Clifford D. Simak spent most of his professional career working in Minnesota for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, but nowadays he's remembered mostly for his science fiction writing -- novels like Mastodonia (1978), The Visitors (1980), Project Pope (1981), Where the Evil Dwells (1982), Special Deliverance (1982), Highway of Eternity (1986).
But Simak had a long, long career -- as witness this story, which first saw print in 1932, when Simak was 28. You can see that Simak grew a great deal as a writer over his lifetime -- or perhaps the original editor had at it a bit too roughly with his blue pencil. But even so -- it's Simak, and it's got a quality that rises over that . . .