You ask dad an' ma if I tell lies.

He'd whale the stuffin' out of me if I did.
Ask 'm." And thereat not another word could the missionary get from me, even though he baited me with more photographs that sent my head whirling with a rush of memory-pictures and that urged and tickled my tongue with spates of speech which I sullenly resisted and overcame.
"He will certainly make a good Bible scholar," the missionary told father and mother after I had kissed them good-night and departed for bed.

"Or else, with that imagination, he'll become a successful fiction-writer." Which shows how prophecy can go agley.

I sit here in Murderers' Row, writing these lines in my last days, or, rather, in Darrell Standing's last days ere they take him out and try to thrust him into the dark at the end of a rope, and I smile to myself.

I became neither Bible scholar nor novelist.