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SQUIRE MEREDITH lived something near a mile west of Irontown in a gray frame house with two enormous stone chimneys buttressing its gables. Across the public road from the house stood the Squire's barn and stable. Abner and the old man arrived at this place late at night, fed the mules, then went in and had their own supper. Immediately after eating, the old justice sat down in the family room and began reading a volume of his beloved Molner.

The Squire's wife, a rather spectral old lady, made shift to keep up a halting conversation, or rather an intermittent monologue with the boy. She reckoned the railroad would mean a lot to Lanesburg; there was a sick man up the road a piece, that they believed was going to die; a neighbour, Mr. Ferns, had been smoking his horse that day for the blind staggers; she herself had a knee that was hurting her, and she had tied red flannel around it which she thought had done it a little good; and so in driblets, on and on and on.

The was a girl in the room, a daughter of the house, who sat as mutely as Abner in the undecided light of the oil lamp. The old Squire read of the coming of the end of time. His book told him signs and portents which market the end of this dispensation, and then there would be a new people and a new earth; the author unrolled the dramatic prelude to the second coming before the old man's eyes. Of the four persons in the sitting room only one, the old Squire, escaped the pinched and meagre present, liberated through the magic of his prophet. Presently the old woman bestirred herself and advised Abner not to wait up for her husband, as lots of nights he would set there readin' tull nine or ten o'clock, and that ever'body on the place went to bed an' left him.