When I was a youth in Charmington, Misereri, it was the pleasure of the local legitimates to preach sermons. In fact there was not a preacher in Charmington who did not preach, nor a minister who did not minister. But they were all Methodists and I was a Baptist. So I heard few of their sermons, received few of their ministrations. Yet this did not send me to hell. I remained in Charmington in our little gray house in the best part of town and real evil books which my mother had bought for me, books like Old Testament Stories, the Life and Times of Peter Rabbit, and an excellent treatise by Grimm on laeries.

My life, however, was not completely cloistered. I often are banana sodas at the drug store and heard the conversation of the concupiscent, the dialogues of the damned. And there I heard of Cartrack, even saw Cartrack, pour soul and I will never be at peace until her story is told, for to me Cartrack is anepic figure, a Helen far from Troy, a Dido unheralded and unsung.

Cartrack was pekinese, the only pekinese of her sex and size in Charmington. And therein lies a tale. For every evening as the crowd stood about the steps of the drug store and I ate my banana soda. Cartrack made her small but definite appearance, religion shining from her eyes. Up the street from her home she came with the Gleam in her eyes and betook herself to the Ninth Incorporated Methodist Church, where the Reverend Isaiah Poodle was holding service. There I was told she would sit for ten minutes by the watches of the crowd about the store when she would leave the perfervid Poodle as rapidly as she had come unto him. For the Reverend Poodle had but one subject on which to preach Sunday nights, and that was Pekinese Purgatory. And Cartrack being a pekinese resented his words even as he resented her existence. She believed devoutly in a purgatory, but she thought that there was as much room there for Poodles as for Cartracks. The rest of the congregation did not. And their glances at poor Cartrack told her so emphatically, finally. Cartrack shook the dust of the Ninth Incorporated from her feet and went her way. She had changed her mind. Purgatory was not imminent and the night had a thousand stars. She repassed the drugstore with intrigue in her pekinese profile.

The crowd about the drug store placed their watches in their pockets. They knew what would happen now. So did I. Leaving my banana soda I went to look at the performance. It was always the same. One after another of the men quit his station by the steps to follow Cartrack. So a long file of solemn marchers were soon in her wake. Main Street in Charmington became for a few minutes a primrose path to an everlasting bonfire, and the bon fire was the rage of Cartrack, damned by religion, damned by man.

And in the only cemetery which Charmington boasts she held her court. Around her in a semi-circle the men of Charmington stood while Cartrack preached, not in the saintly tones of Isaiah Poodle but in the stately rhythms of a purient pekinese. She told them of pleasures they had never known, would never know, of the palaces and sanquti the glitter and garnish of decent diminution, and they hung about her and listened until the moon was high above Charmington and the lights in the passing ten o'clock express made a serpentine suggestion of reality in the passing below the cemetery. And then, refreshed, they went home to dream of pastures pekinese and anti-poodle, pastures fairer than Charmington and much more honest. And they remembered the joke which has long made Charmington famous, a remark of Cartrack herself--"You can't teach a pekinese new profanity."