THE REIGN OF LAW

A TALE OF THE KENTUCKY HEMP FIELDS

BY

JAMES LANE ALLEN

 DEDICATION

 TO THE MEMORY OF A FATHER AND MOTHER WHOSE SELF-SACRIFICE, HIGH SYMPATHY, AND DEVOTION THE WRITING OF THIS STORY HAS CAUSED TO LIVE AFRESH IN THE EVER-GROWING, NEVER-AGING, GRATITUDE OF THEIR SON

JTABLE 5 23 1

THE REIGN OF LAW

HEMP

The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers ofhemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestralBritain. Away back in the days when they lived with wife, child, flockin frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured forth for water, salt, game, tillage--in the very summer of that wild daylight ride ofTomlinson and Bell, by comparison with which, my children, the midnightride of Paul Revere, was as tame as the pitching of a rocking-horse ina boy's nursery--on that history-making twelfth of August, of the year1782, when these two backwoods riflemen, during that same Revolutionthe Kentuckians then fighting a branch of that same British army, rushed out of Bryan's Station for the rousing of the settlements andthe saving of the West--hemp was growing tall and thick near the wallsof the fort. 

Hemp in Kentucky in 1782--early landmark in the history of the soil, ofthe people. Cultivated first for the needs of cabin and clearingsolely; for twine and rope, towel and table, sheet and shirt. By and bynot for cabin and clearing only; not for tow-homespun, fur-cladKentucky alone. To the north had begun the building of ships, Americanships for American commerce, for American arms, for a nation whichNature had herself created and had distinguished as a sea-faring race. To the south had begun the raising of cotton. As the great period ofshipbuilding went on--greatest during the twenty years or more endingin 1860; as the great period of cotton-raising and cotton-baling wenton--never so great before as that in that same year--the two parts ofthe nation looked equally to the one border plateau lying between them, to several counties of Kentucky, for most of the nation's hemp. It wasin those days of the North that the CONSTITUTION was rigged withRussian hemp on one side, with American hemp on the other, for apatriotic test of the superiority of home-grown, home-prepared fibre;and thanks to the latter, before those days ended with the outbreak ofthe Civil War, the country had become second to Great Britain alone inher ocean craft, and but little behind that mistress of the seas. Sothat in response to this double demand for hemp on the American shipand hemp on the southern plantation, at the close of that period ofnational history on land and sea, from those few counties of Kentucky, in the year 1859, were taken well-nigh forty thousand tons of thewell-cleaned bast. 

What history it wrought in those years, directly for the republic, indirectly for the world! What ineffaceable marks it left on Kentuckyitself, land, land-owners! To make way for it, a forest the like ofwhich no human eye will ever see again was felled; and with the forestwent its pastures, its waters. The roads of Kentucky, those longlimestone turnpikes connecting the towns and villages with thefarms--they were early made necessary by the hauling of the hemp. Forthe sake of it slaves were perpetually being trained, hired, bartered;lands perpetually rented and sold; fortunes made or lost. The advancingprice of farms, the westward movement of poor families and consequentdispersion of the Kentuckians over cheaper territory, whither theycarried the same passion for the cultivation of the same plant, --thusmaking Missouri the second hemp-producing state in the Union, --theregulation of the hours in the Kentucky cabin, in the house, at therope-walk, in the factory, --what phase of life went unaffected by thepursuit and fascination of it. Thought, care, hope of the farmeroftentimes throughout the entire year! Upon it depending, it may be, the college of his son, the accomplishments of his daughter, theluxuries of his wife, the house he would build, the stock he could own. His own pleasures also: his deer hunting in the South, his fox huntingat home, his fishing on the great lakes, his excursions on the oldfloating palaces of the Mississippi down to New Orleans--all thesedepending in large measure upon his hemp, that thickest gold-dust ofhis golden acres. 

With the Civil War began the long decline, lasting still. The recordstands that throughout the one hundred and twenty-five odd yearselapsing from the entrance of the Anglo-Saxon farmers into thewilderness down to the present time, a few counties of Kentucky havefurnished army and navy, the entire country, with all but a small partof the native hemp consumed. Little comparatively is cultivated inKentucky now. The traveller may still see it here and there, crowningthose ever-renewing, self-renewing inexhaustible fields. But the timecannot be far distant when the industry there will have become extinct. Its place in the nation's markets will be still further taken bymetals, by other fibres, by finer varieties of the same fibre, by thesame variety cultivated in soils less valuable. The history of it inKentucky will be ended, and, being ended, lost. 

Some morning when the roar of March winds is no more heard in thetossing woods, but along still brown boughs a faint, veil-likegreenness runs; when every spring, welling out of the soaked earth, trickles through banks of sod unbarred by ice; before a bee is abroadunder the calling sky; before the red of apple-buds becomes a sign inthe low orchards, or the high song of the thrush is pouring forth faraway at wet pale-green sunsets, the sower, the earliest sower of thehemp, goes forth into the fields. 

Warm they must be, soft and warm, those fields, its chosen birthplace. Up-turned by the plough, crossed and recrossed by the harrow, clodless, levelled, deep, fine, fertile--some extinct river-bottom, some valleythreaded by streams, some table-land of mild rays, moist airs, alluvialor limestone soils--such is the favorite cradle of the hemp in Nature. Back and forth with measured tread, with measured distance, broadcastthe sower sows, scattering with plenteous hand those small oval-shapedfruits, gray-green, black-striped, heavily packed with living marrow. 

Lightly covered over by drag or harrow, under the rolled earth now theylie, those mighty, those inert seeds. Down into the darkness about themthe sun rays penetrate day by day, stroking them with the brushes oflight, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, dropsfrom the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness, closing up the little hollows of the ground, drawing the particles ofmaternal earth more closely. Suddenly--as an insect that has beenfeigning death cautiously unrolls itself and starts into action--ineach seed the great miracle of life begins. Each awakens as from asleep, as from pretended death. It starts, it moves, it bursts itsashen woody shell, it takes two opposite courses, the white, fibril-tapered root hurrying away from the sun; the tiny stem, bearingits lance-like leaves, ascending graceful, brave like a palm. 

Some morning, not many days later, the farmer, walking out into hisbarn lot and casting a look in the direction of his field, sees--ordoes he not see?--the surface of it less dark. What is that uncertainflush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of multitudinous green?A fortnight, and the field is brown no longer. Overflowing it, buryingit out of sight, is the shallow tidal sea of the hemp, ever rippling. Green are the woods now with their varied greenness. Green are thepastures. Green here and there are the fields: with the bluish green ofyoung oats and wheat; with the gray green of young barley and rye: withorderly dots of dull dark green in vast array--the hills of Indianmaize. But as the eye sweeps the whole landscape undulating far andnear, from the hues of tree, pasture, and corn of every kind, it turnsto the color of the hemp. With that in view, all other shades in natureseem dead and count for nothing. Far reflected, conspicuous, brilliant, strange; masses of living emerald, saturated with blazing sunlight. 

Darker, always darker turns the hemp as it rushes upward: scarce darkeras to the stemless stalks which are hidden now; but darker in the tops. Yet here two shades of greenness: the male plants paler, smaller, maturing earlier, dying first; the females darker, taller, livinglonger, more luxuriant of foliage and flowering heads. 

A hundred days from the sowing, and those flowering heads have comeforth with their mass of leaves and bloom and earliest fruits, elastic, swaying six, ten, twelve feet from the ground and ripe for cutting. Ahundred days reckoning from the last of March or the last of April, sothat it is July, it is August. And now, borne far through the steamingair floats an odor, balsamic, startling: the odor of those plumes andstalks and blossoms from which is exuding freely the narcotic resin ofthe great nettle. The nostril expands quickly, the lungs swell outdeeply to draw it in: fragrance once known in childhood, ever in thememory afterward and able to bring back to the wanderer homesickthoughts of midsummer days in the shadowy, many-toned woods, over intowhich is blown the smell of the hemp-fields. 

Who apparently could number the acres of these in the days gone by? Aland of hemp, ready for the cutting! The oats heavy-headed, rustling, have turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or stored in thelofts of white, bursting barns. The heavy-headed, rustling wheat hasturned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or sent through thewhirling thresher. The barley and the rye are garnered and gone, thelandscape has many bare and open spaces. But separating theseeverywhere, rise the fields of Indian corn now in blade and tassel;and--more valuable than all else that has been sown and harvested orremains to be--everywhere the impenetrable thickets of the hemp. 

Impenetrable! For close together stand the stalks, making common causefor soil and light, each but one of many, the fibre being better whenso grown--as is also the fibre of men. Impenetrable and thereforeweedless; for no plant life can flourish there, nor animal nor bird. Scarce a beetle runs bewilderingly through those forbidding colossalsolitudes. The field-sparrow will flutter away from pollen-bearing topollen-receiving top, trying to beguile you from its nest hidden nearthe edge. The crow and the blackbird will seem to love it, having akeen eye for the cutworm, its only enemy. The quail does love it, notfor itself, but for its protection, leading her brood into itslabyrinths out of the dusty road when danger draws near. Best of allwinged creatures it is loved by the iris-eyed, burnish-breasted, murmuring doves, already beginning to gather in the deadened tree-topswith crops eager for the seed. Well remembered also by the long-flightpassenger pigeon, coming into the land for the mast. Best of all wildthings whose safety lies not in the wing but in the foot, it is lovedby the hare for its young, for refuge. Those lithe, velvety, summer-thin bodies! Observe carefully the tops of the still hemp: arethey slightly shaken? Among the bases of those stalks a cotton-tail isthreading its way inward beyond reach of its pursuer. Are they shakenviolently, parted clean and wide to right and left? It is the path ofthe dog following the hot scent--ever baffled. 

A hundred days to lift out of those tiny seed these powerful stalks, hollow, hairy, covered with their tough fibre, --that strength of cableswhen the big ships are tugged at by the joined fury of wind and ocean. And now some morning at the corner of the field stand the black menwith hooks and whetstones. The hook, a keen, straight blade, bent atright angles to the handle two feet from the hand. Let these men be thestrongest; no weakling can handle the hemp from seed to seed again. Aheart, the doors and walls of which are in perfect order, through whichflows freely the full stream of a healthy man's red blood; lungs deep, clear, easily filled, easily emptied; a body that can bend and twistand be straightened again in ceaseless rhythmical movement; limbstireless; the very spirit of primeval man conquering primevalnature--all these go into the cutting of the hemp. The leader stridesto the edge, and throwing forward his left arm, along which the musclesplay, he grasps as much as it will embrace, bends the stalks over, andwith his right hand draws the blade through them an inch or more fromthe ground. When he has gathered his armful, he turns and flings itdown behind him, so that it lies spread out, covering when fallen thesame space it filled while standing. And so he crosses the broad acres, and so each of the big black followers, stepping one by one to a placebehind him, until the long, wavering, whitish green swaths of theprostrate hemp lie shimmering across the fields. Strongest now is thesmell of it, impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading farthroughout the air. 

So it lies a week or more drying, dying, till the sap is out of thestalks, till leaves and blossoms and earliest ripened or un-ripenedfruits wither and drop off, giving back to the soil the nourishmentthey have drawn from it; the whole top being thus otherwisewasted--that part of the hemp which every year the dreamy millions ofthe Orient still consume in quantities beyond human computation, andfor the love of which the very history of this plant is lost in theantiquity of India and Persia, its home--land of narcotics and desiresand dreams. 

Then the rakers with enormous wooden rakes; they draw the stalks intobundles, tying each with the hemp itself. Following the binders, movethe wagon-beds or slides, gathering the bundles and carrying them towhere, huge, flat, and round, the stacks begin to rise. At last theseare well built; the gates of the field are closed or the bars put up;wagons and laborers are gone; the brown fields stand deserted. 

One day something is gone from earth and sky: Autumn has come, seasonof scales and balances, when the Earth, brought to judgment for itsfruits, says, "I have done what I could--now let me rest!"

Fall!--and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the woods, through the cool silvery air, the leaves, so indispensable once, souseless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after drippingnight, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of leaves. The fall ofwalnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom into the deepgrass. The fall of the hickory-nut, rattling noisily down through thescaly limbs and scattering its hulls among the stones of the brookbelow. 

The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany into the littledust paths made by sheep in the hot months when they had sought thoseroofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted, greencups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon, and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fallof all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their highplaces and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against thetime when they shall arise again as the living generations; the homing, downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over thequiet land. 

In the fields, too, the sights and sounds of falling, the fall of thestanding fatness. The silent fall of the tobacco, to be hung headdownward in fragrant sheds and barns. The felling whack of thecorn-knife and the rustling of the blades, as the workman gatherswithin his arm the top-heavy stalks and presses them into the bulgingshock. The fall of pumpkins into the slow-drawn wagons, the shaded sideof them still white with the morning rime. In the orchards, the fall ofapples shaken thunderously down, and the piling of these in sprawlingheaps near the cider mills. In the vineyards the fall of sugaringgrapes into the baskets and the bearing of them to the winepress in thecool sunshine, where there is the late droning of bees about the sweetpomace. 

But of all that the earth has yielded with or without the farmer'shelp, of all that he can call his own within the limits of his land, nothing pleases him better than those still, brown fields where theshapely stacks stand amid the deadened trees. Two months have passed, the workmen are at it again. The stacks are torn down, the bundlesscattered, the hemp spread out as once before. There to lie till itshall be dew-retted or rotted; there to suffer freeze and thaw, chillrains, locking frosts and loosening snows--all the action of theelements--until the gums holding together the filaments of the fibrerot out and dissolve, until the bast be separated from the woodyportion of the stalk, and the stalk itself be decayed and easily broken. 

Some day you walk across the spread hemp, your foot goes through ateach step, you stoop and taking several stalks, snap them readily inyour fingers. The ends stick out clean apart; and lo! hanging betweenthem, there it is at last--a festoon of wet, coarse, dark gray riband, wealth of the hemp, sail of the wild Scythian centuries before Horaceever sang of him, sail of the Roman, dress of the Saxon and Celt, dressof the Kentucky pioneer. 

The rakers reappear at intervals of dry weather, and draw the hemp intoarmfuls and set it up in shocks of convenient size, wide flared at thebottom, well pressed in and bound at the top, so that the slantingsides may catch the drying sun and the sturdy base resist the strongwinds. And now the fields are as the dark brown camps of armies--eachshock a soldier's tent. Yet not dark always; at times snow-covered; andthen the white tents gleam for miles in the winter sunshine--thesnow-white tents of the camping hemp. 

Throughout the winter and on into early spring, as days may be warm orthe hemp dry, the breaking continues. At each nightfall, cleaned andbaled, it is hauled on wagon-beds or slides to the barns or thehemphouses, where it is weighed for the work and wages of the day. 

Last of all, the brakes having been taken from the field, somenight--dear sport for the lads!--takes place the burning of the"hempherds, " thus returning their elements to the soil. To kindle ahandful of tow and fling it as a firebrand into one of those masses oftinder; to see the flames spread and the sparks rush like swarms of redbees skyward through the smoke into the awful abysses of the night; torun from gray heap to gray heap, igniting the long line of signalfires, until the whole earth seems a conflagration and the heavens areas rosy as at morn; to look far away and descry on the horizon an arrayof answering lights; not in one direction only, but leagues away, tosee the fainter ever fainter glow of burning hempherds--this, too, isone of the experiences, one of the memories. 

And now along the turnpikes the great loaded creaking wagons passslowly to the towns, bearing the hemp to the factories, thence to bescattered over land and sea. Some day, when the winds of March aredying down, the sower enters the field and begins where he began twelvemonths before. 

A round year of the earth's changes enters into the creation of thehemp. The planet has described its vast orbit ere it be grown andfinished. All seasons are its servitors; all contradictions andextremes of nature meet in its making. The vernal patience of thewarming soil; the long, fierce arrows of the summer heat, the long, silvery arrows of the summer rain; autumn's dead skies and sobbingwinds; winter's sternest, all-tightening frosts. Of none but strongvirtues is it the sum. Sickness or infirmity it knows not. It will havea mother young and vigorous, or none; an old or weak or exhausted soilcannot produce it. It will endure no roof of shade, basking only in theeye of the fatherly sun, and demanding the whole sky for the walls ofits nursery. 

Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown, earth-rooted;which must struggle upward, be cut down, rotted and broken, ere theseparation take place between our dross and our worth--poor perishableshard and immortal fibre. Oh, the mystery, the mystery of that growthfrom the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark earth, until thetime when, led through all natural changes and cleansed of weakness, itis borne from the fields of its nativity for the long service. 

I

The century just past had not begun the race of its many-footed yearswhen a neighborhood of Kentucky pioneers, settled throughout the greenvalleys of the silvery Elkhorn, built a church in the wilderness, andconstituted themselves a worshipping association. For some time peaceof one sort prevailed among them, if no peace of any other sort wasprocurable around. But by and by there arose sectarian quarrels withother backwoods folk who also wished to worship God in Kentucky, andhot personal disputes among the members--as is the eternal law. So thatthe church grew as grow infusorians and certain worms, --by fissure, byperiodical splittings and breakings to pieces, each spontaneousdivision becoming a new organism. The first church, however, for allthat it split off and cast off, seemed to lose nothing of its vitalityor fighting qualities spiritual and physical (the strenuous life inthose days!); and there came a time when it took offence at oneparticular man in its membership on account of the liberality of hisreligious opinions. This settler, an old Indian fighter whose vastestate lay about halfway between the church and the nearest village, had built himself a good brick house in the Virginian style; and it washis pleasure and his custom to ask travelling preachers to rest underhis roof as they rode hither and thither throughout thewilderness--Zion's weather-beaten, solitary scouts. 

While giving entertainment to man and beast, if a Sunday came round, hewould further invite his guest, no matter what kind of faith the vesselheld, if it only held any faith, to ride with him through the woods andpreach to his brethren. This was the front of his offending. For sincehe seemed brother to men of every creed, they charged that he was nolonger of THEIR faith (the only true one). They considered his case, and notified him that it was their duty under God to expel him. 

After the sermon one Sunday morning of summer the scene took place. They had asked what he had to say, and silence had followed. Not farfrom the church doors the bright Elkhorn (now nearly dry) swept past inits stately shimmering flood. The rush of the water over the stoppedmill-wheel, that earliest woodland music of civilization, sounded loudamid the suspense and the stillness. 

He rose slowly from his seat on the bench in front of the pulpit--forhe was a deacon--and turned squarely at them; speechless just then, forhe was choking with rage. 

"My brethren, " he said at length slowly, for he would not speak untilhe had himself under control, "I think we all remember what it is to bepersecuted for religion's sake. Long before we came together inSpottsylvania County, Virginia, and organized ourselves into a churchand travelled as a church over the mountains into this wilderness, worshipping by the way, we knew what it was to be persecuted. Some ofus were sent to jail for preaching the Gospel and kept there; wepreached to the people through the bars of our dungeons. Mobs werecollected outside to drown our voices; we preached the louder and somejeered, but some felt sorry and began to serve God. They burned matchesand pods of red pepper to choke us; they hired strolls to beat drumsthat we might not be heard for the din. Some of us knew what it was tohave live snakes thrown into our assemblages while at worship; or nestsof live hornets. Or to have a crowd rush into the church with farmingtools and whips and clubs. Or to see a gun levelled at one of us in thepulpit, and to be dispersed with firearms. Harder than any of thesethings to stand, we have known what it is to be slandered. But nosingle man of us, thank God, ever stopped for these things or foranything. Thirty years and more this lasted, until we and all such aswe found a friend in Patrick Henry. Now, we hear that by statute allreligious believers in Virginia have been made equal as respects therights and favors of the law. 

"But you know it was partly to escape intolerable tyranny that we leftour mother country and travelled a path paved with suffering and linedwith death into this wilderness. For in this virgin land we thought weshould be free to worship God according to our consciences. "

"Since we arrived you know what our life has been, --how we have foughtand toiled and suffered all things together. You recall how lately itwas that when we met in the woods for worship, --having no church and noseats, --we men listened and sang and prayed with our rifles on ourshoulders. "

He paused, for the memories hurt him cruelly. 

"And now you notify me that you intend to expel me from this church asa man no longer fit to worship my Maker in your company. Do you bringany charge against my life, my conduct? None. Nothing but that, as abeliever in the living God--whom honestly I try to serve according tomy erring light--I can no longer have a seat among you--not believingas you believe. But this is the same tyranny that you found unendurablein Spottsylvania. You have begun it in Kentucky. You have been at italready how long? Well, my brethren, I'll soon end your tyranny overme. You need not TURN me out. And I need not change my religiousopinions. I will GO out. But--"

He wheeled round to the rough pulpit on which lay the copy of the Biblethat they had brought with them from Virginia, their Ark of theCovenant on the way, seized it, and faced them again. He strode towardthe congregation as far as the benches would allow--not seeing clearly, for he was sightless with his tears. 

"But, " he roared, and as he spoke he struck the Bible repeatedly withhis clenched fist, "by the Almighty, I will build a church of my own toHim! To Him! do you hear? not to your opinions of Him nor mine nor anyman's! I will cut off a parcel of my farm and make a perpetual deed ofit in the courts, to be held in trust forever. And while the earthstands, it shall stand, free to all Christian believers. I will build aschool-house and a meeting-house, where any child may be free to learnand any man or woman free to worship. "

He put the Bible back with shaking arms and turned on them again. 

"As for you, my brethren, " he said, his face purple and distorted withpassion, "you may be saved in your crooked, narrow way, if the mercy ofGod is able to do it. But you are close to the jaws of Hell this day!"

He went over into a corner for his hat, took his wife by the hand andheld it tightly, gathered the flock of his children before him, anddrove them out of the church. He mounted his horse, lifted his wife toher seat behind him, saw his children loaded on two other horses, and, leading the way across the creek, disappeared in the wilderness. 

II

Some sixty-five years later, one hot day of midsummer in 1865--oneSaturday afternoon--a lad was cutting weeds in a woodland pasture; abig, raw-boned, demure boy of near eighteen. 

He had on heavy shoes, the toes green with grass stain; the leather soseasoned by morning dews as to be like wood for hardness. These were tokeep his feet protected from briers or from the bees scattered upon thewild white clover or from the terrible hidden thorns of thehoney-locust. No socks. A pair of scant homespun trousers, longoutgrown. A coarse clean shirt. His big shock-head thatched with yellowstraw, a dilapidated sun-and-rain shed. 

The lanky young giant cut and cut and cut: great purple-bodied poke, strung with crimson-juiced seed; great burdock, its green burrs aplague; great milkweed, its creamy sap gushing at every gash; greatthistles, thousand-nettled; great ironweed, plumed with royal purple;now and then a straggling bramble prone with velvety berries--theoutpost of a patch behind him; now and then--more carefully, lest henotch his blade--low sprouts of wild cane, survivals of theimpenetrable brakes of pioneer days. All these and more, the rank, mighty measure of the soil's fertility--low down. 

Measure of its fertility aloft, the tops of the trees, from which thecall of the red-headed woodpecker sounded as faint as the memory of asound and the bark of the squirrels was elfin-thin. A hot crowded land, crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth wherever a woodland stood; andaround every woodland dense cornfields; or, denser still, the leaguesof swaying hemp. The smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming tobe dragged hither and thither like a slow scum on the breeze, like amoss on a sluggish pond. A deep robust land; and among its growthshe--this lad, in his way a self-unconscious human weed, the seed of hiskind borne in from far some generations back, but springing out of thesoil naturally now, sap of its sap, strength of its strength. 

He paused by and by and passed his forefinger across his forehead, brushing the sweat away from above his quiet eyes. He moistened the tipof his thumb and slid it along the blade of his hemp hook--he was usingthat for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the edge of thebrier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut, threw off histattered head-gear, and, reaching for his bucket of water covered withpoke leaves, lifted it to his lips and drank deeply, gratefully. Thenhe drew a whetstone from his pocket, spat on it, and fell to sharpeninghis blade. 

The heat of his work, the stifling air, the many-toned woods, the senseof the vast summering land--these things were not in his thoughts. Somedays before, despatched from homestead to homestead, rumors had reachedhim away off here at work on his father's farm, of a great universityto be opened the following autumn at Lexington. The like of it with itsmany colleges Kentucky, the South, the Mississippi valley had neverseen. It had been the talk among the farming people in their harvestfields, at the cross-roads, on their porches--the one deep sensationamong them since the war. 

For solemn, heart-stirring as such tidings would have been at any othertime, more so at this. Here, on the tableland of this unique borderstate, Kentucky--between the halves of the nation lately atstrife--scene of their advancing and retreating armies--pit of afrenzied commonwealth--here was to arise this calm university, pledgeof the new times, plea for the peace and amity of learning, freshchance for study of the revelation of the Lord of Hosts and God ofbattles. The animosities were over, the humanities re-begun. 

Can you remember your youth well enough to be able to recall the timewhen the great things happened for which you seemed to be waiting? Theboy who is to be a soldier--one day he hears a distant bugle: at onceHE knows. A second glimpses a bellying sail: straightway the ocean pathbeckons to him. A third discovers a college, and toward its kindlylamps of learning turns young eyes that have been kindled and will staykindled to the end. 

For some years this particular lad, this obscure item in Nature's planwhich always passes understanding, had been growing more unhappy in hisplace in creation. By temperament he was of a type the most joyous andself-reliant--those sure signs of health; and discontent now was due tothe fact that he had outgrown his place. Parentage--a farm and itstasks--a country neighborhood and its narrowness--what more are thesesometimes than a starting-point for a young life; as a flowerpot mightserve to sprout an oak, and as the oak would inevitably reach the hourwhen it would either die or burst out, root and branch, into the wholeheavens and the earth; as the shell and yolk of an egg are thestarting-point for the wing and eye of the eagle. One thing only he hadnot outgrown, in one thing only he was not unhappy: his religiousnature. This had always been in him as breath was in him, as blood wasin him: it was his life. Dissatisfied now with his position in theworld, it was this alone that kept him contented in himself. Often thereligious are the weary; and perhaps nowhere else does a perpetualvision of Heaven so disclose itself to the weary as above lonelytoiling fields. The lad had long been lifting his inner eye to thisvision. 

When, therefore, the tidings of the university with its Bible Collegereached him, whose outward mould was hardship, whose inner bliss waspiety, at once they fitted his ear as the right sound, as the gladnessof long awaited intelligence. It was bugle to the soldier, sail to thesailor, lamp of learning to the innate student At once he knew that hewas going to the university--sometime, somehow--and from that momentfelt no more discontent, void, restlessness, nor longing. 

It was of this university, then, that he was happily day-dreaming as hewhetted his hemp hook in the depths of the woods that Saturdayafternoon. Sitting low amid heat and weeds and thorns, he was alreadyas one who had climbed above the earth's eternal snow-line and seesonly white peaks and pinnacles--the last sublimities. 

He felt impatient for to-morrow. One of the professors of theuniversity, of the faculty of the Bible College, had been travellingover the state during the summer, pleading its cause before the people. He had come into that neighborhood to preach and to plead. The ladwould be there to hear. 

The church in which the professor was to plead for learning andreligion was the one first set up in the Kentucky wilderness as a houseof religious liberty; and the lad was a great-grandchild of the founderof that church, here emerging mysteriously from the deeps of life fourgenerations down the line. 

III

The church which David's grim old Indian-fighting great-grandfather haddedicated to freedom of belief in the wilderness, cutting off a parcelof his lands as he had hotly sworn and building on it a schoolhousealso, stood some miles distant across the country. The vast estate ofthe pioneer had been cut to pieces for his many sons. With the nextgeneration the law of partible inheritance had further subdivided eachof these; so that in David's time a single small farm was all that hadfallen to his father; and his father had never increased it. The churchwas situated on what had been the opposite boundary of the originalgrant. But he with most of the other boys in the neighborhood hadreceived his simple education in that school; and he had always gone toworship under that broad-minded roof, whatsoever the doctrines anddogmas haply preached. 

These doctrines and dogmas of a truth were varied and conflictingenough; for the different flocks and herds of Protestant believers withtheir parti-colored guides had for over fifty years found the place avery convenient strip of spiritual pasture: one congregation nowgrazing there jealously and exclusively; afterwards another. 

On this quiet bright Sunday morning in the summer of 1865, the building(a better than the original one, which had long before been destroyedby accidental burning) was overcrowded with farming folk, husbands andwives, of all denominations in the neighborhood, eager to hear the newplea, the new pleader. David's father and mother, intense sectariansand dully pious souls, sat among them. He himself, on a rearmost bench, was wedged fast between two other lads of about his own age--they dumbwith dread lest they should be sent away to this university. Theminister soon turned the course of his sermon to the one topic that wasuppermost and bottommost in the minds of all. 

He bade them understand now, if they had never realized it before, thatfrom the entrance of educated men and women into the westernwilderness, those real founders and builders of the great commonwealth, the dream of the Kentuckians had been the establishment of a broad, free institution of learning for their sons. He gave the history of theefforts and the failures to found such an institution, from the year1780 to the beginning of the Civil War; next he showed how, duringthose few awful years, the slow precious accumulations of thatpreceding time had been scattered; books lost, apparatus ruined, thefurniture of lecture rooms destroyed, one college building burned, another seized and held as a hospital by the federal government; and heconcluded with painting for them a vision of the real university whichwas now to arise at last, oldest, best passion of the people, measureof the height and breadth of the better times: knowing no North, noSouth, no latitude, creed, bias, or political end. In speaking of itsmagnificent new endowments, he dwelt upon the share contributed by theliberal-minded farmers of the state, to some of whom he was speaking:showing how, forgetful of the disappointments and failures of theirfathers, they had poured out money by the thousands and tens ofthousands, as soon as the idea was presented to them again--the rearingof a great institution by the people and for the people in their ownland for the training of their sons, that they might not be sent awayto New England or to Europe. 

His closing words were solemn indeed; they related to the college ofthe Bible, where his own labors were to be performed. For this, hedeclared, he pleaded not in the name of the new State, the new nation, but in the name of the Father. The work of this college was to be thepreparation of young men for the Christian ministry, that they might gointo all the world and preach the Gospel. One truth he bade them bearin mind: that this training was to be given without sectarian theology;that his brethren themselves represented a revolution among believers, having cast aside the dogmas of modern teachers, and taken, as the oneinfallible guide of their faith and practice, the Bible simply; somaking it their sole work to bring all modern believers together intoone church, and that one church the church of the apostles. 

For this university, for this college of the Bible especially, heasked, then, the gift and consecration of their sons. 

Toward dusk that day David's father and mother were sitting side byside on the steps of their front porch. Some neighbors who had spentthe afternoon with them were just gone. The two were talking over inlow, confidential tones certain subjects discussed less frankly withtheir guests. These related to the sermon of the morning, to theuniversity, to what boys in the neighborhood would probably be enteredas students. Their neighbors had asked whether David would go. Thefather and mother had exchanged quick glances and made no reply. Something in the father's mind now lay like worm-wood on the lips. 

He sat leaning his head on his hand, his eyes on the ground, brooding, embittered. 

"If I had only had a son to have been proud of!" he muttered. "It's ofno use; he wouldn't go. It isn't in him to take an education. "

"No, " said the mother, comforting him resignedly, after a pause inwhich she seemed to be surveying the boy's whole life; "it's of no use;there never was much in David. "

"Then he shall work!" cried the father, striking his knee with clenchedfist. "I'll see that he is kept at work. "

Just then the lad came round from behind the house, walking rapidly. Since dinner he had been off somewhere, alone, having it out withhimself, perhaps shrinking, most of all, from this first exposure tohis parents. Such an ordeal is it for us to reveal what we really areto those who have known us longest and have never discovered us. 

He walked quickly around and stood before them, pallid and shaking fromhead to foot. 

"Father!"--

There was filial dutifulness in the voice, but what they had neverheard from those lips--authority. 

"I am going to the university, to the Bible College. It will be hardfor you to spare me, I know, and I don't expect to go at once. But Ishall begin my preparations, and as soon as it is possible I am going. I have felt that you and mother ought to know my decision at once. "

As he stood before them in the dusk and saw on their countenances anincredible change of expression, he naturally mistook it, and spokeagain with more authority. 

"Don't say anything to me now, father! And don't oppose me when thetime comes; it would be useless. Try to learn while I am getting readyto give your consent and to obtain mother's. That is all I have to say. "

He turned quickly away and passed out of the yard gate toward the barn, for the evening feeding. 

The father and mother followed his figure with their eyes, forgettingeach other, as long as it remained in sight. If the flesh of their sonhad parted and dissolved away into nothingness, disclosing a hiddenlight within him like the evening star, shining close to their faces, they could scarce have been struck more speechless. But after a fewmoments they had adjusted themselves to this lofty annunciation. Themother, unmindful of what she had just said, began to recall littleincidents of the lad's life to show that this was what he was alwaysmeant to be. She loosened from her throat the breast-pin containing thehair of the three heads braided together, and drew her husband'sattention to it with a smile. He, too, disregarding his disparagementof the few minutes previous, now began to admit with warmth how good amind David had always had. He prophesied that at college he wouldoutstrip the other boys from that neighborhood. This, in its way, wasalso fresh happiness to him; for, smarting under his poverty among richneighbors, and fallen from the social rank to which he was actuallyentitled, he now welcomed the secondary joy which originates in therevenge men take upon each other through the superiority of theirchildren. 

One thing both agreed in: that this explained their son. He hadcertainly always needed an explanation. But no wonder; he was to be aminister. And who had a right to understand a minister? He was entitledto be peculiar. 

When David came in to supper that night and took his seat, shame-faced, frowning and blinking at the candle-light, his father began to talk tohim as he had never believed possible; and his mother, placing hiscoffee before him, let her hand rest on his shoulder. 

He, long ahungered for their affection and finding it now when leastexpected, filled to the brim, choked at every morsel, got away as soonas he could into the sacred joy of the night Ah, those thrilling hourswhen the young disciple, having for the first time confessed openly hislove of the Divine, feels that the Divine returns his love and acceptshis service!

IV

Autumn came, the university opened wide its harmonious doors, welcomingYouth and Peace. 

All that day a lad, alone at his field work away off on the edge of thebluegrass lands, toiled as one listening to a sublime sound in thedistance--the tramping, tramping, tramping of the students as theyassembled from the farms of the state and from other states. Some boysout of his own neighborhood had started that morning, oldschoolfellows. He had gone to say good-by; had sat on the bed andwatched them pack their fine new trunks--cramming these with fondmaternal gifts and the thoughtless affluence of necessary andunnecessary things; had heard all the wonderful talk about classes andprofessors and societies; had wrung their hands at last with eyesturned away, that none might see the look in them--the immortal hunger. 

How empty now the whole land without those two or three boys! Not faraway across the fields, soft-white in the clear sunshine, stood thehome of one of them--the green shutters of a single upper room tightlyclosed. His heart-strings were twisted tight and wrung sore this day;and more than once he stopped short in his work (the cutting of briersalong a fence), arrested by the temptation to throw down his hook andgo. The sacred arguments were on his side. Without choice or search ofhis they clamored and battered at his inner ear--those commands of theGospels, the long reverberations of that absolute Voice, biddingirresolute workaday disciples leave the plough in the furrow, leavewhatsoever task was impending or duty uppermost to the living or thedead, and follow, --"Follow Me!"

Arguments, verily, had he in plenty; but raiment--no; nor scrip. Andknew he ever so little of the world, sure he felt of this: that foryoung Elijahs at the university there were no ravens; nor wild honeyfor St. John; nor Galilean basketfuls left over by hungry fisherfolk, fishers of men. 

So back to his briers. And back to the autumn soil, days of harddrudging, days of hard thinking. The chief problem for the nigh futurebeing, how soonest to provide the raiment, fill the scrip; and so withtime enough to find out what, on its first appearance, is so terrible adiscovery to the young, straining against restraint: that just the lackof a coarse garment or two--of a little money for a little plainfood--of a few candles and a few coverlets for light and warmth with abook or two thrown in--that a need so poor, paltry as this, may keepmind and heart back for years. Ah, happy ye! with whom this last nottoo long--or for always!

Yet happy ye, whether the waiting be for short time or long time, ifonly it bring on meanwhile, as it brought on with him, the struggle!One sure reward ye have, then, as he had, though there may be noneother--just the struggle: the marshalling to the front of rightfulforces--will, effort, endurance, devotion; the putting resolutely backof forces wrongful; the hardening of all that is soft within, thesoftening of all that is hard: until out of the hardening and thesoftening results the better tempering of the soul's metal, and higherdevelopment of those two qualities which are best in man and best inhis ideal of his Maker--strength and kindness, power and mercy. With anadded reward also, if the struggle lead you to perceive (what he didnot perceive), as the light of your darkness, the sweet of bitter, thatreal struggling is itself real living, and that no ennobling thing ofthis earth is ever to be had by man on any other terms: so teachinghim, none too soon, that any divine end is to be reached but throughdivine means, that a great work requires a great preparation. 

Of the lad's desperate experience henceforth in mere outward mattersthe recital may be suppressed: the struggle of the earth's poor hasgrown too common to make fresh reading. He toiled direfully, economizeddirefully, to get to his college, but in this showed only the heroismtoo ordinary among American boys to be marvelled at more. One fact maybe set down, as limning some true figure of him on the landscape ofthose years in that peculiar country. 

The war had just closed. The farmers, recollecting the fortunes made inhemp before, had hurried to the fields. All the more as the longinterruption of agriculture in the South had resulted in scarcity ofcotton; so that the earnest cry came to Kentucky for hemp at once totake many of its places. But meantime the slaves had been set free:where before ordered, they must now be hired. A difficult agreement toeffect at all times, because will and word and bond were of no account. Most difficult when the breaking of hemp was to be bargained for; sincethe laborer is kept all day in the winter fields, away from thefireside, and must toil solitary at his brake, cut off from the talkand laughter which lighten work among that race. So that wages rosesteadily, and the cost of hemp with them. 

The lad saw in this demand for the lowest work at the highest priceshis golden opportunity--and seized it. When the hemp-breaking seasonopened that winter, he made his appearance on the farm of a rich farmernear by, taking his place with the negroes. 

There is little art in breaking hemp. He soon had the knack of that:his muscles were toughened already. He learned what it was sometimes toeat his dinner in the fields, warming it, maybe, on the coals of astump set on fire near his brake; to bale his hemp at nightfall andfollow the slide or wagon to the barn; there to wait with the negroestill it was weighed on the steelyards; and at last, with muscles stiffand sore, throat husky with dust, to stride away rapidly over thebitter darkening land to other work awaiting him at home. 

Had there been call to do this before the war, it might not have beendone. But now men young and old, who had never known what work was, were replacing their former slaves. The preexisting order had indeedrolled away like a scroll; and there was the strange fresh universalstir of humanity over the land like the stir of nature in a boundlesswood under a new spring firmament He was one of a multitude of newtoilers; but the first in his neighborhood, and alone in his grimchoice of work. 

So dragged that winter through. When spring returned, he did better. With his father's approval, he put in some acres for himself--sowed it, watched it, prayed for it; in summer cut it; with hired help stacked itin autumn; broke it himself the winter following; sold it the nextspring; and so found in his pocket the sorely coveted money. 

This was increased that summer from the sale of cord wood, throughdriblets saved by his father and mother; and when, autumn once moreadvanced with her days of shadow and thoughtfulness--two years havingnow passed--he was in possession of his meagre fortune, wrung out ofearth, out of sweat and strength and devotion. 

Only a few days remained now before his leaving for theuniversity--very solemn tender days about the house with his father andmother. 

And now for the lad's own sake, as for the clearer guidance of thosewho may care to understand what so incredibly befell him afterward, anattempt must be made to reveal somewhat of his spiritual life duringthose two years. It was this, not hard work, that writ his history. 

As soon as he had made up his mind to study for the ministry, he hadbegun to read his Bible absorbingly, sweeping through that primitivedawn of life among the Hebrews and that second, brilliant one of theChristian era. He had few other books, none important; he knew nothingof modern theology or modern science. Thus he was brought wholly underthe influence of that view of Man's place in Nature which was held bythe earliest Biblical writers, has imposed itself upon countlessmillions of minds since then, and will continue to impose itself--howmuch longer?

As regarded, then, his place in Nature, this boy became a contemporaryof the Psalmist; looked out upon the physical universe with the eye ofJob; placed himself back beside that simple, audacious, sublimechild--Man but awakening from his cradle of faith in the morning ofcivilization. The meaning of all which to him was this: that the mostimportant among the worlds swung in space was the Earth, on account ofa single inhabitant--Man. Its shape had been moulded, its surfacefitted up, as the dwelling-place of Man. Land, ocean, mountain-range, desert, valley--these were designed alike for Man. The sun--it was forhim; and the moon; and the stars, hung about the earth as itslights--guides to the mariner, reminders to the landsman of the Eyethat never slumbered. The clouds--shade and shower--they weremercifully for Man. Nothing had meaning, possessed value, save as itderived meaning and value from him. The great laws of Nature--they, too, were ordered for Man's service, like the ox and the ass; and as hedrove his ox and his ass whither he would, caused them to move forwardor to stop at the word of command, so Man had only to speak properly(in prayer) and these laws would move faster or less fast, stop still, turn to the right or the left side of the road that he desired totravel. Always Man, Man, Man, nothing but Man! To himself measure ofthe universe as to himself a little boy is sole reason for the food andfurnishings of his nursery. 

This conception of Man's place in Nature has perhaps furnished a verylarge part of the history of the world. Even at this close of thenineteenth century, it is still, in all probability, the most importantfact in the faith and conduct of the race, running with endlessapplications throughout the spheres of practical life and vibratingaway to the extremities of the imagination. In the case of this poor, devout, high-minded Kentucky boy, at work on a farm in the years 1866and 1867, saving his earnings and reading his Bible as the twofoldpreparation for his entrance into the Christian ministry, this belieftook on one of its purest shapes and wrought out in him some of itsloftiest results. 

Let it be remembered that he lived in a temperate, beautiful, bountifulcountry; that his work was done mostly in the fields, with the aspectsof land and sky ever before him; that he was much alone; that histhinking was nearly always of his Bible and his Bible college. Let itbe remembered that he had an eye which was not merely an opening andclosing but a seeing eye--full of health and of enjoyment of thepageantry of things; and that behind this eye, looking through it asthrough its window, stood the dim soul of the lad, itself in a templeof perpetual worship: these are some of the conditions which yieldedhim during these two years the intense, exalted realities of his innerlife. 

When of morning he stepped out of the plain farm-house with its rottingdoors and leaking roof and started off joyously to his day's work, atthe sight of the great sun just rising above the low dew-wet hills, hissoul would go soaring away to heaven's gate. Sometimes he would beabroad late at night, summoning the doctor for his father or returningfrom a visit to another neighborhood. In every farmhouse that he passedon the country road the people were asleep--over all the shadowy landthey were asleep. And everywhere, guardian in the darkness, watched themoon, pouring its searching beams upon every roof, around everyentrance, on kennel and fold, sty and barn--with light not enough toawaken but enough to protect: how he worshipped toward that lamp tendedby the Sleepless! There were summer noons when he would be lying undera solitary tree in a field--in the edge of its shade, resting; his faceturned toward the sky. This would be one over-bending vault of serenestblue, save for a distant flight of snow-white clouds, making him thinkof some earthward-wandering company of angels. He would lie motionless, scarce breathing, in that peace of the earth, that smile of the Father. Or if this same vault remained serene too long; if the soil of thefields became dusty to his boots and his young grain began to wither, when at last, in response to his prayer, the clouds were broughtdirectly over them and emptied down, as he stepped forth into thecooled, dripping, soaking green, how his heart blessed the Power thatreigned above and did all things well!

It was always praise, gratitude, thanks-giving, whatever happened. Ifhe prayed for rain for his crops and none was sent, then he thought hisprayer lacked faith or was unwise, he knew not how; if too much rainfell, so that his grain rotted, this again was from some fault of hisor for his good; or perhaps it was the evil work of the prince of thepowers of the air--by permission of the Omnipotent. In the case of onecrop all the labor of nearly a year went for nothing: he explained thisas a reminder that he must be chastened. 

Come good, come ill, then, crops or no crops, increase or decrease, itwas all the same to him: he traced the cause of all plenty as of alldisappointment and disaster reaching him through the laws of nature tosome benevolent purpose of the Ruler. And ever before his eyes also hekept that spotless Figure which once walked among men on earth--thatSaviour of the world whose service he was soon to enter, whose words ofeverlasting life he was to preach: his father's farm became as thevineyard of the parables in the Gospels, he a laborer in it. 

Thus this lad was nearer the first century and yet earlier ages thanthe nineteenth. He knew more of prophets and apostles than moderndoctors of divinity. When the long-looked-for day arrived for him tothrow his arms around his father and mother and bid them good-by, heshould have mounted a camel, like a youth of the Holy Land of old, andtaken his solemn, tender way across the country toward Jerusalem. 

V

One crisp, autumn morning, then, of that year 1867, a big, raw-boned, bashful lad, having passed at the turnstile into the twenty-acrecampus, stood reverently still before the majestical front of MorrisonCollege. Browned by heat and wind, rain and sun; straight of spine, fine of nerve, tough of muscle. In one hand he carried an enormous, faded valise, made of Brussels carpet copiously sprinkled with small, pink roses; in the other, held like a horizontal javelin, a familyumbrella. A broken rib escaped his fingers. 

It was no time and place for observation or emotion. The turnstilebehind him was kept in a whirl by students pushing through and hurryingtoward the college a few hundred yards distant; others, who had justleft it, came tramping toward him and passing out. In a retired part ofthe campus, he could see several pacing slowly to and fro in the grass, holding text-books before their faces. Some were grouped at the basesof the big Doric columns, at work together. From behind the college onthe right, two or three appeared running and disappeared through abasement entrance. Out of the grass somewhere came the sound of awhistle as clear and happy as of a quail in the wheat; from anotherdirection, the shouts and wrangling of a playground. Once, barelyaudible, through the air surged and died away the last bars of aglorious hymn, sung by a chorus of fresh male voices. The whole scenewas one of bustle, work, sport, worship. 

A few moments the lad remained where he had halted, drinking throughevery thirsting pore; but most of all with his eyes satisfied by thesight of that venerable building which, morning and night, for over twoyears had shaped itself to his imagination--that seat of theuniversity--that entrance into his future. 

Three students came strolling along the path toward him on their waydown town. One was slapping his book against his thigh; one was blowinga ditty through his nose, like music on a comb; one, in the middle, hadhis arms thrown over the shoulders of the others, and was at intervalsusing them as crutches. As they were about to pass the lad, who hadstepped a few feet to one side of the path, they wheeled and laughed athim. 

"Hello, preachy!" cried one. His face was round, red, and soft, likethe full moon; the disk was now broken up by smiling creases. 

"Can you tell me, " inquired the lad, coloring and wondering how it wasalready known that he was to be a preacher, "Can you tell me just theway to the Bible College?"

The one of the three on the right turned to the middle man and repeatedthe question gravely:--

"Can you tell me just the way to the Bible College?"

The middle man turned and repeated it gravely to the one on the left:--

"Can you tell me just the way to the Bible College?"

The one on the left seized a passing student:--

"Can you tell us all just the way to the Bible College?"

"Ministers of grace!" he said, "without the angels!" Then turning tothe lad, he continued: "You see this path? Take it! Those steps? Gostraight up those steps. Those doors? Enter! Then, if you don't see theBible College, maybe you'll see the janitor--if he is there. But don'tyou fear! You may get lost, but you'll never get away!"

The lad knew he was being guyed, but he didn't mind: what hurt him wasthat his Bible College should be treated with such levity. 

"Thank you, " he said pleasantly but proudly. 

"Have you matriculated?" one of the three called after him as hestarted forward. 

David had never heard that word; but he entertained such a respect forknowledge that he hated to appear unnecessarily ignorant. 

"I don't think--I have, " he observed vaguely. 

The small eyes of the full moon disappeared altogether this time. 

"Well, you've got to matriculate, you know, " he said. "You'd better dothat sometime. But don't speak of it to your professors, or to anybodyconnected with the college. It must be kept secret. "

"Will I be too late for the first recitations?"

The eager question was on the lad's lips but never uttered. The triohad wheeled carelessly away. 

There passed them, coming toward David, a tall, gaunt, rough-whiskeredman, wearing a paper collar without a cravat, and a shiny, long-tailed, black cloth coat. He held a Bible opened at Genesis. 

"Good morning, brother, " he said frankly, speaking in the simplekindness which comes from being a husband and father. "You are going toenter the Bible College, I see. "

"Yes, sir, " replied the lad. "Are you one of the professors?"

The middle-aged man laughed painfully. 

"I am one of the students. "

David felt that he had inflicted a wound. "How many students are here?"he asked quickly. 

"About a thousand. "

The two walked side by side toward the college. 

"Have you matriculated?" inquired the lad's companion. There was thatawful word again!

"I don't know HOW to matriculate. How DO you matriculate? What ismatriculating?"

"I'LL go with you. I'LL show you, " said the simple fatherly guide. 

"Thank you, if you will, " breathed the lad, gratefully. 

After a brief silence his companion spoke again. 

"I'm late in life in entering college. I've got a son half as big asyou and a baby; and my wife's here. But, you see, I've had a hard time. I've preached for years. But I wasn't satisfied. I wanted to understandthe Bible better. And this is the place to do that. " Now that he hadexplained himself, he looked relieved. 

"Well, " said David, fervently, entering at once into a brotherhood withthis kindly soul, "that's what I've come for, too. I want to understandthe Bible better--and if I am ever worthy--I want to preach it. And youhave baptized people already?"

"Hundreds of them. Here we are, " said his companion, as they passedunder a low doorway, on one side of the pillared steps. 

"Here I am at last, " repeated the lad to himself with solemn joy, "Andnow God be with me!"

By the end of that week he had the run of things; had met hisprofessors, one of whom had preached that sermon two summers before, and now, on being told who the lad was, welcomed him as a sheaf out ofthat sowing; had been assigned to his classes; had gone down town tothe little packed and crowded book-store and bought the needfulstudent's supplies--so making the first draught on his money; beenassigned to a poor room in the austere dormitory behind the college;made his first failures in recitations, standing before his professorwith no more articulate voice and no more courage than a sheep; and hadawakened to a new sense--the brotherhood of young souls about him, themen of his college. 

A revelation they were! Nearly all poor like himself; nearly all havingworked their way to the university: some from farms, some by teachingdistant country or mountain schools; some by the peddling of books--outof unknown byways, from the hedges and ditches of life, they hadassembled: Calvary's regulars. 

One scene in his new life struck upon the lad's imagination like avision out of the New Testament, --his first supper in the bare diningroom of that dormitory: the single long, rough table; the coarse, frugal food; the shadows of the evening hour; at every chair a formreverently standing; the saying of the brief grace--ah, that firstsupper with the disciples!

Among the things he had to describe in his letter to his father andmother, this scene came last; and his final words to them were ablessing that they had made him one of this company of young men. 

VI

The lad could not study eternally. The change from a toiling body andidle mind to an idle body and toiling mind requires time to make thelatter condition unirksome. Happily there was small need to delve atlearning. His brain was like that of a healthy wild animal freshlycaptured from nature. And as such an animal learns to snap at flungbits of food, springing to meet them and sinking back on his hauncheskeen-eyed for more; so mentally he caught at the lessons prepared forhim by his professors: every faculty asked only to be fed--and remainedhungry after the feeding. 

Of afternoons, therefore, when recitations were over and his musclesached for exercise, he donned his old farm hat and went, stepping inhis high, awkward, investigating way around the town--unaware ofhimself, unaware of the light-minded who often turned to smile at thatgreat gawk in grotesque garments, with his face full of beatitudes andhis pockets full of apples. For apples were beginning to come in fromthe frosty orchards; and the fruit dealers along the streets piled theminto pyramids of temptation. It seemed a hardship to him to have tospend priceless money for a thing like apples, which had always been ascheap and plentiful as spring water. But those evening suppers in thedormitory with the disciples! Even when he was filled (which was notoften) he was never comforted; and one day happening upon one of thosepomological pyramids, he paused, yearned, and bought the apex. It washarder not to buy than to buy. After that he fell into this fruitfulvice almost diurnally; and with mortifying worldly-mindedness he wouldsometimes find his thoughts straying apple-wards while his professorswere personally conducting him through Canaan or leading him dry-shodacross the Red Sea. The little dealer soon learned to anticipate hisapproach; and as he drew up would have the requisite number ready andslide them into his pockets without a word--and without the chance ofinspection. A man's candy famine attacked him also. He usually boughtsome intractable, resisting medium: it left him rather tired ofpleasure. 

So during those crude days he went strolling solemnly about the town, eating, exploring, filling with sweetmeats and filled with wonder. Itwas the first city he had ever seen, the chief interior city of thestate. From childhood he had longed to visit it. The thronged streets, the curious stores, the splendid residences, the flashingequipages--what a new world it was to him! But the first place heinquired his way to was the factory where he had sold his hemp. Awhilehe watched the men at work, wondering whether they might not then behandling some that he had broken. 

At an early date also he went to look up his dear old neighborhoodschoolfellows who two years before had left him, to enter anothercollege of the University. By inquiry he found out where they lived--ina big, handsome boarding-house on a fashionable street. He thought hehad never even dreamed of anything so fine as was this house--nor hadhe. As he sat in the rich parlors, waiting to learn whether his friendswere at home, he glanced uneasily at his shoes to see whether theymight not be soiling the carpet; and he vigorously dusted himself withhis breath and hands--thus depositing on the furniture whatever dustthere was to transfer. 

Having been invited to come up to his friends' room, he mounted andfound one of them waiting at the head of the stairs in his shirtsleeves, smoking. His greeting was hearty in its way yet betokened somesurprise, a little uneasiness, condescension. David followed his hostinto a magnificent room with enormous windows, now raised and openingupon a veranda. Below was a garden full of old vines black with grapesand pear trees bent down with pears and beds bright with cool autumnflowers. (The lad made a note of how much money he would save on applesif he could only live in reach of those pear trees. ) There was a bigrumpled bed in the room; and stretched across this bed on his stomachlay a student studying and waving his heels slowly in the air. A tablestood in the middle of the room: the books and papers had been scrapedoff to the floor; four students were seated at it playing cards andsmoking. Among them his other friend, who rose and gave him a heartygrip and resuming his seat asked what was trumps. A voice he had heardbefore called out to him from the table:--

"Hello, preachy! Did you find your way to the Bible College?"

Whereupon the student on the bed rolled heavily over, sat updejectedly, and ogled him with red eyes and a sagging jaw. 

"Have you matriculated?" he asked. 

David did not think of the cards, and he liked the greeting of the twostrangers who guyed him better than the welcome of his old friends. That hurt: he had never supposed there was anything just like it in thenature of man. But during the years since he had seen them, old timeswere gone, old manners changed. And was it not in the hemp fields ofthe father of one of them that he had meantime worked with the negroes?And is there any other country in the world where the clean laborer isso theoretically honored and so practically despised as by the Americansnob of each sex?

One afternoon he went over to the courthouse and got the county clerkto show him the entry where his great-grandfather had had the deed tohis church recorded. There it all was!--all written down to hold goodwhile the world lasted: that perpetual grant of part and parcel of hisland, for the use of a free school and a free church. The lad wentreverently over the plain, rough speech of the mighty old pioneer, ashe spoke out his purpose. 

During those early days also he sought out the different churches, scrutinizing respectfully their exteriors. How many they were, and howgrand nearly all! Beyond anything he had imagined. He reasoned that ifthe buildings were so fine, how fine must be the singing and thesermons! The unconscious assumption, the false logic here, wascreditable to his heart at least--to that green trust of the young inthings as they should be which becomes in time the best seasoned staffof age. He hunted out especially the Catholic Church. Hisgreat-grandfather had founded his as free for Catholics as Protestants, but he recalled the fact that no priest had ever preached there. Hefelt very curious to see a priest. A synagogue in the town he could notfind. He was sorry. He had a great desire to lay eyes on asynagogue--temple of that ancient faith which had flowed on its deepway across the centuries without a ripple of disturbance from theChrist. He had made up his mind that when he began to preach he wouldoften preach especially to the Jews: the time perhaps had come when theFather, their Father, would reveal his Son to them also. Thus hepromptly fixed in mind the sites of all the churches, because heintended in time to go to them all. 

Meantime he attended his own, the size and elegance of which were amarvel; and in it especially the red velvet pulpit and the vastchandelier (he had never seen a chandelier before), blazing with stars(he had never seen illuminating gas). It was under this chandelier thathe himself soon found a seat. All the Bible students sat there whocould get there, that being the choir of male voices; and before amonth passed he had been taken into this choir: for a storm-like bassrolled out of him as easily as thunder out of a June cloud. Thusuneventful flowed the tenor of his student life during those severalinitiatory weeks: then something occurred that began to make gravehistory for him. 

The pastor announced at service one morning that he would that daybegin a series of sermons on errors in the faith and practice of thedifferent Protestant sects; though he would also consider in time thecases of the Catholics and Jews: it would scarcely be necessary tospeak of the Mohammedans and such others. He was driven to do this, hedeclared, and was anxious to do it, as part of the work of his brethrenall over the country; which was the restoration of ApostolicChristianity to the world. He asked the especial attention of the Biblestudents of the University to these sermons: the first of which he thenproceeded to preach. 

That night the lad was absent from his place: he was seated in thechurch which had been riddled with logic in the morning. Just why itwould be hard to say. Perhaps his motive resembled that which promptsus to visit a battle-field and count the slain. Only, not a soul ofthose people seemed even to have been wounded. They sang, prayed, preached, demeaned themselves generally as those who believed that THEYwere the express chosen of the Lord, and greatly enjoyed the notoriousfact. 

The series of sermons went on: every night the lad was missing from hisplace--gone to see for himself and to learn more about those worldlychurches which had departed from the faith once delivered to thesaints, and if saved at all, then by the mercy of God and much of it. 

In the history of any human soul it is impossible to grasp the firstevent that starts up a revolution. But perhaps the troubles of the ladbegan here. His absences from Sunday night service of course attractednotice under the chandelier. His bass was missed. Another student wasglad to take his place. His roommate and the several other dormitorystudents who had become his acquaintances, discussed with him theimpropriety of these absences: they agreed that he would better stickto his own church. He gave reasons why he should follow up the pastor'sdemonstrations with actual visits to the others: he contended that thepastor established the fact of the errors; but that the best way tounderstand any error was to study the erring. This was all new to him, however. He had not supposed that in educating himself to preach thesimple Gospel, to the end that the world might believe in Christ, hemust also preach against those who believed in Christ already. Besides, no one seemed to be convinced by the pastor but those who agreed withhim in advance: the other churches flourished quite the same. 

He cited a sermon he had heard in one, which, to the satisfaction ofall present, had riddled his own church, every word of the proof beingbased on Scripture: so there you were!

A little cloud came that instant between David and the students to whomhe expressed these views. Some rejoined hotly at once; some maintainedthe cold silence which intends to speak in its own time. The next thingthe lad knew was that a professor requested him to remain after classone day; and speaking with grave kindness, advised him to go regularlyto his own church thereafter. The lad entered ardently into the reasonswhy he had gone to the others. The professor heard him through andwithout comment repeated his grave, kind advice. 

Thereafter the lad was regularly in his own seat there--but with acertain mysterious, beautiful feeling gone. He could not have said whatthis feeling was, did not himself know. Only, a slight film seemed topass before his eyes when he looked at his professor, so that he sawhim less clearly and as more remote. 

One morning there was a sermon on the Catholics. David went dutifullyto his professor. He said he had never been to a Catholic Church andwould like to go. His professor assented cordially, evincing hispleasure in the lad's frankness. But the next Sunday morning he was inthe Catholic Church again, thus for the first time missing thecommunion in his own. Of all the congregations of Christian believersthat the lad had now visited, the Catholic impressed him as being themost solemn, reverent, and best mannered. In his own church the placedid not seem to become the house of God till services began; and onemorning in particular, two old farmers in the pew behind him talked insmothered tones of stock and crops, till it fairly made him homesick. The sermon of the priest, too, filled him with amazement. It weighedthe claims of various Protestant sects to be reckoned as parts of theone true historic church of God. In passing, he barely referred to themost modern of these self-constituted Protestant bodies--David's ownchurch--and dismissed it with one blast of scorn, which seemed tostrike the lad's face like a hot wind: it left it burning. But to theEpiscopal Church the priest dispensed the most vitriolic criticism. Andthat night, carried away by the old impulse, which had grown now almostinto a habit, David went to the Episcopal Church: went to number theslain. The Bishop of the diocese, as it happened, was preaching thatnight--preaching on the union of Christian believers. He showed howready the Episcopal Church was for such a union if the rest would onlyconsent: but no other church, he averred, must expect the EpiscopalChurch ever to surrender one article of its creed, namely: that italone was descended not by historical continuity simply, but by Divinesuccession from the Apostles themselves. The lad walked slowly back tothe dormitory that night with knit brows and a heavy heart. 

A great change was coming over him. His old religious peace had beenunexpectedly disturbed. He found himself in the thick of the wars ofdogmatic theology. At that time and in that part of the United Statesthese were impassioned and rancorous to a degree which even now, lessthan half a century later, can scarce be understood; so rapidly hasdeveloped meantime that modern spirit which is for us the toleranttransition to a yet broader future. Had Kentucky been peopled by hersame people several generations earlier, the land would have run redwith the blood of religious persecutions, as never were England andScotland at their worst. So that this lad, brought in from his solemn, cloistered fields and introduced to wrangling, sarcastic, enviouscreeds, had already begun to feel doubtful and distressed, not knowingwhat to believe nor whom to follow. He had commenced by being soplastic a medium for faith, that he had tried to believe them all. Nowhe was in the intermediate state of trying to ascertain which. Fromthat state there are two and two only final ones to emerge: "I shallamong them believe this one only;" or, "I shall among thembelieve--none. " The constant discussion of some dogma and disproof ofsome dogma inevitably begets in a certain order of mind the temper todiscuss and distrust ALL dogma. 

Not over their theologies alone were the churches wrangling before thelad's distracted thoughts. If the theologies were rending religion, politics was rending the theologies. The war just ended had notbrought, as the summer sermon of the Bible College professor hadstated, breadth of mind for narrowness, calm for passion. Not while menare fighting their wars of conscience do they hate most, but after theyhave fought; and Southern and Union now hated to the bottom and nowhereelse as at their prayers. David found a Presbyterian Church on onestreet called "Southern" and one a few blocks away called "Northern":how those brethren dwelt together. The Methodists were similarlydivided. Of Baptists, the lad ascertained there had been so many kindsand parts of kinds since the settlement of Kentucky, that apparentlyany large-sized family anywhere could reasonably have constituteditself a church, if the parents and children had only been fortunateenough to agree. 

Where politics did not cleave, other issues did. The Episcopal Churchwas cleft into a reform movement (and one unreformable). In his owndenomination internal discord raged over such questions as diabolicpleasures and Apostolic music. He saw young people haled before thepulpit as before a tribunal of exact statutes and expelled for movingtheir feet in certain ways. If in dancing they whirled like a topinstead of being shot straight back and forth like a bobbin in aweaver's shuttle, their moral conduct was aggravated. A church organwas ridiculed as a sort of musical Behemoth--as a dark chamber ofhowling, roaring Belial. 

These controversies overflowed from the congregation to the BibleCollege. The lad in his room at the dormitory one Sunday afternoonheard a debate on whether a tuning fork is a violation of the word ofGod. The debaters turned to him excited and angry:--

"What do you think?" they asked. 

"I don't think it is worth talking about, " he replied quietly. 

They soon became reconciled to each other; they never forgave him. 

Meantime as for his Biblical studies, they enlarged enormously hisknowledge of the Bible; but they added enormously to the questions thatmay be asked about the Bible--questions he had never thought of before. And in adding to the questions that may be asked, they multiplied thosethat cannot be answered. The lad began to ask these questions, began toget no answers. The ground of his interest in the great Book shifted. Out on the farm alone with it for two years, reading it never with acritical but always with a worshipping mind, it had been to him simplythe summons to a great and good life, earthly and immortal. As he satin the lecture rooms, studying it book by book, paragraph by paragraph, writing chalk notes about it on the blackboard, hearing the studentsrecite it as they recited arithmetic or rhetoric, a little homesicknessovercame him for the hours when he had read it at the end of a furrowin the fields, or by his candle the last thing at night before hekneeled to say his prayers, or of Sunday afternoons off by himself inthe sacred leafy woods. The mysterious untouched Christ-feeling was inhim so strong, that he shrank from these critical analyses as he wouldfrom dissecting the body of the crucified Redeemer. 

A significant occurrence took place one afternoon some seven monthsafter he had entered the University. 

On that day, recitations over, the lad left the college alone and witha most thoughtful air crossed the campus and took his course into thecity. Reaching a great central street, he turned to the left andproceeded until he stood opposite a large brick church. Passing alongthe outside of this, he descended a few steps, traversed an alley, knocked timidly at a door, and by a voice within was bidden to enter. He did so, and stood in his pastor's study. He had told his pastor thathe would like to have a little talk with him, and the pastor was thereto have the little talk. 

During those seven months the lad had been attracting notice more andmore. The Bible students had cast up his reckoning unfavorably: he wasnot of their kind--they moved through their studies as one flock ofsheep through a valley, drinking the same water, nipping the samegrass, and finding it what they wanted. His professors had singled himout as a case needing peculiar guidance. Not in his decorum as astudent: he was the very soul of discipline. Not in slackness of study:his mind consumed knowledge as a flame tinder. Not in anyirregularities of private life: his morals were as snow for whiteness. Yet none other caused such concern. 

All this the pastor knew; he had himself long had his eye on this lad. During his sermons, among the rows of heads and brows and eyes upturnedto him, oftenest he felt himself looking at that big shock-head, atthose grave brows, into those eager, troubled eyes. His persistentdemonstrations that he and his brethren alone were right and all otherchurches Scripturally wrong--they always seemed to take the light outof that countenance. There was silence in the study now as the ladmodestly seated himself in a chair which the pastor had pointed out. 

After fidgeting a few moments, he addressed the logician with astupefying premise:--

"My great-grandfather, " he said, "once built a church simply to God, not to any man's opinions of Him. "

He broke off abruptly. 

"So did Voltaire, " remarked the pastor dryly, coming to the rescue. "Voltaire built a church to God: 'Erexit deo Voltaire' Yourgreat-grandfather and Voltaire must have been kin to each other. "

The lad had never heard of Voltaire. The information was ratherprepossessing. 

"I think I should admire Voltaire, " he observed reflectively. 

"So did the Devil, " remarked the pastor. Then he added pleasantly, forhe had a Scotch relish for a theological jest:--

"You may meet Voltaire some day. "

"I should like to. Is he coming here?" asked the lad. 

"Not immediately. He is in hell--or will be after the Resurrection ofthe Dead. "

The silence in the study grew intense. 

"I understand you now, " said the lad, speaking composedly all at once. "You think that perhaps I will go to the Devil also. "

"Oh, no!" exclaimed the pastor, hiding his smile and stroking his beardwith syllogistic self-respect. "My dear young brother, did you want tosee me on any--BUSINESS?"

"I did. I was trying to tell you. My great-grandfather--"

"Couldn't you begin with more modern times?"

"The story begins back there, " insisted the lad, firmly. "The part ofit, at least, that affects me. My great-grandfather founded a churchfree to all Christian believers. It stands in our neighborhood. I havealways gone there. I joined the church there. All the differentdenominations in our part of the country have held services there. Sometimes they have all had services together. I grew up to think theywere all equally good Christians in their different ways. "

"Did you?" inquired the pastor. "You and your grandfather and Voltairemust ALL be kin to each other. "

His visage was not pleasant. 

"My trouble since coming to College, " said the lad, pressing across theinterruption, "has been to know which IS the right church--"

"Are you a member of THIS church?" inquired the pastor sharply, callinga halt to this folly. 

"I am. "

"Then don't you know that it is the only right one?"

"I do not. All the others declare it a wrong one. They stand ready toprove this by the Scriptures and do prove it to their satisfaction. They declare that if I become a preacher of what my church believes, Ishall become a false teacher of men and be responsible to God for thesouls I may lead astray. They honestly believe this. "

"Don't you know that when Satan has entered into a man, he can make himhonestly believe anything?"

"And you think it is Satan that keeps the other churches from seeingthis is the only right one?"

"I do! And beware, young man, that Satan does not get into YOU!"

"He must be in me already. " There was silence again, then the ladcontinued. 

"All this is becoming a great trouble to me. It interferes with mystudies--takes my interest out of my future. I come to you then. Youare my pastor. Where is the truth--the reason--the proof--theauthority? Where is the guiding LAW in all this? I must find THE LAWand that quickly. "

There was no gainsaying his trouble: it expressed itself in his eyes, voice, entire demeanor. The pastor was not seeing any of these things. Here was a plain, ignorant country lad who had rejected his logic andwho apparently had not tact enough at this moment to appreciate his owneffrontery. In the whole sensitiveness of man there is no spot sotouchy as the theological. 

"Have you a copy of the New Testament?"

It was the tone in which the school-master of old times said, "Bring methat switch. "

"I have, "

"You can read it?"

"I can. "

"You find in it the inspired account of the faith of the originalchurch--the earliest history of Apostolic Christianity?"

"I do. "

"Then, can you not compare the teachings of the Apostles, THEIR faithand THEIR practice, with the teachings of this church? ITS faith andITS practice?"

"I have tried to do that. "

"Then there is the truth. And the reason. And the proof. And theauthority. And the LAW. We have no creed but the creed of the Apostolicchurches; no practice but their practice; no teaching but theirteaching in letter and in spirit. "

"That is what was told me before I came to college. It was told me thatyoung men were to be prepared to preach the simple Gospel of Christ toall the world. There was to be no sectarian theology. "

"Well? Has any one taught you sectarian theology?"

"Not consciously, not intentionally. Inevitably--perhaps. That is mytrouble now--ONE of my troubles. "

"Well?"

"May I ask you some questions?"

"You may ask me some questions if they are not silly questions. Youdon't seem to have any creed, but you DO seem to have a catechism!Well, on with the catechism! I hope it will be better than those I haveread. "

So bidden, the lad began;--

"Is it Apostolic Christianity to declare that infants should not bebaptized?"

"It is!" The reply came like a flash of lightning. 

"And those who teach to the contrary violate the word of God?"

"They do!"

"Is it Apostolic Christianity to affirm that only immersion isChristian baptism?"

"It is!"

"And those who use any other form violate the word of God?"

"They do!"

"Is it Apostolic Christianity to celebrate the Lord's Supper once everyseven days?"

"It is!"

"And all who observe a different custom violate the word of God?"

"They do!"

"Is it Apostolic Christianity to have no such officer in the church asan Episcopal bishop?"

"It is!"

"The office of Bishop, then, is a violation of Apostolic Christianity?"

"It is!"

"Is it Apostolic Christianity to make every congregation, no matter howsmall or influenced by passion, an absolute court of trial andpunishment of his members?"

"It is!"

"To give every such body control over the religious standing of itsmembers, so it may turn them out into the world, banish them from thechurch of Christ forever, if it sees fit?"

"It is!"

"And those who frame any other system of church government violatethe--"

"They do!"

"Is it Apostolic Christianity to teach that faith precedes repentance?"

"It is!"

"Those who teach that sorrow for sin is itself the great reason why webelieve in Christ--do they violate--?"

"They do!"

"Is it Apostolic Christianity to turn people out of the church fordancing?"

"It is!"

"The use of an organ in worship--is that a violation of Apostolic--?"

"It is!"

"Is it Apostolic Christianity to require that the believer in it shalllikewise believe everything in the old Bible?"

"It is. "

"Did Christ and the Apostles themselves teach that everything containedin what we call the old Bible must be believed?"

"They did!"

The pastor was grasping the arms of his chair, his body bent toward thelad, his head thrown back, his face livid with sacred rage. He was agood man, tried and true: God-fearing, God-serving. No fault lay in himunless it may be imputed for unrighteousness that he was a stanch, trenchant sectary in his place and generation. As he sat there in thebasement study of his church, his pulpit of authority and his baptismalpool of regeneration directly over his head, all round him in the citythe solid hundreds of his followers, he forgot himself as a man and aminister and remembered only that as a servant of the Most High he wasbeing interrogated and dishonored. His soul shook and thundered withinhim to repel these attacks upon his Lord and Master. As thoseunexpected random questions had poured in upon him thick and fast, allemerging, as it seemed to him, like disembodied evil spirits from theblack pit of Satan and the damned, it was joy to him to deal to eachthat same straight, God-directed spear-thrust of a reply--killing themas they rose. His soul exulted in that blessed carnage. 

But the questions ceased. They had hurried out as though there were amyriad pressing behind--a few issuing bees of an aroused swarm. Butthey ceased. The pastor leaned back in his chair and drew a quiveringbreath through his white lips. 

"Ask some more!"

On his side, the lad had lost divine passion as the pastor had gainedit. His interest waned while the pastor's waxed. His last questionswere put so falteringly, almost so inaudibly, that the pastor mightwell believe his questioner beaten, brought back to modesty andsilence. To a deeper-seeing eye, however, the truth would have beenplain that the lad was not seeing his pastor at all, but seeing THROUGHhim into his own future: into his life, his great chosen life-work. Hisyoung feet had come in their travels nigh to the limits of his PromisedLand: he was looking over into it. 

"Ask some more! The last of them! Out with them ALL! Make an end ofthis now and here!"

The lad reached for his hat, which he had laid on the floor, and stoodup. He was as pale as the dead. 

"I shall never be able to preach Apostolic Christianity, " he said, andturned to the door. 

But reaching it, he wheeled and came back. 

"I am in trouble!" he cried, sitting down again. "I don't know what tobelieve. I don't know what I do believe. My God!" he cried again, burying his face in his hands. "I believe I am beginning to doubt theBible. Great God, what am I coming to! what is my life coming to! MEdoubt the Bible!". . . 

The interview of that day was one of the signs of two storms which wereapproaching: one appointed to reach the University, one to reach thelad. 

The storm now gathering in many quarters and destined in a few years toburst upon the University was like its other storms that had gonebefore: only, this last one left it a ruin which will stay a ruin. 

That oldest, best passion of the Kentucky people for the establishmentin their own land of a broad institution of learning for their ownsons, though revived in David's time on a greater scale than everbefore, was not to be realized. The new University, bearing the name ofthe commonwealth and opening at the close of the Civil War as a sign ofthe new peace of the new nation, having begun so fairly and risen in afew years to fourth or fifth place in patronage among all those in theland, was already entering upon its decline. The reasons of this werethe same that had successively ruined each of its predecessors: thesame old sectarian quarrels, enmities, revenges; the same old politicaloppositions and hatreds; the same personal ambitions, jealousies, strifes. 

Away back in 1780, while every man, woman, and child in the westernwilderness ness was in dire struggle for life itself, those far-seeingpeople had induced the General Assembly of Virginia to confiscate andsell in Kentucky the lands of British Tories, to found a publicseminary for Kentucky boys--not a sectarian school. These samebroad-minded pioneers had later persuaded her to give twenty thousandacres of her land to the same cause and to exempt officers and studentsof the institution from military service. Still later, intent upon thisgreat work, they had induced Virginia to take from her own belovedWilliam and Mary one-sixth of all surveyors' fees in the district andcontribute them. The early Kentuckians, for their part, planned andsold out a lottery--to help along the incorruptible work. For such aninstitution Washington and Adams and Aaron Burr and Thomas Marshall andmany another opened their purses. For it thousands and thousands ofdollars were raised among friends scattered throughout the Atlanticstates, these responding to a petition addressed to all religioussects, to all political parties. A library and philosophical apparatuswere wagoned over the Alleghanies. A committee was sent to England tochoose further equipments. When Kentucky came to have a legislature ofits own, it decreed that each of the counties in the state shouldreceive six thousand acres of land wherewith to start a seminary; andthat all these county seminaries were to train students for thislong-dreamed-of central institution. That they might not be sentaway--to the North or to Europe. When, at the end of the Civil War, afresh attempt (and the last) was made to found in reality and inperpetuity a home institution to be as good as the best in therepublic, the people rallied as though they had never known defeat. Theidea resounded like a great trumpet throughout the land. Individual, legislative, congressional aid--all were poured out lavishly for thatone devoted cause. 

Sad chapter in the history of the Kentuckians! Perhaps the saddestamong the many sad ones. 

For such an institution must in time have taught what all itscourt-houses and all its pulpits--laws human and divine--have not beenable to teach: it must have taught the noble commonwealth to ceasemurdering. Standing there in the heart of the people's land, it musthave grown to stand in the heart of their affections: and so standing, to stand for peace. For true learning always stands for peace. Lettersalways stand for peace. And it is the scholar of the world who has evercome into it as Christ came: to teach that human life is worth savingand must be saved. 

VII

The storm approaching David was vaster and came faster. 

Several days had passed since his anxious and abruptly terminatedinterview with his pastor. During the interval he had addressed nofurther inquiries to any man touching his religious doubts. A serioussign: for when we cease to carry such burdens to those who wait near byas our recognized counsellors and appointed guides, the inference isthat succor for our peculiar need has there been sought in vain. Thissuccor, if existent at all, will be found elsewhere in one of twoplaces: either farther away from home in greater minds whose teachinghas not yet reached us; or still nearer home in what remains as thelast court of inquiry and decision: in the mind itself. With greaterintellects more remote the lad had not yet been put in touch; he hadtherefore grown reflective, and for nearly a week had been spending thebest powers of his unaided thought in self-examination. 

He was sitting one morning at his student's table with his Bible andnote-book opened before him, wrestling with his problems still. Thedormitory was very quiet. A few students remained indoors at work, butmost were absent: some gone into the country to preach trial sermons totrying congregations; some down in the town; some at the college, practising hymns, or rehearsing for society exhibitions; some scatteredover the campus, preparing Monday lessons on a spring morning whenanimal sap stirs intelligently at its sources and sends up its mingledcurrents of new energy and new lassitude. 

David had thrown his window wide open, to let in the fine air; his eyesstrayed outward. A few yards away stood a stunted transplantedlocust--one of those uncomplaining asses of the vegetable kingdom whosemission in life is to carry whatever man imposes. Year after year thisparticular tree had remained patiently backed up behind the dormitory, for the bearing of garments to be dusted or dried. More than onceduring the winter, the lad had gazed out of his snow-crusted panes atthis dwarfed donkey of the woods, its feet buried deep in ashes, itsbody covered with kitchen wash-rags and Bible students' frozenunderwear. He had reasoned that such soil and such servitude had killedit. 

But as he looked out of his window now, his eyes caught sight of theearly faltering green in which this exile of the forest was stillstruggling to clothe itself--its own life vestments. Its enforced andartificial function as a human clothes-horse had indeed nearlydestroyed it; but wherever a bud survived, there its true office innature was asserted, its ancient kind declared, its growth stubbornlyresumed. 

The moment for the lad may have been one of those in the development ofthe young when they suddenly behold familiar objects as with eyes moreclearly opened; when the neutral becomes the decisive; when the sermonis found in the stone. As he now took curious cognizance of the buddingwood which he, seeing it only in winter, had supposed could not budagain, he fell to marvelling how constant each separate thing in natureis to its own life and how sole is its obligation to live that lifeonly. All that a locust had to do in the world was to be a locust; andbe a locust it would though it perished in the attempt. It drew backwith no hesitation, was racked with no doubt, puzzled with no necessityof preference. It knew absolutely the law of its own being and knewabsolutely nothing else; found under that law its liberty, found underthat liberty its life. 

"But I, " he reflected, "am that which was never sown and never grownbefore. All the ages of time, all the generations of men, have notfixed any type of life for me. What I am to become I must myself eachinstant choose; and having chosen, I can never know that I have chosenbest. Often I do know that what I have selected I must discard. And yetno one choice can ever be replaced by its rejected fellow; the betterchance lost once, is lost eternally. Within the limits of a locust, howlittle may the individual wander; within the limits of the wide anderring human, what may not a man become! What now am I becoming? Whatshall I now choose--as my second choice?"

A certain homely parallel between the tree and himself began to shapeitself before his thought: how he, too, had been dug up far away--had, in a sense, voluntarily dug himself up--and been transplanted in thecollege campus; how, ever since being placed there, the differentsectarian churches of the town had, without exception, begun to pin onthe branches of his mind the many-shaped garments of their dogmas, until by this time he appeared to himself as completely draped as thelittle locust after a heavy dormitory washing. There was this terribledifference, however: that the garments hung on the tree were anonremoved; but these doctrines and dogmas were fastened to his mind tostay--as the very foliage of his thought--as the living leaves ofDivine Truth. He was forbidden to strip off one of those sacred leaves. He was told to live and to breathe his religious life through them, andto grow only where they hung. 

The lad declared finally to himself this morning, that realize hisreligious life through those dogmas he never could; that it was uselessany longer to try. Little by little they would as certainly kill him ingrowth and spirit as the rags had killed the locust in sap and bud. Whatever they might be to others--and he judged no man--for him withhis peculiar nature they could never be life-vestments; they wouldbecome his spiritual grave-clothes. 

The parallel went a little way further: that scant faltering green!that unconquerable effort of the tree to assert despite all deadeningexperiences its old wildwood state! Could he do the like, could he goback to his? Yearning, sad, immeasurable filled him as he now recalledthe simple faith of what had already seemed to him his childhood. Through the mist blinding his vision, through the doubts blinding hisbrain, still could he see it lying there clear in the near distance!"No, " he cried, "into whatsoever future I may be driven to enter, closed against me is the peace of my past. Return thither my eyes everwill, my feet never!"

"But as I was true to myself then, let me be true now. If I cannotbelieve what I formerly believed, let me determine quickly what I CANbelieve. The Truth, the Law--I must find these and quickly!"

From all of which, though thus obscurely set forth, it will be divinedthat the lad had now reached, indeed for some days had stood halting, at one of the great partings of the ways: when the whole of Life's roadcan be walked in by us no longer; when we must elect the half we shallhenceforth follow, and having taken it, ever afterward perhaps lookyearningly back upon the other as a lost trail of the mind. 

The parting of the ways where he had thus faltered, summing up hisbewilderment, and crying aloud for fresh directions, was oneimmemorially old in the history of man: the splitting of Life's singleroad into the by-paths of Doubt and Faith. Until within less than ayear, his entire youth had been passed in the possession of what heesteemed true religion. Brought from the country into the town, whereeach of the many churches was proclaiming itself the sole incarnationof this and all others the embodiment of something false, he had, aftermonths of distracted wandering among their contradictory clamors, passed as so many have passed before him into that state of mind whichrejects them all and asks whether such a thing as true religionanywhere exists. 

The parting of Life's road at Doubt and Faith! How many pilgrim feetthroughout the ages, toiling devoutly thus far, have shrunk back beforethat unexpected and appalling sign! Disciples of the living Lord, saints, philosophers, scholars, priests, knights, statesmen--what athrong! What thoughts there born, prayers there ended, vows therebroken, light there breaking, hearts there torn in twain! Mightymountain rock! rising full in the road of journeying humanity. Aroundits base the tides of the generations dividing as part the long racingbillows of the sea about some awful cliff. 

The lad closed his note-book, and taking his chair to the window, folded his arms on the sill and looked out. Soon he noticed what hadescaped him before. Beyond the tree, at the foot of the ash-heap, asingle dandelion had opened. It burned like a steadfast yellow lamp, low in the edge of the young grass. These two simple things--the locustleaves, touched by the sun, shaken by the south wind; the dandelionshining in the grass--awoke in him the whole vision of the spring nowrising anew out of the Earth, all over the land: great Nature! And thevision of this caused him to think of something else. 

On the Sunday following his talk with the lad, the pastor had preachedthe most arousing sermon that the lad had heard: it had grown out ofthat interview: it was on modern infidelity--the new infidelity ascontrasted with the old. 

In this sermon he had arraigned certain books as largely responsible. He called them by their titles. He warned his people against them. Hererecommenced the old story: the lad was at once seized with a desire toread those books, thus exhibiting again the identical trait that hadalready caused him so much trouble. But this trait was perhapshimself--his core; the demand of his nature to hear both sides, tojudge evidence, test things by his own reason, get at the deepest rootof a matter: to see Truth, and to see Truth whole. 

Curiously enough, these books, and some others, had been much heard ofby the lad since coming to college: once; then several times; thenapparently everywhere and all the time. For, intellectually, they hadbecome atmospheric: they had to be breathed, as a newly introducedvital element of the air, whether liked or not liked by the breathers. They were the early works of the great Darwin, together with some ofthat related illustrious group of scientific investigators andthinkers, who, emerging like promontories, islands, entire newcountries, above the level of the world's knowledge, sent their wavesof influence rushing away to every shore. It was in those years thatthey were flowing over the United States, over Kentucky. And as somevolcanic upheaval under mid-ocean will in time rock the tiny boat of asailor boy in some little sheltered bay on the other side of theplanet, so the sublime disturbance in the thought of the civilizedworld in the second half of the nineteenth century had reached David. 

Sitting at his window, looking out blindly for help and helpers amidhis doubts, seeing the young green of the locust, the yellow of thedandelion, he recalled the names of those anathematized books, whichwere described as dealing so strangely with nature and with man's placein it. The idea dominated him at last to go immediately and get thosebooks. 

A little later he might have been seen quitting the dormitory andtaking his way with a dubious step across the campus into the town. 

Saturday forenoons of spring were busy times for the town in thosedays. Farmers were in, streets were crowded with their horses andbuggies and rockaways, with live stock, with wagons hauling cord-wood, oats, hay, and hemp. Once, at a crossing, David waited while a wagonloaded with soft, creamy, gray hemp creaked past toward a factory. Hesniffed with relish the tar of the mud-packed wheels; he put out a handand stroked the heads drawn close in familiar bales. 

Crowded, too, of Saturdays was the book-shop to which the studentsusually resorted for their supplies. Besides town customers and countrycustomers, the pastor of the church often dropped in and sat near thestove, discoursing, perhaps, to some of his elders, or to reverentBible students, or old acquaintances. A small, tight, hot, metal-smelling stove--why is it so enjoyable by a dogmatist?

As David made his way to the rear of the long bookshelves, whichextended back toward the stove, the pastor rose and held out his handwith hearty warmth--and a glance of secret solicitude. The lad lookedsheepish with embarrassment; not until accosted had he himself realizedwhat a stray he had become from his pastor's flock and fold. And hefelt that he ought instantly to tell the pastor this was the case. Butthe pastor had reseated himself and regripped his masterful monologue. The lad was more than embarrassed; he felt conscious of a newremorseful tenderness for this grim, righteous man, now that he hademancipated mind and conscience from his teaching: so true it often isthat affection is possible only where obedience is not demanded. Heturned off sorrowfully to the counter, and a few moments later, gettingthe attention of the clerk, asked in a low conscience-stricken tone for"The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man"; conscience-strickenat the sight of the money in his palm to pay for them. 

"What are you going to do with these?" inquired a Bible student who hadjoined him at the counter and fingered the books. 

"Read them, " said the lad, joyously, "and understand them if I can. "

He pinned them against his heart with his elbow and all but ran back tothe dormitory. Having reached there, he altered his purpose and insteadof mounting to his room, went away off to a quiet spot on the campusand, lying down in the grass under the wide open sky, opened his wideDarwin. 

It was the first time in his life that he had ever encountered outsideof the Bible a mind of the highest order, or listened to it, as itdelivered over to mankind the astounding treasures of its knowledge andwisdom in accents of appealing, almost plaintive modesty. 

That day the lad changed his teachers. 

Of the session more than two months yet remained. Every few days hemight have been seen at the store, examining books, drawing moneyreluctantly from his pocket, hurrying away with another volume. Sometimes he would deliver to the clerk the title of a work written ona slip of paper: an unheard-of book; to be ordered--perhaps from theOld World. For one great book inevitably leads to another. They havetheir parentage, kinship, generations. They are watch-towers in sightof each other on the same human highway. They are strands in a singlecable belting the globe. Link by link David's investigating hands wereslipping eagerly along a mighty chain of truths, forged separately bythe giants of his time and now welded together in the glowing thoughtof the world. 

Not all of these were scientific works. Some were works which followedin the wake of the new science, with rapid applications of its methodsand results to other subjects, scarce conterminous or not even germane. For in the light of the great central idea of Evolution, alldepartments of human knowledge had to be reviewed, reconsidered, reconceived, rearranged, rewritten. Every foremost scholar of theworld, kindling his own personal lamp at that central sunlike radiance, retired straightway into his laboratory of whatsoever kind and found ittruly illuminated for the first time. His lamp seemed to be of twoflames enwrapped as one; a baleful and a benign. Whenever it shone uponanything that was true, it made this stand out the more clear, valuable, resplendent. But wherever it uncovered the false, it dartedthereat a swift tongue of flame, consuming without mercy the ancientrubbish of the mind. Vast purification of the world by the fire oftruth! There have been such purifications before; but never perhaps inthe history of the race was so much burned out of the intellectual pathof man as during the latter half of the nineteenth century. 

There is a sort of land which receives in autumn, year by year, thedeposit of its own dead leaves and weeds and grasses without either thewinds and waters to clear these away or the soil to reabsorb andreconvert them into the materials of reproduction. Thus year by yearthe land tends farther toward sterility by the very accumulation ofwhat was once its life. But send a forest fire across those smotheringstrata of vegetable decay; give once more a chance for every root belowto meet the sun above; for every seed above to reach the ground below;soon again the barren will be the fertile, the desert blossom as therose. It is so with the human mind. It is ever putting forth a thousandthings which are the expression of its life for a brief season. Thesemyriads of things mature, ripen, bear their fruit, fall back dead uponthe soil of the mind itself. That mind may be the mind of anindividual; it may be the mind of a century, a race, a civilization. Tothe individual, then, to a race, a civilization, a century, arrives thehour when it must either consume its own dead or surrender its ownlife. These hours are the moral, the intellectual revolutions ofhistory. 

The new science must not only clear the stagnant ground for the growthof new ideas, it must go deeper. Not enough that rubbish should beburned: old structures of knowledge and faith, dangerous, tottering, unfit to be inhabited longer, must be shaken to their foundations. Itbrought on therefore a period of intellectual upheaval and of drift, such as was once passed through by the planet itself. What had longstood locked and immovable began to move; what had been high sank outof sight; what had been low was lifted. The mental hearing, listeningas an ear placed amid still mountains, could gather into itself fromafar the slip and fall of avalanches. Whole systems of belief which hadchilled the soul for centuries, dropped off like icebergs into thewarming sea and drifted away, melting into nothingness. 

The minds of many men, witnessing this double ruin by flame andearthquake, are at such times filled with consternation: to them itseems that nothing will survive, that beyond these cataclysms therewill never again be stability and peace--a new and better age, saferfooting, wider horizons, clearer skies. 

It was so now. The literature of the New Science was followed by aliterature of new Doubt and Despair. But both of these were followed byyet another literature which rejected alike the New Science and the NewDoubt, and stood by all that was included under the old beliefs. Thevoices of these three literatures filled the world: they were thecharacteristic notes of that half-century, heard sounding together: theOld Faith, the New Science, the New Doubt. And they met at a singlepoint; they met at man's place in Nature, at the idea of God, and inthat system of thought and creed which is Christianity. 

It was at this sublime meeting-place of the Great Three that thisuntrained and simple lad soon arrived--searching for the truth. Here hebegan to listen to them, one after another: reading a little in science(he was not prepared for that), a little in the old faith, but most inthe new doubt. For this he was ready; toward this he had been driven. 

Its earliest effects were soon exhibited in him as a student. Heperformed all required work, slighted no class, shirked no rule, transgressed no restriction. But he asked no questions of any man now, no longer roved distractedly among the sects, took no share in thediscussions rife in his own church. There were changes moresignificant: he ceased to attend the Bible students' prayer-meeting atthe college or the prayer-meeting of the congregation in the town; hewould not say grace at those evening suppers of the Disciples; hedeclined the Lord's Supper; his voice was not heard in the choir. Hewas, singularly enough, in regular attendance at morning and nightservices of the church; but he entered timidly, apologetically, sat asnear as possible to the door, and slipped out a little before thepeople were dismissed: his eyes had been fixed respectfully on hispastor throughout the sermon, but his thoughts were in other temples. 

VIII

The session reached its close. The students were scattered far amongthe villages, farms, cities of many states. Some never to return, having passed from the life of a school into the school of life; some, before vacation ended, gone with their laughter and vigor into thesilence of the better Teacher. 

Over at the dormitory the annual breaking-up of the little band ofBible students had, as always, been affecting. Calm, cool, bright dayof June! when the entire poor tenement house was fragrant with flowersbrought from commencement; when a south wind sent ripples over thecampus grass; and outside the campus, across the street, the yards wereglowing with roses. Oh, the roses of those young days, how sweet, howsweet they were! How much sweeter now after the long, cruel, evilsuffering years which have passed and gone since they faded!

The students were dispersed, and David sat at his table by his openwindow, writing to his father and mother. 

After telling them he had stood well in his classes, and giving somedescriptions of the closing days and ceremonies of the college, for heknew how interested they would be in reading about these things, heannounced that he was not coming home. He enclosed a part of the fundsstill on hand, and requested his father to hire a man in his place towork on the farm during the summer. He said nothing of his doubts andtroubles, but gave as the reason of his remaining away what indeed thereason was: that he wished to study during the vacation; it was thebest chance he had ever had, perhaps would ever have; and it was of theutmost importance to him to settle a great many questions before thenext session of the Bible College opened. His expenses would be small. He had made arrangements with the wife of the janitor to take charge ofhis room and his washing and to give him his meals: his room itselfwould not cost him anything, and he did not need any more clothes. 

It was hard to stay away from them. Not until separated, had herealized how dear they were to him. He could not bear even to writeabout all that. And he was homesick for the sight of the farm, --thehorses and cows and sheep, --for the sight of Captain. But he mustremain where he was; what he had to do must be done quickly--a greatduty was involved. And they must write to him oftener because he wouldneed their letters, their love, more than ever now. And so God keepthem in health and bless them. And he was their grateful son, who toooften had been a care to them, who could never forget the sacrificesthey had made to send him to college, and whose only wish was that hemight not cause them any disappointment in the future. 

This letter drew a quick reply from his father. He returned the money, saying that he had done better on the farm than he had expected and didnot need it, and that he had a man employed, his former slave. Sorry asthey were not to see him that summer, still they were glad of hisdesire to study through vacation. His own life had not been verysuccessful; he had tried hard, but had failed. For a longtime now hehad been accepting the failure as best he could. But compensation forall this were the new interests, hopes, ambitions, which centred in thelife of his son. To see him a minister, a religious leader amongmen--that would be happiness enough for him. His family had always beena religious people. One thing he was already looking forward to: hewanted his son to preach his first sermon in the neighborhood churchfounded by the lad's great-grandfather--that would be the proudest hourof his life and in the lad's mother's. There were times in the pastwhen perhaps he had been hard on him, not understanding him; this onlymade his wish the greater to aid him now in every way, at any cost. When they were not talking of him at home, they were thinking of him. And they blessed God that He had given them such a son. Let him not betroubled about the future; they knew that he would never disappointthem. 

David sat long immovable before that letter. 

One other Bible student remained. On the campus, not far from thedormitory, stood a building of a single story, of several rooms. In oneof these rooms there lived, with his family, that tall, gaunt, shaggy, middle-aged man, in his shiny black coat and paper collars, without anycravats, who had been the lad's gentle monitor on the morning of hisentering college. He, too, was to spend the summer there, having nomeans of getting away with his wife and children. Though he sometimeswent off himself, to hold meetings where he could and for what might bepaid him; now preaching and baptizing in the mountains; now back again, laboring in his shirt-sleeves at the Pentateuch and the elementarystructure of the English language. Such troubles as David's were notfor him; nor science nor doubt. His own age contained him as a greenfield might hold a rock. Not that this kind, faithful, helpful soul wasa lifeless stone; but that he was as unresponsive to the movements ofhis time as a boulder is to the energies of a field. Alive in his ownsublime way he was, and inextricably rooted in one ever-living bookalone--the Bible. 

This middle-aged, childlike man, settled near David as his neighbor, was forever a reminder to him of the faith he once had had--the faithof his earliest youth, the faith of his father and mother. Sometimeswhen the day's work was done and the sober, still twilights came on, this reverent soul, sitting with his family gathered about him near thethreshold of his single homeless room, --his oldest boy standing besidehis chair, his wife holding in her lap the sleeping babe she had justnursed, --would begin to sing. The son's voice joined the father's; thewife's followed the son's, in their usual hymn:--

 "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in His excellent word. "

Up in his room, a few hundred yards away, the lad that moment might betrimming his lamp for a little more reading. More than once he waited, listening in the darkness, to the reliant music of the stalwart, sternold poem. How devotedly he too had been used to sing it!

That summer through, then, he kept on at the work of trying to settlethings before college reopened--things which involved a great duty. Where the new thought of the age attacked dogma, Revelation, Christianity most, there most he read. He was not the only reader. Hewas one of a multitude which no man could know or number; for many readin secret. Ministers of the Gospel read in secret in their libraries, and locked the books away when their church officers calledunexpectedly. On Sunday, mounting their pulpits, they preachedimpassioned sermons concerning faith--addressed to the doubts, ravagingtheir own convictions and consciences. 

Elders and deacons read and kept the matter hid from their pastors. Physicians and lawyers read and spoke not a word to their wives andchildren. In the church, from highest ecclesiastic and layman, whereverin the professions a religious, scientific, scholarly mind, there wasfelt the central intellectual commotion of those years--the Battle ofthe Great Three. 

And now summer was gone, the students flocking in, the sessionbeginning. David reentered his classes. Inwardly he drew back from thisstep; yet take any other, throw up the whole matter, --that he could notdo. With all his lifelong religious sense he held on to the formerrealities, even while his grasp was loosening. 

But this could not endure. University life as a Bible student andcandidate for the ministry, every day and many times every day, required of him duties which he could not longer conscientiouslydischarge; they forced from him expressions regarding his faith whichmade it only too plain both to himself and to others how much out ofplace he now was. 

So the crisis came, as come it must. 

Autumn had given place to winter, to the first snows, thawing duringthe day, freezing at night. The roofs of the town were partly brown, partly white; icicles hung lengthening from the eaves. It was the dateon which the university closed for the Christmas holidays--Fridayafternoon preceding. All day through the college corridors, or alongthe snow-paths leading to the town, there had been the glad noises ofthat wild riotous time: whistle and song and shout and hurrying feet, gripping hands, good wishes, and good-bys. One by one the sounds hadgrown fewer, fainter, and had ceased; the college was left in emptinessand silence, except in a single lecture room in one corner of thebuilding, from the windows of which you looked out across the town andtoward the west; there the scene took place. 

It was at the door of this room that the lad, having paused a momentoutside to draw a deep, quivering breath, knocked, and being told tocome in, entered, closed the door behind him, and sat down white andtrembling in the nearest chair. About the middle of the room wereseated the professors of the Bible College and his pastor. They rose, and calling him forward shook hands with him kindly, sorrowfully, andpointed to a seat before them, resuming their own. 

Before them, then, sat the lad, facing the wintry light; and there wasa long silence. Every one knew beforehand what the result would be. Itwas the best part of a year since that first interview in the pastor'sstudy; there had been other interviews--with the pastor, with theprofessors. They had done what they could to check him, to bring himback. They had long been counsellors; now in duty they wereauthorities, sitting to hear him finally to the end, that they mightpronounce sentence: that would be the severance of his connection withthe university and his expulsion from the church. 

Old, old scene in the history of Man--the trial of his Doubt by hisFaith: strange day of judgment, when one half of the human spiritarraigns and condemns the other half. Only five persons sat in thatroom--four men and a boy. The room was of four bare walls and ablackboard, with perhaps a map or two of Palestine, Egypt, and theRoman Empire in the time of Paul. The era was the winter of the year1868, the place was an old town of the Anglo-Saxon backwoodsmen, on theblue-grass highlands of Kentucky. But in how many other places has thatscene been enacted, before what other audiences of the accusing and theaccused, under what laws of trial, with what degrees and rigors ofjudgment! Behind David, sitting solitary there in the flesh, theimagination beheld a throng so countless as to have been summoned andcontrolled by the deep arraigning eye of Dante alone. Unawares, hestood at the head of an invisible host, which stretched backwardthrough time till it could be traced no farther. Witnesses all to thatsublime, indispensable part of man which is his Doubt--Doubt respectinghis origin, his meaning, his Maker, and his destiny. That perpetualhalf-night of his planet-mind--that shadowed side of hisorbit-life--forever attracted and held in place by the force of Deity, but destined never to receive its light. Yet from that chill, bleakside what things have not reached round and caught the sun! And as ofthe earth's plants, some grow best and are sweetest in darkness, whatstrange blossoms of faith open and are fragrant in that eternal umbra!Sacred, sacred Doubt of Man. His agony, his searching! which has ledhim always onward from more ignorance to less ignorance, from lesstruth to more truth; which is the inspiration of his mind, the sorrowof his heart; which has spoken everywhere in his science, philosophy, literature, art--in his religion itself; which keeps him humble notvain, changing not immutable, charitable not bigoted; which attempts tosolve the universe and knows that it does not solve it, but ever seeksto trace law, to clarify reason, and so to find whatever truth it can. 

As David sat before his professors and his pastor, it was one of themoments that sum up civilization. 

Across the room, behind them also, what a throng! Over on that side wasFaith, that radiant part of the soul which directly basks in the lightof God, the sun. There, visible to the eye of imagination, were thoseof all times, places, and races, who have sat in judgment on doubters, actual or suspected. In whatsoever else differing, united in this: thatthey have always held themselves to be divinely appointed agents of theJudge of all the earth: His creatures chosen to punish His creatures. And so behind those professors, away back in history, were rangedCatholic popes and Protestant archbishops, and kings and queens, Protestant and Catholic, and great mediaeval jurists, and mailedknights and palm-bearing soldiers of the cross, and holy inquisitorsdrowning poor old bewildered women, tearing living flesh from flesh aspaper, crushing bones like glass, burning the shrieking human body tocinders: this in the name of a Christ whose Gospel was mercy, and bythe authority of a God whose law was love. They were all there, tierafter tier, row above row, a vast shadowy colosseum of intent judicialfaces--Defenders of the Faith. 

But no inquisitor was in this room now, nor punitive intention, norunkind thought. Slowly throughout the emerging life of man thisidentical trial has gained steadily in charity and mildness. Lookingbackward over his long pathway through bordering mysteries, man himselfhas been brought to see, time and again, that what was his doubt washis ignorance; what was his faith was his error; that things rejectedhave become believed, and that things believed have become rejected;that both his doubt and his faith are the temporary condition of hisknowledge, which is ever growing; and that rend him faith and doubtever will, but destroy him, never. 

No Smithfield fire, then, no Jesuitical rack, no cup of hemlock, nothumb-screw, no torture of any kind for David. Still, here was a dutyto be done, an awful responsibility to be discharged in sorrow and withprayer; and grave good men they were. Blameless was this lad in alltheir eyes save in his doubt. But to doubt--was not that the greatestof sins?

The lad soon grew composed. These judges were still his friends, nothis masters. His masters were the writers of the books in which hebelieved, and he spoke for them, for what he believed to be the truth, so far as man had learned it. The conference lasted through that shortwinter afternoon. In all that he said the lad showed that he was fullof many confusing voices: the voices of the new science, the voices ofthe new doubt. One voice only had fallen silent in him: the voice ofthe old faith. 

It had grown late. Twilight was descending on the white campus, on thesnow-capped town. Away in the west, beyond the clustered house-tops, there had formed itself the solemn picture of a red winter sunset. Thelight entered the windows and fell on the lad's face. One last questionhad just been asked him by the most venerable and beloved of hisprofessors--in tones awe-stricken, and tremulous with his own humility, and with compassion for the erring boy before him, --

"Do you not even believe in God?"

Ah, that question! which shuts the gates of consciousness upon us whenwe enter sleep, and sits close outside our eyelids as we waken; whichwas framed in us ere we were born, which comes fullest to life in us aslife itself ebbs fastest. That question which exacts of the finite toaffirm whether it apprehends the Infinite, that prodding of the eveningmidge for its opinion of the polar star. 

"Do you not even believe in God?"

The lad stood up, he whose life until these months had been a prayer, whose very slumbers had been worship. He stood up, from someimpulse--perhaps the respectful habit of rising when addressed in classby this professor. At first he made no reply, but remained looking overthe still heads of his elders into that low red sunset sky. How oftenhad he beheld it, when feeding the stock at frozen twilights. Onevision rose before him now of his boyhood life at home--his hopes ofthe ministry--the hemp fields where he had toiled--his father andmother waiting before the embers this moment, mindful of him. Herecalled how often, in the last year, he had sat upon his bedside atmidnight when all were asleep, asking himself that question:--

"Do I believe in God?"

And now he was required to lay bare what his young soul had been ableto do with that eternal mystery. 

He thrust his big coarse hand into his breast-pocket and drew out alittle red morocco Testament which had been given him when he wasreceived into the congregation. He opened it at a place where it seemedused to lie apart. He held it before his face, but could not read. Atlast, controlling himself, he said to them with dignity, and with thecommon honesty which was the life of him:--

"I read you a line which is the best answer I can give just now to yourlast question. "

And so he read:--

"Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief!"

A few moments later he turned to another page and said to them:--

"These lines also I desire to read to you who believe in Christ andbelieve that Christ and God are one. I may not understand them, but Ihave thought of them a great deal:--"

"'And if any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not: for Icame not to judge the world but to save the world. '"

"'He that rejecteth me and receiveth not my words, hath one thatjudgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him inthe last day. '"

He shut his Testament and put it back into his pocket and looked at hisjudges. 

"I understand this declaration of Christ to mean, " he said, "thatwhether I believe in Him or do not believe in Him, I am not to bejudged till God's Day of Judgment. "

IX

A few days later David was walking across the fields on his way home:it was past the middle of the afternoon. 

At early candle-light that morning, the huge red stage-coach, leavingtown for his distant part of the country, had rolled, creaking andrattling, to the dormitory entrance, the same stage that had conveyedhim thither. Throwing up his window he had looked out at the curlingwhite breath of the horses and at the driver, who, buried in coats andrugs, and holding the lash of his whip in his mittened fist, peered upand called out with no uncertain temper. 

The lad was ready. He hastily carried down the family umbrella and theBrussels carpet valise with its copious pink roses, looking strangelyout of season amid all that hoar frost. Then he leaped back upstairsfor something which had been added to his worldly goods since heentered college--a small, cheap trunk, containing a few garments andthe priceless books. These things the driver stored in the boot of thestage, bespattered with mud now frozen. Then, running back once more, the lad seized his coat and hat, cast one troubled glance around themeaningless room which had been the theatre of such a drama in hislife, went over to the little table, and blew out his Bible Student'slamp forever; and hurrying down with a cordial "all ready, " climbed tothe seat beside the driver and was whirled away. 

He turned as he passed from the campus to take a last look at MorrisonCollege, standing back there on the hill, venerable, majestical, tight-closed, its fires put out. As he crossed the city (for there werepassengers to be picked up and the mail-bag to be gotten), he tookunspoken leave of many other places: of the bookstore where he hadbought the masterpieces of his masters; of the little Italianapple-man--who would never again have so simple a customer for hisslightly damaged fruit; of several tall, proud, well-frosted churchspires now turning rosy in the sunrise; of a big, handsome housestanding in a fashionable street, with black coal smoke pouring out ofthe chimneys. There the friends of his boyhood "boarded"; there theywere now, asleep in luxurious beds, or gone away for the holidays, heknew not which: all he did know was that they were gone far away fromhim along life's other pathways. 

Soon the shops on each side were succeeded by homesteads; graduallythese stood farther apart as farm-houses set back from the highroad;the street had become a turnpike, they were in open country and the ladwas on his way to his father and mother. 

In the afternoon, at one of the stops for watering horses, he had histraps and trappings put out. From this place a mud road wound acrossthe country to his neighborhood; and at a point some two miles distant, a pair of bars tapped it as an outlet and inlet for the travel on hisfather's land. 

Leaving his things at the roadside farmhouse with the promise that hewould return for them, the lad struck out--not by the lane, butstraight across country. 

It was a mild winter day without wind, without character--one of thedays on which Nature seems to take no interest in herself and createsno interest in others. The sky was overcrowded with low, ragged clouds, without discernible order or direction. Nowhere a yellow sunbeamglinting on any object, but vast jets of misty radiance shot downwardin far-diverging lines toward the world: as though above the cloudswere piled the waters of light and this were scant escaping spray. 

He walked on, climbing the fences, coming on the familiar sights ofwinter woods and fields. Having been away from them for the first timeand that during more than a year, with what feelings he now beheld them!

Crows about the corn shocks, flying leisurely to the stake-and-rideredfence: there alighting with their tails pointing toward him and theirheads turned sideways over one shoulder; but soon presenting theirbreasts seeing he did not hunt. The solitary caw of one of them--thatthin, indifferent comment of their sentinel, perched on the silver-graytwig of a sycamore. In another field the startled flutter of fieldlarks from pale-yellow bushes of ground-apple. Some boys outrabbit-hunting in the holidays, with red cheeks and gay woollencomforters around their hot necks and jeans jackets full of Spanishneedles: one shouldering a gun, one carrying a game-bag, one eating anapple: a pack of dogs and no rabbit. The winter brooks, tricklingthrough banks of frozen grass and broken reeds; their clear brown watersometimes open, sometimes covered with figured ice. 

Red cattle in one distant wood, moving tender-footed around the edge ofa pond. The fall of a forest tree sounding distinct amid the reigningstillness--felled for cord wood. And in one field--right there beforehim!--the chopping sound of busy hemp brakes and the sight of negroes, one singing a hymn. Oh, the memories, the memories!

By and by he reached the edge of his father's land, climbed to thetopmost rail of the boundary fence and sat there, his eyes glued to thewhole scene. It lay outspread before him, the entirety of that farm. Hehad never realized before how little there was of it, how little! Hecould see all around it, except where the woods hid the division fenceon one side. And the house, standing in the still air of the winterafternoon, with its rotting roof and low red chimneys partly obscuredby scraggy cedars--how small it had become! How poor, how wretchedeverything--the woodpile, the cabin, the hen-house, the ice-house, thebarn! Was this any part of the great world? It was one picture ofdesolation, the creeping paralysis of a house and farm. Did anythingeven move?

Something did move. A column of blue smoke moved straight and thin fromthe chimney of his father's and mother's room. In a far corner of thestable lot, pawing and nozzling some remnants of fodder, were the oldhorses. By the hay-rick he discovered one of the sheep, the rest beingon the farther side. The cows by and by filed slowly around from behindthe barn and entered the doorless milking stalls. Suddenly his dogemerged from one of those stalls, trotting cautiously, then with aplayful burst of speed went in a streak across the lot toward thekitchen. A negro man issued from the cabin, picked out a log, knockedthe ashes out of his pipe in the palm of his hand, and began to cut thefirewood for the night. 

All this did not occur at once: he had been sitting there a longtime--heart-sick with the thought of the tragedy he was bringing home. How could he ever meet them, ever tell them? How would they everunderstand? If he could only say to his father: "I have sinned and Ihave broken your heart: but forgive me. " But he could not say this: hedid not believe that he had done wrong. Yet all that he would now haveto show in their eyes would be the year of his wasted life, and a trunkfull of the books that had ruined him. 

Ah, those two years before he had started to college, during which theyhad lived happily together! Their pride in him! their self-denial, affection--all because he was to be a scholar and a minister!

He fancied he could see them as they sat in the house this moment, notdreaming he was anywhere near. One on each side of the fireplace; hismother wearing her black dress and purple shawl: a ball of yarn andperhaps a tea-cake in her lap; some knitting on her needles; she knit, she never mended. But his father would be mending--leather perhaps, andsewing, as he liked to sew, with hog bristles--the beeswax and the awlslying in the bottom of a chair drawn to his side. There would be nonoises in the room otherwise: he could hear the stewing of the sap inthe end of a fagot, the ticking of one clock, the fainter ticking ofanother in the adjoining room, like a disordered echo. They would notbe talking; they would be thinking of him. He shut his eyes, compressedhis lips, shook his head resolutely, and leaped down. 

He had gone about twenty yards, when he heard a quick, incredulous barkdown by the house and his dog appeared in full view, looking up thatway, motionless. Then he came on running and barking resentfully, and ashort distance off stopped again. 

"Captain, " he called with a quivering voice. 

With ears laid back and one cry of joy the dog was on him. The ladstooped and drew him close. Neither at that moment had any articulatespeech nor needed it. As soon as he was released, the dog, afterseveral leaps toward his face, was off in despair either of expressingor of containing his joy, to tell the news at the house. Davidlaggingly followed. 

As he stepped upon the porch, piled against the wall beside the doorwere fagots as he used to see them. When he reached the door itself, hestopped, gazing foolishly at those fagots, at the little gray lichenson them: he could not knock, he could not turn the knob withoutknocking. But his step had been heard. His mother opened the door andpeered curiously out. 

"Why, it's Davy!" she cried. "Davy! Davy!"

She dropped her knitting and threw her arms around him. 

"David! David!" exclaimed his father, with a glad proud voice inside. "Why, my son, my son!"

"Ah, he's sick--he's come home sick!" cried the mother, holding him alittle way off to look at his face. "Ah! the poor fellow's sick! Comein, come in. And this is why we had no letter! And to think yesterdaywas Christmas Day! And we had the pies and the turkey!"

"My son, are you unwell--have you been unwell? Sit here, lie here. "

The lad's face was overspread with ghastly pallor; he had lost controlof himself. 

"I have not been sick. I am perfectly well, " he said at length, lookingfrom one to the other with forlorn, remorseful affection. They haddrawn a chair close, one on each side of him. "How are you, mother? Howare you, father?"

The change in HIM!--that was all they saw. As soon as he spoke, theyknew he was in good health. Then the trouble was something else, moreterrible. The mother took refuge in silence as a woman instinctivelydoes at such times; the father sought relief in speech. 

"What is the matter? What happened?"

After a moment of horrible silence, David spoke:--

"Ah, father! How can I ever tell you!"

"How can you ever tell me?"

The rising anger mingled with distrust and fear in those words! Howmany a father knows!

"Oh, what is it!" cried his mother, wringing her hands, and burstinginto tears. She rose and went to her seat under the mantelpiece. 

"What have you done?" said his father, also rising and going back tohis seat. 

There was a new sternness in his voice; but the look which returnedsuddenly to his eyes was the old life-long look. 

The lad sat watching his father, dazed by the tragedy he was facing. 

"It is my duty to tell you as soon as possible--I suppose I ought totell you now. "

"Then speak--why do you sit there--"

The words choked him. 

"Oh! oh!--"

"Mother, don't!--"

"What is it?"

"Father, I have been put out of college and expelled from the church. "

How loud sounded the minute noises of the fire--the clocks--the blowsof an axe at the woodpile--the lowing of a cow at the barn. 

"FOR WHAT?"

The question was put at length in a voice flat and dead. It summed up alifetime of failure and admitted it. After an interval it was putagain:--

"FOR WHAT?"

"I do not believe the Bible any longer. I do not believe inChristianity. "

"Oh, don't do THAT!"

The cry proceeded from David's mother, who crossed quickly and satbeside her husband, holding his hand, perhaps not knowing her ownmotive. 

This, then, was the end of hope and pride, the reward of years ofself-denial, the insult to all this poverty. For the time, even theawful nature of his avowal made no impression. 

After a long silence, the father asked feebly:--

"WHY HAVE YOU COME BACK HERE?"

Suddenly he rose, and striding across to his son, struck him one blowwith his mind:--

"OH, I ALWAYS KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING IN YOU!"

It was a kick of the foot. 

X

More than two months had passed. Twilight of closing February wasfalling over the frozen fields. The last crow had flapped low andstraight toward the black wood beyond the southern horizon. No sunsetradiance streamed across the wide land, for all day a solitude of cloudhad stretched around the earth, bringing on the darkness now before itstime. 

In a small hemp field on an edge of the vast Kentucky table-land, asolitary breaker kept on at his work. The splintered shards were piledhigh against his brake: he had not paused to clear them out of his wayexcept around his bootlegs. Near by, the remnant of the shock hadfallen over, clods of mingled frost and soil still sticking to thelevel butt-ends. Several yards to windward, where the dust and refusemight not settle on it, lay the pile of gray-tailed hemp, --the coarsestof man's work, but finished as conscientiously as an art. From thewarming depths of this, rose the head and neck of a common shepherddog, his face turned uneasily but patiently toward the worker. Whateverthat master should do, whether understood or not, was right to him; hedid not ask to understand, but to love and to serve. Farther away inanother direction leaned the charred rind of a rotting stump. Atintervals the rising wind blew the ashes away, exposing livecoals--that fireside of the laborer, wandering with him from spot tospot over the bitter lonely spaces. 

The hemp breaker had just gone to the shock and torn away anotherarmful, dragging the rest down. Exhausting to the picked and powerful, the work seemed easy to him; for he was a young man of the greatestsize and strength, moulded in the proportions which Nature oftenchooses for her children of the soil among that people. Stridingrapidly back to his brake, the clumsy five-slatted device of thepioneer Kentuckians, he raised the handle and threw the armful ofstalks crosswise between the upper and the lower blades. Then swingingthe handle high, with his body wrenched violently forward and thestrength of his good right arm put forth, he brought it down. TheCRASH, CRASH, CRASH could have been heard far through the still air;for it is the office of those dull blades to hack their way as througha bundle of dead rods. 

A little later he stopped abruptly, with silent inquiry turning hisface to the sky: a raindrop had fallen on his hand. Two or three dropsstruck his face as he waited. It had been very cold that morning, toocold for him to come out to work. Though by noon it had moderated, itwas cold still; but out of the warmer currents of the upper atmosphere, which was now the noiseless theatre of great changes going forwardunshared as yet by the strata below, sank these icy globules of thewinter rain. Their usual law is to freeze during descent into thecrystals of snow; rarely they harden after they fall, covering theearth with sleet. 

David, by a few quick circular motions of the wrist, freed his lefthand from the half-broken hemp, leaving the bundle trailing across thebrake. Then he hurried to the heap of well-cleaned fibre: that must notbe allowed to get wet. The dog leaped out and stood to one side, welcoming the end of the afternoon labor and the idea of returninghome. Not many minutes were required for the hasty baling, and Davidsoon rested a moment beside his hemp, ready to lift it to hisshoulders. But he felt disappointed. There lay the remnant of theshock. He had worked hard to finish it before sunset Would there notstill be time?

The field occupied one of the swelling knolls of the landscape; hisbrake was set this day on the very crown of a hill. As he asked himselfthat question, he lifted his eyes and far away through the twilight, lower down, he saw the flash of a candle already being carried about inthe kitchen. At the opposite end of the house the glow of firelightfell on the window panes of his father's and mother's room. Even whilehe observed this, it was intercepted: his mother thus early was closingthe shutters for the night. 

Too late! He gave up the thought of finishing his shock, recollectingother duties. But he remained in his attitude a few moments; for theworkman has a curious unconscious habit of taking a final survey of thescene of his labor before quitting it. David now glanced first up atthe sky, with dubious forethought of to-morrow's weather. The raindropshad ceased to fall, but he was too good a countryman not to foreseeunsettled conditions. The dog standing before him and watching hisface, uttered an uneasy whine as he noted that question addressed tothe clouds: at intervals during the afternoon he had been asking hisquestion also. Then those live coals in the rind of the stump and thedanger of sparks blown to the hemp herds or brake, or fence fartheraway: David walked over and stamped them out. As he returned, hefondled the dog's head in his big, roughened hand. 

"Captain, " he said, "are you hungry?"

All at once he was attracted by a spectacle and forgot everything else. For as he stood there beside his bale of hemp in the dead fields, histhroat and eyes filled with dust, the dust all over him, low on thedark red horizon there had formed itself the solemn picture of a wintersunset. Amid the gathering darkness the workman remained gazing towardthat great light--into the stillness of it--the loneliness--the eternalpeace. On his rugged face an answering light was kindled, the glory ofa spiritual passion, the flame of immortal things alive in his soul. More akin to him seemed that beacon fire of the sky--more nearly hisreal pathway home appeared that distant road and gateway to theInfinite--than the flickering, near house-taper in the valley below. Once before, on the most memorable day of his life, David had beheld awinter sunset like that; but then across the roofs of a town--roofshalf white, half brown with melting snow, and with lengthening iciclesdripping in the twilight. 

Suddenly, as if to shut out troubled thoughts, he stooped and, throwinghis big, long arms about the hemp, lifted it to his shoulder. "Come, Captain, " he called to his companion, and stalked heavily away. As hewent, he began to hum an ancient, sturdy hymn:--

 "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word. The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine. "

He had once been used to love those words and to feel the rocklikebasis of them as fixed unshakably beneath the rolling sea of the music;now he sang the melody only. A little later, as though he had no rightto indulge himself even in this, it died on the air; and only the noiseof his thick, stiffened boots could have been heard crushing the frozenstubble, as he went staggering under his load toward the barn. 

XI

When he reached the worm fence of the hemp field, he threw his loadfrom his shoulder upon the topmost rail, and, holding it there with onehand, climbed over. He had now to cross the stable lot. Midway of this, he passed a rick of hay. Huddled under the sheltered side were thesheep of the farm, several in number and of the common sort. At thesight of him, they always bleated familiarly, but this evening theirlong, quavering, gray notes were more penetrating, more insistent thanusual. These sensitive, gentle creatures, whose instincts represent theaccumulating and inherited experiences of age upon age of directcontact with nature, run far ahead of us in our forecasting wisdom; andmany a time they utter their disquietude and warning in language thatis understood only by themselves. The scant flock now fell into thewake of David, their voices blending in a chorus of meek elegiacs, their fore feet crowding close upon his heels. The dog, yielding hisplace, fell into their wake, as though covering the rear; and so thislittle procession of friends moved in a close body toward the barn. 

David put his hemp in the saddle-house; a separate hemp-house they werenot rich enough to own. He had chosen this particular part of the barnbecause it was dryest in roof and floor. Several bales of hemp werealready piled against the logs on one side; and besides these, the roomcontained the harness, the cart and the wagon gear, the box of tar, hismaul and wedges, his saddle and bridle, and sundry implements used inthe garden or on the farm. It was almost dark in there now, and hegroped his way. 

The small estate of his father, comprising only some fifty or sixtyacres, supported little live stock: the sheep just mentioned, a fewhorses, several head of cattle, a sow and pigs. Every soul of theseinside or outside the barn that evening had been waiting for David. They had begun to think of him and call for him long before he had quitwork in the field. Now, although it was not much later than usual, theheavy cloud made it appear so; and all these creatures, like ourselves, are deceived by appearances and suffer greatly from imagination. Theynow believed that it was far past the customary time for him to appear, that they were nearing the verge of starvation; and so they werebewailing in a dejected way his unaccountable absence and theirmiserable lot--with no one to listen. 

Scarcely had the rattling of the iron latch of the saddle-houseapprised them of his arrival before every dumb brute--dumb, as dumb mensay--experienced a cheerful change of mind, and began to pour into hisears the eager, earnest, gratifying tale of its rights and its wrongs. What honest voices as compared with the human--sometimes. No questionof sincerity could have been raised by any one who heard THEM speak. Itmay not have been music; but every note of it was God's truth. 

The man laughed heartily as he paused a moment and listened to thatrejoicing uproar. But he was touched, also. To them he was the answererof prayer. Not one believed that he ever refused to succor in time ofneed, or turned a deaf ear to supplication. If he made poor provisionfor them sometimes, though they might not feel satisfied, they neverturned against him. The barn was very old. The chemical action of theelements had first rotted away the shingles at the points where thenails pinned them to the roof; and, thus loosened, the winds of manyyears had dislodged and scattered them. Through these holes, rain couldpenetrate to the stalls of the horses, so that often they would get upmired and stiff and shivering; but they never reproached him. On thenorthern side of the barn the weather-boarding was quite gone inplaces, and the wind blew freely in. Of winter mornings the backs ofthe cows would sometimes be flecked with snow, or this being stubbornlymelted by their own heat, their hides would be hung with dew-drops:they never attributed that fact to him as a cruelty. In the wholestable there was not one critic of his providence: all were of thehousehold of faith: the members being in good standing and fullfellowship. 

Remembrance of this lay much in his mind whenever, as often, hecontrasted his association with his poor animals, and the troublousproblem of faith in his own soul. It weighed with especial heavinessupon his heart, this nightfall in the barn, over which hung thatthreatening sky. Do what he could for their comfort, it must beinsufficient in a rotting, windswept shelter like that. And here camethe pinch of conscience, the wrench of remorse: the small sums of moneywhich his father and mother had saved up at such a sacrifice on thefarm, --the money which he had spent lavishly on himself in preparation, as he had supposed, for his high calling in life, --if but a small partof that had been applied to the roof and weather-boarding of thestable, the stock this night might have been housed in warmth andsafety. 

The feeding and bedding attended to, with a basket of cobs in his handfor his mother, he hurried away to the woodpile. This was in the yardnear the negro cabin and a hundred yards or more from the house. Therehe began to cut and split the wood for the fires that night and fornext morning. Three lengths of this: first, for the grate in hisfather's and mother's room--the best to be found among the logs of thewoodpile: good dry hickory for its ready blaze and rousing heat; to bemixed with seasoned oak, lest it burn out too quickly--an expensivewood; and perhaps also with some white ash from a tree he had felled inthe autumn. Then sundry back-logs and knots of black walnut for thecabin of the two negro women (there being no sense of the value of thiswood in the land in those days, nearly all of it going to the cabins, to the kitchens, to cord-wood, or to the fences of the farm; while thestumps were often grubbed up and burned on the spot). Then fuel of thissame sort for the kitchen stove. Next, two or three big armfuls of veryshort sticks for the small grate in his own small room above stairs--alittle more than usual, with the idea that he might wish to sit up late. 

There was scarce light enough to go by. He picked his logs from thegeneral pile by the feel of the bark; and having set his foot on each, to hold it in place while he chopped, he struck rather by habit than bysight. Loud and rapid the strokes resounded; for he went at it with ayouthful will, and with hunger gnawing him; and though his arms werestiff and tired, the axe to him was always a plaything--a playthingthat he loved. At last, from under the henhouse near by he drew out andsplit some pieces of kindling, and then stored his axe in that dryplace with fresh concern about soft weather: for more raindrops werefalling and the wind was rising. 

Stooping down now, he piled the fagots in the hollow of his arm, tillthe wood rose cold and damp against his hot neck, against his ear, andcarried first some to the kitchen; and then some to the side porch ofthe house, where he arranged it carefully against the wall, close tothe door, and conveniently for a hand reaching outward from within. Ashe was heaping up the last of it, having taken three turns to thewoodpile, the door was opened slowly, and a slight, slender womanpeered around at him. 

"What makes you so late?"

Her tone betrayed minute curiosity rather than any large concern. 

"I wanted to finish a shock, mother. But it isn't much later thanusual; it's the clouds. Here's some good kindling for you in themorning and a basket of cobs, " he added tenderly. 

She received in silence the feed basket he held out to her, and watchedhim as he kneeled, busily piling up the last of the fagots. 

"I hope you haven't cut any more of that green oak; your fathercouldn't keep warm. "

"This is hickory, dead hickory, with some seasoned oak. Father'll haveto take his coat off and you'll have to get a fan. "

There was a moment of silence. 

"Supper's over, " she said simply. 

She held in one hand a partly eaten biscuit. 

"I'll be in soon now. I've nothing to do but kindle my fire. "

After another short interval she asked:

"Is it going, to snow?"

"It's going to do something. "

She stepped slowly back into the warm room and closed the door. 

David hurried to the woodpile and carried the sticks for his own grateupstairs, making two trips of it. The stairway was dark; his room darkand damp, and filled with the smell of farm boots and working clothesleft wet in the closets. Groping his way to the mantelpiece, he strucka sulphur match, lighted a half-burned candle, and kneeling down, beganto kindle his fire. 

As it started and spread, little by little it brought out of thecheerless darkness all the features of the rough, homely, kind face, bent over and watching it so impatiently and yet half absently. It gavedefinition to the shapeless black hat, around the brim of which stillhung filaments of tow, in the folds of which lay white splinters ofhemp stalk. There was the dust of field and barn on the edges of thethick hair about the ears; dust around the eyes and the nostrils. Hewas resting on one knee; over the other his hands werecrossed--enormous, powerful, coarsened hands, the skin so frayed andchapped that around the finger-nails and along the cracks here andthere a little blood had oozed out and dried. 

XII

When David came down to his supper, all traces of the day's labor thatwere removable had disappeared. He was clean; and his working clotheshad been laid aside for the cheap black-cloth suit, which he had beenused to wear on Sundays while he was a student. Grave, gentle, lookingtired but looking happy, with his big shock head of hair and a facerugged and majestical like a youthful Beethoven. A kind mouth, most ofall, and an eye of wonderfully deep intelligence. 

The narrow, uncarpeted stairway down which he had noisily twisted hisenormous figure, with some amusement, as always, had brought him to thedining room. This was situated between the kitchen and his father's andmother's bedroom. The door of each of these stood ajar, and some of thewarmth of the stove on one side and of the grate on the other dried andtempered the atmosphere. 

His mother sat in her place at the head of the table, quietly waitingfor him, and still holding in one hand the partially eaten biscuit Ashe took his seat, she rose, and, walking listlessly to the kitchendoor, made a listless request of one of the two negro women. When thecoffee had been brought in, standing, she poured out a cup, sweetened, stirred, and tasted it, and putting the spoon into it, placed it beforehim. Then she resumed her seat (and the biscuit) and looked on, occasionally scrutinizing his face, with an expression perhaps the mosttragic that can ever be worn by maternal eyes: the expression of alowly mother who has given birth to a lofty son, and who has neitherthe power to understand him, nor the grace to realize her owninferiority. 

She wore, as usual, a dress of plain mourning, although she had not theslightest occasion to mourn--at least, from the matter of death. In thethroat of this was caught a large, thin, oval-shaped breastpin, containing a plait of her own and her husband's hair, braided together;and through these there ran a silky strand cut from David's head whenan infant, and long before the parents discovered how unlike theirchild was to themselves. This breastpin, with the hair of the threeheads of the house intertwined, was the only symbol in all the world oftheir harmony or union. 

Around her shoulders she had thrown, according to her wont, a home-knitcrewel shawl of black and purple. Her hair, thick and straight andpasted down over the temples of her small head, looked like a long-usedwig. Her contracted face seemed to have accumulated the wrinkles of themost drawn-out, careworn life. Yet she was not old; and these were notthe lines of care; for her years had been singularly uneventfuland--for her--happy. The markings were, perhaps, inherited from thegenerations of her weather-beaten, toiling, plain ancestors--with theadded creases of her own personal habits. For she lived in her housewith the regularity and contentment of an insect in a dead log. And fewcauses age the body faster than such wilful indolence and monotony ofmind as hers--the mind, that very principle of physical youthfulness. Save only that it can also kill the body ere it age it; either by toogreat rankness breaking down at once the framework on which it has beenreared, or afterward causing this to give way slowly under the fruitageof thoughts, too heavy any longer to be borne. 

That from so dark a receptacle as this mother there should have emergedsuch a child of light, was one of those mysteries that are theperpetual delight of Nature and the despair of Science. This did notseem one of those instances--also a secret of the great Creatress--inwhich she produces upon the stem of a common rose a bud of aliensplendor. It was as if potter's clay had conceived marble. Theexplanation of David did not lie in the fact that such a mother hadproduced him. 

One of the truest marks of her small, cold mind was the rigid tyrannyexercised over it by its own worthless ideas. Had she not sat besideher son while he ate, had she not denied herself the comfort of thefireside in the adjoining room, in order that she might pour out forhim the coffee that was unfit to be drunk, she would have chargedherself with being an unfaithful, undutiful mother. But this done, shesaw no further, beheld nothing of the neglect, the carelessness, thecruelty, of all the rest, part of which this very moment was outspreadbeneath her eyes. 

For at the foot of the table, where David's father had sat, were twopartly eaten dishes: one of spare-rib, one of sausage. The gravy ineach had begun to whiten into lard. Plates heaped with cornbread andwith biscuit, poorly baked and now cold, were placed on each side. Infront of him had been set a pitcher of milk; this rattled, as he pouredit, with its own bluish ice. On all that homely, neglected board onething only put everything else to shame. A single candle, in a low, brass candlestick in the middle of the table, scarce threw enough lightto reveal the scene; but its flame shot deep into the golden, crystalline depths of a jar of honey standing close beside it--honeyfrom the bees in the garden--a scathing but unnoticed rebuke from thefood and housekeeping of the bee to the food and housekeeping of thewoman. 

Work in the hemp fields leaves a man's body calling in every tissue forrestoration of its waste. David had hardly taken his seat before hiseye swept the prospect before him with savage hope. In him was thehunger, not of toil alone, but of youth still growing to manhood, ofabsolute health. Whether he felt any mortification at his mother'sindifference is doubtful. Assuredly life-long experience had taught himthat nothing better was to be expected from her. How far he hadunconsciously grown callous to things as they were at home, there is notelling. Ordinarily we become in such matters what we must; but it islikewise true that the first and last proof of high personalsuperiority is the native, irrepressible power of the mind to createstandards which rise above all experience and surroundings; to carryeverywhere with itself, whether it will or not, a blazing, scorchingcensorship of the facts that offend it. Regarding the householdmanagement of his mother, David at least never murmured; what hesecretly felt he alone knew, perhaps not even he, since he was noself-examiner. As to those shortcomings of hers which he could not failto see, for them he unconsciously showed tenderest compassion. 

She had indulged so long her sloth even in the operation of thinking, that few ideas now rose from the inner void to disturb the apatheticsurface; and she did not hesitate to recur to any one of these anynumber of times in a conversation with the same person. 

"What makes you so late?"

"I wanted to finish a shock. Then there was the feeding, and the woodto cut. And I had to warm my room up a little before I could wash. "

"Is it going to snow?"

"It's hard to say. The weather looks very unsettled and threatening. That's one reason why I wanted to finish my shock. "

There was silence for a while. David was too ravenous to talk; and hismother's habit was to utter one sentence at a time. 

"I got three fresh eggs to-day; one had dropped from the roost andfrozen; it was cracked, but it will do for the coffee in the morning. "

"Winter must be nearly over if the hens are beginning to lay: THEYknow. They must have some fresh nests. "

"The cook wants to kill one of the old ones for soup to-morrow. "

"What an evil-minded cook!"

It was with his mother only that David showed the new cheerfulness thathad begun to manifest itself in him since his return from college. She, however, did not understand the reasons of this and viewed itunfavorably. 

"We opened a hole in the last hill of turnips to-day. "

She spoke with uneasiness. 

"There'll be enough to last, I reckon, mother. "

"You needn't pack any more chips to the smoke-house: the last meat'ssmoked enough. "

"Very well, then. You shall have every basketful of them for your ownfire. "

"If you can keep them from the negroes: negroes love chips. "

"I'll save them while I chop. You shall have them, if I have to catchthem as they fly. "

His hunger had been satisfied: his spirits began to rise. 

"Mother, are you going to eat that piece of biscuit? If not, just handit over to me, please. "

She looked dryly down at the bread in her fingers: humor was deniedher--that playfulness of purest reason. 

David had commenced to collect a plateful of scraps--the mostappetizing of the morsels that he himself had not devoured. He rose andwent out into the porch to the dog. 

"Now, mother, " he said, reentering; and with quiet dignity he precededher into the room adjoining. 

His father sat on one side of the fireplace, watching the open door forthe entrance of his son. He appeared slightly bent over in his chair. Plainly the days of rough farm-work and exposure were over for him, prematurely aged and housed. There was about him--about the shape andcarriage of the head--in the expression of the eye most of all, perhaps, --the not wholly obliterated markings of a thoughtful andpowerful breed of men. His appearance suggested that some explanationof David might be traceable in this quarter. For while we know nothingof these deep things, nor ever shall, in the sense that we can supplythe proofs of what we conjecture; while Nature goes ever about herancient work, and we cannot declare that we have ever watched theoperations of her fingers, think on we will, and reason we must, amidher otherwise intolerable mysteries. Though we accomplish no more inour philosophy than the poor insect, which momentarily illumines itswandering through the illimitable night by a flash from its own body. 

Lost in obscurity, then, as was David's relation to his mother, thereseemed some gleams of light discernible in that between father and son. For there are men whom nature seems to make use of to connect their ownoffspring not with themselves but with earlier sires. They are likesluggish canals running between far-separated oceans--from the deeps oflife to the deeps of life, allowing the freighted ships to pass. And nomore does the stream understand what moves across its surface than dosuch commonplace agents comprehend the sons who have sprung from theirown loins. Here, too, is one of Nature's greatest cruelties to theparent. 

As David's father would not have recognized his remote ancestors ifbrought face to face, so he did not discover in David the image ofthem--the reappearance in the world, under different conditions, ofcertain elements of character found of old in the stock and line. Hecould not have understood how it was possible for him to transmit tothe boy a nature which he himself did not actively possess. And, therefore, instead of beholding here one of Nature's mysteriousreturns, after a long period of quiescence, to her suspended activitiesand the perpetuation of an interrupted type, so that his son was butanother strong link of descent joined to himself, a weak one; insteadof this, he saw only with constant secret resentment that David was atonce unlike him and his superior. 

These two had worked side by side year after year on the farm; suchcomradeship in labor usually brings into consciousness again theprimeval bond of Man against Nature--the brotherhood, at least, of themerely human. But while they had mingled their toil, sweat, hopes, anddisappointments, their minds had never met. The father had never feltat home with his son; David, without knowing why--and many a sorrowfulhour it had cost him--had never accepted as father the man who hadbrought him into the world. Each soon perceived that a distanceseparated them which neither could cross, though vainly both shouldtry, and often both did try, to cross it. 

As he sat in the chimney-corner to-night, his very look as he watchedthe door made it clear that he dreaded the entrance of his son; and tothis feeling had lately been added deeper estrangement. 

When David walked in, he took a seat in front of the fire. His motherfollowed, bringing the sugar-bowl and the honey, which she locked in acloset in the wall: the iron in her blood was parsimony. Then sheseated herself under the mantelpiece on the opposite side and lookedsilently across at the face of her husband. (She was his second wife. His offspring by his first wife had died young. David was the onlychild of mature parents. ) She looked across at him with the complacentexpression of the wife who feels that she and her husband are one, eventhough their offspring may not be of them. The father looked at David;David looked into the fire. There was embarrassment all round. 

"How are you feeling to-night, father?" he asked affectionately, amoment later, without lifting his eyes. 

"I've been suffering a good deal. I think it's the weather. "

"I'm sorry. "

"Do you think it's going to snow?"

The husband had lived so long and closely with his wife, that themechanism of their minds moved much like the two wall-clocks inadjoining rooms of the house; which ticked and struck, year after year, never quite together and never far apart. When David was first with oneand then with another, he was often obliged to answer the samequestions twice--sometimes thrice, since his mother alone required twoidentical responses. He replied now with his invariable and patientcourtesy--yet scarcely patient, inasmuch as this did not try him. 

"What made you so late?"

David explained again. 

"How much hemp did you break?"

"I didn't weigh it, father. Fifty or sixty pounds, perhaps. "

"How many more shocks are there in the field?"

"Twelve or fifteen. I wish there were a hundred. "

"I wish so, too, " said David's mother, smiling plaintively at herhusband. 

"John Bailey was here after dinner, " remarked David's father. "He hassold his crop of twenty-seven acres for four thousand dollars. Tendollars a hundred. "

"That's fine, " said David with enthusiasm, thinking regretfully oftheir two or three acres. 

"Good hemp lands are going to rent for twenty or twenty-five dollars anacre in the spring, " continued his father, watching the effect of hiswords. 

David got up, and going to the door, reached around against the wallfor two or three sticks of the wood he had piled there. He replenishedthe fire, which was going down, and resumed his seat. 

For a while father and son discussed in a reserved way matterspertaining to the farm: the amount of feed in the barn and the chancesof its lasting; crops to be sown in the spring, and in what fields; thehelp they should hire--a new trouble at that time. For the negroes, recently emancipated, were wandering hither and thither over the farms, or flocking to the towns, unused to freedom, unused to the very wagesthey now demanded, and nearly everywhere seeking employment from anyone in preference to their former masters as part of the proof thatthey were no longer in slavery. David's father had owned but a singlesmall family of slaves: the women remained, the man had sought work onone of the far richer estates in the neighborhood. 

They threshed over once more the straw of these familiar topics andthen fell into embarrassed silence. The father broke this with anabrupt, energetic exclamation and a sharp glance:--

"If hemp keeps up to what it is now, I am going to put in more. "

"Where?" asked the son, quietly. "I don't see that we have any groundto spare. "

"I'll take the woods. "

"FATHER!" cried David, wheeling on him. 

"I'll take the woods!" repeated his father, with a flash of anger, ofbitterness. "And if I'm not able to hire the hands to clear it, thenI'll rent it. Bailey wants it. He offered twenty-five dollars an acre. Or I'll sell it, " he continued with more anger, more bitterness. "He'drather buy it than rent. "

"How could we do without the woods?" inquired the son, looking like onedazed, --"without the timber and the grazing?"

"What will we do without the woods?" cried his father, catching up thewords excitedly. "What will we do without the FARM?"

"What do you mean by all this, father? What is back of it?" criedDavid, suddenly aroused by vague fears. 

"I mean, " exclaimed the father, with a species of satisfaction in hisnow plain words, "I mean that Bailey wants to buy the farm. I mean thathe urges me to sell out for my own good! tells me I must sell out! mustmove! leave Kentucky! go to Missouri--like other men when they fail. "

"Go to Missouri, " echoed the wife with dismal resignation, smiling ather husband. 

"Have you sold it?" asked David, with flushed, angry face. 

"No. "

"Nor promised?"

"No!"

"Then, father, don't! Bailey is trying again to get the farm away fromyou. You and mother shall never sell your home and move to Missouri onmy account. "

The son sat looking into the fire, controlling his feelings. The fathersat looking at the son, making a greater effort to control his. Both ofthem realized the poverty of the place and the need of money. 

The hour was already past the father's early bed-time. He straightenedhimself up now, and turning his back, took off his coat, hung it on theback of his chair, and began to unbutton his waistcoat, and rub hisarms. The mother rose, and going to the high-posted bed in a corner ofthe room, arranged the pillows, turned down the covers, and returning, sat provisionally on the edge of her chair and released her breastpin. David started up. 

"Mother, give me a candle, will you?"

He went over with her to the closet, waited while she unlocked it and, thrusting her arm deep into its disordered depths, searched till shedrew out a candle. No good-night was spoken; and David, with a look athis father and mother which neither of them saw, opened and closed thedoor of their warm room, and found himself in the darkness outside atthe foot of the cold staircase. 

XIII

A bed of crimson coals in the bottom of the grate was all that survivedof his own fire. 

He sat down before it, not seeing it, his candle unlighted in his hand, a tragedy in his eyes. 

A comfortless room. Rag carpeting on the floor. No rug softening thehearth-stones. The sashes of the windows loose in the frames and shakento-night by twisty gusts. A pane of glass in one had been broken andthe opening pasted over with a sheet of letter paper. This had beenburst by an indolent hand, thrust through to close the shuttersoutside; and a current of cold air now swept across the small room. Theman felt it, shook himself free of depressing thoughts, roseresolutely. He took from a closet one of his most worthless coats, androlling it into a wad, stopped the hole. Going back to the grate, hepiled on the wood, watching the blaze as it rushed up over the logs, devouring the dried lichens on the bark; then sinking back to thebottom rounds, where it must slowly rise again, reducing the wood toashes. Beside him as he sat in his rush-bottomed chair stood a smallsquare table and on this a low brass candlestick, the companion of theone in the dining room. A half-burnt candle rose out of the socket. AsDavid now lighted it and laid the long fresh candle alongside thesnuffers, he measured with his eye the length of his luminaries and theamount of his wood--two friends. The little grate had commenced to roarat him bravely, affectionately; and the candle sputtered to him andthrew sparks into the air--the rockets of its welcoming flame. 

It was not yet ten o'clock: two hours of the long winter eveningremained. He turned to his treasury. 

This was a trunk in a corner, the trunk he had bought while at college, small and cheap in itself, not in what it held. For here were David'sbooks--the great grave books which had been the making of him, or theundoing of him, according as one may have enough of God's wisdom andmercy to decide whether it were the one or the other. 

As the man now moved his chair over, lifted the lid, and sat gazingdown at the backs of them, arranged in a beautiful order of his own, there was in the lofty, solemn look of him some further evidence oftheir power over him. The coarse toil of the day was forgotten; hisloved dependent animals in the wind-swept barn forgotten; the eveningwith his father and mother, the unalterable emptiness of it, theunkindness, the threatening tragedy, forgotten. Not that desolate roomwith firelight and candle; not the poor farmhouse; not the meagre farm, nor the whole broad Kentucky plateau of fields and woods, heavy withwinter wealth, heavy with comfortable homesteads--any longer held himas domicile, or native region: he was gone far away into the company ofhis high-minded masters, the writers of those books. Choosing one, heclosed the lid of the trunk reluctantly over the rest, and with thebook in one hand and the chair in the other, went back to the fire. 

An hour passed, during which, one elbow on the table, the shaded sideof his face supported in the palm of his hand, he read, scarce movingexcept to snuff the wick or to lay on a fresh fagot. At the end of thistime other laws than those which the writer was tracing began to asserttheir supremacy over David--the laws of strength and health, warmth andweariness. Sleep was descending on him, relaxing his limbs, spreading aquiet mist through his brain, caressing his eyelids. He closed thepages and turned to his dying fire. The book caused him to wrestle; hewanted rest. 

And now, floating to him through that mist in his brain, as softly as anearing melody, as radiantly as dawning light, came the image ofGabriella: after David had pursued Knowledge awhile he was ready forLove. But knowledge, truth, wisdom before every other earthlypassion--that was the very soul of him. His heart yearned for her nowin this closing hour, when everything else out of his way, field-work, stable-work, wood-cutting, filial duties, study, he was alone with thethought of her, the newest influence in his life, taking heed of hersolely, hearkening only to his heart's need of her. In all his rudeexistence she was the only being he had ever known who seemed to himworthy of a place in the company of his great books. Had the summonscome to pack his effects to-morrow and, saying good-by to everythingelse, start on a journey to the congenial places where his mightymasters lived and wrought, he would have wished her alone to go withhim, sharer of life's loftiness. Her companionship wherever he mightbe--to have just that; to feel that she was always with him, and alwaysone with him; to be able to turn his eyes to hers before some vanishingfirelight at an hour like this, with deep rest near them side by side!

He lingered over the first time he had ever seen her; that memorabletwilight in the town, the roofs and chimneys of the houses, half-white, half-brown with melting snow, outlined against the low red sunset sky. He had not long before left the room in the university where his trialhad taken place, and where he had learned that it was all over withhim. He was passing along one of the narrow cross streets, when at acertain point his course was barred by a heap of fresh cedar boughs, just thrown out of a wagon. Some children were gay and busy, carryingthem through the side doors, the sexton aiding. Other children insidethe lighted church were practising a carol to organ music; the choir oftheir voices swelled out through the open doors, and some of the littleones, tugging at the cedar, took up the strain. 

She was standing on the low steps of the church, in charge of thechildren. In one hand she held an unfinished wreath, and she wasbinding the dark, shining leaves with the other. A swarm of snowflakes, scarce more than glittering crystals, danced merrily about her head andflecked her black fur on one shoulder. As David, not very mindful justthen of whither he was going, stepped forward across the light andpaused before the pile of cedar boughs, she glanced at him with asmile, seeing how his path was barred. Then she said to them:--

"Hurry, children! The night comes when we cannot work!"

It was an hour of such good-will on earth to men that no one could seema stranger to her. He instantly became a human brother, next of kin toher--that was all; she was wholly under the influence of the innocenceand purity within and without. 

As he made no reply and for a moment did not move, she glanced quicklyat him, regretting the smile. When she saw his face, he saw the joy godown out of hers; and he felt, as he turned off, that she went with himalong the black street: alone, he seemed not alone any more. 

Though he had been with her many times since, no later impression hadeffaced one line of that first picture. There she stood ever to him, and would stand: on the step of the church, smiling in her mourning, binding her wreath, the jets of the chandelier streaming out on hersnow-sprinkled shoulder, the children carolling among the fragrantcedar boughs scattered at her feet; she there, decorating the church, happy to be of pious service. Ah, to have her there in the room withhim now; to be able to turn his eyes to hers in the vanishingfirelight, near sleep awaiting them, side by side. 

There was the sound of a scratching on David's window shutters, asthough a stiff brush were being moved up and down across the slats. Hebecame aware that this sound had reached him at intervals several timesalready, but as often happens, had been disregarded by him owing to hispreoccupation. Now it was so loud as to force itself positively uponhis attention. 

He listened, puzzled, wondering. His window stood high from the groundand clear of any object. In a few moments, the sound made itselfaudible again. He sprang up, wide awake now, and raising the sash, pushed open the shutters--one of them easily; against the other therewas resistance from outside. This yielded before his pressure; and asthe shutter was forced wide open and David peered out, there swungheavily against his cheek what felt like an enormous brush of thorns, covered with ice. It was the end of one of the limbs of the cedar treewhich stood several feet from his window on one side, and close to thewall of the house. Before David was born, it had been growing there, alittle higher, more far-reaching laterally, every year, until severaltopmost boughs had long since risen above the level of the eaves anddropped their dry needles on the rotting shingles. Now one of thelimbs, bent over sidewise under its ice-freighted berries and twigs, hung as low as his window, and the wind was tossing it. 

Sleet! This, then, was the nature of the threatening storm, which allday had made man and beast foreboding and distressed. David held outhis hand: rain was falling steadily, each drop freezing on whatsoeverit fell, adding ice to ice. The moon rode high by this time; and itsradiance pouring from above on the roof of riftless cloud, diffusedenough light below to render large objects near at hand visible in bulkand outline. A row of old cedars stretched across the yard. Theirshapes, so familiar to him, were already disordered. The sleet musthave been falling for hours to have weighed them down this way andthat. A peculiarity of the night was the wind, which increasedconstantly, but with fitful violence, giving no warning of its highswoop, seizure, and wrench. 

Sleet! Scarce a winter but he had seen some little: once, in hischildhood, a great one. He had often heard his father talk of otherswhich HE remembered--with comment on the destruction they had wroughtfar and wide, on the suffering of all stock and of the wild creatures. The ravage had been more terrible in the forests, his father hadthought, than what the cyclones cause when they rush upon the trees, heavy in their full summer-leaves, and sweep them down as easily asumbrellas set up on the ground. So much of the finest forests ofKentucky had been lost through its annual summer tempests and its rarerbut more awful wintry sleets. 

No work for him in the hemp fields to-morrow, nor for days. No schoolfor Gabriella; the more distant children would be unable to ride; thenearest unable to foot it through the mirrored woods; unless theweather should moderate before morning and melt the ice away as quicklyas it had formed--as sometimes was the case. A good sign of this, hetook it, was the ever rising wind: for a rising wind and a fallingtemperature seldom appeared together. As he bent his ear listening, hecould hear the wild roar of the surges of air breaking through theforest, the edge of which was not fifty yards away. 

David sprang from his chair; there was a loud crack, and the great limbof the cedar swept rattling down across his shutters, twisted, snappedoff at the trunk, rolled over in the air, and striking the ground onits back, lay like a huge animal knocked lifeless. 

He forgot bed and sleep and replenished his fire. His ear, trained tocatch and to distinguish sounds of country life, was now becoming aliveto the commencement of one of those vast appalling catastrophes inNature, for which man sees no reason and can detect the furtherance ofno plan--law being turned with seeming blindness, and in the spirit ofsheer wastage, upon what it has itself achieved, and spending itssublime forces in a work of self-desolation. 

Of the two windows in his room, one opened upon the back yard, one uponthe front. Both back yard and front contained, according to the customof the country, much shrubbery, with aged fruit trees, mostly cherryand peach. There were locusts also at the rear of the house, theold-time yard favorite of the people; other forest trees stood around. Through both his windows there began to reach him a succession offragile sounds; the snapping of rotten, weakest, most overburdenedtwigs. On fruit tree and forest tree these went down first--as is alsothe law of storm and trial of strength among men. The ground was now asone flooring of glass; and as some of these small branches dropped fromthe tree-tops, they were broken into fragments, like icicles, and slidrattling away into the nearest depressions of the ground. Starting farup in the air sometimes, they struck sheer upon other lower branches, bringing them along also; this gathering weight in turn descended uponothers lower yet, until, so augmented, the entire mass swept downwardand fell, shivered against crystal flooring. 

But soon these more trivial facts held his attention no longer: theywere the mere reconnaissance of the elements--the first light attack ofNature upon her own weakness. By and by from the surging, roaringdepths of the woods, there suddenly reverberated to him a deep boom asof a cannon: one of the great trees--two-forked at the mighty summitand already burdened in each half by its tons of timber, split in twainat the fork as though cleft by lightning; and now only the pointedtrunk stood like a funeral shaft above its own ruins. For hours thiswent on: the light incessant rattling, closest around; the creaking, straining, tearing apart as of suffering flesh, less near; the sad, sublime booming of the forest. 

Now the man would walk the floor; now drop into his chair before thefire. His last bit of candle flickered blue, deep in the socket, andsent up its smoke. His wood was soon burnt out: only red coals in thebottom of the grate then, and these fast whitening. More than once hestrode across and stood over his trunk in the shadowy corner--lookingdown at his books--those books that had guided him thus far, ormisguided him, who can say?

When his candle gave out and later his fire, he jerked off his clothesand getting into bed, rolled himself in the bedclothes and laylistening to the mournful sublimity of the storm. 

Toward three o'clock the weather grew colder, the wind died down, thebooming ceased; and David, turning wearily, over, with an impulse toprayer, but with no prayer, went to sleep. 

XIV

When David awoke late and drowsily the next morning after the storm, helay awhile, listening. No rending, crashing, booming in the woods now, nor rattling of his window-frames. No contemplative twitter of winterbirds about the cedars in the yard, nor caw of crow, crossing the housechimneys toward the corn shocks. All things hushed, silent, immovable. 

Following so quickly upon the sublime roar and ravage of the nightbefore, the stillness was disturbing. He sprang up and dressedquickly--admonished by the coldness of his room--before hurrying to hiswindow to look out. When he tried the sash, it could not be raised. Hethrust his hand through the broken pane and tugged at the shutters;they could not be shaken. Running downstairs to the kitchen andreturning with hot water, he melted away the ice embedding the boltsand hinges. 

A marvel of nature, terrible, beautiful, met his eyes: ice-rain and agreat frost Cloud, heavy still, but thinner than on the day before, enwrapped the earth. The sun, descending through this translucent roofof gray, filled the air beneath with a radiance as of molten pearl; andin this under-atmosphere of pearl all earthly things were tipped andhung in silver. Tree, bush, and shrub in the yard below, the roseclambering the pillars of the porch under his window, the scant ivylower down on the house wall, the stiff little junipers, every blade ofgrass--all encased in silver. The ruined cedars trailed from sparliketops their sweeping sails of incrusted emerald and silver. Along theeaves, like a row of inverted spears of unequal lengths, hung theargent icicles. No; not spun silver all this, but glass; all thingsburied, not under a tide of liquid silver, but of flowing and thencooling glass: Nature for once turned into a glass house, fixed in abrittle mass, nowhere bending or swaying; but if handled roughly, sureto be shivered. 

The ground under every tree in the yard was strewn with boughs; whatmust be the ruin of the woods whence the noises had reached him in thenight? Looking out of his window now, he could see enough to let himunderstand the havoc, the wreckage. 

He went at once to the stable for the feeding and found everythingstrangely quiet--the stilling influence of a great frost on animallife. There had been excitement and uneasiness enough during the night;now ensued the reaction, for man is but one of the many animals withnerves and moods. A catastrophe like this which covers with ice theearth--grass, winter edible twig and leaf, roots and nuts for the brutekind that turns the soil with the nose, such putting of all foodwhatsoever out of reach of mouth or hoof or snout--brings thesecreatures face to face with the possibility of starving: they know itand are silent with apprehension of their peril; know it perhaps by thesurvival of prehistoric memories reverberating as instinct still. Andthere is another possible prong of truth to this repression of theircharacteristic cries at such times of frost: then it was in ages pastthat the species which preyed on them grew most ravenous and farranging. The silence of the modern stable in a way takes the place ofthat primeval silence which was a law of safety in the bleakfastnesses, hunted over by flesh eating prowlers. It is the prudentnoiselessness of many a species to-day, as the deer and the moose. 

The sheep, having enjoyed little shelter beside the hayrick, hadencountered the worst of the storm. When David appeared in the stablelot, they beheld him at once; for their faces were bunched expectantlytoward the yard gate through which he must emerge. But they spoke not aword to one another or to him as they hurried slipping forward. The manlooked them over pityingly, yet with humor; for they wore manyundesirable pendants of glass and silver dangling under their belliesand down their tails. 

"You shall come into the barn this night, " he vowed within himself. "I'll make a place for you this day. "

Little did he foresee what awful significance to him lay wrapped inthose simple words. Breakfast was ready when, carrying his customarybasket of cobs for his mother, he returned to the house. One goodresult at least the storm had wrought for the time: it drew the membersof the household more closely together, as any unusual event--danger, disaster--generally does. So that his father, despite his outburst ofanger the night previous, forgot this morning his wrongs anddisappointments and relaxed his severity. During the meal he had muchto recount of other sleets and their consequences. He inferred similarconsequences now if snow should follow, or a cold snap set in: no workin the fields, therefore no hemp-breaking, and therefore delay inselling the crop; the difficulty of feeding and watering the stock; nohauling along the mud roads, and little travel of any sort betweencountry and town; the making of much cord wood out of the fallentimber, with plenty of stuff for woodpiles; the stopping of mill wheelson the frozen creeks, and scarcity of flour and meal. 

"The meal is nearly out now, " said David's mother. "The negroes wasteit. "

"We might shell some corn to-day, " suggested David's father, hesitatingly. It was the first time since his son's return from collegethat he had ever proposed their working together. 

"I'll take a look at the woods first, " said David; "and then I want tomake a place in the stable for the sheep, father. They must come undershelter to-night I'll fix new stalls for the horses inside where weused to have the corn crib. The cows can go where the horses have been, and the sheep can have the shed of the cows: it's better than nothing. I've been wanting to do this ever since I came home from college. "

A thoughtless, unfortunate remark, as connected with that shabby, desperate idea of finding shelter for the stock--fresh reminder of thecreeping, spreading poverty. His father made no rejoinder; and havingfinished his breakfast in silence, left the table. 

His mother, looking across her coffeecup and biscuit at David, withoutchange of expression inquired, --

"Will you get that hen?"

"WHAT hen, mother?"

"I told you last night the cook wanted one of the old hens for soupto-day. Will you get it?"

"No, mother; I will not get the hen for the cook; the cook willprobably get the hen for me. "

"She doesn't know the right one. "

"But neither do I. "

"I want the blue dorking. "

"I have a bad eye for color; I might catch something gray. "

"I want the dorking; she's stopped laying. "

"Is that your motive for taking her life? It would be a terribleprinciple to apply indiscriminately!"

"The cook wants to know how she is to get the vegetables out of theholes in the garden to-day--under all this ice. "

"How would she get the vegetables out of the garden under all this iceif there were no one on the place but herself? I warrant you she'd haveevery variety. "

"It's a pity we are not able to hire a man. If we could hire a man tohelp her, I wouldn't ask you. It's hard on the cook, to make her sufferfor our poverty. "

"A little suffering in that way will do her a world of good, " saidDavid, cheerily. 

His mother did not hesitate, provocation or no provocation, to stingand reproach him in this way. 

She had never thought very highly of her son; her disappointment, therefore, over his failure at college had not been keen. Besides, tragical suffering is the sublime privilege of deep natures: sheescaped by smallness. Nothing would have made her very miserable buthunger and bodily pains. Against hunger she exercised ceaselessprecautions; bodily pains she had none. The one other thing that couldhave agitated her profoundly was the idea that she would be compelledto leave Kentucky. It was hard for her to move about her house, muchless move to Missouri. Not in months perhaps did she even go upstairsto bestow care upon, the closets, the bed, the comforts of her son. Asmight be expected, she considered herself the superior person of thefamily; and as often happens, she imposed this estimate of herself uponher husband. The terrifying vanity and self-sufficiency of thelittle-minded! Nature must set great store upon this type of humanbeing, since it is regularly allowed to rule its betters. 

But his father! David had been at home two months now, for this was thelast of February, and not once during that long ordeal of daily livingtogether had his father opened his lips either to reproach or questionhim. 

Letters had been received from the faculty, from the pastor; of thatDavid was aware; but any conversation as to these or as to the eventsof which they were the sad consummation, his father would not have. Thegulf between them had been wide before; now it was fathomless. 

Yet David well foreknew that the hour of reckoning had to come, whenall that was being held back would be uttered. He realized that bothwere silently making preparations for that crisis, and that each daybrought it palpably nearer. Sometimes he could even see it threateningin his father's eye, hear it in his voice. It had reached the verge ofexplosion the night previous, with that prediction of comingbankruptcy, the selling of the farm of his Kentucky ancestors, theremoval to Missouri in his enfeebled health. Not until his return hadDavid realized how literally his father had begun to build life anew onthe hopes of him. And now feel with him in his disappointment as deeplyas he might, sympathy he could not openly offer, explanation he couldnot possibly give. His life-problem was not his father's problem; hisfather was simply not in a position to understand. Doubt anything inthe Bible--doubt so-called orthodox Christianity--be expelled from thechurch and from college for such a reason--where could his father findpatience or mercy for wilful folly and impiety like that?

Meantime he had gone to work; on the very day after his return he hadgone to work. Two sentences of his father's, on the afternoon of hiscoming home, had rung in David's ears loud and ceaselessly ever since:"WHY HAVE YOU COME BACK HERE?" And "I ALWAYS KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING INYOU?" The first assured him of the new footing on which he stood: hewas no longer desired under that roof. The second summed up thelife-long estimate which had been formed of his character before he hadgone away. 

Therefore he had worked as never even in the old preparatory days. Solong as he remained there, he must at least earn daily bread. More thanthat, he must make good, as soon as possible, the money spent atcollege. So he sent away the hired negro man; he undertook the workdone by him and more: the care of the stock, the wood cutting, everything that a man can be required to do on a farm in winter. Ofbright days he broke hemp. Nothing had touched David so deeply as thediscovery in one corner of the farm of that field of hemp: his fatherhad secretly raised it to be a surprise to him, to help him through hisministerial studies. This David had learned from his mother; his fatherhad avoided mention of it: it might rot in the field! In equal silenceDavid had set about breaking it; and sometimes at night his fatherwould show enough interest merely to ask some questions regarding theday's work. 

Yet, notwithstanding this impending tragedy with his father, anddistress at their reduced circumstances caused by his expenses atcollege, David, during these two months, had entered into much newhappiness. 

The doubts which had racked him for many months were ended. He hadreached a decision not to enter the ministry; had stripped his mindclean and clear of dogmas. The theologies of his day, vast, tangledthickets of thorns overspreading the simple footpath of the piouspilgrim mind, interfered with him no more. It was not now necessary forhim to think or preach that any particular church with which he mightidentify himself was right, the rest of the human race wrong. He didnot now have to believe that any soul was in danger of eternaldamnation for disagreeing with him. Release from these things left hisreligious spirit more lofty and alive than ever. 

For, moreover, David had set his feet a brief space on the wide plainsof living-knowledge; he had encountered through their works many of thegreat minds of his century, been reached by the sublimethought-movements of his time, heard the deep roar of the spirit'socean. Amid coarse, daily labor once more, amid the penury and discordin that ruined farmhouse, one true secret of happiness with David wasthe recollection of all the noble things of human life which he haddiscovered, and to which he meant to work his way again as soon aspossible. And what so helps one to believe in God as knowledge of thegreatness of man?

Meantime, also, his mind was kept freshly and powerfully exercised. Hehad discarded his old way of looking at Nature and man's place in it;and of this fundamental change in him, no better proof could be giventhan the way in which he regarded the storm, as he left thebreakfast-table this morning and went to the woods. 

The damage was unreckonable. The trees had not been prepared against anevent like that. For centuries some of them had developed strength inroot and trunk and branch to resist the winds of the region when cladin all their leaves; or to carry the load of these leaves weighted withraindrops; or to bear the winter snows. Wise self-physicians of theforest! Removing a weak or useless limb, healing their own wounds andfractures! But to be buried under ice and then wrenched and twisted bythe blast--for this they had received no training: and thus, like somany of the great prudent ones who look hourly to their well-being, they had been stricken down at last by the unexpected. 

"Once, " said David reverently to himself, beholding it all, "once Ishould have seen in this storm some direct intention of the Creatortoward man, even toward me. It would have been a reminder of His power;perhaps been a chastisement for some good end which I must believe in, but could not discover. Men certainly once interpreted storms ascommunications from the Almighty, as they did pestilence and famine. There still may be in this neighborhood people who will derive somesuch lesson from this. My father may in his heart believe it a judgmentsent on us and on our neighbors for my impiety. Have not cities beenafflicted on account of the presence of one sinner? Thankful I am notto think in this way now of physical law--not so to misconceive man'splace in Nature. I know that this sleet, so important to us, is but onesmall incident in the long history of the planet's atmosphere andchanging surface. It is the action of natural laws, operating withoutregard to man, though man himself may have had a share in producing it. It will bring death to many a creature; indirectly, it may bring deathto me; but that would be among the results, not in the intention. "

He set his face to cross the wood--sliding, skating, steadying himselfagainst the trunks, driving his heels through the ice crust Theexercise was heating; his breath rose as a steam before his face. Beyond the woods he crossed a field; then a forest of many acres andmagnificent timber, on the far edge of which, under the forest treesand fronting a country lane, stood the schoolhouse of the district. David looked anxiously, as he drew near, for any signs of injury thatthe storm might have done. One enormous tree-top had fallen on thefence. A limb had dropped sheer on the steps. The entire yard waslittle better than a brush heap. He soon turned away home relieved: hewould be able to tell Gabriella to-night that none of the windows hadbeen broken nor the roof; only a new woods scholar, with little feetand a big hard head and a bunch of mistletoe in one hand, was standingon the steps, waiting for her to open the door. 

David's college experience had effected the first great change in himas he passed from youth to manhood; Gabriella had wrought the second. The former was a fragment of the drama of man's soul with God; thelatter was the drama of his heart with woman. 

It had begun the day the former ended--in the gloom of that wintertwilight day, when he had quit the college after his final interviewwith the faculty, and had wandered forlorn and dazed into the happytown, just commencing to celebrate its season of peace on earth andgood will to man. He had found her given up heart and soul to the workof decorating the church of her faith, the church of her fathers. 

When David met her the second time, it was a few days after his returnhome. He was at work in the smoke-house. The meat had been salted downlong enough after the killing: it must be hung, and he was engaged inhanging it. Several pieces lay piled inside the door suitably for thehand. He stood with his back to these beside the meat bench, scrapingthe saltpetre off a large middling and rubbing it with red pepper. Suddenly the light of the small doorway failed; and turning he beheldhis mother, and a few feet behind her--David said that he did notbelieve in miracles--but a few feet behind his mother there now stood adivine presence. Believe it or not, there she was, the miracle! All thebashfulness of his lifetime--it had often made existence well-nighinsupportable--came crowding into that one moment. The feeblest littlebleat of a spring lamb too weak to stand up for the first time wouldhave been a deafening roar in comparison with the silence which nowpenetrated to the marrow of his bones. He faced the two women at bay, with one hand resting on the middling. 

"This is my son, " said his mother neutrally, turning to the young lady. This information did not help David at all. He knew who HE was. He tookit for granted that every one present knew. The visitor at oncerelieved the situation. 

"This is the school-teacher, " she said, coloring and smiling. "I havebeen teaching here ever since you went away. And I am now an oldresident of this neighborhood. "

Not a thing moved about David except a little smoke in the chimney ofhis throat. But the young lady did not wait for more silence to renderthings more tense. She stepped forward into the doorway beside hismother and peered curiously in, looking up at the smoke-blackenedjoists, at the black cross sticks on which the links of sausages werehung, at the little heap of gray ashes in the ground underneath with aring of half-burnt chips around them, at the huge meat bench piled withsalted joints. 

"And this is the way you make middlings?" she inquired, smiling at himencouragingly. 

The idea of that archangel knowing anything about middlings! David'smind executed a rudimentary movement, and his tongue and lips respondedfeebly:--

"This is the way. "

"And this is the way you make hams, sugar-cured hams?"

"This is the way. "

"And this is the way you make--shoulders?"

"This is the way. "

David had found an answer, and he was going to abide by it whilestrength and daylight lasted. 

The young lady seemed to perceive that this was his intention. 

"Let me see you HANG one, " she said desperately. "I have never seenbacon hanged--or hung. I suppose as I teach grammar, I must use bothparticiples. "

David caught up the huge middling by the string and swung it around infront of him, whereupon it slipped out of his nerveless fingers andfell over in the ashes. It did not break the middling, but it broke theice. 

"Can I help you?"

Those torturing, blistering words! David's face got as red as though ithad been rubbed with red pepper and saltpetre both. The flame of itseemed to kindle some faint spark of spirit in him. He picked up themiddling, and as he looked her squarely in the eye, with a humorouslight in his, he nodded at the pieces of bacon by the entrance. 

"Hang one of those, " he said, "if you've a mind. "

As he lifted the middling high, Gabriella noticed above his big redhands a pair of arms like marble for lustre and whiteness (for he hadhis sleeves rolled far back)--as massive a pair of man's arms as everwere formed by life-long health and a life-long labor and life-longright living. 

"Thank you, " she said, retreating through the door. "It's all veryinteresting. I have never lived in the country before. Your mother toldme you were working here, and I asked her to let me come and look on. While I have been living in your neighborhood, you have been living inmy town. I hope you will come to see me, and tell me a great deal. "

As she said this, David perceived that she, standing behind his mother, looked at him with the veiled intention of saying far more. He had suchan instinct for truth himself, that truth in others was bare to him. Those gentle, sympathetic eyes seemed to declare: "I know about yourtroubles. I am the person for whom, without knowing it, you have beenlooking. With me you can break silence about the great things. We canmeet far above the level of such poor scenes as this. I have sought youto tell you this. Come. "

"Mother, " said David that evening, after his father had left the table, dropping his knife and fork and forgetting to eat, "who was that?"

He drew out all that could be drawn: that she had come to take chargeof the school the autumn he had gone away; that she was liked as ateacher, liked by the old people. She had taken great interest in HIM, his mother said reproachfully, and the idea of his studying for theministry. She had often visited the house, had been good to his fatherand to her. This was her first visit since she had gotten back; she hadbeen in town spending the holidays. 

David had begun to go to see Gabriella within a week. At first he wentonce a week--on Saturday nights. Soon he went twice a week--Wednesdaysand Saturdays invariably. On that last day at college, when he hadspoken out for himself, he had ended the student and the youth; when hemet her, it was the beginning of the man: and the new reason of theman's happiness. 

As he now returned home across the mile or more of country, havingsatisfied himself as to the uninjured condition of the schoolhouse, which had a great deal to do with Gabriella's remaining in thatneighborhood, he renewed his resolve to go to see her to-night, thoughit was only Friday. Had not the storm upset all regular laws andcustoms?

Happily, then, on reaching the stable, he fell to work upon his plan ofproviding a shelter for the sheep. 

David felt much more at home in the barn than at the house. For thestock saw no change in him. Believer or unbeliever, rationalist, evolutionist, he was still the same to them. Upon them, in reality, fell the ill consequences of his misspent or well-spent college life;for the money which might have gone for shingles and joists and moreprovender, had in part been spent on books describing the fauna of theearth and the distribution of species on its surface. Some had gone fortreatises on animals under domestication, while his own animals underdomestication were allowed to go poorly fed and worse housed. He hadhad the theory; they had had the practice. But they apprehended nothingof all this. How many tragedies of evil passion brutes escape by notunderstanding their owners! We of the human species so often regretthat individuals read each other's natures so dimly: let us bethankful! David was glad, then, that this little aggregation ofdependent creatures, his congregation of the faithful, neitherperceived the change in him, nor were kept in suspense by the tragedygrowing at the house. 

They had been glad to see him on his return. Captain, who had met himfirst, was gladdest, perhaps. Then the horses, the same old ones. Oneof them, he fancied, had backed up to him, offering a ride. And thecows were friendly. They were the same; their calves were different. The sheep about maintained their number, their increase by naturenearly balancing their decrease by table use. 

One member of the flock David looked for in vain: the boldest, gentlest--there usually is one such. Later on he found it representedby a saddle blanket. After his departure for college, his mother hadconceived of this fine young wether in terms of sweetbreads, tallow forchapped noses, and a soft seat for the spine of her husband. Even thelarded dame of the snow-white sucklings had remembered him well, andhad touched her snout against his boots; so that hardly had he in theold way begun to stroke her bristles, before she spoke comfortably ofher joy, and rolled heavily over in what looked like a grateful swoon. 

No: his animals had not changed in their feelings toward him; but howaltered he in his understanding of them! He had formerly believed thatthese creatures were created for the use of man--that old conceitednotion that the entire earth was a planet of provisions for humanconsumption. It had never even occurred to him to think that the horseswere made but to ride and to work. Cows of course gave milk for thesake of the dairy; cream rose on milk for ease in skimming; whenchurned, it turned sour, that the family might have fresh buttermilk. Hides were for shoes. The skin on sheep, it was put there for Man'swoollens. 

Now David declared that these beings were no more made for Man than Manwas made for them. Man might capture them, keep them in captivity, break, train, use, devour them, occasionally exterminate them bybenevolent assimilation. But this was not the reason of their beingcreated: what that reason was in the Creator's mind, no one knew orwould ever know. 

"Man seizes and uses you, " said David, working that day in his barn;"but you are no more his than he is yours. He calls you dependentcreatures: who has made you dependent? In a state of wild nature, thereis not one of you that Man would dare meet: not the wild stallion, notthe wild bull, not the wild boar, not even an angry ram. The argumentthat Man's whole physical constitution--structure and function-showsthat he was intended to live on beef and mutton, is no better than theargument that the tiger finds man perfectly adapted to his system as afood, and desires none better. Every man-eating creature thinks thesame: the wolf believes Man to be his prey; the crocodile believes himto be his; an old lion is probably sure that a man's young wife isdesigned for his maw alone. So she is, if he manages to catch her. "

As David said this rather unexpectedly to himself, he fell into a novelrevery, forgetting philosophy and brute kind. It was late when Davidfinished his work that day. Toward nightfall the cloud had parted inthe west; the sun had gone down with dark curtains closing heavily overit. Later, the cloud had parted in the east, and the moon had arisenamid white fleeces and floated above banks of pearl. Shining upon allsplendid things else, it illumined one poor scene which must not beforgotten: the rear of an old barn, a sagging roof of rotting shingles;a few common sheep passing in, driven by a shepherd dog; and a bigthoughtful boy holding the door open. 

He had shifted the stock to make way for these additional pensioners, putting the horses into the new stalls, the cows where the horses hadbeen, and the sheep under the shed of the cows. (It is the horse thatalways gets the best of everything in a stable. ) He reproached himselfthat he did least for the creatures that demanded least. 

"That's the nature of man, " he said disapprovingly, "topmost of allbrutes. "

When he stepped out of doors after supper that night, the clouds hadhidden the moon. But there was light enough for him to see his wayacross the ice fields to Gabriella. The Star of Love shone about hisfeet. 

XV

When Gabriella awoke on that same morning after the storm, she tooascertained that her shutters could not be opened. But Gabriella didnot go down into the kitchen for hot water to melt the ice from thebolts and hinges. She fled back across the cold matting to thehigh-posted big bed and cuddled down solitary into its warmth again, tucking the counterpane under her chin and looking out from the pillowswith eyes as fresh as flowers. Flowers in truth Gabriella's eyeswere--the closing and disclosing blossoms of a sweet nature. Somehowthey made you think of earliest spring, of young leaves, of theflutings of birds deep within a glade sifted with golden light, fragrant with white fragrance. They had their other seasons: theirsummer hours of angry flash and swift downpour; their autumn days ofstill depths and soberness, and autumn nights of long, quiet rainfallswhen no one knew. One season they lacked: Gabriella's eyes had nowinter. 

Brave spirit! Had nature not inclined her to spring rather than autumn, had she not inherited joyousness and the temperamental gayety of thewell-born, she must long ago have failed, broken down. Behind her weregenerations of fathers and mothers who had laughed heartily all theirdays. The simple gift of wholesome laughter, often the best as oftenthe only remedy for so many discomforts and absurdities in life--thiswas perhaps to be accounted among her best psychological heirlooms. 

Her first thought on awaking late this morning (for she too had beenkept awake by the storm) was that there could be no school. And thiswas only Friday, with Saturday and Sunday to follow--three wholeconsecutive days of holiday! Gabriella's spirits invariably rose in astorm; her darkest days were her brightest. The weather that tried hersoul was the weather which was disagreeable, but not disagreeableenough to break up school. When she taught, she taught with all herpowers and did it well; when not teaching, she hated it with everyfaculty and capacity of her being. And to discharge patiently andthoroughly a daily hated work--that takes noble blood. 

Nothing in the household stirred below. The members of the family hadremained up far into the night. As for the negroes, they understand howto get a certain profit for themselves out of all disturbances of theweather. Gabriella was glad of the chance to wait for the house-girl tocome up and kindle her fire--grateful for the luxury of lying in bed onFriday morning, instead of getting up to a farmer's early breakfast, when sometimes there were candles on the table to reveal the localitiesof the food! How she hated those candles, flaring in her eyes so early!How she loved the mellow flicker of them at night, and how she hatedthem in the morning--those early-breakfast candles!

In high spirits, then, with the certainty of a late breakfast and noschool, she now lay on the pillows, looking across with sparkling eyesat last night's little gray ridge of ashes under the bars of her smallgrate. Those hearthstones!--when her bare soles accidentally touchedone on winter mornings, Gabriella was of the opinion that they were thecoldest bricks that ever came from a fiery furnace. There was one thingin the room still colder: the little cherrywood washstand away over onthe other side of the big room between the windows, --placed there atthe greatest possible distance from the fire! Sometimes when she peepeddown into her wash-pitcher of mornings, the ice bulged up at her like awhite cannon-ball that had gotten lodged on the way out. She jabbed atit with the handle of her toothbrush; or, if her temper got the best ofher (or the worst), with the poker. Often her last act at night was todry her toothbrush over the embers so that the hair in it would not befrozen in the morning. 

Gabriella raised her head from the pillows and peeped over at thecounterpane covering her. It consisted of stripes of different colors, starting from a point at the middle of the structure and wideningtoward the four sides. Her feet were tucked away under a bank of plumcolor sprinkled with salt; up her back ran a sort of comet's tail ofpuddled green. Over her shoulder and descending toward her chin, floweda broadening delta of well-beaten egg. 

She was thankful for these colors. The favorite hue of the farmer'swife was lead. Those hearthstones--lead! The strip of oilcloth coveringthe washstand--lead! The closet in the wall containing herthings--lead! The stair-steps outside--lead! The porches downbelow--lead! Gabriella sometimes wondered whether this woman might nothave had lead-colored ancestors. 

A pair of recalcitrant feet were now heard mounting the stair: theflowers on the pillow closed their petals. When the negro girl kneltdown before the grate, with her back to the bed and the soles of hershoes set up straight side by side like two gray bricks, the eyes weresoftly opened again, Gabriella had never seen a head like this negrogirl's, that is, never until the autumn before last, when she had comeout into this neighborhood of plain farming people to teach a districtschool. Whenever she was awake early enough to see this curiosity, shenever failed to renew her study of it with unflagging zest. It was sucha mysterious, careful arrangement of knots, and pine cones, and thestrangest-looking little black sticks wrapped with white packingthread, and the whole system of coils seemingly connected with acentral mental battery, or idea, or plan, within. She studied it now, as the fire was being kindled, and the kindler, with inflammatory blowsof the poker on the bars of the grate, told her troubles over audiblyto herself: "Set free, and still making fires of winter mornings; howwas THAT? Where was any freedom in THAT? Her wages? Didn't she work forher wages? Didn't she EARN her wages? Then where did freedom come in?"

One must look low for high truth sometimes, as we gather necessaryfruit on nethermost boughs and dig the dirt for treasure. TheAnglo-Saxon girl lying in the bed and the young African girl kindlingher fire--these two, the highest and the humblest types of womanhood inthe American republic--were inseparably connected in that room thatmorning as children of the same Revolution. It had cost the war of theUnion, to enable this African girl to cast away the cloth envelopingher head--that detested sign of her slavery--and to arrange her hairwith ancestral taste, the true African beauty sense. As long as she hadbeen a slave, she had been compelled by her Anglo-Saxon mistress towear her head-handkerchief; as soon as she was set free, she, with allthe women of her race in the South, tore the head-handkerchiefindignantly off. In the same way, it cost the war of the Union toenable Gabriella to teach school. She had been set free also, and thebandage removed from her liberties. The negress had been empowered todemand wages for her toil; the Anglo-Saxon girl had been empowered toaccept without reproach the wages for hers. 

Gabriella's memoirs might be writ large in four parts that would reallybe the history of the United States, just as a slender seam of gold canonly be explained through the geology of the earth. But they can alsobe writ so small that each volume may be dropped, like certainminute-books of bygone fashions, into a waistcoat pocket, or even read, as through a magnifying glass, entire on a single page. 

The first volume was the childhood book, covering the period fromGabriella's birth to the beginning of the Civil War, by which time shewas fourteen years old: it was fairy tale. These earliest recollectionswent back to herself as a very tiny child living with her mother andgrandmother in a big white house with green window-shutters, inLexington--so big that she knew only the two or three rooms in one ell. Her mother wore mourning for her father, and was always drawing her toher bosom and leaving tears on her face or lilylike hands. One day--shecould not remember very well--but the house had been darkened and theservants never for a moment ceased amusing her--one day the house wasall opened again and Gabriella could not find her mother; and hergrandmother, everybody else, was kinder to her than ever. She did notthink what kindness was then, but years afterward she learned perfectly. 

Very slowly Gabriella's knowledge began to extend over the house andoutside it. There were enormous, high-ceiled halls and parlors, andbedrooms and bedrooms and bedrooms. There were verandas front and back, so long that it took her breath away to run the length of one andreturn. Upstairs, front and back, verandas again, balustraded so thatlittle girls could not forget themselves and fall off. The pillars ofthese verandas at the rear of the house were connected by a network ofwires, and trained up the pillars and branching over the wires werecoiling twisting vines of wisteria as large as Gabriella's neck. Thiswas the sunny southern side; and when the wisteria was blooming, Gabriella moved her establishment of playthings out behind those sunlitcascades of purple and green, musical sometimes with goldfinches. 

The front of the house faced a yard of stately evergreens and greattubs of flowers, oleander, crepe myrtle, and pomegranate. Beyond theyard, a gravelled carriage drive wound out of sight behind cedars, catalpa, and forest trees, shadowing a turfy lawn. At the end of thelawn was the great entrance gate and the street of the town, Gabriellalong knew this approach only by her drives with her grandmother. At therear of the house was enough for her: a large yard, green grazing lotsfor the stable of horses, and best of all a high-fenced gardencontaining everything the heart could desire: vegetables, and flowers;summer-houses, and arbors with seats; pumps of cold water, andhot-houses of plants and grapes, and fruit trees, and a swing, andgooseberry bushes--everything. 

In one corner, the ground was too shaded by an old apple tree to be ofuse: they gave this to Gabriella for her garden. She had attachedparticularly to her person a little negress of about the same age--herMilly, the color of a ripe gourd. So when in spring the gardener beganto make his garden, with her grandmother sometimes standing over him, directing, Gabriella, taking her little chair to the apple tree, --withsome pretended needle-work and a real switch, --would set Milly to workmaking hers. Nothing that they put into the earth ever was heard ofagain, though they would sometimes make the same garden over every dayfor a week. So that more than once, forsaking seed, they pulled off thetops of green things near by, planted these, and so had a perfectgarden in an hour. 

Then Gabriella, seated under the apple tree, would order Milly to waterthe flowers from the pump; and taking her switch and calling Millyclose, she would give her a sharp rap or two around the bare legs (forthat was expected), and tell her that if she didn't stop being sotrifling, she would sell her South to the plantations. Whereupon Milly, injured more in heart than legs, and dropping the watering-pot, wouldbegin to bore her dirty fists into her eyes. Then Gabriella would sayrepentantly:--

"No, I won't, Milly! And you needn't work any more to-day. And you canhave part of my garden if you want it. "

Milly, smiling across the mud on her cheeks, would murmur:--

"You ain' goin' sell yo' Milly down South, is you, Miss Gabriella?"

"_I_ won't. But I'm not so sure about grandmother, Milly. You know sheWILL do it sometimes. Our cotton's got to be picked by SOMEBODY, andwho's to do it but you lazy negroes?"

In those days the apple tree would be blooming, and the petals wouldsift down on Gabriella. Looking up at the marriage bell of blossoms, and speaking in the language of her grandmother, she would say:--

"Milly, when I grow up and get married, I am going to be married out ofdoors in spring under an apple tree. "

"I don' know whah _I_ gwine be married, " Milly would say with a hoarse, careless cackle. "I 'spec' in a brier-patch. "

Gabriella's first discovery of what meanness human nature can exhibitwas connected with this garden. So long as everything was sour andgreen, she could play there by the hour; but as soon as anything gotripe and delicious, the gate with the high latch was shut and she couldnever enter it unguarded. What tears she shed outside the fence as shepeeped through! When they did take her in, they always held her by thehand. 

"DON'T hold my hand, Sam, " pleadingly to the negro gardener. "It's soHOT!"

"You fall down and hurt yourself. "

"How absurd, Sam! The idea of my falling down when I am walking alongslowly!"

"You get lost. "

"How can you say anything so amusing as that, Sam! Did I ever get lostin here?"

"Snakes bite you. "

"Why do you think they'd bite ME, Sam? They have never been known tobite anybody else. "

"You scratch yourself. "

"How can I scratch myself, Sam, when I'm not doing anything?"

"Caterpillars crawl on you. "

"They crawl on me when I'm not in the garden, Sam. So why do you harpon THAT?"

Slowly they walked on--past the temptations of Eden. 

"Please, let me try just once, Sam!"

"Try what, Miss Gabriella?"

"To see whether the snakes will bite me. "

"I couldn't!"

"Then take me to see the grapes, " she would say wearily. 

There they were, hanging under the glass: bunches of black and ofpurple Hamburgs, and of translucent Malagas, big enough to have been anarmful!

"Just one, Sam, please. "

"Make you sick. "

"They never make me sick when I eat them in the house. They are goodfor me! One COULDN'T make me sick. I'm sick because you DON'T give itto me. Don't I LOOK sick, Sam?"

The time came when Gabriella began to extend her knowledge to thecountry, as she drove out beside her grandmother in the balmy springand early summer afternoons. 

"What is that, grandmother?" she would say, pointing with her smallforefinger to a field by the turnpike. 

"That is corn. "

"And what is that?"

"That is wheat. "

"And what is that?"

"Oats, Gabriella. "

"Oh, grandmother, what is THAT?"

"Tut, tut, child! Don't you know what that is? That's hemp. That iswhat bales all our cotton. "

"Oh, grandmother, smell it!"

After this sometimes Gabriella would order the driver to turn off intosome green lane about sunset and press on till they found a field bythe way. As soon as they began to pass it, over into their faces wouldbe wafted the clean, cooling, velvet-soft, balsam breath of the hemp. The carriage would stop, and Gabriella, standing up and facing thefield, would fill her lungs again and again, smiling at her grandmotherfor approval. Then she would take her seat and say quietly:--

"Turn round, Tom, and drive back. I have smelt it enough. "

These drives alone with her grandmother were for spring and earlysummer only. Full summer brought up from their plantations inLouisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, her uncles and the wives andchildren of some of them. All the bedrooms in the big house werefilled, and Gabriella was nearly lost in the multitude, she being theonly child of the only daughter of her grandmother. And now what happytimes there were. The silks, and satins, and laces! The plate, thegold, the cut glass! The dinners, the music, the laughter, the wines!

Later, some of her uncles' families might travel on with their servantsto watering places farther north. But in September all were back againunder the one broad Kentucky roof, stopping for the beautiful Lexingtonfair, then celebrated all over the land; and for the races--those daysof the thoroughbred only; and until frost fall should make it safe toreturn to the swamps and bayous, loved by the yellow fever. 

When all were departed, sometimes her grandmother, closing the housefor the winter, would follow one of her sons to his plantation; thencelater proceeding to New Orleans, at that time the most brilliant ofAmerican capitals; and so Gabriella would see the Father of Waters, andthe things that happened in the floating palaces of the Mississippi;see the social life of the ancient French and Spanish city. 

All that could be most luxurious and splendid in Kentucky during thoselast deep, rich years of the old social order, was Gabriella's: theextravagance, the gayety, the pride, the lovely manners, theselfishness and cruelty in its terrible, unconscious, and narrow way, the false ideals, the aristocratic virtues. Then it was that, overspreading land and people, lay the full autumn of that sowing, which had moved silently on its way toward its fateful fruits for overfifty years. Everything was ripe, sweet, mellow, dropping, turningrotten. 

O ye who have young children, if possible give them happy memories!Fill their earliest years with bright pictures! A great historian manycenturies ago wrote it down that the first thing conquered in battleare the eyes: the soldier flees from what he sees before him. But sooften in the world's fight we are defeated by what we look back upon;we are whipped in the end by the things we saw in the beginning oflife. The time arrived for Gabriella when the gorgeous fairy tale ofher childhood was all that she had to sustain her: when it meantconsolation, courage, fortitude, victory. 

A war volume, black, fiery, furious, awful--this comprised the secondpart of her history: it contained the overthrow of half the Americanpeople, and the downfall of the child princess Gabriella. An idea--hownegative, nerveless, it looks printed! A little group of fourideas--how should they have power of life and death over millions ofhuman beings! But say that one is the idea of the right ofself-government--much loved and fought for all round the earth by theAnglo-Saxon race. Say that a second is the idea that with his ownproperty a man has a right to do as he pleases: another notion that hasbeen warred over, world without end. Let these two ideas run in theblood and passions of the Southern people. Say that a third idea isthat of national greatness (the preservation of the Union), anotheridol of this nation-building race. Say that the fourth idea is that ofevolving humanity, or, at least, that slave-holding societies must bemade non-slave-holding--if not peaceably, then by force of arms. Letthese two ideas be running in the blood and passions of the Northernpeople. Bring the first set of ideas and the second set together in astruggle for supremacy. By all mankind it is now known what the resultwas for the nation. What these ideas did for one little girl, living inLexington, Kentucky, was part of that same sad, sublime history. 

They ordered the grandmother across the lines, as a wealthy sympathizerand political agent of the Southern cause; they seized her house, confiscated it, used it as officers' headquarters: in the end theykilled her with grief and care; they sent her sons, every man of them, into the Southern armies, ravaged their plantations, liberated theirslaves, left them dead on the fields of battle, or wrecked in health, hope, fortune. Gabriella, placed in a boarding-school in Lexington atthat last hurried parting with her grandmother, stayed there a year. Then the funds left to her account in bank were gone; she went to livewith near relatives; and during the remaining years of the war wasfirst in one household, then another, of kindred or friends all of whomcontended for the privilege of finding her a home. But at the close ofthe war, Gabriella, issuing from the temporary shelters given herduring the storm, might have been seen as a snow-white pigeon flyinglost and bewildered across a black cloud covering half the sky. 

The third volume--the Peace Book in which there was no Peace: this wasthe beginning of Gabriella, child of the Revolution. She did not nowown a human being except herself; could give orders to none butherself; could train for this work, whip up to that duty, only herself;and if, she was still minded to play the mistress--firm, kind, efficient, capable--must be such a mistress solely to Gabriella. 

By that social evolution of the race which in one country after anotherhad wrought the overthrow of slavery, she had now been placed with ageneration unique in history: a generation of young Southern girls, ofgentle birth and breeding, of the most delicate nature, who, heiressesin slaves and lands at the beginning of the war, were penniless andunrecognized wards of the federal government at its close, their slaveshaving been made citizens and their plantations laid waste. On theseunprepared and innocent girls thus fell most heavily not only themistakes and misdeeds of their own fathers and mothers but the commonguilt of the whole nation, and particularly of New England, as respectsthe original traffic in human souls. The change in the lives of thesegirls was as sudden and terrible as if one had entered a brilliantballroom and in the voice of an overseer ordered the dancers to go asthey were to the factories. 

To the factories many of them went, in a sense: to hard work of somesort--to wage-earning and wage-taking: sometimes becoming the mainstayof aged or infirm parents, the dependence of younger brothers andsisters. If the history of it all is ever written, it will makepitiful, heroic, noble reading. 

The last volume of Gabriella's memoirs showed her in this field ofstruggle--of new growth to suit the newer day. It was so unlike thefirst volume as to seem no continuation of her own life. It began onesummer morning about two years after the close of the war--an intervalwhich she had spent in various efforts at self-help, at self-training. 

On that morning, pale and trembling, but resolute, her face heavilyveiled, she might have been seen on her way to Water Street inLexington--a street she had heard of all her life and had been carefulnever to enter except to take or to alight from a train at the station. Passing quickly along until she reached a certain ill-smelling littlestairway which opened on the foul sidewalk, she mounted it, knocked ata low black-painted plank door, and entered a room which was acuriosity shop. There she was greeted by an elderly gentleman, whounited in himself the offices of superintendent of schools, experimental astronomer, and manufacturer of a high grade of mustard. She had presented herself to be examined for a teacher's certificate. 

Fortunately for Gabriella this kindly old sage remembered well hergrandmother and her uncles: they had been connoisseurs; they had foryears bought liberally of his mustard. Her uncles had used it first ontheir dinner tables as a condiment and afterward on their foreheads andstomachs as a plaster. They had never failed to praise it to hisface--both for its power to draw an appetite and for its power towithdraw an ache. In turn he now praised them and asked the easiestquestions. Gabriella, whose knowledge of arithmetic was as a grain ofmustard seed, and who spoke beautiful English, but could not haveparsed, "John, come here!"--received a first-class certificate for thesake of the future and a box of mustard in memory of the past. 

Early in that autumn she climbed, one morning, into an old yellow-red, ever muddied stage-coach (the same that David had ridden in) and setout to a remote neighborhood, where, after many failures otherwise, shehad secured a position to teach a small country school. She was gladthat it was distant; she had a feeling that the farther away it wasfrom Lexington, the easier it would be to teach. 

Nearly all that interminable day, the mechanism of the stage and thecondition of the pike (much fresh-cracked limestone on it) administeredto Gabriella's body such a massage as is not now known to medicalscience. But even this was as nothing in comparison to the rack onwhich she stretched every muscle of her mind. What did she know aboutteaching? What kind of people would they be?

Late that mild September afternoon she began to find out The stagestopped at the mouth of a lane; and looking out with deathly faintness, Gabriella saw, standing beside a narrow, no-top buggy, a big, hearty, sunburned farmer with his waist-coat half unbuttoned, wearing a suit ofbutternut jeans and a yellow straw hat with the wide brim turned uplike a cow's horns. 

"Have you got my school-teacher in there?" he called out in a voicethat carried like a heavy, sweet-sounding bell. "And did you bring methem things I told you to get?"

"Which is she?" he asked as he came over to the stage window and peeredin at the several travellers. 

"How do you do, Miss Gabriella?" he said, taking his hat clear off hisbig, honest, hairy, brown head and putting in a hand that would haveheld several of Gabriella's. "I'm glad to see you; and the childrenhave been crying for you. Now, if you will just let me help you to aseat in the buggy, and hold the lines for a minute while I get somethings Joe's brought me, we'll jog along home. I'm glad to see you. Ibeen hearing a heap about you from the superintendent. "

Gabriella already loved him! When they were seated in the buggy, hetook up six-sevenths of the space. She was so close to him that itscared her--so close that when he turned his head on his short, thickneck to look at her, he could hardly see her. 

"He has a little slip of a wife, " explained Gabriella to herself. "I'min her seat: that's why he's used to it. "

So SHE got used to it; and soon felt a frank comfort in being able tonestle freely against him--to cling to him like a bat to a warm wall. For cling sometimes she must. He was driving a sorrel fresh frompasture, with long, ragged hoofs, burrs in mane and tail, and a wilddesire to get home to her foal; so that she fled across thecountry--bridges, ditches, everything, frantic with maternal passion. One circumstance made for Gabriella's security: the buggy tilted overtoward him so low, that she could not conveniently roll out: insteadshe felt as though she were being whirled around a steep hillside. 

Meantime, how he talked to her! Told her the school was all made up:what families were going to send, and how many children from each. Theyhad all heard from the superintendent what a fine teacher she was (notfor nothing is it said that things are handed along kindly in Kentucky)!

"Oh, " murmured Gabriella to herself, "if the family are only like HIM!"The mere way in which he called her by her first name, as though shewere an old friend--a sort of old sweetheart of his whom for somereason he had failed to marry--filled her with perfect trust. 

"That's my house!" he said at last, pointing with extended arm and whip(which latter he had no occasion to use) across the open country. 

Gabriella followed his gesture with apprehensive eyes and beheld awayoff a big comfortable-looking two-story brick dwelling withwhite-washed fences around it and all sorts of white-washed houses onone side or the other--a plain, sweet, country, Kentucky home, Godbless it! The whiteness won Gabriella at once; and with the whitenesswent other things just as good: the assurance everywhere of thrift, comfort. Not a weed in sight, but September bluegrass, deep flowing, orfresh-ploughed fields or clean stubble. Every rail in its place onevery fence; every gate well swung. Everything in sight in the way oflive stock seemed to Gabriella either young or just old enough. Thevery stumps they passed looked healthy. 

Her conjecture had been correct: the slender slip of a woman met her atthe side porch a little diffidently, with a modest smile; then kissedher on the mouth and invited her in. The supper table was already setin the middle of the room; and over in one corner was a big whitebed--with a trundle bed (not visible) under it. Gabriella "took off herthings" and laid them on the snowy counterpane; and the housewife toldher she would let the children entertain her for a few minutes whileshe saw about supper. 

The children accepted the agreement. They swarmed about her as about anew cake. Two or three of the youngest began to climb over her as theyclimbed over the ice-house, to sit on her as they sat on the stiles. The oldest produced their geographies and arithmetics and showed herhow far they had gone. (They had gone a great deal farther thanGabriella!) No one paid the least attention to any one else, or stoodin awe of anything or anybody: Fear had never come to that Jungle!

But trouble must enter into the affairs of this world, and it enteredthat night into Gabriella. 

At supper the farmer, having picked out for her the best piece of thebreast of the fried chicken, inquired in a voice which implied howcordially superfluous the question was:--

"Miss Gabriella, will you have cream gravy?"

"No, thank you. "

The shock to that family! Not take cream gravy! What kind of a teacherwas that, now? Every small hand, old enough to use a knife or fork, held it suspended. At the foot of the table, the farmer, dropping hishead a little, helped the children, calling their names one by one, more softly and in a tone meant to restore cheerfulness if possible. The little wife at the head of the table had just put sugar intoGabriella's cup and was in the act of pouring the coffee. She hastilyemptied the sugar back into the sugar-dish and asked with look ofdismay:--

"Will you have sugar in your coffee?"

The situation grew worse at breakfast. In a voice to which confidencehad been mysteriously restored during the night--a voice that seemed toissue from a honey-comb and to drip sweetness all the way across thetable, that big fellow at the foot again inquired:--

"Miss Gabriella, will you have cream gravy--THIS MORNING?"

"No, thank you!"

The oldest boy cocked his eye sideways at his mother, openly announcingthat he had won a secret wager. The mother hastily remarked:--

"I thought you might like a little for your breakfast. "

The baby, noticing the stillness and trouble everywhere, and feelingitself deeply wounded because perfectly innocent, burst into franticcrying. 

Gabriella could have outcried the baby! She resolved that if they hadit for dinner, she would take it though it were the dessert. A momentlater she did better. Lifting her plate in both hands, she held it out, knife, fork, and all. 

"I believe I'll change my mind. It looks SO tempting. "

"I think you'll find it nice, " remarked the housewife, conciliated, butresentful. But every child now determined to watch and see what elseshe didn't take. They watched in vain: she took everything. So that ina few days they recovered their faith in her and resumed theircrawling. Gabriella had never herself realized how many differentroutes and stations she had in her own body until it had been thustravelled over: feet and ankles; knees; upper joints; trunk line;eastern and western divisions; head terminal. 

There was never any more trouble for her in that household. They madeonly two demands: that she eat whatever was put on the table and lovethem. Whatever was put on the table was good; and they were alllovable. They were one live, disorderly menagerie of nothing but love. But love is not the only essential of life; and its phenomena can betrying. 

Here, then, in this remote neighborhood of plain farmers, in a littledistrict school situated on a mud road, Gabriella began alone andwithout training her new life, --attempt of the Southern girl to makeherself self-supporting in some one of the professions, --sign of a vastnational movement among the women of her people. In her surroundingsand ensuing struggles she had much use for that saving sense of humorwhich had been poured into her veins out of the deep clear wells of herancestors; need also of that radiant, bountiful light which still fellupon her from the skies of the past; but more than these as staff toher young hands, cup to her lips, lamp to her feet, oil to her dailybruises, rest to her weary pillow, was reliance on Higher Help. For theyears--and they seemed to her many and wide--had already drivenGabriella, as they have driven countless others of her sex, out of thecold, windy world into the church: she had become a Protestant devotee. Had she been a Romanist, she would long ere this have been a nun. Shewas now fitted for any of those merciful and heroic services which keepfresh on earth the records of devoted women. The inner supporting stemof her nature had never been snapped; but it had been bruised enough togive off life-fragrance. Adversity had ennobled her. In truth, she hadso weathered the years of a Revolution which had left her as destituteas it had left her free, that she was like Perdita's rosemary: a flowerwhich keeps seeming and savor all the winter long. The North Wind hadbolted about her in vain his whitest snows; and now the woods wereturning green. 

It was merely in keeping with Gabriella's nature, therefore, that asshe grew to know the people among whom she had come to stay, theirhomes, their family histories, one household and one story should haveengaged her deep interest: David's parents and David's career. As shedrove about the country, visiting with the farmer's wife, there hadbeen pointed out a melancholy remnant of a farm, desperately resistingabsorption by some one of three growing estates touching it on threesides. She had been taken to call on the father and mother; had seenthe poverty within doors, the half-ruined condition of the outhouses;had heard of their son, now away at the university; of how they hadsaved and he had struggled. A proud father it was who now told of hisson's magnificent progress already at college. 

"Ah, " she exclaimed, thinking it over in her room that night, "this issomething worth hearing! Here is the hero in life! Among theseeasy-going people this solitary struggler. I, too, am one now; I canunderstand him. "

During the first year of her teaching, there had developed in her anoble desire to see David; but one long to be disappointed. He did notreturn home during his vacation; she went away during hers. The autumnfollowing he was back in college; she at her school. Then the Christmasholidays and his astounding, terrible home-coming, put out of collegeand church. As soon as she heard of that awful downfall, Gabriella felta desire to go straight to him. She did not reason or hesitate: shewent. 

And now for two months they had been seeing each other every few days. 

Thus by the working out of vast forces, the lives of Gabriella andDavid had been jostled violently together. They were the children oftwo revolutions, separate yet having a common end: she produced by thesocial revolution of the New World, which overthrew mediaeval slavery;he by the intellectual revolution of the Old World, which began to putforth scientific law, but in doing this brought on one of the greatestages of religious doubt. So that both were early vestiges of the sameimmeasurable race evolution, proceeding along converging lines. She, living on the artificial summits of a decaying social order, hadfarthest to fall, in its collapse, ere she reached the natural earth;he, toiling at the bottom, had farthest to rise before he could lookout upon the plains of widening modern thought and man's evolvingdestiny. Through her fall and his rise, they had been brought to acommon level. But on that level all that had befallen her had drivenher as out of a blinding storm into the church, the seat and asylum ofreligion; all that had befallen him had driven him out of the churchesas the fortifications of theology. She had been drawn to that part ofworship which lasts and is divine; he had been repelled by the partthat passes and is human. 

XVI

Although Gabriella had joyously greeted the day, as bringing exemptionfrom stifling hours in school, her spirits had drooped ere evening withmonotony. There were no books in use among the members of that lovablehousehold except school-books; they were too busy with the primary joysof life to notice the secondary resources of literature. She had nopleasant sewing. To escape the noise of the pent-up children, she mustrestrict herself to that part of the house which comprised her room. Awalk out of doors was impracticable, although she ventured once intothe yard to study more closely the marvels of the ice-work; and to theedge of the orchard, to ascertain how the apple trees were bearing upunder those avalanches of frozen silver slipped from the clouds. 

So there were empty hours for her that day; and always the emptiest arethe heaviest--those unfilled baskets of time which strangely becomelightest only after we have heaped them with the best we have to give. Gabriella filled the hour-baskets this day with thoughts of David, whose field work she knew would be interrupted by the storm, and whosemovements about the house she vainly tried to follow in imagination. 

Two months of close association with him in that dull countryneighborhood had wrought great changes in the simple feeling with whichshe had sought him at first. He had then been to her only a Prodigalwho had squandered his substance, tried to feed his soul on the swinishhusks of Doubt, and returning to his father's house unrepentant, hadbeen admitted yet remained rejected: a Prodigal not of the flesh andthe world but of the spirit and the Lord. But what has ever interestedthe heart of woman as a prodigal of some kind?

At other times he was figured by her sympathies as a young Samaritangone travelling into a Divine country but fallen among spiritualthieves, who had stripped him of his seamless robe of Faith and lefthim bruised by Life's wayside: a maltreated Christ-neighbor whom it washer duty to succor if she could. But a woman's nursing of a man'swound--how often it becomes the nursing of the wounded! Moreover, Gabriella had now long been aware of what she had become to herprodigal, her Samaritan; she saw the truth and watched it growing fromday to day; for he was incapable of disguises. But often what effecthas such watching upon the watcher, a watcher who is alone in theworld? So that while she fathomed with many feminine soundings all thatshe was to David, Gabriella did not dream what David had become to her. 

Shortly after nightfall, when she heard his heavy tread on the porchbelow, the tedium of the day instantly vanished. Happiness rose in herlike a clear fountain set suddenly playing--rose to her eyes--bathedher in refreshing vital emotions. 

"I am so glad you came, " she said as she entered the parlor, gave himher hand, and stood looking up into his softened rugged face, at hismajestical head, which overawed her a little always. Large as was themould in which nature had cast his body, this seemed to her dwarfed bythe inner largeness of the man, whose development she could note as nowgoing forward almost visibly from day to day: he had risen so faralready and was still so young. 

He did not reply to her greeting except with a look. In matters whichinvolved his feeling for her, he was habitually hampered and ill atease; only on general subjects did she ever see him master of hisresources. Gabriella had fallen into the habit of looking into his eyesfor the best answers: there he always spoke not only with ideas butemotions: a double speech much cared for by woman. 

They seated themselves on opposite sides of the wide deep fire-place: agrate for soft coal had not yet destroyed that. 

"Your schoolhouse is safe, " he announced briefly. 

"Oh, I've been wanting to know all day but had no one to send! How doYOU know?" she inquired quickly. 

"It's safe. The yard will have to be cleared of brush: that's all. "

She looked at him gratefully. "You are always so kind!"

"Well, " observed David, with a great forward stride, "aren't you?"

Gabriella, being a woman, did not particularly prize this remark: itsuggested his being kind because she had been kind; and a woman likesnothing as reward, everything as tribute. 

"And now if the apple trees are only not killed!" she exclaimedjoyously, changing the subject. 

"Why the apple trees?"

"If you had been here last spring, you would have understood. When theybloom, they are mine, I take possession. " After a moment she added:"They bring back the recollection of such happy times--springs longago. Some time I'll tell you. "

"When you were a little girl?"

"Yes. "

"I wish I had known you when you were a little girl, " said David, in anundertone, looking into the fire. 

Gabriella reflected how impossible this would have been: the thoughtcaused her sharp pain. 

Some time later, David, who had appeared more and more involved in someinward struggle, suddenly asked a relieving question:--

"Do you know the first time I ever saw you?"

She did not answer at once. 

"In the smoke-house, " she said with a ripple of laughter. Gabriella, when she was merry, made one, think of some lovely green April hill, snow-capped. 

David shook his head slowly. His eyes grew soft and mysterious. 

"It was the first time _I_ ever saw YOU, " she protested. 

He continued to shake his head, and she looked puzzled. 

"You saw me once before that, and smiled at me. "

Gabriella seemed incredulous and not well pleased. 

After a little while David began in the manner of one who sets out totell a story he is secretly fond of. 

"Do you remember standing on the steps of a church the Friday eveningbefore Christmas--a little after dark?"

Gabriella's eyes began to express remembrance. "A wagon-load of cedarhad just been thrown out on the sidewalk, the sexton was carrying itinto the church, some children were helping, you were making a wreath:do you remember?"

She knew every word of this. 

"A young man--a Bible student--passed, or tried to pass. You smiled athis difficulty. Not unkindly, " he added, smiling not unkindly himself. 

"And that was you? This explains why I have always believed I had seenyou before. But it was only for a moment, your face was in the dark;how should I remember?"

After she said this, she looked grave: his face that night had been farfrom a happy one. 

"That day, " continued David, quickly grave also, "that day I saw myprofessors and pastor for the last time; it ended me as a Biblestudent. I had left the University and the scene of my trial only alittle while before. "

He rose as he concluded and took a turn across the room. Then he facedher, smiling a little sadly. 

"Once I might have thought all that Providential. I mean, seeing thefaces of my professors--my judges--last, as the end of my old life;then seeing your face next--the beginning of the new. "

He had long used frankness like this, making no secret of himself, ofher influence over him. It was embarrassing; it declared so much, assumed so much, that had never been declared or assumed in any otherway. But her stripped and beaten young Samaritan was no labyrinthinecourtier, bescented and bedraped and bedyed with worldliness andconventions: he came ever in her presence naked of soul. It was thisthat empowered her to take the measure of his feeling for her: it hadits effect. 

David returned to his chair and looked across with a mixture ofhesitancy and determination. 

"I have never spoken to you about my expulsion--my unbelief. "

After a painful pause she answered. 

"You must be aware that I have noticed your silence. Perhaps you do notrealize how much I have regretted it. "

"You know why I have not?"

She did not answer. 

"I have been afraid. It's the only thing in the world I've ever beenafraid of. "

"Why should you have been?"

"I dreaded to know how you might feel. It has caused a difficulty withevery one so far. It separated me from my friends among the Biblestudents. It separated me from my professors, my pastor. It hasalienated my father and mother. I did not know how you would regard it. "

"Have I not known it all the time? Has it made any difference?"

"Ah! but that might be only your toleration! Meantime it has become aquestion with me how far your toleration will go--what is back of yourtoleration! We tolerate so much in people who are merelyacquaintances--people that we do not care particularly for and that weare never to have anything to do with in life. But if the tie begins tobe closer, then the things we tolerated at a distance--what becomes ofthem then?"

He was looking at her steadily, and she dropped her eyes. This wasanother one of the Prodigal's assumptions--but never before put sopointedly. 

"So I have feared that when I myself told you what I believe and what Ido not believe, it might be the end of me. And when you learned myfeelings toward what YOU believe--that might be more troublesome still. But the time has come when I must know. "

He turned his face away from her, and rising, walked several timesacross the room. 

At last also the moment had arrived for which she had been waiting. Freely as they had spoken to each other of their pasts--she giving himglimpses of the world in which she had been reared, he taking her intohis world which was equally unfamiliar--on this subject silence betweenthem had never been broken. She had often sought to pass the guard heplaced around this tragical episode but had always been turned away. The only original ground of her interest in him, therefore, stillremained a background, obscure and unexplored. She regretted this formany reasons. Her belief was that he was merely passing through a phaseof religious life not uncommon with those who were born to go far inmental travels before they settled in their Holy Land. She believed itwould be over the sooner if he had the chance to live it out indiscussion; and she herself offered the only possibility of this. Gabriella was in a position to know by experience what it means inhours of trouble to need the relief of companionship. Ideas, she hadlearned, long shut up in the mind tend to germinate and take root. There had been discords which had ceased sounding in her own ear assoon as they were poured into another. 

"I have always hoped, " she repeated, as he seated himself, "that youwould talk with me about these things. " And then to divert theconversation into less difficult channels, she added:--

"As to what you may think of my beliefs, I have no fear; they need notbe discussed and they cannot be attacked. "

"You are an Episcopalian, " he suggested hesitatingly. "I do not wish tobe rude, but--your church has its dogmas. "

"There is not a dogma of my church that I have ever thought of for amoment: or of any other church, " she replied instantly and clearly. 

In those simple words she had uttered unaware a long historic truth:that religion, not theology, forms the spiritual life of women. In thewhole history of the world's opinions, no dogma of any weight has everoriginated with a woman; wherein, as in many other ways, she showspoints of superiority in her intellect. It is a man who tries toapprehend God through his logic and psychology; a woman understands Himbetter through emotions and deeds. It is the men who are concernedabout the cubits, the cedar wood, the Urim and Thummim of theTabernacle; woman walks straight into the Holy of Holies. Menconstructed the Cross; women wept for the Crucified. It was a man--aJew defending his faith in his own supernatural revelation--who triedto ram a sponge of vinegar into the mouth of Christ, dying; it waswomen who gathered at the sepulchre of Resurrection. If Christ couldhave had a few women among his Apostles, there might have been more ofHis religion in the world and fewer creeds barnacled on the World'sShip of Souls. 

"How can you remain in your church without either believing ordisbelieving its dogmas?" asked David, squarely. 

"My church is the altar of Christ and the house of God, " repliedGabriella, simply. "And so is any other church. " That was all the logicshe had and all the faith she needed; beyond that limit she did noteven think. 

"And you believe in THEM ALL?" he asked with wondering admiration. 

"I believe in them all. "

"Once I did also, " observed David, reverently and with new reverencefor her. 

"What I regret is that you should have thrown away your religion onaccount of your difficulties with theology. Nothing more awful couldhave befallen you than that. "

"It was the churches that made the difficulties, " said David, "I didnot. But there is more than theology in it. You do not know what Ithink about religions--revelations--inspirations--man's place innature. "

"What DO you think?" she asked eagerly. "I suppose now I shall hearsomething about those great books. "

She put herself at ease in her chair like one who prepares to listenquietly. 

"Shall I tell you how the whole argument runs as I have arranged it? Ishall have to begin far away and come down to the subject by degrees. "He looked apologetic. 

"Tell me everything; I have been waiting a long time. "

David reflected a few moments and then began:--

"The first of my books as I have arranged them, considers what we callthe physical universe as a whole--our heavens--the stars--and discussesthe little that man knows about it. I used to think the earth was thecentre of this universe, the most important world in it, on account ofMan. That is what the ancient Hebrews thought. In this room floatmillions of dust-particles too small to be seen by us. To say that theuniverse is made for the sake of the earth would be something likesaying that the earth was created for the sake of one of theseparticles of its own dust. "

He paused to see how she received this. 

"That ought to be a great book, " she said approvingly. "I should liketo study it. "

"The second takes up that small part of the universe which we call oursolar system and sums up the little we have learned regarding it. Iused to think the earth the most important part of the solar system, onaccount of Man. So the earliest natural philosophers believed. That islike believing that the American continent was created for the sake, say, of my father's farm. "

He awaited her comment. 

"That should be a great book, " she said simply. "Some day let me seeTHAT. "

"The third detaches for study one small planet of that system--ourearth--and reviews our latest knowledge of that: as to how it has beenevolved into its present stage of existence through other stagesrequiring unknown millions and millions and millions of years. Once Ithought it was created in six days. So it is written. Do you believethat?"

There was silence. 

"What is the next book?" she asked. 

"The fourth, " said David, with a twinkle in his eye at her refusal toanswer his question, "takes up the history of the earth's surface--itscrust--the layers of this--as one might study the skin of an apple aslarge as the globe. In the course of an almost infinite time, as wemeasure things, it discovers the appearance of Life on this crust, andthen tries to follow the progress of Life from the lowest forms upward, always upward, to Man: another time infinitely vast, according to ourstandards. "

He looked over for some comment but she made none, and he continued, his interest deepening, his face kindling:--

"The fifth takes up the subject of Man, as a single one of the myriadsof forms of Life that have grown on the earth's crust, and gives thebest of what we know of him viewed as a species of animal. Does thistire you?"

Gabriella made the only gesture of displeasure he had ever seen. 

"Now, " said David, straightening himself up, "I draw near to the rootof the matter. A sixth book takes up what we call the civilization ofthis animal species, Man. It subdivides his civilization into differentcivilizations. It analyzes these civilizations, where it is possible, into their arts, governments, literatures, religions, and otherelements. And the seventh, " he resumed after a grave pause, scrutinizing her face most eagerly, "the seventh takes up just one partof his civilizations--the religions of the globe--and gives an accountof these. It describes how they have grown and flourished, how somehave passed as absolutely away as the civilizations that produced them. It teaches that those religions were as natural a part of thosecivilizations as their civil laws, their games, their wars, theirphilosophy; that the religious books of these races, which theythemselves often thought inspired revelations, were no more inspiredand no more revelations than their secular books; that Buddha's faithor Brahma's were no more direct from God than Buddhistic or Brahmantemples were from God; that the Koran is no more inspired than Moorisharchitecture is inspired; that the ancient religion of the Jewish racestands on the same footing as the other great religions of theglobe--as to being Supernatural; that the second religion of theHebrews, starting out of them, but rejected by them, the Christianreligion, the greatest of all to us, takes its place with the others asa perfectly natural expression of the same human desire and effort tofind God and to worship Him through all the best that we know inourselves and of the universe outside us. "

"Ah, " said Gabriella, suddenly leaning forward in her chair, "that isthe book that has done all the harm. "

"One moment! All these books, " continued David, for he was aroused nowand did not pause to consider her passionate protest, "have this incommon: that they try to discover and to trace Law. The universe--it isthe expression of Law. Our solar system--it has been formed by Law, Thesun--the driving force of Law has made it. Our earth--Law has shapedthat; brought Life out of it; evolved Life on it from the lowest to thehighest; lifted primeval Man to modern Man; out of barbarism developedcivilization; out of prehistoric religions, historic religions. Andthis one order--method--purpose--ever running and unfolding through theuniverse, is all that we know of Him whom we call Creator, God, ourFather. So that His reign is the Reign of Law. He, Himself, is theauthor of the Law that we should seek Him. We obey, and our seekingsare our religions. "

"If you ask me whether I believe in the God of the Hebrews, I say'Yes'; just as I believe in the God of the Babylonians, of theEgyptians, of the Greeks, of the Romans, of all men. But if you askwhether I believe what the Hebrews wrote of God, or what any other ageor people thought of God, I say 'No. ' I believe what the best thoughtof my own age thinks of Him in the light of man's whole past and of ourgreater present knowledge of the Laws of His universe, " said David, stoutly, speaking for his masters. 

"As for the theologies, " he resumed hastily, as if not wishing to beinterrupted, "I know of no book that has undertaken to number them. They, too, are part of Man's nature and civilization, of his neverceasing search. But they are merely what he thinks of God--neveranything more. They often contain the highest thought of which he iscapable in his time and place; but the awful mistake and cruelty ofthem is that they have regularly been put forth as the voice of GodHimself, authoritative, inviolable, and unchanging. An assemblage ofmen have a perfect right to turn a man out of their church ontheological grounds; but they have no right to do it in the name ofGod. With as much propriety a man might be expelled from a politicalparty in the name of God. In the long life of any one of the greatreligions of the globe, how many brief theologies have grown up underit like annual plants under a tree! How many has the Christian religionitself sprouted, nourished, and trampled down as dead weeds! What do wethink now of the Christian theology of the tenth century? of thetwelfth? of the fifteenth? In the nineteenth century alone, how manysystems of theology have there been? In the Protestantism of the UnitedStates, how many are there to-day? Think of the names they bear--olderand newer! According to founders, and places, and sources, andcontents, and methods: Arminian--Augustinian--Calvinistic--Lutheran--Gallican--Genevan--Mercersburg--New England--Oxford--national--revealed--Catholic--evangelical--fundamental--historical--homiletical--moral--mystical--pastoral--practical--dogmatic--exegetical--polemic--rational--systematic. That sounds a littlelike Polonius, " said David, stopping suddenly, "but there is nohumor in it! One great lesson in the history of them all is not to beneglected: that through them also runs the great Law of Evolution, ofthe widening thoughts of men; so that now, in civilized countries atleast, the churches persecute to the death no longer. You know what theEgyptian Priesthood would have done with me at my trial. What theMediaeval hierarchy would have done. What the Protestant or theCatholic theology of two centuries ago might have done. Now mankind isdeveloping better ideas of these little arrangements of humanpsychology on the subject of God, though the churches still try toenforce them in His name. But the time is coming when the churches willbe deserted by all thinking men, unless they cease trying to uphold, asthe teachings of God, mere creeds of their ecclesiastical founders. Very few men reject all belief in God; and it is no man's right toinquire in what any man's belief consists; men do reject and have aright to reject what some man writes out as the eternal truth of thematter. "

"And now, " he said, turning to her sorrowfully, "that is the best orthe worst of what I believe--according as one may like it or not likeit. I see all things as a growth, a sublime unfolding by the Laws ofGod. The race ever rises toward Him. The old things which were its bestonce die off from it as no longer good. Its charity grows, its justicegrows. All the nobler, finer elements of its spirit come forth more andmore--a continuous advance along the paths of Law. And the better theworld, the larger its knowledge, the easier its faith in Him who madeit and who leads it on. The development of Man is itself the greatRevelation of Him! But I have studied these things ignorantly, only alittle while. I am at the beginning of my life, and hope to grow. StillI stand where I have placed myself. And now, are you like the others:do you give me up?"

He faced her with the manner in which he had sat before his professors, conceiving himself as on trial a second time. He had in him the stuffof martyrs and was prepared to stand by his faith at the cost of allthings. 

The silence in the room lasted. Her feeling for him was so much deeperthan all this--so centred, not in what his faith was to her but in whatHE was to her, that she did not trust herself to speak. He was not ontrial in these matters in the least: without his knowing it, he hadbeen on trial in many other ways for a long time. 

He misunderstood her silence, read wrongly her expression which wasobeying with some severity the need she felt to conceal what she had noright to show. 

"Ah, well! Ah, well!" he cried piteously, rising slowly. 

When she saw his face a moment later across the room as he turned, itwas the face she had first seen in the dark street. It had stopped hersinging then; it drew an immediate response from her now. She crossedover to him and took one of his hands in both of hers. Her cheeks wereflushed, her voice trembled. 

"I am not your judge, " she said, "and in all this there is only onething that is too sad, too awful, for me to accept. I am sorry youshould have been misled into believing that the Christian religion isnothing more than one of the religions of the world, and Christ merelyone of its religious teachers. I wish with all my strength you believedas you once believed, that the Bible is a direct Revelation from God, making known to us, beyond all doubt, the Resurrection of the dead, theImmortality of the Soul, in a better world than this, and the presencewith us of a Father who knows our wants, pities our weakness, andanswers our prayers. But I believe you will one day regain your faith:you will come back to the Church. "

He shook his head. 

"Don't be deceived, " he said. 

"Men, great men, have said that before and they have come back. I am awoman, and these questions never trouble us; but is it not a commonoccurrence that men who think deeply on such mysteries pass throughtheir period of doubt?"

"But suppose I never pass through mine! You have not answered myquestion, " he said determinedly. "Does this make no difference in yourfeeling for me? Would it make none?"

"Will you bring me that book on the religions of the world?"

"Ah, " he said, "you have not answered. "

"I have told you that I am not your judge. "

"Ah, but that tells nothing: a woman is never a judge. She is eitherwith one or against him. "

"Which do I look like?"--she laughed evasively--"Mercy or Vengeance?And have you forgotten that it is late--too late to ask questions?"

He stood, comprehending her doubtfully, with immeasurable joy, and thenwent out to get his overcoat. 

"Bring your things in here, " she said, "it is cold in the hall. Andwrap up warmly! That is more important than all the Genevan and thehomiletical!"

He bade her good night, subdued with happiness that seemed to blot outthe troublous past, to be the beginning of new life. New happinessbrought new awkwardness:--

"This was not my regular night, " he said threateningly. "I cameto-night instead of to-morrow night. "

Gabriella could answer a remark like that quickly enough. 

"Certainly: it is hard to wait even for a slight pleasure, and it isbest to be through with suffering. "

He looked as if cold water and hot water had been thrown on him at thesame time: he received shocks of different kinds and was doubtful as tothe result. He shook his head questioningly. 

"I may do very well with science, but I am not so sure about women. "

"Aren't women science?"

"They are a branch of theology, " he said; "they are what a man thinksabout when he begins to probe his Destiny!"

XVII

David slept peacefully that night, like a man who has reached the endof long suspense. When he threw his shutters open late, he found thatthe storm had finished its work and gone and that the weather hadsettled stinging cold. The heavens were hyacinth, the ground white withsnow; and the sun, day-lamp of that vast ceiling of blue, made theearth radiant as for the bridal morn of Winter. So HIS thoughts ran. 

"Gabriella! Gabriella!" he cried, as he beheld the beauty, the purity, the breadth, the clearness. "It is you--except the coldness, thecruelty. "

All day then those three: the hyacinthine sky, the flashing lamp, thewhite earth, with not one crystal thawing. 

It being Saturday, there was double work for him. He knocked up thewood for that day and for Sunday also, packed and stored it; cut doublethe quantity of oats; threw over twice the usual amount of fodder. Theshocks were buried. He had hard kicking to do before he reached therich brown fragrant stalks. Afterwards he made paths through the snowabout the house for his mother; to the dairy, to the hen-house. In thewooden monotony of her life an interruption in these customary visitswould have been to her a great loss. The snow being over the cook'sshoe-tops, he took a basket and dug the vegetables out of the holes inthe garden. 

In the afternoon he had gone to the pond in the woods to cut a drinkingplace for the cattle. As he was returning with his axe on his shoulder, the water on it having instantly frozen, he saw riding away across thestable lot, the one of their neighbors who was causing him so muchtrouble about the buying of the farm. He stopped hot with anger andwatched him. 

In those years a westward movement was taking place among theKentuckians--a sad exodus. Many families rendered insolvent or bankruptby the war and the loss of their slaves, while others interspersedamong them had grown richer by Government contracts, were now beingbought out, forced out, by debt or mortgage, and were seeking new homeswhere lay cheaper lands and escape from the suffering of living on, ruined, amid old prosperous acquaintances. It was a profound historicdisturbance of population, destined later on to affect profoundly manyyounger commonwealths. This was the situation now bearing heavily onDavid's father, on three sides of whose fragmentary estate lay richneighbors, one of whom especially desired it. 

The young man threw his axe over his shoulder again and took a linestraight toward the house. 

"He shall not take advantage of my father's weakness again, " he said, "nor shall he use to further his purposes what I have done to reducehim to this want. "

He felt sure that this pressure upon his father lay in part back of thefeeling of his parents toward him. His expulsion from college and theirbelief that he was a failure; the fact that for three years repairs hadbeen neglected and improvements allowed to wait, in order that allpossible revenues might be collected for him; even these caused themless acute distress than the fear that as a consequence they should nowbe forced so late in life to make that mournful pilgrimage into strangeregions. David was saddened to think that ever at his father's side sathis mother, irritating him by dropping all day into his ear the halfidle, half intentional words which are the water that wears out therock. 

The young man walked in a straight line toward the house, determined toascertain the reason of this last visit, and to have out thelong-awaited talk with his father. He reached the yard gate, thenpaused and wheeled abruptly toward the barn. 

"Not to-day, " he said, thinking of Gabriella and of his coming visit toher now but a few hours off. "To-morrow! Day after to-morrow! Any timeafter this! But no quarrels to-day!" and his face softened. 

Before the barn door, where the snow had been tramped down by the stockand seeds of grain lay scattered, he flushed a flock of little birds, nearly all strangers to each other. Some from the trees about the yard;some from the thickets, fences, and fields farther away. As he threwopen the barn doors, a few more, shyer still, darted swiftly intohiding. He heard the quick heavy flap of wings on the joists of theoats loft overhead, and a hawk swooped out the back door and sailed lowaway. 

The barn had become a battle-field of hunger and life. This was thesecond day of famine--all seeds being buried first under ice and nowunder snow; swift hunger sending the littler ones to this granary, thelarger following to prey on them. To-night there would be owls and inthe darkness tragedies. In the morning, perhaps, he would find afeather which had floated from a breast. A hundred years ago, hereflected, the wolves would have gathered here also and the cougar andthe wildcat for bigger game. 

It was sunset as he left the stable, his work done. Beside the yardgate there stood a locust tree, and on a bough of this, midway up, forhe never goes to the tree-tops at this season, David saw a cardinal. Hewas sitting with his breast toward the clear crimson sky; every twigaround him silver filigree; the whole tree glittering with a milliongems of rose and white, gold and green; and wherever a fork, there ahanging of snow. The bird's crest was shot up. He had come forth tolook abroad upon this strange wreck of nature and peril to his kind. David had scarcely stopped before him when with a quick shy movement hedived down into one of his ruined winter fortresses-a cedar dismemberedand flattened out, never to rise again. 

The supper that evening was a very quiet one. David felt that hisfather's eyes were often on him reproachfully; and that his mother'swere approvingly on his father's. Time and again during the meal theimpulse well-nigh overcame him to speak to his father then and there;but he knew it would be a cruel, angry scene; and each time the face ofGabriella restrained him. It was for peace; and his heart shut out alldiscord from around that new tenderer figure of her which had comeforth within him this day. 

Soon even the trouble at home was forgotten; he was on his way throughthe deep snow toward her. 

XVIII

Gabriella had brought with her into this neighborhood of good-natured, non-reading people the recollections of literature. These became herlibrary of the mind; and deep joy she drew from its invisible volumes. She had transported a fine collection of the heroes and heroines ofgood fiction (Gabriella, according to the usage of her class and time, had never read any but standard works). These, when the earlier yearsof adversity came on, had been her second refuge from the world:religion was the first. Now they were the means by which she returnedto the world in imagination. The failure to gather together so durablea company of friends leaves every mind the more destitute--especially awoman's, which has greater need to live upon ideals, and cannot alwaysfind these in actual life. Then there were short poems and parts oflong poems, which were as texts out of a high and beautiful Gospel ofNature. One of these was on the snowstorm; and this same morning hermemory long was busy, fitting the poem within her mind to the sceneryaround the farmhouse, as she passed joyously from window to window, looking out far and near. 

There it all was as the great New England poet had described it: thatmasonry out of an unseen quarry, that frolic architecture of the snow, nightwork of the North Wind, fierce artificer. In a few hours he hadmimicked with wild and savage fancy the structures which human art canscarce rear, stone by stone, in an age: white bastions curved withprojected roof round every windward stake or tree or door; the gatewayovertopped with tapering turrets; coop and kennel hung mockingly withParian wreaths; a swanlike form investing the hidden thorn. 

From one upper window under the blue sky in the distance she could seewhat the poet had never beheld: a field of hemp shocks looking like awinter camp, dazzlingly white. The scene brought to her mind someverses written by a minor Kentucky writer on his own soil and people. 

 SONG OF THE HEMP

 Ah, gentle are the days when the Year is young And rolling fields with rippling hemp are green And from old orchards pipes the thrush at morn. No land, no land like this is yet unsung Where man and maid at twilight meet unseen And Love is born. 

 Oh, mighty summer days and god of flaming tress When in the fields full-headed bends the stalk, And blossoms what was sown! No land, no land like this for tenderness When man and maid as one together walk And Love is grown. 

 Oh, dim, dim autumn days of sobbing rain When on the fields the ripened hemp is spread And woods are brown. No land, no land like this for mortal pain When Love stands weeping by the sweet, sweet bed For Love cut down. 

 Ah, dark, unfathomably dark, white winter days When falls the sun from out the crystal deep On muffled farms. No land, no land like this for God's sad ways When near the tented fields Love's Soldier lies asleep With empty arms. 

The verses were too sorrowful for this day, with its new, half-awakenedhappiness. Had Gabriella been some strong-minded, uncompromising NewEngland woman, she might have ended her association with David thenight before--taking her place triumphantly beside an Accusing Judge. Or she might all the more fiercely have set on him an acrid conscience, and begun battling with him through the evidences of Christianity, thatshe might save his soul. But this was a Southern girl of strong, warm, deep nature, who felt David's life in its simple entirety, and had nothought of rejecting the whole on account of some peculiarity in one ofits parts; the white flock was more to her than one dark member. Inexpressibly dear and sacred as was her own church, her own faith, shehad never been taught to estimate a man primarily with reference tohis. What was his family, how he stood in his profession, his honorablecharacter, his manners, his manhood--these were what Gabriella hadalways been taught to look for first in a man. 

In many other ways than in his faith and doubt David was a new type ofman to her. He was the most religious, the only religious, one she hadever known--a new spiritual growth arising out of his people as a youngoak out of the soil. Had she been familiar with the Greek idea, shemight have called him a Kentucky autochthon. It was the first time alsothat she had ever encountered in a Kentuckian the type of studentmind--that fitness and taste for scholarship which sometimes moves sounobtrusively and rises so high among that people, but is usuallyunobserved unless discovered pre-eminent and commanding far from theconfines of the state. 

Touching his scepticism she looked upon him still as she had thought ofhim at first, --as an example of a sincere soul led astray for a timeonly. Strange as were his views (and far stranger they seemed in thoseyears than now), she felt no doubt that when the clouds marshalledacross his clear vision from the minds of others had been withdrawn, hewould once more behold the Sun of Righteousness as she did. Gabriellaas by intuition reasoned that a good life most often leads to a beliefin the Divine Goodness; that as we understand in others only what weare in ourselves, so it is the highest elements of humanity that mustbe relied upon to believe in the Most High: and of David's lofty natureshe possessed the whole history of his life as evidence. 

Her last act, then, the night before had been, in her nightgown, on herknees, to offer up a prayer that he might be saved from the influencesof false teachers and guided back to the only Great One. But when agirl, with all the feelings which belong to her at that hour, seeksthis pure audience and sends upward the name of a man on her spotlessprayers, he is already a sacred happiness to her as well as a care. 

On this day she was radiant with tender happiness. The snow of itselfwas exhilarating. It spread around her an enchanted land. It buried outof sight in the yard and stable lots all mire, all ugly things. Thisennoblement of eternal objects reacted with comic effect on theinterior of the house itself; outside it was a marble palace, surrounded by statuary; within--alas! It provoked her humor, thatinnocent fun-making which many a time had rendered her environment themore tolerable. 

When she went down into the parlor early that evening to await David'scoming, this gayety, this laughter of the generations of men and womenwho made up her past, possessed her still. She made a freshinvestigation of the parlor, took a new estimate of its peculiarfurnishings. The hearthstones--lead color. The mohair furniture--coldat all temperatures of the room and slippery in every position of thebody. The little marble-top table on which rested a glass case holdinga stuffed blue jay clutching a varnished limb: tail and eyes stretchedbeyond the reach of muscles. Near the door an enormous shell which, onsummer days, the cook blew as a dinner horn for the hands in the field. A collection of ambrotypes which, no matter how held, always caused thesitter to look as though the sun was shining in his eyes. The violenceof the Brussels carpet. But the cheap family portraits in thin woodenframes--these were Gabriella's delight in a mood like this. 

The first time she saw these portraits, she turned and walked rapidlyout of the parlor. She had enough troubles of her own without bearingthe troubles of all these faces. Later on she could confront them withequanimity--that company of the pallid, the desperately sick, theunaccountably uncomfortable. All looked, not as though there had been adeath in the family, but a death in the collection: only the same griefcould have so united them as mourners. And whatever else they lacked, each showed two hands, the full number, placed where they were sure tobe counted. 

She was in the midst of this psychological reversion to ancestralgayety when David arrived. Each looked quickly at the other withunconscious fear. Within a night and a day each had drawn nearer to theother; and each secretly inquired whether the other now discovered thisnearness. Gabriella saw at least that he, too, was excited withhappiness. 

He appeared to her for the first time handsome. He WAS better looking. When one approaches the confines of love, one nears the borders ofbeauty. Nature sets going a certain work of decoration, oftransformation. Had David about this time been a grouse, he wouldprobably have displayed a prodigious ruff. Had he been a bulbul andcontinued to feel as he did, he would have poured into the ear of nightsuch roundelays as had never been conceived of by that disciplinedsinger. Had he been a master violinist, he would have been unable toplay a note from a wild desire to flourish the bow. He had long stoodrooted passively in the soil of being like a century plant when it ismerely keeping itself in existence. But latterly, feeling in advancethe approach of the Great Blossoming Hour, he had begun to shoot uprapidly into a lofty life-stalk; there were inches of the rankestgrowth on him within the last twenty-four hours. To-night he was noteven serious in his conversation; and therefore he was the moreawkward. His emotions were unmanageable; much more his talk. But shewho witnesses this awkwardness and understands--does she ever fail topardon?

"Last night, " he said with a droll twinkle, after the evening was abouthalf spent, "there was one subject I did not speak to you about--Man'splace in Nature. Have you ever thought about that?"

"I've been too busy thinking about my place in the school!" saidGabriella, laughing--Gabriella who at all times was simplicity andclearness. 

"You see Nature does nothing for Man except what she enables him to dofor himself. In this way she has made a man of him; she has given himhis resources and then thrown him upon them. Beyond that she caresnothing, does nothing, provides, arranges nothing. I used to think, forinstance, that the greenness of the earth was intended for hiseyes--all the loveliness of spring. On the contrary, she merely gavehim an eye which has adapted itself to get pleasure out of thegreenness. The beauty of spring would have been the same, year afteryear, century after century, had he never existed. And the blue of thesky--I used to think it was hung about the earth for his sake; and thecolors of the clouds, the great sunsets. But the blueness of the sky isnothing but the dust of the planet floating deep around it, too lightto sink through the atmosphere, but reflecting the rays of the sun. These rays fall on the clouds and color them. It would all have beenso, had Man never been born. The earth's springs of drinking water, refreshing showers, the rainbow on the cloud, --they would have been thesame, had no human being ever stood on this planet to claim them forages as the signs of providence and of covenant. "

Gabriella had her own faith as to the rainbow. 

"So, none of the other animals was made for Man, " resumed David, whoseemed to have some ulterior purpose in all this. "I used to think thestructure and nature of the ass were given him that he might be adaptedto bear Man's burdens; they were given him that he might bear his ownburdens. Horses were not made for cavalry. And a camel--I never doubtedthat he was a wonderful contrivance to enable man to cross the desert;he is a wonderful contrivance in order that the contrivance itself maycross the desert. "

"I hope I may never have to use one, " said Gabriella, "when I commenceto ride again. I prefer horses and carriages--though I suppose youwould say that only the carriage was designed for me and that I had noright to be drawn in that way. "

"Some day a horse may be designed for you, just as the carriage is. Wedo not use horses on railroads now; we did use them at first inKentucky. Sometime you may not use horses in your carriage. You mayhave a horse that was designed for you. "

"I think, " said Gabriella, "I should prefer a horse that was designedfor itself. "

"And so, " resumed David, moving straight on toward his concealedclimax, "if I were a poet, I'd never write poems about flowers andclouds and lakes and mountains and moonbeams and all that; those thingsare not for a man. If I were a novelist, I'd never write stories abouta grizzly bear, or a dog, or a red bird. If I were a sculptor, I'd notcarve a lynx or a lion. If I were a painter, I'd never paint sheep. Inall this universe there is only one thing that Nature ever created fora man. I'd write poems about that one thing! I'd write novels about it!I'd paint it! I'd carve it! I'd compose music to it!"

"Why, what is that?" said Gabriella, led sadly astray. 

"A woman!" said David solemnly, turning red. 

Gabriella fled into the uttermost caves of silence. 

"And there was only one thing ever made for woman. "

"I understand perfectly. "

David felt rebuffed. He hardly knew why. But after a moment or two ofsilence he went on, still advancing with rough paces toward his goal:--

"Sometimes, " he said mournfully, "it's harder for a man to get the onlything in the world that was ever made for him than anything else! Thisdifficulty, however, appertains exclusively to the human species. "

Gabriella touched her handkerchief quickly to her lips and held itthere. 

"But then, many curious things are true of our species, " he continued, with his eyes on the fire and in the manner of a soliloquy, "that neveroccur elsewhere. A man, for instance, is the only animal that willsettle comfortably down for the rest of its days to live on theexertions of the female. "

"It shows how a woman likes to be depended on, " said Gabriella, withher deep womanliness. 

"Tom-cats of the fireside, " said David, "who are proud of what fat micetheir wives feed them on. It may show what you say in the nature of thewoman. But what does it show in the nature of the man?"

"That depends. "

"I don't think it depends, " replied David. "I think it is either one ofthe results of Christianity or a survival of barbarism. As one of theresults of Christianity, it demonstrates what women will endure whenthey are imposed upon. As a relic of barbarism--when it happens in ourcountry--why not regard it as derived from the North American Indians?The chiefs lounged around the house and smoked the best tobacco andsent the squaws out to work for them. Occasionally they broke silenceby briefly declaring that they thought themselves immortal. "

Gabriella tried to draw the conversation into other channels, but Davidwas not to be diverted. 

"It has been a great fact in the history of your sex, " he said, lookingacross at her, with a shake of his head, as though she did notappreciate the subject, "that idea that everything in the universe wasmade for Man. "

"Why?" inquired Gabriella, resigning herself to the perilous and theirresistible. 

"Well, in old times it led men to think that since everything elsebelonged to them, so did woman: therefore when they wanted her they didnot ask for her; they took her. "

"It is much better arranged at present, whatever the reason. "

"Now a man cannot always get one, even when he asks for her, " and Davidturned red again and knotted his hands. 

"I am so glad the schoolhouse was not damaged by the storm, " observedGabriella, reflecting. 

David fell into a revery but presently awoke. 

"There are more men than women in the world. On an average, that isonly a fraction of a woman to every man. Still the men cannot take careof them. But it ought to be a real pleasure to every man to take careof an entire woman. "

"Did you ever notice the hands in that portrait?"

David glanced at the portrait without noticing it, and went his way. 

"Since a man knows nothing else was created for him, he feels hisloneliness without her so much more deeply. They ought to be very goodand true to each other--a man and a woman--since they two are alone inthe universe. "

He gulped down his words and stood up, trembling. 

"I must be going, " he said, without even looking at Gabriella, and wentout into the hall for his coat. 

"Bring it in here. " she called. "It is cold out there. " She watched howcareless he was about making himself snug for his benumbing walk. Hehad a woollen comforter which he left loosely tied about his neck. 

"Tie it closer, " she commanded. "You had a cold last night, and it isworse tonight. Tuck it in close about your neck. "

David made the attempt. He was not thinking. 

"This way!" And Gabriella showed him by using her fingers around herown neck and collar. 

He tried again and failed, standing before her with a mingling ofembarrassment and stubborn determination. 

"That will never do!" she cried with genuine concern. She took hold ofthe comforter by the ends and drew the knot up close to his throat, helifting his head to receive it as it came. Then David with his eyes onthe ceiling felt his coat collar turned up and her soft warm fingerstucking the comforter in around his neck. When he looked down, she wasstanding over by the fireplace. 

"Good night, " she said positively, with a quick gesture of dismissal asshe saw the look in his eyes. 

Each of the million million men who made up the past of David, thatmoment reached a hand out of the distance and pushed him forward. Butof them all there was none so helpless with modesty, --so in need ofhiding from every eye, --even his own, --the sacred annals of that moment. 

He was standing by the table on which burned the candles. He bent downquickly and blew them out and went over to her by the dim firelight. 

XIX

All high happiness has in it some element of love; all love contains adesire for peace. One immediate effect of new happiness, new love, isto make us turn toward the past with a wish to straighten out itsdifficulties, heal its breaches, forgive its wrongs. We think mosthopefully of distressing things which may still be remedied, mostregretfully of others that have passed beyond our reach and will. 

It was between ten and eleven o'clock of the next day--Sunday. David'scold had become worse. He had turned over necessary work to the negroman and stayed quietly in his room since the silent breakfast Two orthree books chosen carelessly out of the trunk lay on his table beforethe fire: interest had gone out of them this day. With his face red andswollen, he was sitting beside this table with one hand looselycovering the forgotten books, his eyes turned to the window, butlooking upon distant inward scenes. 

Sunday morning between ten and eleven o'clock! the church-going hour ofhis Bible-student life. In imagination he could hear across these wideleagues of winter land the faint, faint peals of the church bells whichwere now ringing. He was back in the town again--up at the college--inhis room at the dormitory; and it was in the days before the times ofhis trouble. The students were getting ready for church, with freshlyshaved faces, boots well blacked, best suits on, not always good ones. He could hear their talk in the rooms around his, hear fragments ofhymns, the opening and shutting of doors along the hallways, and therunning of feet down the stairs. By ones and twos and larger groupsthey passed down and out with their hymnals, Testaments, sometimesblank books for notes on the sermon. Several thrust bright, cordialfaces in at the door, as they passed, to see whether he and hisroommate had started. 

The scene changed. He was in the church, which was crowded from pulpitto walls. He was sitting under the chandelier in the choir, the numberof the first hymn had just been whispered along, and he began to sing, with hundreds of others, the music which then released the pinions ofhis love and faith as the air releases the wings of a bird. The hymnceased; he could see the pastor rise from behind the pulpit, advance, and with a gesture gather that sea of heads to prayer. He could followthe sermon, most of all the exhortation; around him was such stillnessin the church that his own heart-beats were audible. Then the Supperand then home to the dormitory again--with a pain of happiness fillinghim, the rest and the unrest of consecration. 

Many other scenes he lived through in memory this morning--once livedin reality amid that brotherhood of souls. His tenderest thoughtsperhaps dwelt on the young men's prayer-meetings of Sunday afternoonsat the college. There they drew nearest to the Eternal Strength whichwas behind their weakness, and closest to each other as student afterstudent lifted a faltering, stumbling petition for a common blessing ontheir work. The Immortal seemed to be in that bare room, filling theirhearts with holy flame, drawing around them the isolation of a devotedband. They were one in One. Then had followed the change in him whichproduced the change in them: no fellowship, no friendship, with anunbeliever; and he was left without a comrade. 

His heart was yearning and sick this day to be reconciled to them all. How did they think of him, speak of him, now? Who slept in his bed? Whosat a little while, after the studies of the night were over, talkingto his room-mate? Who knelt down across the room at his prayers whenthe lights were put out? And his professors--what bulwarks of knowledgeand rectitude and kindness they were!--all with him at first, allagainst him at last, as in duty bound. 

To one man alone among those hundreds could David look back as havingbegun to take interest in him toward the close of his college days. During that vacation which he had spent in reading and study, he hadoften refreshed himself by taking his book out to the woodland parknear the city, which in those days was the grounds of one of thecolleges of the University. There he found the green wild countryagain, a forest like his pioneer ancestor's. Regularly here he observedat out-of-door work the professor of Physical Science, who also waspressing his investigations forward during the leisure of those summermonths. An authority from the north, from a New England university, whohad resigned his chair to come to Kentucky, attracted by the fairprospects of the new institution. A great gray-bearded, eagle-faced, square-shouldered, big-footed man: reserved, absorbed, asking to be letalone, one of the silent masters. But David, desperate withintellectual loneliness himself, and knowing this man to be a studentof the new science, one day had introduced himself and made inquiryabout entering certain classes in his course the following session. 

The professor shook his head. He was going back to New England himselfthe next year; and he moved away under the big trees, resuming his work. 

As troubles had thickened about David, his case became discussed inUniversity circles; and he was stopped on the street one day by thisfrigid professor and greeted with a man's grasp and a look of freshbeautiful affection. His apostasy from dogmatism had made him a friendof that lone thinker whose worship of God was the worship of Himthrough the laws of His universe and not through the dogmas of men. 

This professor--and Gabriella: they alone, though from differentmotives, had been drawn to him by what had repelled all others. It washis new relation to her beyond anything else that filled David this daywith his deep desire for peace with his past. She had such peace inherself, such charity of feeling, such simple steadfast faith: she castthe music of these upon the chords of his own soul. To the influence ofher religion she was now adding the influence of her love; it filledhim, subdued, overwhelmed him. And this morning, also out of his ownhappiness he remembered with most poignant suffering the unhappiness ofhis father. His own life was unfolding into fulness of affection andknowledge and strength; his father's was closing amid the weakness andtroubles that had gathered about him; and he, David, had contributedhis share to these. To be reconciled to his father this day--that washis sole thought. 

It was about four o'clock. The house held that quiet which reigns of aSunday afternoon when the servants have left the kitchen for the cabin, when all work is done, and the feeling of Sunday rest takes possessionof our minds. The winter sunshine on the fields seems full of rest; thebrutes rest--even those that are not beasts of burden. The birds appearto know the day, and to make note of it in quieter twitter and slowerflight. 

David rose resolutely and started downstairs. As he entered hisfather's room, his mother was passing out She looked at her son withapprehension, as she closed the door. His father was sitting by awindow, reading, as was his Sunday wont, the Bible. He had once writtento David that his had always been a religious people; it was true. Agrave, stern man--sternest, gravest on Sunday. When it was not possibleto go to church, the greater to him the reason that the house itselfshould become churchlike in solemnity, out of respect to the day andthe duty of self-examination. A man of many failings, but on thissubject strong. 

David sat down and waited for him to reach the end of the page orchapter. But his father read on with a slow perceptible movement of hislips. 

"Father. "

The gray head was turned slowly toward him in silent resentment of theinterruption. 

"I thought it would be better to come down and talk with you. "

The eyes resought the page, the lips resumed their movements. 

"I am sorry to interrupt you. "

The eye still followed the inspired words, from left to right, left toright, left to right. 

"Father, things ought not to go on in this way between us. I have beenat home now for two months. I have waited, hoping that you would giveme the chance to talk about it all. You have declined, and meantime Ihave simply been at work, as I used to be. But this must not be put offlonger for several reasons. There are other things in my life now thatI have to think of and care for. " The tone in which David spoke theselast words was unusual and significant. 

The eyes stopped at a point on the page. The lips were pressed tightlytogether. 

David rose and walked quietly out of the room. After he had closed thedoor behind him and put his foot on the stairs, he stopped and withfresh determination reopened the door. His father had shut the Bible, laid it on the floor at the side of his chair, and was standing in themiddle of the room with his eyes on the door through which David hadpassed. He pointed to his son to be seated, and resumed his chair. Hedrew his penknife from his pocket and slowly trimmed the ravellingsfrom his shirt-cuffs, blowing them off his wrists. David saw that hishands were trembling violently. The tragedy in the poor action cut himto the heart and he threw himself remorsefully into the midst of things. 

"Father, I know I have disappointed you! Know it as well as you do; butI could not have done differently. "

"YOU not believe in Christianity! YOU not believe the Bible!"

The suppressed enraged voice summed up again the old contemptuousopinion. 

The young man felt that there was another than himself whom it wounded. 

"Sir, you must not speak to me with that feeling! Try to see that I amas sincere as you are. As to the goodness of my mind, I did not deriveit from myself and am not to blame. I have only made an earnest and anhonest use of what mind was given me. But I have not relied upon italone. There are great men, some of the greatest minds of the world, who have been my teachers and determined my belief. "

"All your life you had the word of God as your teacher and you believedit. Now these men tell you not to believe it and you believe them. Andthen you complain that I do not think more highly of you. "

"Father, " cried David, "there is one man whose name is very dear to usboth. The blood of that man is in me as it is in you. Sir, it is yourgrandfather. Do you remember what the church of his day did with him?Do you forget that, standing across the fields yonder, is the church hehimself built to freedom of opinion in religious matters? I grew up, not under the shadow of that church, for it casts none, but in thelight of it. I have seen many churches worship there. I have had beforeme, from the time I could remember, my great-grandfather's words: theyseemed to me the voice of God by whom all men were created, and thespirit of Christ by whom, as you believe, men are to be saved. "

The younger man stopped and waited in vain for the older one to reply. But his father also waited, and David went on:--

"I do not expect you to stand against the church in what it has donewith me: that HAD to be done. If you had been an elder of that church, I know you, too, would have voted to expel me. What I do ask of you isthat you think me as sincere in my belief as I think you in yours. I doask for your toleration, your charity. Everything else between us willbe easy, if you can see that I have done only what I could. The faithof the world grows, changes. Sons cannot always agree with theirfathers; otherwise the world would stand still. You do not believe manythings your own grandfather believed--the man of whose memory you areso proud. The faith you hold did not even exist among men in his day. Ican no longer agree with you: I do not think the less of you because Ibelieve differently; do not think the less of me!"

The young man could not enter into any argument with the old one. Hewould not have disturbed if he could his father's faith: it was toolate in life for that. Neither could he defend his own views withoutattacking his father's: that also would have been cruelty in itself andwould have been accepted as insulting. Still David could not leave hiscase without witnesses. 

"There are things in the old Bible that no scholar now believes. "

"The Almighty declares they are true; you say they are not: I prefer tobelieve the Almighty. Perhaps He knows better than you and thescholars. "

David fell into sorrowful silence. "There are some other matters aboutwhich I should like to speak with you, father, " he said, changing thesubject. "I recall one thing you said to me the day I came home. Youasked me why I had come back here: do you still feel that way?"

"I do. This is a Christian house. This is a Christian community. Youare out of place under this roof and in this neighborhood. Life washard enough for your mother and me before. But we did for you what wecould; you were pleased to make us this return. It will be better foryou to go. "

Every word seemed to have been hammered out of iron, once melted in theforge, but now cold and unchangeably shaped to its heavy purpose. Theyoung man writhed under the hopelessness of the situation:--

"Sir, is it all on one side? Have I done nothing for you in all theseyears? Until I was nearly a man's age, did I not work? For my years oflabor did I receive more than a bare living? Did you ever know a slaveas faithful? Were you ever a harsh master to this slave? Do you owe menothing for all those years?--I do not mean money, --I mean kindness, justice!"

"How many years before you began to work for us did your mother and Iwork for you? Did you owe us nothing for all that?"

"I did! I do! I always shall! But do you count it against me thatNature brought me forth helpless and kept me helpless for so many yearsafterwards? If my being born was a fault, whose was it? Is thedependence of an infant on its parent a debt? Father! father! Be just!be just! that you may be more kind to me. "

"Kind to YOU! Just to YOU!" Hitherto his father had spoken with aquietude which was terrible, on account of the passion raging beneath. But now he sprang to his feet, strode across, and, pulling a raggedshirt-cuff down from under his coat-sleeve, shook it in his son'seyes--poverty. He went to one of the rotting doors and jerking it openwithout turning the knob, rattled it on its loose hinges--poverty. Heturned to the window, and with one gesture depicted ruined outhousesand ruined barn, now hidden under the snow, and beautiful in the Sundayevening light--poverty. He turned and faced his son, majestic inmingled grief and care. 

"Kind! just! you who have trifled with your advantages, you who aresending your mother out of her home--"

David sprang toward him in an agony of trouble and remorse. 

"It is not true, it is not necessary! Father, you have been too muchinfluenced by my mother's fears. This is Bailey's doing. It is aboutthis I have wanted to talk to you. I shall see Bailey to-morrow. "

"I forbid you to see him or to interfere. "

"I must see him, whether you wish it or not, " and David, to save otherhard words that were coming, turned quickly and left the room. 

He did not go down to supper. Toward bedtime, as he sat before hisfire, he heard a slow, unfamiliar step mounting the stair. Not often ina year did he have the chance to recognize that step. His motherentered, holding a small iron stewpan, from under the cover of whichsteamed a sweet, spicy odor. 

"This will do your cold good, " she said, tasting the stew out of aspoon which she brought in her other hand, and setting it down on thehot hearth. Then she stood looking a little fearfully at her son, whohad not moved. Ah, that is woman's way! She incites men to adifficulty, and then appears innocently on the battle-field withbandages for the belligerents. How many of the quarrels of this worldhas she caused--and how few ever witnessed!

David was sick in heart and body and kept his chair and made no reply. His mother suddenly turned, feeling a cold draft on her back, andobserved the broken window-pane and the flapping sheet of paper. 

"There's putty and glass in the store-room: why don't you put that paneof glass in?"

"I will sometime, " said David, absently. She went over to his bed andbeat up the bolster and made everything ready for him. 

"You ought to have clean sheets and pillow-cases, " she remarkedconfidently; "the negroes are worthless. Good night, " she said, withher hand on the door, looking back at him timidly. 

He sprang up and went over to her. "Oh, mother! mother! mother!" hecried, and then he checked the useless words that came rushing in aflood. 

"Good night! and thank you for coming. Good night! Be careful, I'llbring the candle, the stairway is dark. Good night!"

"Oh, Gabriella! Gabriella!" he murmured as he went back to his table. He buried his head on his arms a moment, then, starting up, threw offhis clothes, drank the mixture, and got into bed. 

XX

At dead of night out in a lonely country, what sound freezes the bloodlike the quick cry of an animal seized and being killed? The fright, the pain, the despair: whosoever has heard these notes has listened tothe wild death-music of Nature, ages old. 

On the still frozen air near two or three o'clock of next morning, sucha cry rang out from inside the barn. There were the short rushes to andfro, round and round; then violent leapings against the door, thetroughs, and sides of the stable; then mad plunging, struggling, panting; then a long, terrified, weakened wail, which told everythingbeyond the clearness of words. 

Up in his room, perfectly dark, for the coals in the grate were nowsparkless, David was lying on his back, sleeping heavily and bathed inperspiration. Overheated, he had pushed the bed covers off from histhroat; he had hollowed the pillow away from his face. So deep was thestillness of the house and of the night air outside, that almost thefirst sounds had reached his ear and sunk down into his brain: hestirred slightly. As the tumult grew louder, he tossed his head fromside to side uneasily, and muttered a question in his broken dreams. And now the barn was in an uproar; and the dog, chained at his kennelbehind the house, was howling, roaring to get loose. Would he neverwaken? Would the tragedy which he himself had unwittingly planned andstaged be played to its end without his hearing a word? (So often it isthat way in life. ) At last, as one who has long tugged at his ownsleep, striving to rend it as a smothering blanket and burst throughinto free air, he sat up in bed, confused, listening. 

"Dogs!" he exclaimed, grinding his teeth. 

He was out of bed in an instant, groping for his clothes. It seemed hewould never find them. As he dressed, he muttered remorsefully tohimself:--"I simply put them into a trap. "

When he had drawn on socks, boots, and trousers, he slipped into hisovercoat, felt for his hat, and hurried down. He released the dog, which instantly was off in a noiseless run, and followed, buttoning thecoat about him as he went: the air was like ice against his bare, hotthroat. Another moment and he could hear the dogs fighting. When hereached the door of the shed and threw it open, the flock of sheepbounded out past him in a wild rush for the open. He stepped inside, searching around with his foot as he groped. Presently it struckagainst something large and soft close to the wall in a corner. Hereached down and taking it by the legs, pulled the sheep out into themoonlight, several yards across the snow: a red track followed, asthough made with a broad dripping brush. 

David stood looking down at it and kicked it two or three times. 

"Did it make any difference to you whether your life were taken by dogor man? The dog killing you from instinct and famine; a man killing youas a luxury and with a fine calculation? And who is to blame now foryour death, if blame there be? I who went to college instead ofbuilding a stable? Or the storm which deprived these prowlers of nearerfood and started them on a far hunt, desperate with hunger? Or man whotook you from wild Nature and made you more defenceless under hiskeeping? Or Nature herself who edged the tooth and the mind of thedog-wolf in the beginning that he might lengthen his life by shorteningyours? Where and with what purpose began on this planet the taking oflife that there might be life? Poor questions that never troubled you, poor sheep! But that follow, as his shadow, pondering Man, who no moreknows the reason of it all than you did. "

The fighting of the dogs had for the first few moments sounded fartherand farther away, retreating through the barn and thence into the lot;and by and by the shepherd ran around and stood before David, awaitingorders. David seized the sheep by the feet and dragged it into thesaddle-house; sent the dog to watch the rest of the flock; and ran backto the house, drawing his overcoat more tightly about him. As quicklyas possible he got into bed and covered up warmly. Something caused himto recollect just then the case of one of the Bible students. 

"Now I am in for it, " he said. 

And this made him think of his great masters and of Gabriella; and helay there very anxious in the night. 

XXI

Twilight had three times descended on the drear land. Three timesGabriella, standing at her windows and looking out upon the snow andice, had seen everything disappear. How softly white were thesnow-covered trees; how soft the black that thickened about them tillthey were effaced. Gabriella thought of them as still perfectly whiteout there in the darkness. Three evenings with her face against thepane she had watched for a familiar figure to stalk towering up theyard path, and no familiar figure had come. Three evenings she hadreturned to her firelight, and sat before it with an ear on guard forthe sound of a familiar step on the porch below; but no step had beenheard. 

On the first night she had all but hoped that he would not seek her;the avowal of their love for each other had well-nigh left it anunendurable joy. But the second night she had begun to expect himconfidently; and when the hour had passed and he had not come, Gabriella sat long before her fire with a new wound--she who had feltso many. By the third day she had reviewed all that she had ever heardof him or known of him: gathered it all afresh as a beautiful thing forreceiving him with when he should come to her that night. Going earlyto her room she had taken her chair to the window and with her faceclose to the pane had watched again--watched that white yard; and againnothing moved in that white yard but the darkness. 

She sprang up and began to walk to and fro. 

"If he does not come to-night, something has happened. I know, I know, I know! Something is wrong. My heart is not mistaken. Oh, if anythingwere to happen to HIM! I must not think of it! I have borne manythings; but THAT! I must not think of it!"

She sank into her chair with her ear strained toward the porch below. For a long time there was no sound. Then she heard the noise of heavyboots--a tapping of the toes against the pillars, to knock off thesnow, and then the slow creaking of soles across the frozen boards. Shestarted up. "It is some one else, " she cried, wringing her hands. "Something has happened to him. "

She stopped still in the middle of the room, her arms dropped at hersides, her eyes stretched wide. 

The house girl's steps were heard running upstairs. Gabriella jerkedthe door open in her face. 

"What is the matter?" she cried. 

A negro man had come with a message for her. The girl looked frightened. 

Gabriella ran past her down into the hall. "What is the matter?" sheasked. 

His Marse David had sent for her and wanted her to come at once. He hadbrought a horse for her. 

"Is he ill--seriously ill?" He had had a bad cold and was worse. 

"The doctor--has he sent for the doctor?"

The negro said that he was to take her back first and then go for thedoctor. 

"Go at once. "

It was very dark, he urged, and slippery. 

"Go on for the doctor! Where have you left the horse?"

The horse was at the stiles. The negro insisted that it would be betterfor him to go back with her. 

"Don't lose time, " she said, "and don't keep me waiting. Go! as quicklyas you can!"

The negro cautioned her to dismount at the frozen creek. 

When Gabriella, perhaps an hour later, knocked at the side door ofDavid's home, --his father's and mother's room, --there was no summons toenter. She turned the knob and walked in. The room was empty; the firehad burned low; a cat lay on the hearthstones. It raised its headhalfway and looked at her through the narrow slits of its yellow eyesand curled the tip of its tail--the cat which is never inconvenienced, which shares all comforts and no troubles. She sat down in a chair, overcome with excitement and hesitating what to do. In a moment shenoticed that the door opening on the foot of the staircase stood ajar. It led to his room. Not a sound reached her from above. She summonedall her self-control, mounted the stairway, and entered. 

The two negro women were standing inside with their backs to the door. On one side of the bed sat David's mother, on the other his father. Both were looking at David. He lay in the middle of the bed, his eyesfixed restlessly on the door. As soon as he saw her, he lifted himselfwith an effort and stretched out his arms and shook them at her withhoarse little cries. "Oh! oh! oh! oh!"

The next moment he locked his arms about her. 

"Oh, it has been so long!" he said, drawing her close, "so long!"

"Ah, why did you not send for me? I have waited and waited. "

He released her and fell back upon the pillows; then with a slightgesture he said to his father and mother:--

"Will you leave us alone?"

When they had gone out, he took one of her hands and pressed it againsthis cheek and lay looking at her piteously. 

Gabriella saw the change in him: his anxious expression, his cheeksflushed with a red spot, his restlessness, his hand burning. She couldfeel the big veins throbbing too fast, too crowded. But a woman smileswhile her heart breaks. 

He propped himself a little higher on the pillows and turned on hisside, clutching at his lung. 

"Don't be frightened, " he said, searching her face, "I've got somethingto tell you. Promise. "

"I promise. "

"I am going to have pneumonia, or I have it now. You are notfrightened?"

Her eyes answered for her. 

"I had a cold. I had taken something to throw me into a sweat--that wasthe night after I saw you. "

At the thought of their last interview, he took her hand again andpressed it to his lips, looking tenderly at it. 

"The dogs were killing the sheep, and I got up and went out while I wasin a perspiration. I know it's pneumonia. I have had a long, hardchill. My head feels like it would burst, and there are other symptoms. This lung! It's pneumonia. One of the Bible college students had it. Ihelped to nurse him. Oh, he got well, " he said, shaking his head at herwith a smile, "and so will I!"

"I know it, " she murmured, "I'm sure of it. "

"What I want to ask is, Will you stay with me?"

"Ah, nothing could take me from you. "

"I don't want you to leave me. I want to feel that you are right hereby me through it all. I have to tell you something else: I may bedelirious and not know what is going on. I have sent for the doctor. But there is a better one in Lexington. You try to get him to come. Iknow that he goes wherever he is called and stays till the danger ispast or--or--till it is settled. Don't spare anything that can be donefor me. I am in danger, and I must live. I must not lose all thegreatness of life and lose you. "

"Ah, " she implored, seeing how ill he was. "Everything that can be doneshall be done. Now oughtn't you to be quiet and let me make youcomfortable till the doctor comes?"

"I must say something else while I can, and am sure. I might not getover this--"

"Ah--"

"Let me say this: I MIGHT not! If I should not, have no fear about thefuture; I have none; it will all be well with ME in Eternity. "

He lay quiet a moment, his face turned off. She had buried hers on thebed. The flood of tears would come. He turned over, and seeing it laidhis hand on it very lightly. 

"If it be so, Gabriella, I hope all the rest of your life you will behappy. I hope no more trouble will ever come to you. "

Suddenly he sat up, lifted her head, and threw his arms around heragain. "Oh, Gabriella!" he cried, "you have been all there is to me. "

"Some day, " he continued a moment later, "if it turns out that way, come over here to see my father and mother. And tell them I left wordthat perhaps they had never quite understood me and so had never beenable to do me justice. Now, will you call my mother?"

"Mother, " he said, taking her by the hand and placing it inGabriella's, "this is my wife, as I hope she will be, and yourdaughter; and I have asked her to stay and help you to nurse me throughthis cold. "

Three twilights more and there was a scene in the little upper room ofthe farmhouse: David drawn up on the bed; at one side of it, the poordistracted mother, rocking herself and loudly weeping; for thoughmothers may not greatly have loved their grown sons, when the big menlie stricken and the mothers once more take their hands to wash them, bathe their faces with a cloth, put a spoon to their lips, memorybrings back the days when those huge erring bodies lay across theirbreasts. They weep for the infant, now an infant again and perhapsfalling into a long sleep. 

On the other side of the bed sat David's father, bending over toward, trying now, as he had so often tried, to reach his son; thinking atswift turns of the different will he would have to make and of whowould write it; of his own harshness; and also not free from the awfuldread that this was the summons to his son to enter Eternity with hissoul unprepared. At the foot of the bed were the two doctors, watchful, whispering to each other, one of whom led the mother out of the room;over by the door the two negro women and the negro man. Gabriella wasnot there. 

Gabriella had gone once more to where she had been many times: gone topour out in secret the prayer of her church, and of her own soul forthe sick--with faith that her prayer would be answered. 

A dark hour: a dog howling on the porch below; at the stable the criesof hungry, neglected animals; the winter hush settling over the greatevening land. 

XXII

When one sets out to walk daily across a wood or field in a freshdirection, starting always at the same point and arriving always at thesame, without intention one makes a path; it may be long first, but intime the path will come. It commences at the home gate or bars andreaches forward by degrees; it commences at the opposite goal andlengthens backward thence: some day the ends meet and we discover withsurprise how slightly we have deviated in all those crossings andrecrossings. The mind has unconsciously marked a path long before thefeet have traced it. 

When Gabriella had begun teaching, she passed daily out of the yardinto an apple orchard and thence across a large woodland pasture, inthe remote corner of which the schoolhouse was situated. Through thiswoods the children had made their path: the straight instinctive pathof childhood. But Gabriella, leaving this at the woods-gate, had begunto make one for herself. She followed her will from day to day; now ledin this direction by some better vista; now drawn aside toward a groupof finer trees; or seeing, farther on, some little nooklike place. Intime, she had out of short disjointed threads sown a continuous path;it was made up of her loves, and she loved it. Of mornings a brisk walkalong this braced her mind for the day; in the evening it quietedjangled nerves and revived a worn-out spirit: shedding her toil at theschoolhouse door as a heavy suffocating garment, she stepped gratefullyout into its largeness, its woodland odors, and twilight peace. 

On the night of the sleet tons of timber altogether had descendedacross this by-way. When the snow fell the next night, it brought downmore. But the snow melted, leaving the ice; the ice melted, leaving thedripping boughs and bark. In time these were warmed and dried by sunand wind. New edges of greenness appeared running along the path. Thetree-tops above were tossing and roaring in the wild gales of March, Under loose autumn leaves the earliest violets were dim with blue. ButGabriella had never once been there to realize how her path had beenruined, or to note the birth of spring. 

It was perhaps a month afterward that one morning at the usual schoolhour her tall lithe figure, clad in gray hood and cloak, appeared atlast walking along this path, stepping over or passing around thefallen boughs. She was pale and thin, but the sweet warm womanliness ofher, if possible, lovelier. There was a look of religious gratitude inthe eyes, but about her mouth new happiness. 

Her duties were done earlier than usual that afternoon, for not muchcould be accomplished on this first day of reassembling the children. They were gone; and she stood on the steps of the school-house, facingtoward a gray field on a distant hillside, which caught the faintsunshine. It drew her irresistibly in heart and foot, and she set outtoward it. 

The day was one of those on which the seasons meet. Strips of snowermined the field; but on the stumps, wandering and warbling beforeGabriella as she advanced, were bluebirds, those wings of the sky, those breasts of earth. She reached the spot she was seeking, andpaused. There it was--the whole pitiful scene! His hemp brake; thecharred rind of a stump where he had kindled a fire to warm his hands;the remnant of the shock fallen over and left unfinished that lastafternoon; trailing across his brake a handful of hemp partly brokenout. 

She surveyed it all with wistful tenderness. Then she looked away tothe house. She could see the window of his room at which she had sathow many days, gazing out toward this field! On his bed in that room hewas now stretched weak and white, but struggling back into health. 

She came closer and gazed down at his frozen boot prints. How near hisfeet had drawn to that long colder path which would have carried himaway from her. How nearly had his young life been left, like the handof hemp he last had handled--half broken out, not yet ready for stronguse and good service. At that moment one scene rose before her memory:a day at Bethlehem nigh Jerusalem; a young Hebrew girl issuing from herstricken house and hastening to meet Him who was the Resurrection andthe Life; then in her despair uttering her one cry:--"Lord, if Thouhadst been here, my brother had not died. "

The mist of tears blinded Gabriella, whose love and faith were asMartha's. She knelt down and laid her cheek against the coarse hempwhere it had been wrapped about his wrist. 

"Lord, " she said, "hadst Thou not been here, hadst Thou not heard myprayer for him, he would have died!"

XXIII

Spring, who breaks all promises in the beginning to keep them in theend, had ceased from chilling caprice and withdrawals: the whole landwas now the frank revelation of her loveliness. Autumn--the hours offalling and of departing; spring--season of rise and of return. Therise of sap from root to summit; the rise of plant from soil to sun;the rise of bud from bark to bloom; the rise of song from heart tohearing: vital days. And days when things that went away come back, when woods, fields, thickets, and streams are full of returns. 

Gabriella was not disappointed. Those provident old tree-mothers on theorchard slope, whose red-cheeked children are autumn apples, had notlet themselves be fatally surprised by the great February frost: theirbark-cradled bud-infants had only been wrapped away the more warmlytill danger was over. For many days now the hillside had been a groveof pink and white domes under each of which hung faint fragrance: thegreat silent marriage-bells of the trees. 

After the early family supper, Gabriella, if there had been no shower, would take her shawl to sit on and some bit of work for companionship. She would go out to the edge of this orchard away from the tumult ofthe house. The hill sloped down into a wide green valley winding awaytoward the forest below. Through this valley a stream of white springwater, drunk by the stock, ran within banks of mint and over a bed ofrocks and moss. On the hillside opposite was a field of young hempstretching westward--soon to be a low sea of rippling green. Beyondthis field was the sunset; over it flashed the evening star; and forthe past few days beside the star had hung the inconstant, theconstant, crescent of ages. 

She liked to spread her shawl on the edge of the orchard overlookingthe valley--a deep carpet of grass sprinkled with wind-blown petals; towatch the sky kindle and burn out; see the recluse Evening come forthbefore the Night and walk softly down the valley toward the woods; feelas an elixir about her the air, sweet from the trees, sweet with earthodors, sweet with all the lingering history of the day. Nearer, evernearer would swing the stars into her view. The moon, late a bow ofthinnest, mistiest silver, now of broadening, brightening gold, wouldbegin to drive the darkness downward from the white domes of the treestill it lay as a faint shadow beneath them. These were hours fraughtwith peace and rest to her tired mind and tired body. 

One day she was sitting thus, absently knitting herself some bleachinggloves, (Gabriella's hands were as if stained by all the mixed petalsof the boughs. ) The sun was going down beyond the low hills, In theorchard behind her she could hear the flutter of wings and the lastcalls of quieting birds. 

She had dropped the threads of her handiwork into her lap, and withfolded hands was knitting memories. 

At twilights such as this in years gone by, she, a little girl, hadbeen used to drive out into the country with her grandmother--oftenchoosing the routes herself and ordering the carriage to be stopped onthe road as her fancy pleased. For in those aristocratic days, Southernchildren, like those of royal families, were encouraged early in lifeto learn how to give orders and to exact obedience and to rule: whenthey grew up they would have many under them: and not to reign was tobe ruined. So that the infantile autocrat Gabriella was beinginstructed in this way and in that way by the powerful, strong-minded, efficient grandmother as a tender old lioness might train a cub for themastering of its dangerous world. She recalled these twilight driveswhen the fields along the turnpikes were turning green with the younggrain; the homeward return through the lamp-lit town to the big ironentrance-gate, the parklike lawn; the brilliant supper in the greathouse, the noiseless movements, the perfect manners of the manyservants; later in the evening the music, the dancing, the wildjoy--fairyland once more. But how far, far away now! And how the forcesof life had tossed things since then like straws on the eddies of atempest: her grandmother killed, thousands of miles away, with sorrow;her uncles with their oldest sons, mere boys, fighting and fallingtogether; tears, poverty, ruin everywhere: and she, after years ofstruggle, cast completely out of the only world she had ever known intoanother that she had never imagined. 

Gabriella felt this evening what often came to her at times: a deepyearning for her own people of the past, for their voices, their waysof looking at life; for the gentleness and courtesy, and the thousandunconscious moods and acts that rendered them distinguished anddelightful. She would have liked to slip back into the old elegance, tohave been surrounded by the old rich and beautiful things. Thechild-princess who was once her sole self was destined to live withinGabriella always. 

But she knew that the society in which she had moved was lost to herfinally. Not alone through the vicissitudes of the war; for after thewar, despite the overthrow, the almost complete disappearance, of manyfamilies, it had come together, it had reconstituted itself, itflourished still. It was lost to her because she had become pennilessand because she had gone to work. When it transpired that she haddeclined all aid, thrown off all disguises, and taken her future intoher own hands, to work and to receive wages for her work, in the socialworld where she was known and where the generations of her family hadbeen leaders, there were kind offers of aid, secret condolences, whispered regrets, visible distress: her resolve was a new thing for agirl in those years. She could, indeed, in a way, have kept her place;but she could not have endured the sympathy, the change, with which shewould have been welcomed--and discarded. She made trial of this a fewtimes and was convinced: up to the day of the cruel discovery of that, Gabriella had never dreamed what her social world could be to one whohad dropped out of it. 

Her church and the new life--these two had been left her. She no longerhad a pew, but she had her faith and this was enough; for it alwaysgave her, wherever she was, some secret place in which to kneel andfrom which to rise strengthened and comforted. As for the fearfulfields of work into which she had come, a strange and solitary learner, these had turned into the abiding, the living landscapes of life now. Here she had found independence--sweet, wholesome crust; found anotherself within herself; and here found her mission for the future--David. So that looking upon the disordered and planless years, during which ithad often seemed that she was struggling unwatched, Gabriella nowbelieved that through them she had most been guided, When many handshad let hers go, One had taken it; when old pathways were closed, a newone was opened; and she had been led along it--home. 

David's illness had deepened beyond any other experience her faith inan overruling Providence. His return to health was to her a return fromdeath: it was an answer to her prayers: it was a resurrection. Henceforth his life was a gift for the second time to himself, to her, to the world for which he must work with all his powers and workaright. And her pledge, her compact with the Divine, was to help him, to guide him back into the faith from which he had wandered. Outside ofprayer, days and nights at his bedside had made him hers: vigils, nursing, suffering, helplessness, dependence--all these had been aspurest oil to that alabaster lamp of love which burned within herchaste soul. 

The sun had gone down. The hush of twilight was descending from theclear sky, in the depths of which the brightest stars began to appearas points of silvery flame. The air had the balm of early summer, theground was dry and warm. 

Gabriella began to watch. The last time she had gone to see him, as hewalked part of the way back with her, he had said:--

"I am well now; the next time _I_ am coming to see YOU. "

Soon, along the edge of the orchard from the direction of the house, she saw him walking slowly toward her, thin, gaunt; he was leaning on arough, stout hickory, as long as himself, in the manner of an old man. 

She rose quickly and hastened to him. "Did you walk?"

"I rode. But I am walking now--barely. This young tree is escorting me. "

They went back to her shawl, which she opened and spread, making aplace for him. She moved it back a little, for safety, so that it wasunder the boughs of one of the trees. 

How quiet the land was, how beautiful the evening light, how sweet theair!

Now and then a petal from some finished blossom sifted down onGabriella. 

They were at such peace: their talk was interrupted by the longsilences which are peace. 

"Gabriella, you saved my life. "

"It is not I who have power over life and death. "

"It was your nursing. "

"It was my prayers, " murmured Gabriella. 

"And you gave me the will to get well: that also was a great help:without you I should not have had that same will to live. "

"It was a higher Will than yours or mine. "

"And the doctor from town who stayed with me. "

"And a Greater Physician who stayed also. "

He made no reply for a while, but then asked, turning his face towardher uneasily:--

"Our different ways of looking at things--will they never make anydifference with you?"

"Some day there will be no difference. "

"You will agree with me?" he exclaimed joyfully. 

"You will agree with me. "

"Do not expect that! Do not expect that I shall ever again believe inthe old things. "

"I expect you to believe in God, in the New Testament, in theResurrection, in the answer to prayer. "

"If I do not?"

"Then you will in the Life to come. "

"But will this separate us?"

"You will need me all the more. "

The light was fading: they could no longer see the green of the valley. A late bird fluttered into the boughs overhead and more petals camedown. 

"It is a nest, " said David, softly, "a good thing to go home to, anight like this. "

"And now, " he continued, "there are matters about which I must consultyou. You will be glad to know that things are pleasanter at home. Sincemy illness my father and mother have changed toward me. Sickness, nearness to death, is a great reconciler. Your being in the house hadmuch to do with this--especially your influence over my mother. Myfather was talked to by the doctor from town. During the days andnights he stayed with me, he got into my trunk of books, for he is agreat reader; and--as he told me before leaving--a believer in the NewScience, an evolutionist. He knew of my expulsion, of course, and ofthe reasons. I think he explained a great deal to my father, who saidto me one day simply that the doctor had talked to him. "

"He talked to me, also, " said Gabriella. "And did not persuade you?"

"He said I almost persuaded him!"

"And then, too, my father and I have arranged the money trouble. It isnot the best, but the best possible. When I came home from college, Ibrought with me almost half the money I had accumulated. I turned thisover to my father, of course. It will go toward making necessaryrepairs. But it was not enough, and the woods has had to go. The farmshall not be sold, but the woods is rented for a term of years as hempland, the trees must be deadened and cut down. I am sorry; it is thelast of the forest of my great-grandfather. But with the proceeds, theplace can be put into fairly good condition, and this is the greatestrelief to my father and mother--and to me. "

"It is a good arrangement. "

After a pause, he continued in a changed tone:--

"And now while everything is pleasant at home, it is the time for me togo away. My father was right: this is no place for me. I must be wherepeople think as I do--must live where I shall not be alone. There willsoon be plenty of companions everywhere. The whole world will believein Evolution before I am an old man. "

"I think you are right, " she said quietly. "It is best for you to goand to go at once. "

When he spoke again, plainly he was inspired with fresh confidence byher support of his plans. 

"And now, Gabriella, I must tell you what I have determined to do inlife: I want your approval of that, and then I am perfectly happy. "

"Ah, " she said quickly, "that is what I have been wanting to know. Itis very important. Your whole future depends on a wise choice. "

"I am going to some college--to some northern university, as soon aspossible. I shall have to work my way through, sometimes by teaching, in whatever way I can. I want to study physical science. I want toteach some branch of it. It draws me, draws all that is in me. That isto be my life-work. And now?"

He waited for her answer: it did not come at once. 

"You have chosen wisely. I am so glad!"

"Oh, Gabriella!" he cried, "if you had failed me in that, I do not knowwhat I should have done! Science! Science! There is the fresh path forthe faith of the race! For the race henceforth must get its idea ofGod, and build its religion to Him, from its knowledge of the laws ofHis universe. A million years from now! Where will our dark theologicaldogmas be in that radiant time? The Creator of all life, in all life Hemust be studied! And in the study of science there is least wrangling, least tyranny, least bigotry, no persecution. It teaches charity, itteaches a well-ordered life, it teaches the world to be more kind. Itis the great new path of knowledge into the future. All things mustfollow whither it leads. Our religion will more and more be what ourscience is, and some day they will be the same. "

She had no controversy to raise with him about this. She was toointently thinking of troublous problems nearer heart and home. 

And these rose before him also: he fell into silence. 

"But, oh, Gabriella! how long, how long the years will be that separateme from you!"

"No!" she exclaimed, her whole nature starting up, terrified. "What doyou mean? No!"

"I mean while I am going through college; while I am preparing a placefor you. "

"Preparing a place FOR ME! You have prepared a place for me and I havetaken it. My place is with you. "

"Gabriella, do you know I have not a dollar in the world?"

"_I_ have!"

"But--"

"Ah, don't! don't! That would be the first time you had ever woundedme!"

"How can I--"

"How can you go away and leave mehere--here--anywhere--alone--struggling in the world alone? And yousomewhere else alone? Lose those years of being together? Can you evenbear the thought of it? Ah, I did not think this!"

"It was only because--"

"But it shall never be! I will not be separated from you!"

David remembered a middle-aged man at the University, working his waythrough college with his wife beside him. His heart melted in joy andtenderness--before the possibility of life with her so near. He couldnot speak. 

"I will never be separated from you!"

And then, feeling her victory won, she added joyously: "And what I haveshall never be separated from me! We three--I, thou, it--go together. My two years' salary--do you think I love it so little as to leave itbehind when I go away with you?"

"Oh, Gabriella!"--

The domes of the trees were white with blossoms now and with moonlight. How warm and sweet the air! How sacred the words and the silences! Twochildren of vast and distant revolutions guided together into onelife--a young pair facing toward a future of wider, better things formankind. 

"Gabriella, when a man has heard the great things calling to him, howthey call and call, day and night, day and night!"

"When a woman hears them once, it is enough. "

Even in this hour Gabriella was receiving the wound which is so oftenthe pathos and the happiness of a woman's love. For even in thesemoments he could not forget Truth for her. And so, she said to herselfwith a hidden tear, it would be always. She would give him her all, shecould never be all to him. Her life would be enfolded completely inhis; but he would hold out his arms also toward a cold Spirit who wouldforever elude him--Wisdom. 

The golden crescent dropped behind the dark green hills of the silentland. Where were they? Gone? or still under the trees?

"Ah, Gabriella, it is love that makes a man believe in a God of Love!"

"David! David!"--

The south wind, warm with the first thrill of summer, blew from acrossthe valley, from across the mighty rushing sea of the young hemp. 

O Mystery Immortal! which is in the hemp and in our souls, in its bloomand in our passions; by which our poor brief lives are led upward outof the earth for a season, then cut down, rotted and broken--for Thylong service!