They Grind Exceeding Small
By BEN AMES WILLIAMS
From Saturday Evening Post
I telephoned down the hill to Hazen Kinch. "Hazen," I asked, "are you going to town to-
day?"
"Yes, yes," he said abruptly in his quick, harsh fashion. "Of course I'm going to town."
"I've a matter of business," I suggested.
"Come along," he invited brusquely. "Come along."
There was not another man within forty miles to whom he would have given that
invitation.
"I'll be down in ten minutes," I promised him; and I went to pull on my Pontiacs and
heavy half boots over them and started downhill through the sandy snow. It was bitterly
cold; it had been a cold winter. The bay--I could see it from my window--was frozen over
for a dozen miles east and west and thirty north and south; and that had not happened in
close to a score of years. Men were freighting across to the islands with heavy teams.
Automobiles had beaten a rough road along the course the steamers took in summer. A
man who had ventured to stock one of the lower islands with foxes for the sake of their
fur, counting on the water to hold them prisoners, had gone bankrupt when his stock in
trade escaped across the ice. Bitterly cold and steadily cold, and deep snow lay upon the
hills, blue-white in the distance. The evergreens were blue-black blotches on this
whiteness. The birches, almost indistinguishable, were like trees in camouflage. To me
the hills are never so grand as in this winter coat they wear. It is easy to believe that a
brooding God dwells upon them. I wondered as I ploughed my way down to Hazen
Kinch's farm whether God did indeed dwell among these hills; and I wondered what He
thought of Hazen Kinch.
This was no new matter of thought with me. I had given some thought to Hazen in the
past. I was interested in the man and in that which should come to him. He was, it seemed
to me, a problem in fundamental ethics; he was, as matters stood, a demonstration of the
essential uprightness of things as they are. The biologist would have called him a sport, a
deviation from type, a violation of all the proper laws of life. That such a man should live
and grow great and prosper was not fitting; in a well-regulated world it could not be. Yet
Hazen Kinch did live; he had grown--in his small way--great; and by our lights he had
prospered. Therefore I watched him. There was about the man the fascination which
clothes a tight-rope walker above Niagara; an aeronaut in the midst of the nose dive. The
spectator stares with half-caught breath, afraid to see and afraid to miss seeing the
ultimate catastrophe. Sometimes I wondered whether Hazen Kinch suspected this attitude
