I live in a place locally known as "Bailiff's Hollow", named for the Bailiff family who lived here for many years. It's sort of an odd place, somewhat like Gamble Rogers' Ocklawahah County brought to life. One newspaper man I know describes it as a "little pocket of weirdness; like the Bermuda Triangle, only smaller." Back around 1929, Old Man Bailiff, a preacher and a farmer, decided to preach his own funeral. This was quite an event as at the time, entertainment of any sort was hard to come by. So everyone for miles around came to hear the preaching. By all accounts, Old Man Bailiff was a pretty good preacher; some say he was a good farmer, too and he must have been to get anything to grow in the rocky, sandy clay of the Hollow. Whe he got down to the end of the funeral oration, Old Man Bailiff said, "That's it for sin; there's no more sin. And that's it for the devil: the devil is dead." They carried out a coffin and buried it below a tombstone that says "Here Lies the Devil". The tombstone is still there, although most people couldn't find it today as the Bailiff house is long gone and the woods have grown to cover the area. When my brother started to build his house here in 1975 (and that's where I live now), the Reverend Williams, who lives up the road a ways, said that he thought living across from the devil's tombstone would make for a nice, quiet place. A different view than some might take, I admit, but Reverend Williams is just about one of the finest people I know and besides, he has a quarter-scale replica of Stonehenge in his yard and makes triple-strung harps (remember, this is Bailiff's Hollow). And his predicition has proved to be true: it is in fact a nice, quiet place except for the bobcats, timber wolves, cougars and mushroom hunters in the spring. But as I said, there's every reason to belive the coffin is empty. Oh, yes...Old Man Bailiff lived for another thirty years or so after his funeral, and I'm sure there's a lesson in this. What it might be, though, I'm not so sure.