old one would last us out. He "never heard no complaint from
anybody 't ever rode in it." that placed our last journey on a homely, humorous basis, and

14. we smiled, and reflected that we preferred going up the hill borne by friendly hands, with
the light of heaven falling on our coffin-lids.
The antiquary would set much store by our headstones, did he ever find them out. Certain
of them are very ancient, according to our ideas; for they came over from england, and
are now fallen into the grayness of age. They are woven all over with lichens, and the
blackberry binds them fast. Well, too, for them! They need the grace of some such veiling;
for most of them are alive, even to this day, with warning skulls, and awful cherubs
compounded of bleak, bald faces and sparsely feathered wings. One discovery, made
there on a summer day, has not, i fancy, been duplicated in another new england town.
On six of the larger tombstones are carved, below the grass level, a row of tiny imps,
grinning faces and humanized animals. Whose was the hand that wrought? The
tivertonians know nothing about it. They say there was a certain old veasey who, some
eighty odd years ago, used to steal into the graveyard with his tools, and there, for love,
scrape the mosses from the stones and chip the letters clear. He liked to draw, "creatur's"
especially, and would trace them for children on their slates. He lived alone in a little
house long since fallen, and he would eat no meat. That is all they know of him. I can
guess but one thing more: that when no looker-on was by, he pushed away the grass,
and wrote his little jokes, safe in the kindly tolerance of the dead. This was the identical
soul who should, in good old days, have been carving gargoyles and misereres; here his
only field was the obscurity of tiverton churchyard, his only monument these
grotesqueries so cunningly concealed. We have epitaphs, too,--all our own as yet, for the
world has not discovered them. One couple lies in well-to-do respectability under a tiny
monument not much taller than the conventional gravestone, but shaped on a pretentious
model.
"we'd ruther have it nice," said the builders, "even if there ain't much of it."

15. These were eliza marden and peleg her husband, who worked from sun to sun, with scant
reward save that of pride in their own fore-handedness. I can imagine them as they drove
to church in the open wagon, a couple portentously large and prosperous: their one child,
hannah, sitting between them, and glancing about her, in a flickering, intermittent way, at
the pleasant holiday world. Hannah was no worker; she liked a long afternoon in the sun,
her thin little hands busied about nothing weightier than crochet; and her mother regarded
her with a horrified patience, as one who might some time be trusted to sow all her wild
oats of idleness. The well-mated pair died within the same year, and it was hannah who
composed their epitaph, with an artistic accuracy, we townsfolk found something haunting
and bewildering in the lines; they drew, and yet they baffled us, with their suggested
echoes luring only to betray. Hannah never wrote anything else, but we always cherished
the belief that she could do "'most anything" with words and their possibilities. Still, we
accepted her one crowning achievement, and never urged her to further proof. In tiverton
we never look genius in the mouth. Nor did hannah herself propose developing her gift.
Relieved from the spur of those two unquiet spirits who had begotten her, she settled
down to sit all day in the sun, learning new patterns of crochet; and having cheerfully let
her farm run down, she died at last in a placid poverty.
Then there was desire baker, who belonged to the era of colonial hardship, and who,
through a redundant punctuation, is relegated to a day still more remote. For some stone-
cutter, scornful of working by the card, or born with an inordinate taste for periods, set
forth, below her obiit, the astounding statement:--
"the first woman. She made the journey to boston. By stage."
Here, too, are the ironies whereof departed life is prodigal. This is the tidy lot of peter
merrick, who had a desire to stand well with the world, in leaving it, and whose purple and
fine linen were embodied in the pomp of death. He was a cobbler, and he put his small
savings together to erect a modest monument to his own memory. Every sunday he

16. visited it, "after meetin'," and perhaps his day-dreams, as he sat leather-aproned on his
bench, were still of that white marble idealism. The inscription upon it was full of significant
blanks; they seemed an interrogation of the destiny which governs man. But ambitious
peter never lay there at all; for in his later prime, with one flash of sharp desire to see the
world, he went on a voyage to the banks, and was drowned. And his wife? The story
grows somewhat threadbare. She summoned his step-brother to settle the estate, and
he, a marble- cutter by trade, filled in the date of peter's death with letters english and
illegible. In the process of their carving, the widow stood by, hands folded under her apron
from the midsummer sun. The two got excellent well acquainted, and the stone-cutter
prolonged his stay. He came again in a little over a year, at thanksgiving time, and they
were married. Which shows that nothing is certain in life,--no, not the proprieties of our
leaving it,--and that even there we must walk softly, writing no boastful legend for time to
annul. At one period a certain quatrain had a great run in tiverton; it was the epitaph of
the day. Noting how it overspread that stony soil, you picture to yourself the modest pride
of its composer; unless, indeed, it had been copied from an older inscription in an english
yard, and transplanted through the heart and brain of some settler whose thoughts were
ever flitting back. Thus it runs in decorous metre:--
"dear husband, now my life is passed, you have dearly loved me to the last. Grieve not
for me, but pity take
On my dear children for my sake."
But one sorrowing widower amended it, according to his wife's direction, so that it bore a
new and significant meaning. He was charged to
"pity take
On my dear parent for my sake."

17. The lesson was patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and she was
"difficult." who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on the possibilities of reef
and quicksand for the alien two left alone without her guiding hand? So she set the
warning of her love and fear to be no more forgotten while she herself should be
remembered.
The husband was a silent man. He said very little about his intentions; performance was
enough for him. Therefore it happened that his "parent," adopted perforce, knew nothing
about this public charge until she came upon it, on her first sunday visit, surveying the
new glory of the stone. The story goes that she stood before it, a square, portentous figure
in black alpaca and warlike mitts, and that she uttered these irrevocable words. And
monday morning, spite of his loyal dissuasions, she packed her "blue chist," and drove
off to a far-away cousin, who got her "nussin'" to do. Another lesson from the warning
finger of death: let what was life not dream that it can sway the life that is, after the two
part company.
Not always were mothers-in-law such breakers of the peace. There is a story in tiverton
of one man who went remorsefully mad after his wife's death, and whose mind dwelt
unceasingly on the things he had denied her. These were not many, yet the sum seemed
to him colossal. It piled the ossa of his grief. Especially did he writhe under the
remembrance of certain blue dishes she had desired the week before her sudden death;
and one night, driven by an insane impulse to expiate his blindness, he walked to town,
bought them, and placed them in a foolish order about her grave. It was a puerile, crazy
deed, but no one smiled, not even the little children who heard of it next day, on the way
home from school, and went trudging up there to see. To their stirring minds it seemed a
strange departure from the comfortable order of things, chiefly because their elders stood
about with furtive glances at one another and murmurs of "poor creatur'!" but one man,
wiser than the rest, "harnessed up," and went to tell the dead woman's mother, a mile

18. away. Jonas was "shackled;" he might "do himself a mischief." in the late afternoon, the
guest so summoned walked quietly into the silent house, where jonas sat by the window,
beating one hand incessantly upon the sill, and staring at the air. His sister, also, had
come; she was frightened, however, and had betaken herself to the bedroom, to sob. But
in walked this little plump, soft-footed woman, with her banded hair, her benevolent
spectacles, and her atmosphere of calm.
"i guess i'll blaze a fire, jonas," said she. "you step out an' git me a mite o' kindlin'."
The air of homely living enwrapped him once again, and mechanically, with the inertia of
old habit, he obeyed. They had a "cup o' tea" together; and then, when the dishes were
washed, and the peaceful twilight began to settle down upon them like a sifting mist, she
drew a little rocking chair jonas," said she, in that still voice which had been harmonized
by the experiences of life, "arter dark, you jest go up an' bring home them blue dishes.
Mary's got an awful lot o' fun in her, an' if she ain't laughin' over that, i'm beat. Now, jonas,
you do it! Do you s'pose she wants them nice blue pieces out there through wind an'
weather? She'd ruther by half see 'em on the parlor cluzzet shelves; an' if you'll fetch 'em
home, i'll scallop some white paper, jest as she liked, an' we'll set 'em up there."
Jonas wakened a little from his mental swoon. Life seemed warmer, more tangible, again.
"law, do go," said the mother soothingly. "she don't want the whole township tramplin' up
there to eye over her chiny. Make her as nervous as a witch. Here's the ha'-bushel basket,
an' some paper to put between 'em. You go, jonas, an' i'll clear off the shelves."
So jonas, whether he was tired of guiding the impulses of his own unquiet mind, or
whether he had become a child again, glad to yield to the maternal, as we all do in our
grief, took the basket and went. He stood by, still like a child, while this comfortable
woman put the china on the shelves, speaking warmly, as she worked, of the pretty
curving of the cups, and her belief that the pitcher was "one you could pour out of." she

19. stayed on at the house, and jonas, through his sickness of the mind, lay back upon her
soothing will as a baby lies in its mother's arms. But the china was never used, even when
he had come to his normal estate, and bought and sold as before. The mother's
prescience was too keen for that.
Here in this ground are the ambiguities of life carried over into that other state, its pathos
and its small misunderstandings. This was a much- married man whose last spouse had
been a triple widow. Even to him the situation proved mathematically complex, and the
sumptuous stone to her memory bears the dizzying legend that "enoch nudd who erects
this stone is her fourth husband and his fifth wife." perhaps it was the exigencies of space
which brought about this amazing elision; but surely, in its very apparent intention, there
is only a modest pride. For indubitably the much-married may plume themselves upon
being also the widely sought. If it is the crown of sex to be desired, here you have it, under
seal of the civil bond. No baseless, windy boasting that "i might an if i would!" nay, here
be the marriage ties to testify.
In this pleasant, weedy corner is a little white stone, not so long erected. "i shall arise in
thine image," runs the inscription; and reading it, you shall remember that the dust within
belonged to a little hunchback, who played the fiddle divinely, and had beseeching eyes.
With that cry he escaped from the marred conditions of the clay. Here, too (for this is a
sort of bachelor nook), is the grave of a man whom we unconsciously thrust into a
permanent masquerade. Years and years ago he broke into a house,--an unknown felony
in our quiet limits,--and was incontinently shot. The burglar lost his arm, and went about
at first under a cloud of disgrace and horror, which became, with healing of the public
conscience, a veil of sympathy. After his brief imprisonment indoors, during the healing
of the mutilated stump, he came forth among us again, a man sadder and wiser in that
he had learned how slow and sure may be the road to wealth. He had sown his wild oats
in one night's foolish work, and now he settled down to doing such odd jobs as he might

20. with one hand. We got accustomed to his loss. Those of us who were children when it
happened never really discovered that it was disgrace at all; we called it misfortune, and
no one said us nay. Then one day it occurred to us that he must have been shot "in the
war," and so, all unwittingly to himself, the silent man became a hero. We accepted him.
He was part of our poetic time, and when he died, we held him still in remembrance
among those who fell worthily. When decoration day was first observed in tiverton, one
of us thought of him, and dropped some apple blossoms on his grave; and so it had its
posy like the rest, although it bore no flag. It was the doctor who set us right there. "i
wouldn't do that," he said, withholding the hand of one unthinking child; and she took back
her flag. But she left the blossoms, and, being fond of precedent, we still do the same;
unless we stop to think, we know not why. You may say there is here some perfidy to the
republic and the honored dead, or at least some laxity of morals. We are lax, indeed, but
possibly that is why we are so kind. We are not willing to "hurt folks' feelings" even when
they have migrated to another star; and a flower more or less from the overplus given to
men who made the greater choice will do no harm, tossed to one whose soul may be
sitting, like lazarus, at their riches' gate. But of all these fleeting legends made to, hold
the soul a moment on its way, and keep it here in fickle permanence, one is more dramatic
than all, more charged with power and pathos. Years ago there came into tiverton an
unknown man, very handsome, showing the marks of high breeding, and yet in his
bearing strangely solitary and remote. He wore a cloak, and had a foreign look. He came
walking into the town one night, with dust upon his shoes, and we judged that he had
been traveling a long time. He had the appearance of one who was not nearly at his
journey's end, and would pass through the village, continuing on a longer way. He glanced
at no one, but we all stared at him. He seemed, though we had not the words to put it so,
an exiled prince. He went straight through tiverton street until he came to the parsonage;
and something about it (perhaps its garden, hot with flowers, larkspur, coreopsis, and the
rest) detained his eye, and he walked in. Next day the old doctor was there also with his

21. little black case, but we were none the wiser for that; for the old doctor was of the sort
who intrench themselves in a professional reserve. You might draw up beside the road to
question him, but you could as well deter the course of nature. He would give the roan a
flick, and his sulky would flash by.
"what's the matter with so-and-so?" would ask a mousing neighbor. "he's sick," ran the
laconic reply.
"goin' to die?" one daring querist ventured further.
"some time," said the doctor.
But though he assumed a right to combat thus the outer world, no one was gentler with a
sick man or with those about him in their grief. To the latter he would speak; but he used
to say he drew his line at second cousins.
Into his hands and the true old parson's fell the stranger's confidence, if confidence it
were. He may have died solitary and unexplained; but no matter what he said, his story
was safe. In a week he was carried out for burial; and so solemn was the parson's manner
as he spoke a brief service over him, so thrilling his enunciation of the words "our
brother,"that we dared not even ask what else he should be called. And we never knew.
The headstone, set up by the parson, bore the words "peccator maximus." for a long time
we thought they made the stranger's name, and, judged that he must have been a
foreigner; but a new schoolmistress taught us otherwise. It was latin, she said, and it
meant "the chiefest among sinners." when that report flew round, the parson got wind of
it, and then, in the pulpit one morning, he announced that he felt it necessary to say that
the words had been used "at our brother's request," and that it was his own decision to
write below them, "for this cause came i into the world."
We have accepted the stranger as we accept many things in tiverton. Parson and doctor
kept his secret well. He is quite safe from our questioning; but for years i expected a lady,

22. always young and full of grief, to seek out his grave and shrive him with her tears. She
will not appear now, unless she come as an old, old woman, to lie beside him. It is too
late.
One more record of our vanished time,--this full of poesy only, and the pathos of farewell.
It was not the aged and heartsick alone who lay down here to rest we have been no more
fortunate than others. Youth and beauty came also, and returned no more. This, where
the white rose-bush grows untended, was the young daughter of a squire in far-off days:
too young to have known the pangs of love or the sweet desire of death, save that, in
primrose time, he always paints himself so fair. I have thought the inscription must have
been borrowed from another grave, in some yard shaded by yews and silent under the
cawing of the rooks; perhaps, from its stiffness, translated from a stately latin verse. This
it is, snatched not too soon from oblivion; for a few more years will wear it quite away:--
"here lies the purple flower of a maid
Having to envious death due tribute paid.
Her sudden loss her parents did lament,
And all her friends with grief their hearts did rent. Life's short. Your wicked lives amend
with care, for mortals know we dust and shadows are." the purple flower of a maid!" all
the blossomy sweetness, the fragrant lamenting of lycidas, lies in that one line. Alas, poor
love-lies-bleeding! And yet not poor according to the barren pity we accord the dead, but
dowered with another youth set like a crown upon the unstained front of this. Not going
with sparse blossoms ripened or decayed, but heaped with buds and dripping over in
perfume. She seems so sweet in her still loveliness, the empty promise of her balmy
spring, that for a moment fain are you to snatch her back into the pageant of your day.
Reading that phrase, you feel the earth is poorer for her loss. And yet not so, since the
world holds other greater worlds as well. Elsewhere she may have grown to age and

23. stature; but here she lives yet in beauteous permanence,--as true a part of youth and joy
and rapture as the immortal figures on the grecian urn. While she was but a flying
phantom on the frieze of time, death fixed her there forever,--a haunting spirit in perennial
bliss. The little village of bohun beacon was perched on a hill so steep that the tall spire
of its church seemed only like the peak of a small mountain. At the foot of the church
stood a smithy, generally red with fires and always littered with hammers and scraps of
iron; opposite to this, over a rude cross of cobbled paths, was "the blue boar," the only
inn of the place. It was upon this crossway, in the lifting of a leaden and silver daybreak,
that two brothers met in the street and spoke; though one was beginning the day and the
other finishing it. The rev. And hon. Wilfred bohun was very devout, and was making his
way to some austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn. Colonel the hon.
Norman bohun, his elder brother, was by no means devout, and was sitting in evening
dress on the bench outside "the blue boar," drinking what the philosophic observer was
free to regard either as his last glass on tuesday or his first on wednesday. The colonel
was not particular.
The bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families really dating from the middle
ages, and their pennon had actually seen palestine. But it is a great mistake to suppose
that such houses stand high in chivalric tradition. Few except the poor preserve traditions.
Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions. The bohuns had been mohocks under
queen anne and mashers under queen victoria. But like more than one of the really
ancient houses, they had rotted in the last two centuries into mere drunkards and dandy
degenerates, till there had even come a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was
something hardly human about the colonel's wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic
resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the hideous clarity of insomnia. He
was a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked
merely blonde and leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his face that they

24. looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very long yellow moustaches;
on each side of them a fold or furrow from nostril to jaw, so that a sneer seemed cut into
his face. Over his evening clothes he wore a curious pale yellow coat that looked more
like a very light dressing gown than an overcoat, and on the back of his head was stuck
an extraordinary broad-brimmed hat of a bright green colour, evidently some oriental
curiosity caught up at random. He was proud of appearing in such incongruous attires--
proud of the fact that he always made them look congruous.
His brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the elegance, but he was buttoned up
to the chin in black, and his face was clean-shaven, cultivated, and a little nervous. He
seemed to live for nothing but his religion; but there were some who said (notably the
blacksmith, who was a presbyterian) that it was a love of gothic architecture rather than
of god, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another and purer turn
of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his brother raging after women and wine.
This charge was doubtful, while the man's practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the
charge was mostly an ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and secret prayer,
and was founded on his being often found kneeling, not before the altar, but in peculiar
places, in the crypts or gallery, or even in the belfry. He was at the moment about to enter
the church through the yard of the smithy, but stopped and frowned a little as he saw his
brother's cavernous eyes staring in the same direction. On the hypothesis that the colonel
was interested in the church he did not waste any speculations. There only remained the
blacksmith's shop, and though the blacksmith was a puritan and none of his people,
wilfred bohun had heard some scandals about a beautiful and rather celebrated wife. He
flung a suspicious look across the shed, and the colonel stood up laughing to speak to
him.
"good morning, wilfred," he said. "like a good landlord i am watching sleeplessly over my
people. I am going to call on the blacksmith."

25. Wilfred looked at the ground, and said: "the blacksmith is out. He is over at greenford."
"i know," answered the other with silent laughter; "that is why i am calling on him."
"norman," said the cleric, with his eye on a pebble in the road, "are you ever afraid of
thunderbolts? What do you mean?" asked the colonel. "is your hobby meteorology?"
"i mean," said wilfred, without looking up, "do you ever think that god might strike you in
the street?"
"i beg your pardon," said the colonel; "i see your hobby is folk-lore."
"i know your hobby is blasphemy," retorted the religious man, stung in the one live place
of his nature. "but if you do not fear god, you have good reason to fear man."
The elder raised his eyebrows politely. "fear man?" he said.
"barnes the blacksmith is the biggest and strongest man for forty miles round," said the
clergyman sternly. "i know you are no coward or weakling, but he could throw you over
the wall."
This struck home, being true, and the lowering line by mouth and nostril darkened and
deepened. For a moment he stood with the heavy sneer on his face. But in an instant
colonel bohun had recovered his own cruel good humour and laughed, showing two dog-
like front teeth under his yellow moustache. "in that case, my dear wilfred," he said quite
carelessly, "it was wise for the last of the bohuns to come out partially in armour."
And he took off the queer round hat covered with green, showing that it was lined within
with steel. Wilfred recognised it indeed as a light japanese or chinese helmet torn down
from a trophy that hung in the old family hall.
"it was the first hat to hand," explained his brother airily; "always the nearest hat--and the
nearest woman."

26. "the blacksmith is away at greenford," said wilfred quietly; "the time of his return is
unsettled."
And with that he turned and went into the church with bowed head, crossing himself like
one who wishes to be quit of an unclean spirit. He was anxious to forget such grossness
in the cool twilight of his tall gothic cloisters; but on that morning it was fated that his still
round of religious exercises should be everywhere arrested by small shocks. As he
entered the church, hitherto always empty at that hour, a kneeling figure rose hastily to
its feet and came towards the full daylight of the doorway. When the curate saw it he
stood still with surprise. For the early worshipper was none other than the village idiot, a
nephew of the blacksmith, one who neither would nor could care for the church or for
anything else. He was always called "mad joe," and seemed to have no other name; he
was a dark, strong, slouching lad, with a heavy white face, dark straight hair, and a mouth
always open. As he passed the priest, his moon-calf countenance gave no hint of what
he had been doing or thinking of. He had never been known to pray before. What sort of
prayers was he saying now? Extraordinary prayers surely.
Wilfred bohun stood rooted to the spot long enough to see the idiot go out into the
sunshine, and even to see his dissolute brother hail him with a sort of avuncular jocularity.
The last thing he saw was the colonel throwing pennies at the open mouth of joe, with the
serious appearance of trying to hit it.
This ugly sunlit picture of the stupidity and cruelty of the earth sent the ascetic finally to
his prayers for purification and new thoughts. He went up to a pew in the gallery, which
brought him under a coloured window which he loved and always quieted his spirit; a blue
window with an angel carrying lilies. There he began to think less about the half-wit, with
his livid face and mouth like a fish. He began to think less of his evil brother, pacing like
a lean lion in his horrible hunger. He sank deeper and deeper into those cold and sweet
colours of silver blossoms and sapphire sky.

27. In this place half an hour afterwards he was found by gibbs, the village cobbler, who had
been sent for him in some haste. He got to his feet with promptitude, for he knew that no
small matter would have brought gibbs into such a place at all. The cobbler was, as in
many villages, an atheist, and his appearance in church was a shade more extraordinary
than mad joe's. It was a morning of theological enigmas. What is it?" asked wilfred bohun
rather stiffly, but putting out a trembling hand for his hat.
The atheist spoke in a tone that, coming from him, was quite startlingly respectful, and
even, as it were, huskily sympathetic.
"you must excuse me, sir," he said in a hoarse whisper, "but we didn't think it right not to
let you know at once. I'm afraid a rather dreadful thing has happened, sir. I'm afraid your
brother--"
Wilfred clenched his frail hands. "what devilry has he done now?" he cried in voluntary
passion.
"why, sir," said the cobbler, coughing, "i'm afraid he's done nothing, and won't do anything.
I'm afraid he's done for. You had really better come down, sir."
The curate followed the cobbler down a short winding stair which brought them out at an
entrance rather higher than the street. Bohun saw the tragedy in one glance, flat
underneath him like a plan. In the yard of the smithy were standing five or six men mostly
in black, one in an inspector's uniform. They included the doctor, the presbyterian
minister, and the priest from the roman catholic chapel, to which the blacksmith's wife
belonged. The latter was speaking to her, indeed, very rapidly, in an undertone, as she,
a magnificent woman with red-gold hair, was sobbing blindly on a bench. Between these
two groups, and just clear of the main heap of hammers, lay a man in evening dress,
spread-eagled and flat on his face. From the height above wilfred could have sworn to

28. every item of his costume and appearance, down to the bohun rings upon his fingers; but
the skull was only a hideous splash, like a star of blackness and blood.
Wilfred bohun gave but one glance, and ran down the steps into the yard. The doctor,
who was the family physician, saluted him, but he scarcely took any notice. He could only
stammer out: "my brother is dead. What does it mean? What is this horrible mystery?"
there was an unhappy silence; and then the cobbler, the most outspoken man present,
answered: "plenty of horror, sir," he said; "but not much mystery."what do you mean?"
asked wilfred, with a white face.
"it's plain enough," answered gibbs. "there is only one man for forty miles round that could
have struck such a blow as that, and he's the man that had most reason to."
"we must not prejudge anything," put in the doctor, a tall, black-bearded man, rather
nervously; "but it is competent for me to corroborate what mr. Gibbs says about the nature
of the blow, sir; it is an incredible blow. Mr. Gibbs says that only one man in this district
could have done it. I should have said myself that nobody could have done it."
A shudder of superstition went through the slight figure of the curate. "i can hardly
understand," he said.
"mr. Bohun," said the doctor in a low voice, "metaphors literally fail me. It is inadequate
to say that the skull was smashed to bits like an eggshell. Fragments of bone were driven
into the body and the ground like bullets into a mud wall. It was the hand of a giant."
He was silent a moment, looking grimly through his glasses; then he added: "the thing
has one advantage--that it clears most people of suspicion at one stroke. If you or i or any
normally made man in the country were accused of this crime, we should be acquitted as
an infant would be acquitted of stealing the nelson column."

29. "that's what i say," repeated the cobbler obstinately; "there's only one man that could have
done it, and he's the man that would have done it. Where's simeon barnes, the
blacksmith?"
"he's over at greenford," faltered the curate. "more likely over in france," muttered the
cobbler.
"no; he is in neither of those places," said a small and colorless voice, which came from
the little roman priest who had joined the group. "as a matter of fact, he is coming up the
road at this moments the little priest was not an interesting man to look at, having stubbly
brown hair and a round and stolid face. But if he had been as splendid as apollo no one
would have looked at him at that moment. Everyone turned round and peered at the
pathway which wound across the plain below, along which was indeed walking, at his
own huge stride and with a hammer on his shoulder, simeon the smith. He was a bony
and gigantic man, with deep, dark, sinister eyes and a dark chin beard. He was walking
and talking quietly with two other men; and though he was never especially cheerful, he
seemed quite at his ease.
"my god!" cried the atheistic cobbler, "and there's the hammer he did it with."
"no," said the inspector, a sensible-looking man with a sandy moustache, speaking for
the first time. "there's the hammer he did it with over there by the church wall. We have
left it and the body exactly as they are."
All glanced round and the short priest went across and looked down in silence at the tool
where it lay. It was one of the smallest and the lightest of the hammers, and would not
have caught the eye among the rest; but on the iron edge of it were blood and yellow hair.
After a silence the short priest spoke without looking up, and there was a new note in his
dull voice. "mr. Gibbs was hardly right," he said, "in saying that there is no mystery. There

30. is at least the mystery of why so big a man should attempt so big a blow with so little a
hammer."
"oh, never mind that," cried gibbs, in a fever. "what are we to do with simeon barnes?"
"leave him alone," said the priest quietly. "he is coming here of himself. I know those two
men with him. They are very good fellows from greenford, and they have come over about
the presbyterian chapel."
Even as he spoke the tall smith swung round the corner of the church, and strode into his
own yard. Then he stood there quite still, and the hammer fell from his hand. The
inspector, who had preserved impenetrable propriety, immediately went up to him.
"i won't ask you, mr. Barnes," he said, "whether you know anything about what has
happened here. You are not bound to say. I hope you don't know, and that you will be
able to prove it. But i must go through the form of arresting you in the king's name for the
murder of colonel norman bohun."
"you are not bound to say anything," said the cobbler in officious excitement. "they've got
to prove everything. They haven't proved yet that it is colonel bohun, with the head all
smashed up like that."
"that won't wash," said the doctor aside to the priest. "that's out of the detective stories. I
was the colonel's medical man, and i knew his body better than he did. He had very fine
hands, but quite peculiar ones. The second and third fingers were the same length. Oh,
that's the colonel right enough."
As he glanced at the brained corpse upon the ground the iron eyes of the motionless
blacksmith followed them and rested there also.
"is colonel bohun dead?" said the smith quite calmly. "then he's damned."

31. "don't say anything! Oh, don't say anything," cried the atheist cobbler, dancing about in
an ecstasy of admiration of the english legal system. For no man is such a legalist as the
good secularist.
The blacksmith turned on him over his shoulder the august face of a fanatic.
"it's well for you infidels to dodge like foxes because the world's law favors you," he said;
"but god guards his own in his pocket, as you shall see this day."
Then he pointed to the colonel and said: "when did this dog die in his sins? “moderate
your language," said the doctor.
"moderate the bible's language, and i'll moderate mine. When did he die?"
"i saw him alive at six o'clock this morning," stammered wilfred bohun.
"god is good," said the smith. "mr. Inspector, i have not the slightest objection to being
arrested. It is you who may object to arresting me. I don't mind leaving the court without
a stain on my character. You do mind perhaps leaving the court with a bad set-back in
your career."
The solid inspector for the first time looked at the blacksmith with a lively eye; as did
everybody else, except the short, strange priest, who was still looking down at the little
hammer that had dealt the dreadful blow.
"there are two men standing outside this shop," went on the blacksmith with ponderous
lucidity, "good tradesmen in greenford whom you all know, who will swear that they saw
me from before midnight till daybreak and long after in the committee room of our revival
mission, which sits all night, we save souls so fast. In greenford itself twenty people could
swear to me for all that time. If i were a heathen, mr. Inspector, i would let you walk on to
your downfall. But as a christian man i feel bound to give you your chance, and ask you
whether you will hear my alibi now or in court."

32. The inspector seemed for the first time disturbed, and said, "of course i should be glad to
clear you altogether now."
The smith walked out of his yard with the same long and easy stride, and returned to his
two friends from greenford, who were indeed friends of nearly everyone present. Each of
them said a few words which no one ever thought of disbelieving. When they had spoken,
the innocence of simeon stood up as solid as the great church above them. One of those
silences struck the group which are more strange and insufferable than any speech.
Madly, in order to make conversation, the curate said to the catholic priest:
"you seem very much interested in that hammer, father brown."
"yes, i am," said father brown; "why is it such a small hammer?"
The doctor swung round on him.
"by george, that's true," he cried; "who would use a little hammer with ten larger hammers
lying about?"
Then he lowered his voice in the curate's ear and said: "only the kind of person that can't
lift a large hammer. It is not a question of force or courage between the sexes. It's a
question of lifting power in the shoulders. A bold woman could commit ten murders with
a light hammer and never turn a hair. She could not kill a beetle with a heavy one."
Wilfred bohun was staring at him with a sort of hypnotised horror, while father brown
listened with his head a little on one side, really interested and attentive. The doctor went
on with more hissing emphasis:
"Why do these idiots always assume that the only person who hates the wife's lover is
the wife's husband? Nine times out of ten the person who most hates the wife's lover is
the wife. Who knows what insolence or treachery he had shown her--look there!"

33. He made a momentary gesture towards the red-haired woman on the bench. She had
lifted her head at last and the tears were drying on her splendid face. But the eyes were
fixed on the corpse with an electric glare that had in it something of idiocy.
The rev. Wilfred bohun made a limp gesture as if waving away all desire to know; but
father brown, dusting off his sleeve some ashes blown from the furnace, spoke in his
indifferent way. You are like so many doctors," he said; "your mental science is really
suggestive. It is your physical science that is utterly impossible. I agree that the woman
wants to kill the co-respondent much more than the petitioner does. And i agree that a
woman will always pick up a small hammer instead of a big one. But the difficulty is one
of physical impossibility. No woman ever born could have smashed a man's skull out flat
like that." then he added reflectively, after a pause: "these people haven't grasped the
whole of it. The man was actually wearing an iron helmet, and the blow scattered it like
broken glass. Look at that woman. Look at her arms."
Silence held them all up again, and then the doctor said rather sulkily: "well, I may be
wrong; there are objections to everything. But i stick to the main point. No man but an
idiot would pick up that little hammer if he could use a big hammer."
With that the lean and quivering hands of Wilfred bohun went up to his head and seemed
to clutch his scanty yellow hair. After an instant they dropped, and he cried: "that was the
word i wanted; you have said the word."
Then he continued, mastering his discomposure: "the words you said were, 'no man but
an idiot would pick up the small hammer.'"
"Yes," said the doctor. "Well?"
"Well," said the curate, "no man but an idiot did." the rest stared at him with eyes arrested
and riveted, and he went on in a febrile and feminine agitation.

34. "i am a priest," he cried unsteadily, "and a priest should be no shedder of blood. I--I mean
that he should bring no one to the gallows. And I thank god that I see the criminal clearly
now--because he is a criminal who cannot be brought to the gallows."
"You will not denounce him?" inquired the doctor. He would not be hanged if I did
denounce him," answered Wilfred with a wild but curiously happy smile. "When I went
into the church this morning I found a madman praying there--that poor joe, who has been
wrong all his life. God knows what he prayed; but with such strange folk it is not incredible
to suppose that their prayers are all upside down. Very likely a lunatic would pray before
killing a man. When I last saw poor joe he was with my brother. My brother was mocking
him."
"By jove!" cried the doctor, "this is talking at last. But how do you explain--"
The rev. Wilfred was almost trembling with the excitement of his own glimpse of the truth.
"Don’t you see; don't you see," he cried feverishly; "that is the only theory that covers both
the queer things, that answers both the riddles. The two riddles are the little hammer and
the big blow. The smith might have struck the big blow, but would not have chosen the
little hammer. His wife would have chosen the little hammer, but she could not have struck
the big blow. But the madman might have done both. As for the little hammer--why, he
was mad and might have picked up anything. And for the big blow, have you never heard,
doctor, that a maniac in his paroxysm may have the strength of ten men?"
The doctor drew a deep breath and then said, "By golly, I believe you've got it."
Father Brown had fixed his eyes on the speaker so long and steadily as to prove that his
large grey, ox-like eyes were not quite as insignificant as the rest of his face. When silence
had fallen he said with marked respect: "Mr. Bohun, yours is the only theory yet
propounded which holds water every way and is essentially unassailable.

35. In the end I just walked near her mother and told him about my own desires and also
about my destiny when his mother got my idea just hugged his son and asked for a fee
of cricket academy. his son was looking like he will conquer the world and all of sudden
both looked at me and said thank you to me for making their eyes open about desires
and destiny moral god always a better decision for you so you just make a desire and
keep going on and always show faith in him.