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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Reign of Law, by James Lane Allen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Reign of Law
+       A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields
+
+Author: James Lane Allen
+
+Posting Date: May 19, 2009 [EBook #3791]
+Release Date: February, 2003
+First Posted: September 12, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REIGN OF LAW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Robert Rowe and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 of
+hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral
+Britain. Away back in the days when they lived with wife, child, flock
+in frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured forth for water,
+salt, game, tillage--in the very summer of that wild daylight ride of
+Tomlinson and Bell, by comparison with which, my children, the midnight
+ride of Paul Revere, was as tame as the pitching of a rocking-horse in
+a boy's nursery--on that history-making twelfth of August, of the year
+1782, when these two backwoods riflemen, during that same Revolution
+the Kentuckians then fighting a branch of that same British army,
+rushed out of Bryan's Station for the rousing of the settlements and
+the saving of the West--hemp was growing tall and thick near the walls
+of the fort.
+
+Hemp in Kentucky in 1782--early landmark in the history of the soil, of
+the people. Cultivated first for the needs of cabin and clearing
+solely; for twine and rope, towel and table, sheet and shirt. By and by
+not for cabin and clearing only; not for tow-homespun, fur-clad
+Kentucky alone. To the north had begun the building of ships, American
+ships for American commerce, for American arms, for a nation which
+Nature had herself created and had distinguished as a sea-faring race.
+To the south had begun the raising of cotton. As the great period of
+shipbuilding went on--greatest during the twenty years or more ending
+in 1860; as the great period of cotton-raising and cotton-baling went
+on--never so great before as that in that same year--the two parts of
+the nation looked equally to the one border plateau lying between them,
+to several counties of Kentucky, for most of the nation's hemp. It was
+in those days of the North that the CONSTITUTION was rigged with
+Russian hemp on one side, with American hemp on the other, for a
+patriotic test of the superiority of home-grown, home-prepared fibre;
+and thanks to the latter, before those days ended with the outbreak of
+the Civil War, the country had become second to Great Britain alone in
+her ocean craft, and but little behind that mistress of the seas. So
+that in response to this double demand for hemp on the American ship
+and hemp on the southern plantation, at the close of that period of
+national history on land and sea, from those few counties of Kentucky,
+in the year 1859, were taken well-nigh forty thousand tons of the
+well-cleaned bast.
+
+What history it wrought in those years, directly for the republic,
+indirectly for the world! What ineffaceable marks it left on Kentucky
+itself, land, land-owners! To make way for it, a forest the like of
+which no human eye will ever see again was felled; and with the forest
+went its pastures, its waters. The roads of Kentucky, those long
+limestone turnpikes connecting the towns and villages with the
+farms--they were early made necessary by the hauling of the hemp. For
+the sake of it slaves were perpetually being trained, hired, bartered;
+lands perpetually rented and sold; fortunes made or lost. The advancing
+price of farms, the westward movement of poor families and consequent
+dispersion of the Kentuckians over cheaper territory, whither they
+carried the same passion for the cultivation of the same plant,--thus
+making Missouri the second hemp-producing state in the Union,--the
+regulation of the hours in the Kentucky cabin, in the house, at the
+rope-walk, in the factory,--what phase of life went unaffected by the
+pursuit and fascination of it. Thought, care, hope of the farmer
+oftentimes throughout the entire year! Upon it depending, it may be,
+the college of his son, the accomplishments of his daughter, the
+luxuries 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 hunting
+at home, his fishing on the great lakes, his excursions on the old
+floating palaces of the Mississippi down to New Orleans--all these
+depending in large measure upon his hemp, that thickest gold-dust of
+his golden acres.
+
+With the Civil War began the long decline, lasting still. The record
+stands that throughout the one hundred and twenty-five odd years
+elapsing from the entrance of the Anglo-Saxon farmers into the
+wilderness down to the present time, a few counties of Kentucky have
+furnished army and navy, the entire country, with all but a small part
+of the native hemp consumed. Little comparatively is cultivated in
+Kentucky now. The traveller may still see it here and there, crowning
+those ever-renewing, self-renewing inexhaustible fields. But the time
+cannot be far distant when the industry there will have become extinct.
+Its place in the nation's markets will be still further taken by
+metals, by other fibres, by finer varieties of the same fibre, by the
+same variety cultivated in soils less valuable. The history of it in
+Kentucky will be ended, and, being ended, lost.
+
+Some morning when the roar of March winds is no more heard in the
+tossing woods, but along still brown boughs a faint, veil-like
+greenness runs; when every spring, welling out of the soaked earth,
+trickles through banks of sod unbarred by ice; before a bee is abroad
+under the calling sky; before the red of apple-buds becomes a sign in
+the low orchards, or the high song of the thrush is pouring forth far
+away at wet pale-green sunsets, the sower, the earliest sower of the
+hemp, 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 valley
+threaded by streams, some table-land of mild rays, moist airs, alluvial
+or limestone soils--such is the favorite cradle of the hemp in Nature.
+Back and forth with measured tread, with measured distance, broadcast
+the sower sows, scattering with plenteous hand those small oval-shaped
+fruits, gray-green, black-striped, heavily packed with living marrow.
+
+Lightly covered over by drag or harrow, under the rolled earth now they
+lie, those mighty, those inert seeds. Down into the darkness about them
+the sun rays penetrate day by day, stroking them with the brushes of
+light, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, drops
+from the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness,
+closing up the little hollows of the ground, drawing the particles of
+maternal earth more closely. Suddenly--as an insect that has been
+feigning death cautiously unrolls itself and starts into action--in
+each seed the great miracle of life begins. Each awakens as from a
+sleep, as from pretended death. It starts, it moves, it bursts its
+ashen woody shell, it takes two opposite courses, the white,
+fibril-tapered root hurrying away from the sun; the tiny stem, bearing
+its lance-like leaves, ascending graceful, brave like a palm.
+
+Some morning, not many days later, the farmer, walking out into his
+barn lot and casting a look in the direction of his field, sees--or
+does he not see?--the surface of it less dark. What is that uncertain
+flush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of multitudinous green?
+A fortnight, and the field is brown no longer. Overflowing it, burying
+it out of sight, is the shallow tidal sea of the hemp, ever rippling.
+Green are the woods now with their varied greenness. Green are the
+pastures. Green here and there are the fields: with the bluish green of
+young oats and wheat; with the gray green of young barley and rye: with
+orderly dots of dull dark green in vast array--the hills of Indian
+maize. But as the eye sweeps the whole landscape undulating far and
+near, from the hues of tree, pasture, and corn of every kind, it turns
+to the color of the hemp. With that in view, all other shades in nature
+seem 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 darker
+as 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, living
+longer, more luxuriant of foliage and flowering heads.
+
+A hundred days from the sowing, and those flowering heads have come
+forth with their mass of leaves and bloom and earliest fruits, elastic,
+swaying six, ten, twelve feet from the ground and ripe for cutting. A
+hundred days reckoning from the last of March or the last of April, so
+that it is July, it is August. And now, borne far through the steaming
+air floats an odor, balsamic, startling: the odor of those plumes and
+stalks and blossoms from which is exuding freely the narcotic resin of
+the great nettle. The nostril expands quickly, the lungs swell out
+deeply to draw it in: fragrance once known in childhood, ever in the
+memory afterward and able to bring back to the wanderer homesick
+thoughts of midsummer days in the shadowy, many-toned woods, over into
+which is blown the smell of the hemp-fields.
+
+Who apparently could number the acres of these in the days gone by? A
+land of hemp, ready for the cutting! The oats heavy-headed, rustling,
+have turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or stored in the
+lofts of white, bursting barns. The heavy-headed, rustling wheat has
+turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or sent through the
+whirling thresher. The barley and the rye are garnered and gone, the
+landscape has many bare and open spaces. But separating these
+everywhere, rise the fields of Indian corn now in blade and tassel;
+and--more valuable than all else that has been sown and harvested or
+remains to be--everywhere the impenetrable thickets of the hemp.
+
+Impenetrable! For close together stand the stalks, making common cause
+for soil and light, each but one of many, the fibre being better when
+so grown--as is also the fibre of men. Impenetrable and therefore
+weedless; for no plant life can flourish there, nor animal nor bird.
+Scarce a beetle runs bewilderingly through those forbidding colossal
+solitudes. The field-sparrow will flutter away from pollen-bearing to
+pollen-receiving top, trying to beguile you from its nest hidden near
+the edge. The crow and the blackbird will seem to love it, having a
+keen eye for the cutworm, its only enemy. The quail does love it, not
+for itself, but for its protection, leading her brood into its
+labyrinths out of the dusty road when danger draws near. Best of all
+winged creatures it is loved by the iris-eyed, burnish-breasted,
+murmuring doves, already beginning to gather in the deadened tree-tops
+with crops eager for the seed. Well remembered also by the long-flight
+passenger pigeon, coming into the land for the mast. Best of all wild
+things whose safety lies not in the wing but in the foot, it is loved
+by the hare for its young, for refuge. Those lithe, velvety,
+summer-thin bodies! Observe carefully the tops of the still hemp: are
+they slightly shaken? Among the bases of those stalks a cotton-tail is
+threading its way inward beyond reach of its pursuer. Are they shaken
+violently, parted clean and wide to right and left? It is the path of
+the 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 cables
+when 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 men
+with hooks and whetstones. The hook, a keen, straight blade, bent at
+right angles to the handle two feet from the hand. Let these men be the
+strongest; no weakling can handle the hemp from seed to seed again. A
+heart, the doors and walls of which are in perfect order, through which
+flows freely the full stream of a healthy man's red blood; lungs deep,
+clear, easily filled, easily emptied; a body that can bend and twist
+and be straightened again in ceaseless rhythmical movement; limbs
+tireless; the very spirit of primeval man conquering primeval
+nature--all these go into the cutting of the hemp. The leader strides
+to the edge, and throwing forward his left arm, along which the muscles
+play, he grasps as much as it will embrace, bends the stalks over, and
+with his right hand draws the blade through them an inch or more from
+the ground. When he has gathered his armful, he turns and flings it
+down behind him, so that it lies spread out, covering when fallen the
+same 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 place
+behind him, until the long, wavering, whitish green swaths of the
+prostrate hemp lie shimmering across the fields. Strongest now is the
+smell of it, impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading far
+throughout the air.
+
+So it lies a week or more drying, dying, till the sap is out of the
+stalks, till leaves and blossoms and earliest ripened or un-ripened
+fruits wither and drop off, giving back to the soil the nourishment
+they have drawn from it; the whole top being thus otherwise
+wasted--that part of the hemp which every year the dreamy millions of
+the Orient still consume in quantities beyond human computation, and
+for the love of which the very history of this plant is lost in the
+antiquity of India and Persia, its home--land of narcotics and desires
+and dreams.
+
+Then the rakers with enormous wooden rakes; they draw the stalks into
+bundles, tying each with the hemp itself. Following the binders, move
+the wagon-beds or slides, gathering the bundles and carrying them to
+where, huge, flat, and round, the stacks begin to rise. At last these
+are 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, season
+of scales and balances, when the Earth, brought to judgment for its
+fruits, 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, so
+useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after dripping
+night, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of leaves. The fall of
+walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom into the deep
+grass. The fall of the hickory-nut, rattling noisily down through the
+scaly limbs and scattering its hulls among the stones of the brook
+below.
+
+The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany into the little
+dust paths made by sheep in the hot months when they had sought those
+roofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted, green
+cups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon,
+and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fall
+of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high
+places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against the
+time when they shall arise again as the living generations; the homing,
+downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over the
+quiet land.
+
+In the fields, too, the sights and sounds of falling, the fall of the
+standing fatness. The silent fall of the tobacco, to be hung head
+downward in fragrant sheds and barns. The felling whack of the
+corn-knife and the rustling of the blades, as the workman gathers
+within his arm the top-heavy stalks and presses them into the bulging
+shock. The fall of pumpkins into the slow-drawn wagons, the shaded side
+of them still white with the morning rime. In the orchards, the fall of
+apples shaken thunderously down, and the piling of these in sprawling
+heaps near the cider mills. In the vineyards the fall of sugaring
+grapes into the baskets and the bearing of them to the winepress in the
+cool sunshine, where there is the late droning of bees about the sweet
+pomace.
+
+But of all that the earth has yielded with or without the farmer's
+help, of all that he can call his own within the limits of his land,
+nothing pleases him better than those still, brown fields where the
+shapely stacks stand amid the deadened trees. Two months have passed,
+the workmen are at it again. The stacks are torn down, the bundles
+scattered, the hemp spread out as once before. There to lie till it
+shall be dew-retted or rotted; there to suffer freeze and thaw, chill
+rains, locking frosts and loosening snows--all the action of the
+elements--until the gums holding together the filaments of the fibre
+rot out and dissolve, until the bast be separated from the woody
+portion of the stalk, and the stalk itself be decayed and easily broken.
+
+Some day you walk across the spread hemp, your foot goes through at
+each step, you stoop and taking several stalks, snap them readily in
+your fingers. The ends stick out clean apart; and lo! hanging between
+them, there it is at last--a festoon of wet, coarse, dark gray riband,
+wealth of the hemp, sail of the wild Scythian centuries before Horace
+ever sang of him, sail of the Roman, dress of the Saxon and Celt, dress
+of the Kentucky pioneer.
+
+The rakers reappear at intervals of dry weather, and draw the hemp into
+armfuls and set it up in shocks of convenient size, wide flared at the
+bottom, well pressed in and bound at the top, so that the slanting
+sides may catch the drying sun and the sturdy base resist the strong
+winds. And now the fields are as the dark brown camps of armies--each
+shock a soldier's tent. Yet not dark always; at times snow-covered; and
+then the white tents gleam for miles in the winter sunshine--the
+snow-white tents of the camping hemp.
+
+Throughout the winter and on into early spring, as days may be warm or
+the hemp dry, the breaking continues. At each nightfall, cleaned and
+baled, it is hauled on wagon-beds or slides to the barns or the
+hemphouses, where it is weighed for the work and wages of the day.
+
+Last of all, the brakes having been taken from the field, some
+night--dear sport for the lads!--takes place the burning of the
+"hempherds," thus returning their elements to the soil. To kindle a
+handful of tow and fling it as a firebrand into one of those masses of
+tinder; to see the flames spread and the sparks rush like swarms of red
+bees skyward through the smoke into the awful abysses of the night; to
+run from gray heap to gray heap, igniting the long line of signal
+fires, until the whole earth seems a conflagration and the heavens are
+as rosy as at morn; to look far away and descry on the horizon an array
+of answering lights; not in one direction only, but leagues away, to
+see the fainter ever fainter glow of burning hempherds--this, too, is
+one of the experiences, one of the memories.
+
+And now along the turnpikes the great loaded creaking wagons pass
+slowly to the towns, bearing the hemp to the factories, thence to be
+scattered over land and sea. Some day, when the winds of March are
+dying down, the sower enters the field and begins where he began twelve
+months before.
+
+A round year of the earth's changes enters into the creation of the
+hemp. The planet has described its vast orbit ere it be grown and
+finished. All seasons are its servitors; all contradictions and
+extremes of nature meet in its making. The vernal patience of the
+warming soil; the long, fierce arrows of the summer heat, the long,
+silvery arrows of the summer rain; autumn's dead skies and sobbing
+winds; winter's sternest, all-tightening frosts. Of none but strong
+virtues is it the sum. Sickness or infirmity it knows not. It will have
+a mother young and vigorous, or none; an old or weak or exhausted soil
+cannot produce it. It will endure no roof of shade, basking only in the
+eye of the fatherly sun, and demanding the whole sky for the walls of
+its 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 the
+separation take place between our dross and our worth--poor perishable
+shard and immortal fibre. Oh, the mystery, the mystery of that growth
+from the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark earth, until the
+time when, led through all natural changes and cleansed of weakness, it
+is 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 years
+when a neighborhood of Kentucky pioneers, settled throughout the green
+valleys of the silvery Elkhorn, built a church in the wilderness, and
+constituted themselves a worshipping association. For some time peace
+of one sort prevailed among them, if no peace of any other sort was
+procurable around. But by and by there arose sectarian quarrels with
+other backwoods folk who also wished to worship God in Kentucky, and
+hot personal disputes among the members--as is the eternal law. So that
+the church grew as grow infusorians and certain worms,--by fissure, by
+periodical splittings and breakings to pieces, each spontaneous
+division becoming a new organism. The first church, however, for all
+that it split off and cast off, seemed to lose nothing of its vitality
+or fighting qualities spiritual and physical (the strenuous life in
+those days!); and there came a time when it took offence at one
+particular man in its membership on account of the liberality of his
+religious opinions. This settler, an old Indian fighter whose vast
+estate lay about halfway between the church and the nearest village,
+had built himself a good brick house in the Virginian style; and it was
+his pleasure and his custom to ask travelling preachers to rest under
+his roof as they rode hither and thither throughout the
+wilderness--Zion's weather-beaten, solitary scouts.
+
+While giving entertainment to man and beast, if a Sunday came round, he
+would further invite his guest, no matter what kind of faith the vessel
+held, if it only held any faith, to ride with him through the woods and
+preach to his brethren. This was the front of his offending. For since
+he seemed brother to men of every creed, they charged that he was no
+longer 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 far
+from the church doors the bright Elkhorn (now nearly dry) swept past in
+its stately shimmering flood. The rush of the water over the stopped
+mill-wheel, that earliest woodland music of civilization, sounded loud
+amid the suspense and the stillness.
+
+He rose slowly from his seat on the bench in front of the pulpit--for
+he was a deacon--and turned squarely at them; speechless just then, for
+he was choking with rage.
+
+"My brethren," he said at length slowly, for he would not speak until
+he had himself under control, "I think we all remember what it is to be
+persecuted for religion's sake. Long before we came together in
+Spottsylvania County, Virginia, and organized ourselves into a church
+and travelled as a church over the mountains into this wilderness,
+worshipping by the way, we knew what it was to be persecuted. Some of
+us were sent to jail for preaching the Gospel and kept there; we
+preached to the people through the bars of our dungeons. Mobs were
+collected outside to drown our voices; we preached the louder and some
+jeered, but some felt sorry and began to serve God. They burned matches
+and pods of red pepper to choke us; they hired strolls to beat drums
+that we might not be heard for the din. Some of us knew what it was to
+have live snakes thrown into our assemblages while at worship; or nests
+of live hornets. Or to have a crowd rush into the church with farming
+tools and whips and clubs. Or to see a gun levelled at one of us in the
+pulpit, and to be dispersed with firearms. Harder than any of these
+things to stand, we have known what it is to be slandered. But no
+single man of us, thank God, ever stopped for these things or for
+anything. Thirty years and more this lasted, until we and all such as
+we found a friend in Patrick Henry. Now, we hear that by statute all
+religious believers in Virginia have been made equal as respects the
+rights and favors of the law.
+
+"But you know it was partly to escape intolerable tyranny that we left
+our mother country and travelled a path paved with suffering and lined
+with death into this wilderness. For in this virgin land we thought we
+should be free to worship God according to our consciences."
+
+"Since we arrived you know what our life has been,--how we have fought
+and toiled and suffered all things together. You recall how lately it
+was that when we met in the woods for worship,--having no church and no
+seats,--we men listened and sang and prayed with our rifles on our
+shoulders."
+
+He paused, for the memories hurt him cruelly.
+
+"And now you notify me that you intend to expel me from this church as
+a man no longer fit to worship my Maker in your company. Do you bring
+any charge against my life, my conduct? None. Nothing but that, as a
+believer in the living God--whom honestly I try to serve according to
+my erring light--I can no longer have a seat among you--not believing
+as you believe. But this is the same tyranny that you found unendurable
+in Spottsylvania. You have begun it in Kentucky. You have been at it
+already how long? Well, my brethren, I'll soon end your tyranny over
+me. You need not TURN me out. And I need not change my religious
+opinions. I will GO out. But--"
+
+He wheeled round to the rough pulpit on which lay the copy of the Bible
+that they had brought with them from Virginia, their Ark of the
+Covenant on the way, seized it, and faced them again. He strode toward
+the 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 with
+his clenched fist, "by the Almighty, I will build a church of my own to
+Him! To Him! do you hear? not to your opinions of Him nor mine nor any
+man's! I will cut off a parcel of my farm and make a perpetual deed of
+it in the courts, to be held in trust forever. And while the earth
+stands, it shall stand, free to all Christian believers. I will build a
+school-house and a meeting-house, where any child may be free to learn
+and 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 with
+passion, "you may be saved in your crooked, narrow way, if the mercy of
+God 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 and
+held it tightly, gathered the flock of his children before him, and
+drove them out of the church. He mounted his horse, lifted his wife to
+her 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--one
+Saturday afternoon--a lad was cutting weeds in a woodland pasture; a
+big, raw-boned, demure boy of near eighteen.
+
+He had on heavy shoes, the toes green with grass stain; the leather so
+seasoned by morning dews as to be like wood for hardness. These were to
+keep his feet protected from briers or from the bees scattered upon the
+wild white clover or from the terrible hidden thorns of the
+honey-locust. No socks. A pair of scant homespun trousers, long
+outgrown. A coarse clean shirt. His big shock-head thatched with yellow
+straw, 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 a
+plague; great milkweed, its creamy sap gushing at every gash; great
+thistles, thousand-nettled; great ironweed, plumed with royal purple;
+now and then a straggling bramble prone with velvety berries--the
+outpost of a patch behind him; now and then--more carefully, lest he
+notch his blade--low sprouts of wild cane, survivals of the
+impenetrable 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 the
+call of the red-headed woodpecker sounded as faint as the memory of a
+sound and the bark of the squirrels was elfin-thin. A hot crowded land,
+crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth wherever a woodland stood; and
+around every woodland dense cornfields; or, denser still, the leagues
+of swaying hemp. The smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming to
+be dragged hither and thither like a slow scum on the breeze, like a
+moss on a sluggish pond. A deep robust land; and among its growths
+he--this lad, in his way a self-unconscious human weed, the seed of his
+kind borne in from far some generations back, but springing out of the
+soil 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 tip
+of his thumb and slid it along the blade of his hemp hook--he was using
+that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the edge of the
+brier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut, threw off his
+tattered head-gear, and, reaching for his bucket of water covered with
+poke leaves, lifted it to his lips and drank deeply, gratefully. Then
+he drew a whetstone from his pocket, spat on it, and fell to sharpening
+his blade.
+
+The heat of his work, the stifling air, the many-toned woods, the sense
+of the vast summering land--these things were not in his thoughts. Some
+days before, despatched from homestead to homestead, rumors had reached
+him away off here at work on his father's farm, of a great university
+to be opened the following autumn at Lexington. The like of it with its
+many colleges Kentucky, the South, the Mississippi valley had never
+seen. It had been the talk among the farming people in their harvest
+fields, at the cross-roads, on their porches--the one deep sensation
+among them since the war.
+
+For solemn, heart-stirring as such tidings would have been at any other
+time, more so at this. Here, on the tableland of this unique border
+state, Kentucky--between the halves of the nation lately at
+strife--scene of their advancing and retreating armies--pit of a
+frenzied commonwealth--here was to arise this calm university, pledge
+of the new times, plea for the peace and amity of learning, fresh
+chance for study of the revelation of the Lord of Hosts and God of
+battles. The animosities were over, the humanities re-begun.
+
+Can you remember your youth well enough to be able to recall the time
+when the great things happened for which you seemed to be waiting? The
+boy who is to be a soldier--one day he hears a distant bugle: at once
+HE knows. A second glimpses a bellying sail: straightway the ocean path
+beckons to him. A third discovers a college, and toward its kindly
+lamps of learning turns young eyes that have been kindled and will stay
+kindled to the end.
+
+For some years this particular lad, this obscure item in Nature's plan
+which always passes understanding, had been growing more unhappy in his
+place in creation. By temperament he was of a type the most joyous and
+self-reliant--those sure signs of health; and discontent now was due to
+the fact that he had outgrown his place. Parentage--a farm and its
+tasks--a country neighborhood and its narrowness--what more are these
+sometimes than a starting-point for a young life; as a flowerpot might
+serve to sprout an oak, and as the oak would inevitably reach the hour
+when it would either die or burst out, root and branch, into the whole
+heavens and the earth; as the shell and yolk of an egg are the
+starting-point for the wing and eye of the eagle. One thing only he had
+not outgrown, in one thing only he was not unhappy: his religious
+nature. This had always been in him as breath was in him, as blood was
+in him: it was his life. Dissatisfied now with his position in the
+world, it was this alone that kept him contented in himself. Often the
+religious are the weary; and perhaps nowhere else does a perpetual
+vision of Heaven so disclose itself to the weary as above lonely
+toiling fields. The lad had long been lifting his inner eye to this
+vision.
+
+When, therefore, the tidings of the university with its Bible College
+reached him, whose outward mould was hardship, whose inner bliss was
+piety, at once they fitted his ear as the right sound, as the gladness
+of long awaited intelligence. It was bugle to the soldier, sail to the
+sailor, lamp of learning to the innate student At once he knew that he
+was going to the university--sometime, somehow--and from that moment
+felt no more discontent, void, restlessness, nor longing.
+
+It was of this university, then, that he was happily day-dreaming as he
+whetted his hemp hook in the depths of the woods that Saturday
+afternoon. Sitting low amid heat and weeds and thorns, he was already
+as one who had climbed above the earth's eternal snow-line and sees
+only white peaks and pinnacles--the last sublimities.
+
+He felt impatient for to-morrow. One of the professors of the
+university, of the faculty of the Bible College, had been travelling
+over the state during the summer, pleading its cause before the people.
+He had come into that neighborhood to preach and to plead. The lad
+would be there to hear.
+
+The church in which the professor was to plead for learning and
+religion was the one first set up in the Kentucky wilderness as a house
+of religious liberty; and the lad was a great-grandchild of the founder
+of that church, here emerging mysteriously from the deeps of life four
+generations down the line.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The church which David's grim old Indian-fighting great-grandfather had
+dedicated to freedom of belief in the wilderness, cutting off a parcel
+of his lands as he had hotly sworn and building on it a schoolhouse
+also, stood some miles distant across the country. The vast estate of
+the pioneer had been cut to pieces for his many sons. With the next
+generation the law of partible inheritance had further subdivided each
+of these; so that in David's time a single small farm was all that had
+fallen to his father; and his father had never increased it. The church
+was situated on what had been the opposite boundary of the original
+grant. But he with most of the other boys in the neighborhood had
+received his simple education in that school; and he had always gone to
+worship under that broad-minded roof, whatsoever the doctrines and
+dogmas haply preached.
+
+These doctrines and dogmas of a truth were varied and conflicting
+enough; for the different flocks and herds of Protestant believers with
+their parti-colored guides had for over fifty years found the place a
+very convenient strip of spiritual pasture: one congregation now
+grazing 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 destroyed
+by accidental burning) was overcrowded with farming folk, husbands and
+wives, of all denominations in the neighborhood, eager to hear the new
+plea, the new pleader. David's father and mother, intense sectarians
+and 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 dumb
+with dread lest they should be sent away to this university. The
+minister soon turned the course of his sermon to the one topic that was
+uppermost and bottommost in the minds of all.
+
+He bade them understand now, if they had never realized it before, that
+from the entrance of educated men and women into the western
+wilderness, 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 the
+efforts and the failures to found such an institution, from the year
+1780 to the beginning of the Civil War; next he showed how, during
+those few awful years, the slow precious accumulations of that
+preceding time had been scattered; books lost, apparatus ruined, the
+furniture of lecture rooms destroyed, one college building burned,
+another seized and held as a hospital by the federal government; and he
+concluded with painting for them a vision of the real university which
+was now to arise at last, oldest, best passion of the people, measure
+of the height and breadth of the better times: knowing no North, no
+South, no latitude, creed, bias, or political end. In speaking of its
+magnificent new endowments, he dwelt upon the share contributed by the
+liberal-minded farmers of the state, to some of whom he was speaking:
+showing how, forgetful of the disappointments and failures of their
+fathers, they had poured out money by the thousands and tens of
+thousands, as soon as the idea was presented to them again--the rearing
+of a great institution by the people and for the people in their own
+land for the training of their sons, that they might not be sent away
+to New England or to Europe.
+
+His closing words were solemn indeed; they related to the college of
+the Bible, where his own labors were to be performed. For this, he
+declared, 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 the
+preparation of young men for the Christian ministry, that they might go
+into all the world and preach the Gospel. One truth he bade them bear
+in 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 one
+infallible guide of their faith and practice, the Bible simply; so
+making it their sole work to bring all modern believers together into
+one church, and that one church the church of the apostles.
+
+For this university, for this college of the Bible especially, he
+asked, then, the gift and consecration of their sons.
+
+Toward dusk that day David's father and mother were sitting side by
+side on the steps of their front porch. Some neighbors who had spent
+the afternoon with them were just gone. The two were talking over in
+low, confidential tones certain subjects discussed less frankly with
+their guests. These related to the sermon of the morning, to the
+university, to what boys in the neighborhood would probably be entered
+as students. Their neighbors had asked whether David would go. The
+father 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 of
+no use; he wouldn't go. It isn't in him to take an education."
+
+"No," said the mother, comforting him resignedly, after a pause in
+which 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 clenched
+fist. "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 with
+himself, perhaps shrinking, most of all, from this first exposure to
+his parents. Such an ordeal is it for us to reveal what we really are
+to those who have known us longest and have never discovered us.
+
+He walked quickly around and stood before them, pallid and shaking from
+head to foot.
+
+"Father!"--
+
+There was filial dutifulness in the voice, but what they had never
+heard from those lips--authority.
+
+"I am going to the university, to the Bible College. It will be hard
+for you to spare me, I know, and I don't expect to go at once. But I
+shall 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 an
+incredible change of expression, he naturally mistook it, and spoke
+again with more authority.
+
+"Don't say anything to me now, father! And don't oppose me when the
+time comes; it would be useless. Try to learn while I am getting ready
+to 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, forgetting
+each other, as long as it remained in sight. If the flesh of their son
+had parted and dissolved away into nothingness, disclosing a hidden
+light within him like the evening star, shining close to their faces,
+they could scarce have been struck more speechless. But after a few
+moments they had adjusted themselves to this lofty annunciation. The
+mother, unmindful of what she had just said, began to recall little
+incidents of the lad's life to show that this was what he was always
+meant to be. She loosened from her throat the breast-pin containing the
+hair of the three heads braided together, and drew her husband's
+attention to it with a smile. He, too, disregarding his disparagement
+of the few minutes previous, now began to admit with warmth how good a
+mind David had always had. He prophesied that at college he would
+outstrip the other boys from that neighborhood. This, in its way, was
+also fresh happiness to him; for, smarting under his poverty among rich
+neighbors, and fallen from the social rank to which he was actually
+entitled, he now welcomed the secondary joy which originates in the
+revenge men take upon each other through the superiority of their
+children.
+
+One thing both agreed in: that this explained their son. He had
+certainly always needed an explanation. But no wonder; he was to be a
+minister. And who had a right to understand a minister? He was entitled
+to 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 to
+him as he had never believed possible; and his mother, placing his
+coffee before him, let her hand rest on his shoulder.
+
+He, long ahungered for their affection and finding it now when least
+expected, filled to the brim, choked at every morsel, got away as soon
+as he could into the sacred joy of the night Ah, those thrilling hours
+when the young disciple, having for the first time confessed openly his
+love of the Divine, feels that the Divine returns his love and accepts
+his service!
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Autumn came, the university opened wide its harmonious doors, welcoming
+Youth and Peace.
+
+All that day a lad, alone at his field work away off on the edge of the
+bluegrass lands, toiled as one listening to a sublime sound in the
+distance--the tramping, tramping, tramping of the students as they
+assembled from the farms of the state and from other states. Some boys
+out of his own neighborhood had started that morning, old
+schoolfellows. He had gone to say good-by; had sat on the bed and
+watched them pack their fine new trunks--cramming these with fond
+maternal gifts and the thoughtless affluence of necessary and
+unnecessary things; had heard all the wonderful talk about classes and
+professors and societies; had wrung their hands at last with eyes
+turned 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 far
+away across the fields, soft-white in the clear sunshine, stood the
+home of one of them--the green shutters of a single upper room tightly
+closed. His heart-strings were twisted tight and wrung sore this day;
+and more than once he stopped short in his work (the cutting of briers
+along a fence), arrested by the temptation to throw down his hook and
+go. The sacred arguments were on his side. Without choice or search of
+his they clamored and battered at his inner ear--those commands of the
+Gospels, the long reverberations of that absolute Voice, bidding
+irresolute workaday disciples leave the plough in the furrow, leave
+whatsoever task was impending or duty uppermost to the living or the
+dead, and follow,--"Follow Me!"
+
+Arguments, verily, had he in plenty; but raiment--no; nor scrip. And
+knew he ever so little of the world, sure he felt of this: that for
+young Elijahs at the university there were no ravens; nor wild honey
+for 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 hard
+drudging, days of hard thinking. The chief problem for the nigh future
+being, how soonest to provide the raiment, fill the scrip; and so with
+time enough to find out what, on its first appearance, is so terrible a
+discovery to the young, straining against restraint: that just the lack
+of a coarse garment or two--of a little money for a little plain
+food--of a few candles and a few coverlets for light and warmth with a
+book or two thrown in--that a need so poor, paltry as this, may keep
+mind and heart back for years. Ah, happy ye! with whom this last not
+too long--or for always!
+
+Yet happy ye, whether the waiting be for short time or long time, if
+only 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 none
+other--just the struggle: the marshalling to the front of rightful
+forces--will, effort, endurance, devotion; the putting resolutely back
+of forces wrongful; the hardening of all that is soft within, the
+softening of all that is hard: until out of the hardening and the
+softening results the better tempering of the soul's metal, and higher
+development of those two qualities which are best in man and best in
+his ideal of his Maker--strength and kindness, power and mercy. With an
+added reward also, if the struggle lead you to perceive (what he did
+not perceive), as the light of your darkness, the sweet of bitter, that
+real struggling is itself real living, and that no ennobling thing of
+this earth is ever to be had by man on any other terms: so teaching
+him, none too soon, that any divine end is to be reached but through
+divine means, that a great work requires a great preparation.
+
+Of the lad's desperate experience henceforth in mere outward matters
+the recital may be suppressed: the struggle of the earth's poor has
+grown too common to make fresh reading. He toiled direfully, economized
+direfully, to get to his college, but in this showed only the heroism
+too ordinary among American boys to be marvelled at more. One fact may
+be set down, as limning some true figure of him on the landscape of
+those years in that peculiar country.
+
+The war had just closed. The farmers, recollecting the fortunes made in
+hemp before, had hurried to the fields. All the more as the long
+interruption of agriculture in the South had resulted in scarcity of
+cotton; so that the earnest cry came to Kentucky for hemp at once to
+take many of its places. But meantime the slaves had been set free:
+where before ordered, they must now be hired. A difficult agreement to
+effect 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; since
+the laborer is kept all day in the winter fields, away from the
+fireside, and must toil solitary at his brake, cut off from the talk
+and laughter which lighten work among that race. So that wages rose
+steadily, and the cost of hemp with them.
+
+The lad saw in this demand for the lowest work at the highest prices
+his golden opportunity--and seized it. When the hemp-breaking season
+opened that winter, he made his appearance on the farm of a rich farmer
+near 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 to
+eat his dinner in the fields, warming it, maybe, on the coals of a
+stump set on fire near his brake; to bale his hemp at nightfall and
+follow the slide or wagon to the barn; there to wait with the negroes
+till it was weighed on the steelyards; and at last, with muscles stiff
+and sore, throat husky with dust, to stride away rapidly over the
+bitter darkening land to other work awaiting him at home.
+
+Had there been call to do this before the war, it might not have been
+done. But now men young and old, who had never known what work was,
+were replacing their former slaves. The preexisting order had indeed
+rolled away like a scroll; and there was the strange fresh universal
+stir of humanity over the land like the stir of nature in a boundless
+wood under a new spring firmament He was one of a multitude of new
+toilers; but the first in his neighborhood, and alone in his grim
+choice 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 it
+in autumn; broke it himself the winter following; sold it the next
+spring; and so found in his pocket the sorely coveted money.
+
+This was increased that summer from the sale of cord wood, through
+driblets saved by his father and mother; and when, autumn once more
+advanced with her days of shadow and thoughtfulness--two years having
+now passed--he was in possession of his meagre fortune, wrung out of
+earth, out of sweat and strength and devotion.
+
+Only a few days remained now before his leaving for the
+university--very solemn tender days about the house with his father and
+mother.
+
+And now for the lad's own sake, as for the clearer guidance of those
+who may care to understand what so incredibly befell him afterward, an
+attempt must be made to reveal somewhat of his spiritual life during
+those 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 had
+begun to read his Bible absorbingly, sweeping through that primitive
+dawn of life among the Hebrews and that second, brilliant one of the
+Christian era. He had few other books, none important; he knew nothing
+of modern theology or modern science. Thus he was brought wholly under
+the influence of that view of Man's place in Nature which was held by
+the earliest Biblical writers, has imposed itself upon countless
+millions of minds since then, and will continue to impose itself--how
+much longer?
+
+As regarded, then, his place in Nature, this boy became a contemporary
+of the Psalmist; looked out upon the physical universe with the eye of
+Job; placed himself back beside that simple, audacious, sublime
+child--Man but awakening from his cradle of faith in the morning of
+civilization. The meaning of all which to him was this: that the most
+important among the worlds swung in space was the Earth, on account of
+a single inhabitant--Man. Its shape had been moulded, its surface
+fitted up, as the dwelling-place of Man. Land, ocean, mountain-range,
+desert, valley--these were designed alike for Man. The sun--it was for
+him; and the moon; and the stars, hung about the earth as its
+lights--guides to the mariner, reminders to the landsman of the Eye
+that never slumbered. The clouds--shade and shower--they were
+mercifully for Man. Nothing had meaning, possessed value, save as it
+derived 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 he
+drove his ox and his ass whither he would, caused them to move forward
+or 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 to
+travel. Always Man, Man, Man, nothing but Man! To himself measure of
+the universe as to himself a little boy is sole reason for the food and
+furnishings of his nursery.
+
+This conception of Man's place in Nature has perhaps furnished a very
+large part of the history of the world. Even at this close of the
+nineteenth century, it is still, in all probability, the most important
+fact in the faith and conduct of the race, running with endless
+applications throughout the spheres of practical life and vibrating
+away 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 1866
+and 1867, saving his earnings and reading his Bible as the twofold
+preparation for his entrance into the Christian ministry, this belief
+took on one of its purest shapes and wrought out in him some of its
+loftiest results.
+
+Let it be remembered that he lived in a temperate, beautiful, bountiful
+country; that his work was done mostly in the fields, with the aspects
+of land and sky ever before him; that he was much alone; that his
+thinking was nearly always of his Bible and his Bible college. Let it
+be remembered that he had an eye which was not merely an opening and
+closing but a seeing eye--full of health and of enjoyment of the
+pageantry of things; and that behind this eye, looking through it as
+through its window, stood the dim soul of the lad, itself in a temple
+of perpetual worship: these are some of the conditions which yielded
+him during these two years the intense, exalted realities of his inner
+life.
+
+When of morning he stepped out of the plain farm-house with its rotting
+doors and leaking roof and started off joyously to his day's work, at
+the sight of the great sun just rising above the low dew-wet hills, his
+soul would go soaring away to heaven's gate. Sometimes he would be
+abroad late at night, summoning the doctor for his father or returning
+from a visit to another neighborhood. In every farmhouse that he passed
+on the country road the people were asleep--over all the shadowy land
+they were asleep. And everywhere, guardian in the darkness, watched the
+moon, pouring its searching beams upon every roof, around every
+entrance, on kennel and fold, sty and barn--with light not enough to
+awaken but enough to protect: how he worshipped toward that lamp tended
+by the Sleepless! There were summer noons when he would be lying under
+a solitary tree in a field--in the edge of its shade, resting; his face
+turned toward the sky. This would be one over-bending vault of serenest
+blue, save for a distant flight of snow-white clouds, making him think
+of 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 the
+fields became dusty to his boots and his young grain began to wither,
+when at last, in response to his prayer, the clouds were brought
+directly over them and emptied down, as he stepped forth into the
+cooled, dripping, soaking green, how his heart blessed the Power that
+reigned above and did all things well!
+
+It was always praise, gratitude, thanks-giving, whatever happened. If
+he prayed for rain for his crops and none was sent, then he thought his
+prayer lacked faith or was unwise, he knew not how; if too much rain
+fell, so that his grain rotted, this again was from some fault of his
+or for his good; or perhaps it was the evil work of the prince of the
+powers of the air--by permission of the Omnipotent. In the case of one
+crop all the labor of nearly a year went for nothing: he explained this
+as a reminder that he must be chastened.
+
+Come good, come ill, then, crops or no crops, increase or decrease, it
+was all the same to him: he traced the cause of all plenty as of all
+disappointment and disaster reaching him through the laws of nature to
+some benevolent purpose of the Ruler. And ever before his eyes also he
+kept that spotless Figure which once walked among men on earth--that
+Saviour of the world whose service he was soon to enter, whose words of
+everlasting life he was to preach: his father's farm became as the
+vineyard of the parables in the Gospels, he a laborer in it.
+
+Thus this lad was nearer the first century and yet earlier ages than
+the nineteenth. He knew more of prophets and apostles than modern
+doctors of divinity. When the long-looked-for day arrived for him to
+throw his arms around his father and mother and bid them good-by, he
+should have mounted a camel, like a youth of the Holy Land of old, and
+taken 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-acre
+campus, stood reverently still before the majestical front of Morrison
+College. 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 family
+umbrella. A broken rib escaped his fingers.
+
+It was no time and place for observation or emotion. The turnstile
+behind him was kept in a whirl by students pushing through and hurrying
+toward the college a few hundred yards distant; others, who had just
+left it, came tramping toward him and passing out. In a retired part of
+the campus, he could see several pacing slowly to and fro in the grass,
+holding text-books before their faces. Some were grouped at the bases
+of the big Doric columns, at work together. From behind the college on
+the right, two or three appeared running and disappeared through a
+basement entrance. Out of the grass somewhere came the sound of a
+whistle as clear and happy as of a quail in the wheat; from another
+direction, the shouts and wrangling of a playground. Once, barely
+audible, through the air surged and died away the last bars of a
+glorious hymn, sung by a chorus of fresh male voices. The whole scene
+was one of bustle, work, sport, worship.
+
+A few moments the lad remained where he had halted, drinking through
+every thirsting pore; but most of all with his eyes satisfied by the
+sight of that venerable building which, morning and night, for over two
+years had shaped itself to his imagination--that seat of the
+university--that entrance into his future.
+
+Three students came strolling along the path toward him on their way
+down town. One was slapping his book against his thigh; one was blowing
+a ditty through his nose, like music on a comb; one, in the middle, had
+his arms thrown over the shoulders of the others, and was at intervals
+using them as crutches. As they were about to pass the lad, who had
+stepped a few feet to one side of the path, they wheeled and laughed at
+him.
+
+"Hello, preachy!" cried one. His face was round, red, and soft, like
+the full moon; the disk was now broken up by smiling creases.
+
+"Can you tell me," inquired the lad, coloring and wondering how it was
+already known that he was to be a preacher, "Can you tell me just the
+way to the Bible College?"
+
+The one of the three on the right turned to the middle man and repeated
+the 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 to
+the lad, he continued: "You see this path? Take it! Those steps? Go
+straight up those steps. Those doors? Enter! Then, if you don't see the
+Bible College, maybe you'll see the janitor--if he is there. But don't
+you 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 was
+that 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 he
+started forward.
+
+David had never heard that word; but he entertained such a respect for
+knowledge 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 do
+that sometime. But don't speak of it to your professors, or to anybody
+connected 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 trio
+had wheeled carelessly away.
+
+There passed them, coming toward David, a tall, gaunt, rough-whiskered
+man, 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 simple
+kindness which comes from being a husband and father. "You are going to
+enter 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 that
+awful word again!
+
+"I don't know HOW to matriculate. How DO you matriculate? What is
+matriculating?"
+
+"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 as
+you 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 understand
+the Bible better. And this is the place to do that." Now that he had
+explained himself, he looked relieved.
+
+"Well," said David, fervently, entering at once into a brotherhood with
+this kindly soul, "that's what I've come for, too. I want to understand
+the Bible better--and if I am ever worthy--I want to preach it. And you
+have baptized people already?"
+
+"Hundreds of them. Here we are," said his companion, as they passed
+under a low doorway, on one side of the pillared steps.
+
+"Here I am at last," repeated the lad to himself with solemn joy, "And
+now God be with me!"
+
+By the end of that week he had the run of things; had met his
+professors, 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 of
+that sowing; had been assigned to his classes; had gone down town to
+the little packed and crowded book-store and bought the needful
+student's supplies--so making the first draught on his money; been
+assigned to a poor room in the austere dormitory behind the college;
+made his first failures in recitations, standing before his professor
+with no more articulate voice and no more courage than a sheep; and had
+awakened to a new sense--the brotherhood of young souls about him, the
+men of his college.
+
+A revelation they were! Nearly all poor like himself; nearly all having
+worked their way to the university: some from farms, some by teaching
+distant country or mountain schools; some by the peddling of books--out
+of unknown byways, from the hedges and ditches of life, they had
+assembled: Calvary's regulars.
+
+One scene in his new life struck upon the lad's imagination like a
+vision out of the New Testament,--his first supper in the bare dining
+room of that dormitory: the single long, rough table; the coarse,
+frugal food; the shadows of the evening hour; at every chair a form
+reverently standing; the saying of the brief grace--ah, that first
+supper with the disciples!
+
+Among the things he had to describe in his letter to his father and
+mother, this scene came last; and his final words to them were a
+blessing 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 and
+idle mind to an idle body and toiling mind requires time to make the
+latter condition unirksome. Happily there was small need to delve at
+learning. His brain was like that of a healthy wild animal freshly
+captured from nature. And as such an animal learns to snap at flung
+bits of food, springing to meet them and sinking back on his haunches
+keen-eyed for more; so mentally he caught at the lessons prepared for
+him by his professors: every faculty asked only to be fed--and remained
+hungry after the feeding.
+
+Of afternoons, therefore, when recitations were over and his muscles
+ached for exercise, he donned his old farm hat and went, stepping in
+his high, awkward, investigating way around the town--unaware of
+himself, unaware of the light-minded who often turned to smile at that
+great gawk in grotesque garments, with his face full of beatitudes and
+his pockets full of apples. For apples were beginning to come in from
+the frosty orchards; and the fruit dealers along the streets piled them
+into pyramids of temptation. It seemed a hardship to him to have to
+spend priceless money for a thing like apples, which had always been as
+cheap and plentiful as spring water. But those evening suppers in the
+dormitory with the disciples! Even when he was filled (which was not
+often) he was never comforted; and one day happening upon one of those
+pomological pyramids, he paused, yearned, and bought the apex. It was
+harder not to buy than to buy. After that he fell into this fruitful
+vice almost diurnally; and with mortifying worldly-mindedness he would
+sometimes find his thoughts straying apple-wards while his professors
+were personally conducting him through Canaan or leading him dry-shod
+across the Red Sea. The little dealer soon learned to anticipate his
+approach; and as he drew up would have the requisite number ready and
+slide them into his pockets without a word--and without the chance of
+inspection. A man's candy famine attacked him also. He usually bought
+some intractable, resisting medium: it left him rather tired of
+pleasure.
+
+So during those crude days he went strolling solemnly about the town,
+eating, exploring, filling with sweetmeats and filled with wonder. It
+was the first city he had ever seen, the chief interior city of the
+state. From childhood he had longed to visit it. The thronged streets,
+the curious stores, the splendid residences, the flashing
+equipages--what a new world it was to him! But the first place he
+inquired his way to was the factory where he had sold his hemp. Awhile
+he watched the men at work, wondering whether they might not then be
+handling some that he had broken.
+
+At an early date also he went to look up his dear old neighborhood
+schoolfellows who two years before had left him, to enter another
+college of the University. By inquiry he found out where they lived--in
+a big, handsome boarding-house on a fashionable street. He thought he
+had never even dreamed of anything so fine as was this house--nor had
+he. As he sat in the rich parlors, waiting to learn whether his friends
+were at home, he glanced uneasily at his shoes to see whether they
+might not be soiling the carpet; and he vigorously dusted himself with
+his breath and hands--thus depositing on the furniture whatever dust
+there was to transfer.
+
+Having been invited to come up to his friends' room, he mounted and
+found one of them waiting at the head of the stairs in his shirt
+sleeves, smoking. His greeting was hearty in its way yet betokened some
+surprise, a little uneasiness, condescension. David followed his host
+into a magnificent room with enormous windows, now raised and opening
+upon a veranda. Below was a garden full of old vines black with grapes
+and pear trees bent down with pears and beds bright with cool autumn
+flowers. (The lad made a note of how much money he would save on apples
+if he could only live in reach of those pear trees.) There was a big
+rumpled bed in the room; and stretched across this bed on his stomach
+lay a student studying and waving his heels slowly in the air. A table
+stood in the middle of the room: the books and papers had been scraped
+off to the floor; four students were seated at it playing cards and
+smoking. Among them his other friend, who rose and gave him a hearty
+grip and resuming his seat asked what was trumps. A voice he had heard
+before 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 up
+dejectedly, 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 two
+strangers who guyed him better than the welcome of his old friends.
+That hurt: he had never supposed there was anything just like it in the
+nature of man. But during the years since he had seen them, old times
+were gone, old manners changed. And was it not in the hemp fields of
+the 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 is
+so theoretically honored and so practically despised as by the American
+snob of each sex?
+
+One afternoon he went over to the courthouse and got the county clerk
+to show him the entry where his great-grandfather had had the deed to
+his church recorded. There it all was!--all written down to hold good
+while the world lasted: that perpetual grant of part and parcel of his
+land, for the use of a free school and a free church. The lad went
+reverently over the plain, rough speech of the mighty old pioneer, as
+he spoke out his purpose.
+
+During those early days also he sought out the different churches,
+scrutinizing respectfully their exteriors. How many they were, and how
+grand nearly all! Beyond anything he had imagined. He reasoned that if
+the buildings were so fine, how fine must be the singing and the
+sermons! The unconscious assumption, the false logic here, was
+creditable to his heart at least--to that green trust of the young in
+things as they should be which becomes in time the best seasoned staff
+of age. He hunted out especially the Catholic Church. His
+great-grandfather had founded his as free for Catholics as Protestants,
+but he recalled the fact that no priest had ever preached there. He
+felt very curious to see a priest. A synagogue in the town he could not
+find. He was sorry. He had a great desire to lay eyes on a
+synagogue--temple of that ancient faith which had flowed on its deep
+way across the centuries without a ripple of disturbance from the
+Christ. He had made up his mind that when he began to preach he would
+often preach especially to the Jews: the time perhaps had come when the
+Father, their Father, would reveal his Son to them also. Thus he
+promptly fixed in mind the sites of all the churches, because he
+intended in time to go to them all.
+
+Meantime he attended his own, the size and elegance of which were a
+marvel; and in it especially the red velvet pulpit and the vast
+chandelier (he had never seen a chandelier before), blazing with stars
+(he had never seen illuminating gas). It was under this chandelier that
+he himself soon found a seat. All the Bible students sat there who
+could get there, that being the choir of male voices; and before a
+month passed he had been taken into this choir: for a storm-like bass
+rolled out of him as easily as thunder out of a June cloud. Thus
+uneventful flowed the tenor of his student life during those several
+initiatory weeks: then something occurred that began to make grave
+history for him.
+
+The pastor announced at service one morning that he would that day
+begin a series of sermons on errors in the faith and practice of the
+different Protestant sects; though he would also consider in time the
+cases of the Catholics and Jews: it would scarcely be necessary to
+speak of the Mohammedans and such others. He was driven to do this, he
+declared, and was anxious to do it, as part of the work of his brethren
+all over the country; which was the restoration of Apostolic
+Christianity to the world. He asked the especial attention of the Bible
+students of the University to these sermons: the first of which he then
+proceeded to preach.
+
+That night the lad was absent from his place: he was seated in the
+church which had been riddled with logic in the morning. Just why it
+would be hard to say. Perhaps his motive resembled that which prompts
+us to visit a battle-field and count the slain. Only, not a soul of
+those people seemed even to have been wounded. They sang, prayed,
+preached, demeaned themselves generally as those who believed that THEY
+were the express chosen of the Lord, and greatly enjoyed the notorious
+fact.
+
+The series of sermons went on: every night the lad was missing from his
+place--gone to see for himself and to learn more about those worldly
+churches which had departed from the faith once delivered to the
+saints, 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 first
+event that starts up a revolution. But perhaps the troubles of the lad
+began here. His absences from Sunday night service of course attracted
+notice under the chandelier. His bass was missed. Another student was
+glad to take his place. His roommate and the several other dormitory
+students who had become his acquaintances, discussed with him the
+impropriety of these absences: they agreed that he would better stick
+to his own church. He gave reasons why he should follow up the pastor's
+demonstrations with actual visits to the others: he contended that the
+pastor established the fact of the errors; but that the best way to
+understand any error was to study the erring. This was all new to him,
+however. He had not supposed that in educating himself to preach the
+simple Gospel, to the end that the world might believe in Christ, he
+must also preach against those who believed in Christ already. Besides,
+no one seemed to be convinced by the pastor but those who agreed with
+him in advance: the other churches flourished quite the same.
+
+He cited a sermon he had heard in one, which, to the satisfaction of
+all present, had riddled his own church, every word of the proof being
+based on Scripture: so there you were!
+
+A little cloud came that instant between David and the students to whom
+he expressed these views. Some rejoined hotly at once; some maintained
+the cold silence which intends to speak in its own time. The next thing
+the lad knew was that a professor requested him to remain after class
+one day; and speaking with grave kindness, advised him to go regularly
+to his own church thereafter. The lad entered ardently into the reasons
+why he had gone to the others. The professor heard him through and
+without comment repeated his grave, kind advice.
+
+Thereafter the lad was regularly in his own seat there--but with a
+certain mysterious, beautiful feeling gone. He could not have said what
+this feeling was, did not himself know. Only, a slight film seemed to
+pass before his eyes when he looked at his professor, so that he saw
+him less clearly and as more remote.
+
+One morning there was a sermon on the Catholics. David went dutifully
+to his professor. He said he had never been to a Catholic Church and
+would like to go. His professor assented cordially, evincing his
+pleasure in the lad's frankness. But the next Sunday morning he was in
+the Catholic Church again, thus for the first time missing the
+communion in his own. Of all the congregations of Christian believers
+that the lad had now visited, the Catholic impressed him as being the
+most solemn, reverent, and best mannered. In his own church the place
+did not seem to become the house of God till services began; and one
+morning in particular, two old farmers in the pew behind him talked in
+smothered tones of stock and crops, till it fairly made him homesick.
+The sermon of the priest, too, filled him with amazement. It weighed
+the claims of various Protestant sects to be reckoned as parts of the
+one true historic church of God. In passing, he barely referred to the
+most modern of these self-constituted Protestant bodies--David's own
+church--and dismissed it with one blast of scorn, which seemed to
+strike the lad's face like a hot wind: it left it burning. But to the
+Episcopal Church the priest dispensed the most vitriolic criticism. And
+that night, carried away by the old impulse, which had grown now almost
+into a habit, David went to the Episcopal Church: went to number the
+slain. The Bishop of the diocese, as it happened, was preaching that
+night--preaching on the union of Christian believers. He showed how
+ready the Episcopal Church was for such a union if the rest would only
+consent: but no other church, he averred, must expect the Episcopal
+Church ever to surrender one article of its creed, namely: that it
+alone was descended not by historical continuity simply, but by Divine
+succession from the Apostles themselves. The lad walked slowly back to
+the dormitory that night with knit brows and a heavy heart.
+
+A great change was coming over him. His old religious peace had been
+unexpectedly disturbed. He found himself in the thick of the wars of
+dogmatic theology. At that time and in that part of the United States
+these were impassioned and rancorous to a degree which even now, less
+than half a century later, can scarce be understood; so rapidly has
+developed meantime that modern spirit which is for us the tolerant
+transition to a yet broader future. Had Kentucky been peopled by her
+same people several generations earlier, the land would have run red
+with the blood of religious persecutions, as never were England and
+Scotland at their worst. So that this lad, brought in from his solemn,
+cloistered fields and introduced to wrangling, sarcastic, envious
+creeds, had already begun to feel doubtful and distressed, not knowing
+what to believe nor whom to follow. He had commenced by being so
+plastic a medium for faith, that he had tried to believe them all. Now
+he was in the intermediate state of trying to ascertain which. From
+that state there are two and two only final ones to emerge: "I shall
+among them believe this one only;" or, "I shall among them
+believe--none." The constant discussion of some dogma and disproof of
+some dogma inevitably begets in a certain order of mind the temper to
+discuss and distrust ALL dogma.
+
+Not over their theologies alone were the churches wrangling before the
+lad's distracted thoughts. If the theologies were rending religion,
+politics was rending the theologies. The war just ended had not
+brought, as the summer sermon of the Bible College professor had
+stated, breadth of mind for narrowness, calm for passion. Not while men
+are fighting their wars of conscience do they hate most, but after they
+have fought; and Southern and Union now hated to the bottom and nowhere
+else as at their prayers. David found a Presbyterian Church on one
+street called "Southern" and one a few blocks away called "Northern":
+how those brethren dwelt together. The Methodists were similarly
+divided. Of Baptists, the lad ascertained there had been so many kinds
+and parts of kinds since the settlement of Kentucky, that apparently
+any large-sized family anywhere could reasonably have constituted
+itself a church, if the parents and children had only been fortunate
+enough to agree.
+
+Where politics did not cleave, other issues did. The Episcopal Church
+was cleft into a reform movement (and one unreformable). In his own
+denomination internal discord raged over such questions as diabolic
+pleasures and Apostolic music. He saw young people haled before the
+pulpit as before a tribunal of exact statutes and expelled for moving
+their feet in certain ways. If in dancing they whirled like a top
+instead of being shot straight back and forth like a bobbin in a
+weaver's shuttle, their moral conduct was aggravated. A church organ
+was ridiculed as a sort of musical Behemoth--as a dark chamber of
+howling, roaring Belial.
+
+These controversies overflowed from the congregation to the Bible
+College. The lad in his room at the dormitory one Sunday afternoon
+heard a debate on whether a tuning fork is a violation of the word of
+God. 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 his
+knowledge of the Bible; but they added enormously to the questions that
+may be asked about the Bible--questions he had never thought of before.
+And in adding to the questions that may be asked, they multiplied those
+that cannot be answered. The lad began to ask these questions, began to
+get 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 a
+critical but always with a worshipping mind, it had been to him simply
+the summons to a great and good life, earthly and immortal. As he sat
+in the lecture rooms, studying it book by book, paragraph by paragraph,
+writing chalk notes about it on the blackboard, hearing the students
+recite it as they recited arithmetic or rhetoric, a little homesickness
+overcame him for the hours when he had read it at the end of a furrow
+in the fields, or by his candle the last thing at night before he
+kneeled to say his prayers, or of Sunday afternoons off by himself in
+the sacred leafy woods. The mysterious untouched Christ-feeling was in
+him so strong, that he shrank from these critical analyses as he would
+from dissecting the body of the crucified Redeemer.
+
+A significant occurrence took place one afternoon some seven months
+after he had entered the University.
+
+On that day, recitations over, the lad left the college alone and with
+a most thoughtful air crossed the campus and took his course into the
+city. Reaching a great central street, he turned to the left and
+proceeded until he stood opposite a large brick church. Passing along
+the 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 that
+he would like to have a little talk with him, and the pastor was there
+to have the little talk.
+
+During those seven months the lad had been attracting notice more and
+more. The Bible students had cast up his reckoning unfavorably: he was
+not of their kind--they moved through their studies as one flock of
+sheep through a valley, drinking the same water, nipping the same
+grass, and finding it what they wanted. His professors had singled him
+out as a case needing peculiar guidance. Not in his decorum as a
+student: he was the very soul of discipline. Not in slackness of study:
+his mind consumed knowledge as a flame tinder. Not in any
+irregularities 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 upturned
+to him, oftenest he felt himself looking at that big shock-head, at
+those grave brows, into those eager, troubled eyes. His persistent
+demonstrations that he and his brethren alone were right and all other
+churches Scripturally wrong--they always seemed to take the light out
+of that countenance. There was silence in the study now as the lad
+modestly seated himself in a chair which the pastor had pointed out.
+
+After fidgeting a few moments, he addressed the logician with a
+stupefying 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' Your
+great-grandfather and Voltaire must have been kin to each other."
+
+The lad had never heard of Voltaire. The information was rather
+prepossessing.
+
+"I think I should admire Voltaire," he observed reflectively.
+
+"So did the Devil," remarked the pastor. Then he added pleasantly, for
+he 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 of
+the 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 beard
+with syllogistic self-respect. "My dear young brother, did you want to
+see 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 of
+it, at least, that affects me. My great-grandfather founded a church
+free to all Christian believers. It stands in our neighborhood. I have
+always gone there. I joined the church there. All the different
+denominations in our part of the country have held services there.
+Sometimes they have all had services together. I grew up to think they
+were all equally good Christians in their different ways."
+
+"Did you?" inquired the pastor. "You and your grandfather and Voltaire
+must ALL be kin to each other."
+
+His visage was not pleasant.
+
+"My trouble since coming to College," said the lad, pressing across the
+interruption, "has been to know which IS the right church--"
+
+"Are you a member of THIS church?" inquired the pastor sharply, calling
+a 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 to
+prove this by the Scriptures and do prove it to their satisfaction.
+They declare that if I become a preacher of what my church believes, I
+shall become a false teacher of men and be responsible to God for the
+souls I may lead astray. They honestly believe this."
+
+"Don't you know that when Satan has entered into a man, he can make him
+honestly believe anything?"
+
+"And you think it is Satan that keeps the other churches from seeing
+this 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 lad
+continued.
+
+"All this is becoming a great trouble to me. It interferes with my
+studies--takes my interest out of my future. I come to you then. You
+are my pastor. Where is the truth--the reason--the proof--the
+authority? Where is the guiding LAW in all this? I must find THE LAW
+and 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 and
+who apparently had not tact enough at this moment to appreciate his own
+effrontery. In the whole sensitiveness of man there is no spot so
+touchy 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 me
+that switch."
+
+"I have,"
+
+"You can read it?"
+
+"I can."
+
+"You find in it the inspired account of the faith of the original
+church--the earliest history of Apostolic Christianity?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"Then, can you not compare the teachings of the Apostles, THEIR faith
+and THEIR practice, with the teachings of this church? ITS faith and
+ITS practice?"
+
+"I have tried to do that."
+
+"Then there is the truth. And the reason. And the proof. And the
+authority. And the LAW. We have no creed but the creed of the Apostolic
+churches; no practice but their practice; no teaching but their
+teaching in letter and in spirit."
+
+"That is what was told me before I came to college. It was told me that
+young men were to be prepared to preach the simple Gospel of Christ to
+all 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 my
+trouble now--ONE of my troubles."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"May I ask you some questions?"
+
+"You may ask me some questions if they are not silly questions. You
+don'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 have
+read."
+
+So bidden, the lad began;--
+
+"Is it Apostolic Christianity to declare that infants should not be
+baptized?"
+
+"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 is
+Christian 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 every
+seven 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 as
+an 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 how
+small or influenced by passion, an absolute court of trial and
+punishment of his members?"
+
+"It is!"
+
+"To give every such body control over the religious standing of its
+members, so it may turn them out into the world, banish them from the
+church of Christ forever, if it sees fit?"
+
+"It is!"
+
+"And those who frame any other system of church government violate
+the--"
+
+"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 we
+believe in Christ--do they violate--?"
+
+"They do!"
+
+"Is it Apostolic Christianity to turn people out of the church for
+dancing?"
+
+"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 shall
+likewise believe everything in the old Bible?"
+
+"It is."
+
+"Did Christ and the Apostles themselves teach that everything contained
+in what we call the old Bible must be believed?"
+
+"They did!"
+
+The pastor was grasping the arms of his chair, his body bent toward the
+lad, his head thrown back, his face livid with sacred rage. He was a
+good man, tried and true: God-fearing, God-serving. No fault lay in him
+unless it may be imputed for unrighteousness that he was a stanch,
+trenchant sectary in his place and generation. As he sat there in the
+basement study of his church, his pulpit of authority and his baptismal
+pool of regeneration directly over his head, all round him in the city
+the solid hundreds of his followers, he forgot himself as a man and a
+minister and remembered only that as a servant of the Most High he was
+being interrogated and dishonored. His soul shook and thundered within
+him to repel these attacks upon his Lord and Master. As those
+unexpected random questions had poured in upon him thick and fast, all
+emerging, as it seemed to him, like disembodied evil spirits from the
+black pit of Satan and the damned, it was joy to him to deal to each
+that same straight, God-directed spear-thrust of a reply--killing them
+as they rose. His soul exulted in that blessed carnage.
+
+But the questions ceased. They had hurried out as though there were a
+myriad pressing behind--a few issuing bees of an aroused swarm. But
+they ceased. The pastor leaned back in his chair and drew a quivering
+breath through his white lips.
+
+"Ask some more!"
+
+On his side, the lad had lost divine passion as the pastor had gained
+it. His interest waned while the pastor's waxed. His last questions
+were put so falteringly, almost so inaudibly, that the pastor might
+well believe his questioner beaten, brought back to modesty and
+silence. To a deeper-seeing eye, however, the truth would have been
+plain that the lad was not seeing his pastor at all, but seeing THROUGH
+him into his own future: into his life, his great chosen life-work. His
+young feet had come in their travels nigh to the limits of his Promised
+Land: he was looking over into it.
+
+"Ask some more! The last of them! Out with them ALL! Make an end of
+this now and here!"
+
+The lad reached for his hat, which he had laid on the floor, and stood
+up. He was as pale as the dead.
+
+"I shall never be able to preach Apostolic Christianity," he said, and
+turned 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 to
+believe. 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 the
+Bible. Great God, what am I coming to! what is my life coming to! ME
+doubt the Bible!". . .
+
+The interview of that day was one of the signs of two storms which were
+approaching: one appointed to reach the University, one to reach the
+lad.
+
+The storm now gathering in many quarters and destined in a few years to
+burst upon the University was like its other storms that had gone
+before: only, this last one left it a ruin which will stay a ruin.
+
+That oldest, best passion of the Kentucky people for the establishment
+in their own land of a broad institution of learning for their own
+sons, though revived in David's time on a greater scale than ever
+before, was not to be realized. The new University, bearing the name of
+the commonwealth and opening at the close of the Civil War as a sign of
+the new peace of the new nation, having begun so fairly and risen in a
+few years to fourth or fifth place in patronage among all those in the
+land, was already entering upon its decline. The reasons of this were
+the same that had successively ruined each of its predecessors: the
+same old sectarian quarrels, enmities, revenges; the same old political
+oppositions and hatreds; the same personal ambitions, jealousies,
+strifes.
+
+Away back in 1780, while every man, woman, and child in the western
+wilderness ness was in dire struggle for life itself, those far-seeing
+people had induced the General Assembly of Virginia to confiscate and
+sell in Kentucky the lands of British Tories, to found a public
+seminary for Kentucky boys--not a sectarian school. These same
+broad-minded pioneers had later persuaded her to give twenty thousand
+acres of her land to the same cause and to exempt officers and students
+of the institution from military service. Still later, intent upon this
+great work, they had induced Virginia to take from her own beloved
+William and Mary one-sixth of all surveyors' fees in the district and
+contribute them. The early Kentuckians, for their part, planned and
+sold out a lottery--to help along the incorruptible work. For such an
+institution Washington and Adams and Aaron Burr and Thomas Marshall and
+many another opened their purses. For it thousands and thousands of
+dollars were raised among friends scattered throughout the Atlantic
+states, these responding to a petition addressed to all religious
+sects, to all political parties. A library and philosophical apparatus
+were wagoned over the Alleghanies. A committee was sent to England to
+choose further equipments. When Kentucky came to have a legislature of
+its own, it decreed that each of the counties in the state should
+receive six thousand acres of land wherewith to start a seminary; and
+that all these county seminaries were to train students for this
+long-dreamed-of central institution. That they might not be sent
+away--to the North or to Europe. When, at the end of the Civil War, a
+fresh attempt (and the last) was made to found in reality and in
+perpetuity a home institution to be as good as the best in the
+republic, the people rallied as though they had never known defeat. The
+idea resounded like a great trumpet throughout the land. Individual,
+legislative, congressional aid--all were poured out lavishly for that
+one devoted cause.
+
+Sad chapter in the history of the Kentuckians! Perhaps the saddest
+among the many sad ones.
+
+For such an institution must in time have taught what all its
+court-houses and all its pulpits--laws human and divine--have not been
+able to teach: it must have taught the noble commonwealth to cease
+murdering. Standing there in the heart of the people's land, it must
+have grown to stand in the heart of their affections: and so standing,
+to stand for peace. For true learning always stands for peace. Letters
+always stand for peace. And it is the scholar of the world who has ever
+come into it as Christ came: to teach that human life is worth saving
+and must be saved.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+The storm approaching David was vaster and came faster.
+
+Several days had passed since his anxious and abruptly terminated
+interview with his pastor. During the interval he had addressed no
+further inquiries to any man touching his religious doubts. A serious
+sign: for when we cease to carry such burdens to those who wait near by
+as our recognized counsellors and appointed guides, the inference is
+that succor for our peculiar need has there been sought in vain. This
+succor, if existent at all, will be found elsewhere in one of two
+places: either farther away from home in greater minds whose teaching
+has not yet reached us; or still nearer home in what remains as the
+last court of inquiry and decision: in the mind itself. With greater
+intellects more remote the lad had not yet been put in touch; he had
+therefore grown reflective, and for nearly a week had been spending the
+best powers of his unaided thought in self-examination.
+
+He was sitting one morning at his student's table with his Bible and
+note-book opened before him, wrestling with his problems still. The
+dormitory was very quiet. A few students remained indoors at work, but
+most were absent: some gone into the country to preach trial sermons to
+trying congregations; some down in the town; some at the college,
+practising hymns, or rehearsing for society exhibitions; some scattered
+over the campus, preparing Monday lessons on a spring morning when
+animal sap stirs intelligently at its sources and sends up its mingled
+currents of new energy and new lassitude.
+
+David had thrown his window wide open, to let in the fine air; his eyes
+strayed outward. A few yards away stood a stunted transplanted
+locust--one of those uncomplaining asses of the vegetable kingdom whose
+mission in life is to carry whatever man imposes. Year after year this
+particular tree had remained patiently backed up behind the dormitory,
+for the bearing of garments to be dusted or dried. More than once
+during the winter, the lad had gazed out of his snow-crusted panes at
+this dwarfed donkey of the woods, its feet buried deep in ashes, its
+body covered with kitchen wash-rags and Bible students' frozen
+underwear. He had reasoned that such soil and such servitude had killed
+it.
+
+But as he looked out of his window now, his eyes caught sight of the
+early faltering green in which this exile of the forest was still
+struggling to clothe itself--its own life vestments. Its enforced and
+artificial function as a human clothes-horse had indeed nearly
+destroyed it; but wherever a bud survived, there its true office in
+nature was asserted, its ancient kind declared, its growth stubbornly
+resumed.
+
+The moment for the lad may have been one of those in the development of
+the young when they suddenly behold familiar objects as with eyes more
+clearly opened; when the neutral becomes the decisive; when the sermon
+is found in the stone. As he now took curious cognizance of the budding
+wood which he, seeing it only in winter, had supposed could not bud
+again, he fell to marvelling how constant each separate thing in nature
+is to its own life and how sole is its obligation to live that life
+only. All that a locust had to do in the world was to be a locust; and
+be a locust it would though it perished in the attempt. It drew back
+with no hesitation, was racked with no doubt, puzzled with no necessity
+of preference. It knew absolutely the law of its own being and knew
+absolutely nothing else; found under that law its liberty, found under
+that liberty its life.
+
+"But I," he reflected, "am that which was never sown and never grown
+before. All the ages of time, all the generations of men, have not
+fixed any type of life for me. What I am to become I must myself each
+instant choose; and having chosen, I can never know that I have chosen
+best. Often I do know that what I have selected I must discard. And yet
+no one choice can ever be replaced by its rejected fellow; the better
+chance lost once, is lost eternally. Within the limits of a locust, how
+little may the individual wander; within the limits of the wide and
+erring human, what may not a man become! What now am I becoming? What
+shall I now choose--as my second choice?"
+
+A certain homely parallel between the tree and himself began to shape
+itself before his thought: how he, too, had been dug up far away--had,
+in a sense, voluntarily dug himself up--and been transplanted in the
+college campus; how, ever since being placed there, the different
+sectarian churches of the town had, without exception, begun to pin on
+the branches of his mind the many-shaped garments of their dogmas,
+until by this time he appeared to himself as completely draped as the
+little locust after a heavy dormitory washing. There was this terrible
+difference, however: that the garments hung on the tree were anon
+removed; but these doctrines and dogmas were fastened to his mind to
+stay--as the very foliage of his thought--as the living leaves of
+Divine 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, and
+to grow only where they hung.
+
+The lad declared finally to himself this morning, that realize his
+religious life through those dogmas he never could; that it was useless
+any longer to try. Little by little they would as certainly kill him in
+growth 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 with
+his peculiar nature they could never be life-vestments; they would
+become 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 deadening
+experiences its old wildwood state! Could he do the like, could he go
+back to his? Yearning, sad, immeasurable filled him as he now recalled
+the simple faith of what had already seemed to him his childhood.
+Through the mist blinding his vision, through the doubts blinding his
+brain, 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 ever
+will, my feet never!"
+
+"But as I was true to myself then, let me be true now. If I cannot
+believe what I formerly believed, let me determine quickly what I CAN
+believe. The Truth, the Law--I must find these and quickly!"
+
+From all of which, though thus obscurely set forth, it will be divined
+that 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 road
+can be walked in by us no longer; when we must elect the half we shall
+henceforth follow, and having taken it, ever afterward perhaps look
+yearningly back upon the other as a lost trail of the mind.
+
+The parting of the ways where he had thus faltered, summing up his
+bewilderment, and crying aloud for fresh directions, was one
+immemorially old in the history of man: the splitting of Life's single
+road into the by-paths of Doubt and Faith. Until within less than a
+year, his entire youth had been passed in the possession of what he
+esteemed true religion. Brought from the country into the town, where
+each of the many churches was proclaiming itself the sole incarnation
+of this and all others the embodiment of something false, he had, after
+months of distracted wandering among their contradictory clamors,
+passed as so many have passed before him into that state of mind which
+rejects them all and asks whether such a thing as true religion
+anywhere exists.
+
+The parting of Life's road at Doubt and Faith! How many pilgrim feet
+throughout the ages, toiling devoutly thus far, have shrunk back before
+that unexpected and appalling sign! Disciples of the living Lord,
+saints, philosophers, scholars, priests, knights, statesmen--what a
+throng! What thoughts there born, prayers there ended, vows there
+broken, light there breaking, hearts there torn in twain! Mighty
+mountain rock! rising full in the road of journeying humanity. Around
+its base the tides of the generations dividing as part the long racing
+billows 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 had
+escaped him before. Beyond the tree, at the foot of the ash-heap, a
+single dandelion had opened. It burned like a steadfast yellow lamp,
+low in the edge of the young grass. These two simple things--the locust
+leaves, touched by the sun, shaken by the south wind; the dandelion
+shining in the grass--awoke in him the whole vision of the spring now
+rising anew out of the Earth, all over the land: great Nature! And the
+vision of this caused him to think of something else.
+
+On the Sunday following his talk with the lad, the pastor had preached
+the most arousing sermon that the lad had heard: it had grown out of
+that interview: it was on modern infidelity--the new infidelity as
+contrasted 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. Here
+recommenced the old story: the lad was at once seized with a desire to
+read those books, thus exhibiting again the identical trait that had
+already caused him so much trouble. But this trait was perhaps
+himself--his core; the demand of his nature to hear both sides, to
+judge evidence, test things by his own reason, get at the deepest root
+of a matter: to see Truth, and to see Truth whole.
+
+Curiously enough, these books, and some others, had been much heard of
+by the lad since coming to college: once; then several times; then
+apparently everywhere and all the time. For, intellectually, they had
+become atmospheric: they had to be breathed, as a newly introduced
+vital element of the air, whether liked or not liked by the breathers.
+They were the early works of the great Darwin, together with some of
+that related illustrious group of scientific investigators and
+thinkers, who, emerging like promontories, islands, entire new
+countries, above the level of the world's knowledge, sent their waves
+of influence rushing away to every shore. It was in those years that
+they were flowing over the United States, over Kentucky. And as some
+volcanic upheaval under mid-ocean will in time rock the tiny boat of a
+sailor boy in some little sheltered bay on the other side of the
+planet, so the sublime disturbance in the thought of the civilized
+world in the second half of the nineteenth century had reached David.
+
+Sitting at his window, looking out blindly for help and helpers amid
+his doubts, seeing the young green of the locust, the yellow of the
+dandelion, he recalled the names of those anathematized books, which
+were described as dealing so strangely with nature and with man's place
+in it. The idea dominated him at last to go immediately and get those
+books.
+
+A little later he might have been seen quitting the dormitory and
+taking his way with a dubious step across the campus into the town.
+
+Saturday forenoons of spring were busy times for the town in those
+days. Farmers were in, streets were crowded with their horses and
+buggies and rockaways, with live stock, with wagons hauling cord-wood,
+oats, hay, and hemp. Once, at a crossing, David waited while a wagon
+loaded with soft, creamy, gray hemp creaked past toward a factory. He
+sniffed with relish the tar of the mud-packed wheels; he put out a hand
+and stroked the heads drawn close in familiar bales.
+
+Crowded, too, of Saturdays was the book-shop to which the students
+usually resorted for their supplies. Besides town customers and country
+customers, the pastor of the church often dropped in and sat near the
+stove, discoursing, perhaps, to some of his elders, or to reverent
+Bible 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, which
+extended back toward the stove, the pastor rose and held out his hand
+with hearty warmth--and a glance of secret solicitude. The lad looked
+sheepish with embarrassment; not until accosted had he himself realized
+what a stray he had become from his pastor's flock and fold. And he
+felt that he ought instantly to tell the pastor this was the case. But
+the pastor had reseated himself and regripped his masterful monologue.
+The lad was more than embarrassed; he felt conscious of a new
+remorseful tenderness for this grim, righteous man, now that he had
+emancipated mind and conscience from his teaching: so true it often is
+that affection is possible only where obedience is not demanded. He
+turned off sorrowfully to the counter, and a few moments later, getting
+the attention of the clerk, asked in a low conscience-stricken tone for
+"The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man"; conscience-stricken
+at 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 had
+joined 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 to
+the dormitory. Having reached there, he altered his purpose and instead
+of mounting to his room, went away off to a quiet spot on the campus
+and, lying down in the grass under the wide open sky, opened his wide
+Darwin.
+
+It was the first time in his life that he had ever encountered outside
+of the Bible a mind of the highest order, or listened to it, as it
+delivered over to mankind the astounding treasures of its knowledge and
+wisdom 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 he
+might have been seen at the store, examining books, drawing money
+reluctantly from his pocket, hurrying away with another volume.
+Sometimes he would deliver to the clerk the title of a work written on
+a slip of paper: an unheard-of book; to be ordered--perhaps from the
+Old World. For one great book inevitably leads to another. They have
+their parentage, kinship, generations. They are watch-towers in sight
+of each other on the same human highway. They are strands in a single
+cable belting the globe. Link by link David's investigating hands were
+slipping eagerly along a mighty chain of truths, forged separately by
+the giants of his time and now welded together in the glowing thought
+of the world.
+
+Not all of these were scientific works. Some were works which followed
+in the wake of the new science, with rapid applications of its methods
+and results to other subjects, scarce conterminous or not even germane.
+For in the light of the great central idea of Evolution, all
+departments of human knowledge had to be reviewed, reconsidered,
+reconceived, rearranged, rewritten. Every foremost scholar of the
+world, kindling his own personal lamp at that central sunlike radiance,
+retired straightway into his laboratory of whatsoever kind and found it
+truly illuminated for the first time. His lamp seemed to be of two
+flames enwrapped as one; a baleful and a benign. Whenever it shone upon
+anything that was true, it made this stand out the more clear,
+valuable, resplendent. But wherever it uncovered the false, it darted
+thereat a swift tongue of flame, consuming without mercy the ancient
+rubbish of the mind. Vast purification of the world by the fire of
+truth! There have been such purifications before; but never perhaps in
+the history of the race was so much burned out of the intellectual path
+of man as during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
+
+There is a sort of land which receives in autumn, year by year, the
+deposit of its own dead leaves and weeds and grasses without either the
+winds and waters to clear these away or the soil to reabsorb and
+reconvert them into the materials of reproduction. Thus year by year
+the land tends farther toward sterility by the very accumulation of
+what was once its life. But send a forest fire across those smothering
+strata of vegetable decay; give once more a chance for every root below
+to 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 the
+rose. It is so with the human mind. It is ever putting forth a thousand
+things which are the expression of its life for a brief season. These
+myriads of things mature, ripen, bear their fruit, fall back dead upon
+the soil of the mind itself. That mind may be the mind of an
+individual; it may be the mind of a century, a race, a civilization. To
+the individual, then, to a race, a civilization, a century, arrives the
+hour when it must either consume its own dead or surrender its own
+life. These hours are the moral, the intellectual revolutions of
+history.
+
+The new science must not only clear the stagnant ground for the growth
+of new ideas, it must go deeper. Not enough that rubbish should be
+burned: old structures of knowledge and faith, dangerous, tottering,
+unfit to be inhabited longer, must be shaken to their foundations. It
+brought on therefore a period of intellectual upheaval and of drift,
+such as was once passed through by the planet itself. What had long
+stood locked and immovable began to move; what had been high sank out
+of sight; what had been low was lifted. The mental hearing, listening
+as an ear placed amid still mountains, could gather into itself from
+afar the slip and fall of avalanches. Whole systems of belief which had
+chilled the soul for centuries, dropped off like icebergs into the
+warming sea and drifted away, melting into nothingness.
+
+The minds of many men, witnessing this double ruin by flame and
+earthquake, are at such times filled with consternation: to them it
+seems that nothing will survive, that beyond these cataclysms there
+will never again be stability and peace--a new and better age, safer
+footing, wider horizons, clearer skies.
+
+It was so now. The literature of the New Science was followed by a
+literature of new Doubt and Despair. But both of these were followed by
+yet another literature which rejected alike the New Science and the New
+Doubt, and stood by all that was included under the old beliefs. The
+voices of these three literatures filled the world: they were the
+characteristic notes of that half-century, heard sounding together: the
+Old Faith, the New Science, the New Doubt. And they met at a single
+point; they met at man's place in Nature, at the idea of God, and in
+that system of thought and creed which is Christianity.
+
+It was at this sublime meeting-place of the Great Three that this
+untrained and simple lad soon arrived--searching for the truth. Here he
+began 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 in
+the new doubt. For this he was ready; toward this he had been driven.
+
+Its earliest effects were soon exhibited in him as a student. He
+performed 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 the
+discussions rife in his own church. There were changes more
+significant: he ceased to attend the Bible students' prayer-meeting at
+the college or the prayer-meeting of the congregation in the town; he
+would not say grace at those evening suppers of the Disciples; he
+declined the Lord's Supper; his voice was not heard in the choir. He
+was, singularly enough, in regular attendance at morning and night
+services of the church; but he entered timidly, apologetically, sat as
+near as possible to the door, and slipped out a little before the
+people were dismissed: his eyes had been fixed respectfully on his
+pastor throughout the sermon, but his thoughts were in other temples.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+The session reached its close. The students were scattered far among
+the 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 the
+silence of the better Teacher.
+
+Over at the dormitory the annual breaking-up of the little band of
+Bible students had, as always, been affecting. Calm, cool, bright day
+of June! when the entire poor tenement house was fragrant with flowers
+brought from commencement; when a south wind sent ripples over the
+campus grass; and outside the campus, across the street, the yards were
+glowing with roses. Oh, the roses of those young days, how sweet, how
+sweet they were! How much sweeter now after the long, cruel, evil
+suffering years which have passed and gone since they faded!
+
+The students were dispersed, and David sat at his table by his open
+window, writing to his father and mother.
+
+After telling them he had stood well in his classes, and giving some
+descriptions of the closing days and ceremonies of the college, for he
+knew how interested they would be in reading about these things, he
+announced that he was not coming home. He enclosed a part of the funds
+still on hand, and requested his father to hire a man in his place to
+work on the farm during the summer. He said nothing of his doubts and
+troubles, but gave as the reason of his remaining away what indeed the
+reason was: that he wished to study during the vacation; it was the
+best chance he had ever had, perhaps would ever have; and it was of the
+utmost importance to him to settle a great many questions before the
+next session of the Bible College opened. His expenses would be small.
+He had made arrangements with the wife of the janitor to take charge of
+his room and his washing and to give him his meals: his room itself
+would not cost him anything, and he did not need any more clothes.
+
+It was hard to stay away from them. Not until separated, had he
+realized how dear they were to him. He could not bear even to write
+about all that. And he was homesick for the sight of the farm,--the
+horses and cows and sheep,--for the sight of Captain. But he must
+remain where he was; what he had to do must be done quickly--a great
+duty was involved. And they must write to him oftener because he would
+need their letters, their love, more than ever now. And so God keep
+them in health and bless them. And he was their grateful son, who too
+often had been a care to them, who could never forget the sacrifices
+they had made to send him to college, and whose only wish was that he
+might 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 did
+not need it, and that he had a man employed, his former slave. Sorry as
+they were not to see him that summer, still they were glad of his
+desire to study through vacation. His own life had not been very
+successful; he had tried hard, but had failed. For a longtime now he
+had been accepting the failure as best he could. But compensation for
+all this were the new interests, hopes, ambitions, which centred in the
+life of his son. To see him a minister, a religious leader among
+men--that would be happiness enough for him. His family had always been
+a religious people. One thing he was already looking forward to: he
+wanted his son to preach his first sermon in the neighborhood church
+founded by the lad's great-grandfather--that would be the proudest hour
+of his life and in the lad's mother's. There were times in the past
+when perhaps he had been hard on him, not understanding him; this only
+made 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 be
+troubled about the future; they knew that he would never disappoint
+them.
+
+David sat long immovable before that letter.
+
+One other Bible student remained. On the campus, not far from the
+dormitory, stood a building of a single story, of several rooms. In one
+of these rooms there lived, with his family, that tall, gaunt, shaggy,
+middle-aged man, in his shiny black coat and paper collars, without any
+cravats, who had been the lad's gentle monitor on the morning of his
+entering college. He, too, was to spend the summer there, having no
+means of getting away with his wife and children. Though he sometimes
+went off himself, to hold meetings where he could and for what might be
+paid him; now preaching and baptizing in the mountains; now back again,
+laboring in his shirt-sleeves at the Pentateuch and the elementary
+structure of the English language. Such troubles as David's were not
+for him; nor science nor doubt. His own age contained him as a green
+field might hold a rock. Not that this kind, faithful, helpful soul was
+a lifeless stone; but that he was as unresponsive to the movements of
+his time as a boulder is to the energies of a field. Alive in his own
+sublime way he was, and inextricably rooted in one ever-living book
+alone--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 faith
+of his earliest youth, the faith of his father and mother. Sometimes
+when the day's work was done and the sober, still twilights came on,
+this reverent soul, sitting with his family gathered about him near the
+threshold of his single homeless room,--his oldest boy standing beside
+his chair, his wife holding in her lap the sleeping babe she had just
+nursed,--would begin to sing. The son's voice joined the father's; the
+wife'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 be
+trimming his lamp for a little more reading. More than once he waited,
+listening in the darkness, to the reliant music of the stalwart, stern
+old poem. How devotedly he too had been used to sing it!
+
+That summer through, then, he kept on at the work of trying to settle
+things 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. He
+was one of a multitude which no man could know or number; for many read
+in secret. Ministers of the Gospel read in secret in their libraries,
+and locked the books away when their church officers called
+unexpectedly. On Sunday, mounting their pulpits, they preached
+impassioned sermons concerning faith--addressed to the doubts, ravaging
+their 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 and
+children. In the church, from highest ecclesiastic and layman, wherever
+in the professions a religious, scientific, scholarly mind, there was
+felt the central intellectual commotion of those years--the Battle of
+the Great Three.
+
+And now summer was gone, the students flocking in, the session
+beginning. David reentered his classes. Inwardly he drew back from this
+step; yet take any other, throw up the whole matter,--that he could not
+do. With all his lifelong religious sense he held on to the former
+realities, even while his grasp was loosening.
+
+But this could not endure. University life as a Bible student and
+candidate for the ministry, every day and many times every day,
+required of him duties which he could not longer conscientiously
+discharge; they forced from him expressions regarding his faith which
+made it only too plain both to himself and to others how much out of
+place he now was.
+
+So the crisis came, as come it must.
+
+Autumn had given place to winter, to the first snows, thawing during
+the day, freezing at night. The roofs of the town were partly brown,
+partly white; icicles hung lengthening from the eaves. It was the date
+on which the university closed for the Christmas holidays--Friday
+afternoon preceding. All day through the college corridors, or along
+the snow-paths leading to the town, there had been the glad noises of
+that wild riotous time: whistle and song and shout and hurrying feet,
+gripping hands, good wishes, and good-bys. One by one the sounds had
+grown fewer, fainter, and had ceased; the college was left in emptiness
+and silence, except in a single lecture room in one corner of the
+building, from the windows of which you looked out across the town and
+toward the west; there the scene took place.
+
+It was at the door of this room that the lad, having paused a moment
+outside to draw a deep, quivering breath, knocked, and being told to
+come in, entered, closed the door behind him, and sat down white and
+trembling in the nearest chair. About the middle of the room were
+seated the professors of the Bible College and his pastor. They rose,
+and calling him forward shook hands with him kindly, sorrowfully, and
+pointed to a seat before them, resuming their own.
+
+Before them, then, sat the lad, facing the wintry light; and there was
+a long silence. Every one knew beforehand what the result would be. It
+was the best part of a year since that first interview in the pastor's
+study; there had been other interviews--with the pastor, with the
+professors. They had done what they could to check him, to bring him
+back. They had long been counsellors; now in duty they were
+authorities, sitting to hear him finally to the end, that they might
+pronounce sentence: that would be the severance of his connection with
+the university and his expulsion from the church.
+
+Old, old scene in the history of Man--the trial of his Doubt by his
+Faith: strange day of judgment, when one half of the human spirit
+arraigns and condemns the other half. Only five persons sat in that
+room--four men and a boy. The room was of four bare walls and a
+blackboard, with perhaps a map or two of Palestine, Egypt, and the
+Roman Empire in the time of Paul. The era was the winter of the year
+1868, the place was an old town of the Anglo-Saxon backwoodsmen, on the
+blue-grass highlands of Kentucky. But in how many other places has that
+scene been enacted, before what other audiences of the accusing and the
+accused, under what laws of trial, with what degrees and rigors of
+judgment! Behind David, sitting solitary there in the flesh, the
+imagination beheld a throng so countless as to have been summoned and
+controlled by the deep arraigning eye of Dante alone. Unawares, he
+stood at the head of an invisible host, which stretched backward
+through time till it could be traced no farther. Witnesses all to that
+sublime, indispensable part of man which is his Doubt--Doubt respecting
+his origin, his meaning, his Maker, and his destiny. That perpetual
+half-night of his planet-mind--that shadowed side of his
+orbit-life--forever attracted and held in place by the force of Deity,
+but destined never to receive its light. Yet from that chill, bleak
+side what things have not reached round and caught the sun! And as of
+the earth's plants, some grow best and are sweetest in darkness, what
+strange blossoms of faith open and are fragrant in that eternal umbra!
+Sacred, sacred Doubt of Man. His agony, his searching! which has led
+him always onward from more ignorance to less ignorance, from less
+truth to more truth; which is the inspiration of his mind, the sorrow
+of his heart; which has spoken everywhere in his science, philosophy,
+literature, art--in his religion itself; which keeps him humble not
+vain, changing not immutable, charitable not bigoted; which attempts to
+solve the universe and knows that it does not solve it, but ever seeks
+to 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 the
+moments that sum up civilization.
+
+Across the room, behind them also, what a throng! Over on that side was
+Faith, that radiant part of the soul which directly basks in the light
+of God, the sun. There, visible to the eye of imagination, were those
+of all times, places, and races, who have sat in judgment on doubters,
+actual or suspected. In whatsoever else differing, united in this: that
+they have always held themselves to be divinely appointed agents of the
+Judge of all the earth: His creatures chosen to punish His creatures.
+And so behind those professors, away back in history, were ranged
+Catholic popes and Protestant archbishops, and kings and queens,
+Protestant and Catholic, and great mediaeval jurists, and mailed
+knights and palm-bearing soldiers of the cross, and holy inquisitors
+drowning poor old bewildered women, tearing living flesh from flesh as
+paper, crushing bones like glass, burning the shrieking human body to
+cinders: this in the name of a Christ whose Gospel was mercy, and by
+the authority of a God whose law was love. They were all there, tier
+after tier, row above row, a vast shadowy colosseum of intent judicial
+faces--Defenders of the Faith.
+
+But no inquisitor was in this room now, nor punitive intention, nor
+unkind thought. Slowly throughout the emerging life of man this
+identical trial has gained steadily in charity and mildness. Looking
+backward over his long pathway through bordering mysteries, man himself
+has been brought to see, time and again, that what was his doubt was
+his ignorance; what was his faith was his error; that things rejected
+have become believed, and that things believed have become rejected;
+that both his doubt and his faith are the temporary condition of his
+knowledge, which is ever growing; and that rend him faith and doubt
+ever will, but destroy him, never.
+
+No Smithfield fire, then, no Jesuitical rack, no cup of hemlock, no
+thumb-screw, no torture of any kind for David. Still, here was a duty
+to be done, an awful responsibility to be discharged in sorrow and with
+prayer; and grave good men they were. Blameless was this lad in all
+their eyes save in his doubt. But to doubt--was not that the greatest
+of sins?
+
+The lad soon grew composed. These judges were still his friends, not
+his masters. His masters were the writers of the books in which he
+believed, 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 short
+winter afternoon. In all that he said the lad showed that he was full
+of many confusing voices: the voices of the new science, the voices of
+the new doubt. One voice only had fallen silent in him: the voice of
+the old faith.
+
+It had grown late. Twilight was descending on the white campus, on the
+snow-capped town. Away in the west, beyond the clustered house-tops,
+there had formed itself the solemn picture of a red winter sunset. The
+light entered the windows and fell on the lad's face. One last question
+had just been asked him by the most venerable and beloved of his
+professors--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 when
+we enter sleep, and sits close outside our eyelids as we waken; which
+was framed in us ere we were born, which comes fullest to life in us as
+life itself ebbs fastest. That question which exacts of the finite to
+affirm whether it apprehends the Infinite, that prodding of the evening
+midge 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 some
+impulse--perhaps the respectful habit of rising when addressed in class
+by this professor. At first he made no reply, but remained looking over
+the still heads of his elders into that low red sunset sky. How often
+had he beheld it, when feeding the stock at frozen twilights. One
+vision rose before him now of his boyhood life at home--his hopes of
+the ministry--the hemp fields where he had toiled--his father and
+mother waiting before the embers this moment, mindful of him. He
+recalled how often, in the last year, he had sat upon his bedside at
+midnight 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 able
+to do with that eternal mystery.
+
+He thrust his big coarse hand into his breast-pocket and drew out a
+little red morocco Testament which had been given him when he was
+received into the congregation. He opened it at a place where it seemed
+used to lie apart. He held it before his face, but could not read. At
+last, controlling himself, he said to them with dignity, and with the
+common honesty which was the life of him:--
+
+"I read you a line which is the best answer I can give just now to your
+last 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 and
+believe that Christ and God are one. I may not understand them, but I
+have thought of them a great deal:--"
+
+"'And if any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not: for I
+came not to judge the world but to save the world.'"
+
+"'He that rejecteth me and receiveth not my words, hath one that
+judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in
+the last day.'"
+
+He shut his Testament and put it back into his pocket and looked at his
+judges.
+
+"I understand this declaration of Christ to mean," he said, "that
+whether I believe in Him or do not believe in Him, I am not to be
+judged 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, leaving
+town for his distant part of the country, had rolled, creaking and
+rattling, to the dormitory entrance, the same stage that had conveyed
+him thither. Throwing up his window he had looked out at the curling
+white breath of the horses and at the driver, who, buried in coats and
+rugs, and holding the lash of his whip in his mittened fist, peered up
+and called out with no uncertain temper.
+
+The lad was ready. He hastily carried down the family umbrella and the
+Brussels carpet valise with its copious pink roses, looking strangely
+out of season amid all that hoar frost. Then he leaped back upstairs
+for something which had been added to his worldly goods since he
+entered college--a small, cheap trunk, containing a few garments and
+the priceless books. These things the driver stored in the boot of the
+stage, bespattered with mud now frozen. Then, running back once more,
+the lad seized his coat and hat, cast one troubled glance around the
+meaningless room which had been the theatre of such a drama in his
+life, went over to the little table, and blew out his Bible Student's
+lamp forever; and hurrying down with a cordial "all ready," climbed to
+the seat beside the driver and was whirled away.
+
+He turned as he passed from the campus to take a last look at Morrison
+College, standing back there on the hill, venerable, majestical,
+tight-closed, its fires put out. As he crossed the city (for there were
+passengers to be picked up and the mail-bag to be gotten), he took
+unspoken leave of many other places: of the bookstore where he had
+bought the masterpieces of his masters; of the little Italian
+apple-man--who would never again have so simple a customer for his
+slightly damaged fruit; of several tall, proud, well-frosted church
+spires now turning rosy in the sunrise; of a big, handsome house
+standing in a fashionable street, with black coal smoke pouring out of
+the chimneys. There the friends of his boyhood "boarded"; there they
+were now, asleep in luxurious beds, or gone away for the holidays, he
+knew not which: all he did know was that they were gone far away from
+him along life's other pathways.
+
+Soon the shops on each side were succeeded by homesteads; gradually
+these stood farther apart as farm-houses set back from the highroad;
+the street had become a turnpike, they were in open country and the lad
+was on his way to his father and mother.
+
+In the afternoon, at one of the stops for watering horses, he had his
+traps and trappings put out. From this place a mud road wound across
+the 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 his
+father's land.
+
+Leaving his things at the roadside farmhouse with the promise that he
+would return for them, the lad struck out--not by the lane, but
+straight across country.
+
+It was a mild winter day without wind, without character--one of the
+days on which Nature seems to take no interest in herself and creates
+no interest in others. The sky was overcrowded with low, ragged clouds,
+without discernible order or direction. Nowhere a yellow sunbeam
+glinting on any object, but vast jets of misty radiance shot downward
+in far-diverging lines toward the world: as though above the clouds
+were piled the waters of light and this were scant escaping spray.
+
+He walked on, climbing the fences, coming on the familiar sights of
+winter woods and fields. Having been away from them for the first time
+and that during more than a year, with what feelings he now beheld them!
+
+Crows about the corn shocks, flying leisurely to the stake-and-ridered
+fence: there alighting with their tails pointing toward him and their
+heads turned sideways over one shoulder; but soon presenting their
+breasts seeing he did not hunt. The solitary caw of one of them--that
+thin, indifferent comment of their sentinel, perched on the silver-gray
+twig of a sycamore. In another field the startled flutter of field
+larks from pale-yellow bushes of ground-apple. Some boys out
+rabbit-hunting in the holidays, with red cheeks and gay woollen
+comforters around their hot necks and jeans jackets full of Spanish
+needles: one shouldering a gun, one carrying a game-bag, one eating an
+apple: a pack of dogs and no rabbit. The winter brooks, trickling
+through banks of frozen grass and broken reeds; their clear brown water
+sometimes open, sometimes covered with figured ice.
+
+Red cattle in one distant wood, moving tender-footed around the edge of
+a pond. The fall of a forest tree sounding distinct amid the reigning
+stillness--felled for cord wood. And in one field--right there before
+him!--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 the
+topmost rail of the boundary fence and sat there, his eyes glued to the
+whole scene. It lay outspread before him, the entirety of that farm. He
+had never realized before how little there was of it, how little! He
+could see all around it, except where the woods hid the division fence
+on one side. And the house, standing in the still air of the winter
+afternoon, with its rotting roof and low red chimneys partly obscured
+by scraggy cedars--how small it had become! How poor, how wretched
+everything--the woodpile, the cabin, the hen-house, the ice-house, the
+barn! Was this any part of the great world? It was one picture of
+desolation, the creeping paralysis of a house and farm. Did anything
+even move?
+
+Something did move. A column of blue smoke moved straight and thin from
+the chimney of his father's and mother's room. In a far corner of the
+stable lot, pawing and nozzling some remnants of fodder, were the old
+horses. By the hay-rick he discovered one of the sheep, the rest being
+on the farther side. The cows by and by filed slowly around from behind
+the barn and entered the doorless milking stalls. Suddenly his dog
+emerged from one of those stalls, trotting cautiously, then with a
+playful burst of speed went in a streak across the lot toward the
+kitchen. A negro man issued from the cabin, picked out a log, knocked
+the ashes out of his pipe in the palm of his hand, and began to cut the
+firewood for the night.
+
+All this did not occur at once: he had been sitting there a long
+time--heart-sick with the thought of the tragedy he was bringing home.
+How could he ever meet them, ever tell them? How would they ever
+understand? If he could only say to his father: "I have sinned and I
+have broken your heart: but forgive me." But he could not say this: he
+did not believe that he had done wrong. Yet all that he would now have
+to show in their eyes would be the year of his wasted life, and a trunk
+full of the books that had ruined him.
+
+Ah, those two years before he had started to college, during which they
+had 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, not
+dreaming he was anywhere near. One on each side of the fireplace; his
+mother wearing her black dress and purple shawl: a ball of yarn and
+perhaps a tea-cake in her lap; some knitting on her needles; she knit,
+she never mended. But his father would be mending--leather perhaps, and
+sewing, as he liked to sew, with hog bristles--the beeswax and the awls
+lying in the bottom of a chair drawn to his side. There would be no
+noises in the room otherwise: he could hear the stewing of the sap in
+the end of a fagot, the ticking of one clock, the fainter ticking of
+another in the adjoining room, like a disordered echo. They would not
+be talking; they would be thinking of him. He shut his eyes, compressed
+his lips, shook his head resolutely, and leaped down.
+
+He had gone about twenty yards, when he heard a quick, incredulous bark
+down by the house and his dog appeared in full view, looking up that
+way, motionless. Then he came on running and barking resentfully, and a
+short 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 lad
+stooped and drew him close. Neither at that moment had any articulate
+speech nor needed it. As soon as he was released, the dog, after
+several leaps toward his face, was off in despair either of expressing
+or of containing his joy, to tell the news at the house. David
+laggingly followed.
+
+As he stepped upon the porch, piled against the wall beside the door
+were fagots as he used to see them. When he reached the door itself, he
+stopped, gazing foolishly at those fagots, at the little gray lichens
+on them: he could not knock, he could not turn the knob without
+knocking. But his step had been heard. His mother opened the door and
+peered 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 a
+little way off to look at his face. "Ah! the poor fellow's sick! Come
+in, come in. And this is why we had no letter! And to think yesterday
+was 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 control
+of himself.
+
+"I have not been sick. I am perfectly well," he said at length, looking
+from one to the other with forlorn, remorseful affection. They had
+drawn a chair close, one on each side of him. "How are you, mother? How
+are you, father?"
+
+The change in HIM!--that was all they saw. As soon as he spoke, they
+knew he was in good health. Then the trouble was something else, more
+terrible. The mother took refuge in silence as a woman instinctively
+does 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! How
+many a father knows!
+
+"Oh, what is it!" cried his mother, wringing her hands, and bursting
+into tears. She rose and went to her seat under the mantelpiece.
+
+"What have you done?" said his father, also rising and going back to
+his seat.
+
+There was a new sternness in his voice; but the look which returned
+suddenly 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 to
+tell 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 blows
+of 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 a
+lifetime of failure and admitted it. After an interval it was put
+again:--
+
+"FOR WHAT?"
+
+"I do not believe the Bible any longer. I do not believe in
+Christianity."
+
+"Oh, don't do THAT!"
+
+The cry proceeded from David's mother, who crossed quickly and sat
+beside her husband, holding his hand, perhaps not knowing her own
+motive.
+
+This, then, was the end of hope and pride, the reward of years of
+self-denial, the insult to all this poverty. For the time, even the
+awful 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 blow
+with 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 was
+falling over the frozen fields. The last crow had flapped low and
+straight toward the black wood beyond the southern horizon. No sunset
+radiance streamed across the wide land, for all day a solitude of cloud
+had stretched around the earth, bringing on the darkness now before its
+time.
+
+In a small hemp field on an edge of the vast Kentucky table-land, a
+solitary breaker kept on at his work. The splintered shards were piled
+high against his brake: he had not paused to clear them out of his way
+except around his bootlegs. Near by, the remnant of the shock had
+fallen over, clods of mingled frost and soil still sticking to the
+level butt-ends. Several yards to windward, where the dust and refuse
+might not settle on it, lay the pile of gray-tailed hemp,--the coarsest
+of man's work, but finished as conscientiously as an art. From the
+warming depths of this, rose the head and neck of a common shepherd
+dog, his face turned uneasily but patiently toward the worker. Whatever
+that master should do, whether understood or not, was right to him; he
+did not ask to understand, but to love and to serve. Farther away in
+another direction leaned the charred rind of a rotting stump. At
+intervals the rising wind blew the ashes away, exposing live
+coals--that fireside of the laborer, wandering with him from spot to
+spot over the bitter lonely spaces.
+
+The hemp breaker had just gone to the shock and torn away another
+armful, dragging the rest down. Exhausting to the picked and powerful,
+the work seemed easy to him; for he was a young man of the greatest
+size and strength, moulded in the proportions which Nature often
+chooses for her children of the soil among that people. Striding
+rapidly back to his brake, the clumsy five-slatted device of the
+pioneer Kentuckians, he raised the handle and threw the armful of
+stalks crosswise between the upper and the lower blades. Then swinging
+the handle high, with his body wrenched violently forward and the
+strength of his good right arm put forth, he brought it down. The
+CRASH, 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 through
+a bundle of dead rods.
+
+A little later he stopped abruptly, with silent inquiry turning his
+face to the sky: a raindrop had fallen on his hand. Two or three drops
+struck his face as he waited. It had been very cold that morning, too
+cold for him to come out to work. Though by noon it had moderated, it
+was cold still; but out of the warmer currents of the upper atmosphere,
+which was now the noiseless theatre of great changes going forward
+unshared as yet by the strata below, sank these icy globules of the
+winter rain. Their usual law is to freeze during descent into the
+crystals of snow; rarely they harden after they fall, covering the
+earth with sleet.
+
+David, by a few quick circular motions of the wrist, freed his left
+hand from the half-broken hemp, leaving the bundle trailing across the
+brake. Then he hurried to the heap of well-cleaned fibre: that must not
+be allowed to get wet. The dog leaped out and stood to one side,
+welcoming the end of the afternoon labor and the idea of returning
+home. Not many minutes were required for the hasty baling, and David
+soon rested a moment beside his hemp, ready to lift it to his
+shoulders. But he felt disappointed. There lay the remnant of the
+shock. He had worked hard to finish it before sunset Would there not
+still be time?
+
+The field occupied one of the swelling knolls of the landscape; his
+brake was set this day on the very crown of a hill. As he asked himself
+that question, he lifted his eyes and far away through the twilight,
+lower down, he saw the flash of a candle already being carried about in
+the kitchen. At the opposite end of the house the glow of firelight
+fell on the window panes of his father's and mother's room. Even while
+he observed this, it was intercepted: his mother thus early was closing
+the shutters for the night.
+
+Too late! He gave up the thought of finishing his shock, recollecting
+other duties. But he remained in his attitude a few moments; for the
+workman has a curious unconscious habit of taking a final survey of the
+scene of his labor before quitting it. David now glanced first up at
+the sky, with dubious forethought of to-morrow's weather. The raindrops
+had ceased to fall, but he was too good a countryman not to foresee
+unsettled conditions. The dog standing before him and watching his
+face, uttered an uneasy whine as he noted that question addressed to
+the clouds: at intervals during the afternoon he had been asking his
+question also. Then those live coals in the rind of the stump and the
+danger of sparks blown to the hemp herds or brake, or fence farther
+away: David walked over and stamped them out. As he returned, he
+fondled 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, his
+throat and eyes filled with dust, the dust all over him, low on the
+dark red horizon there had formed itself the solemn picture of a winter
+sunset. Amid the gathering darkness the workman remained gazing toward
+that great light--into the stillness of it--the loneliness--the eternal
+peace. On his rugged face an answering light was kindled, the glory of
+a spiritual passion, the flame of immortal things alive in his soul.
+More akin to him seemed that beacon fire of the sky--more nearly his
+real pathway home appeared that distant road and gateway to the
+Infinite--than the flickering, near house-taper in the valley below.
+Once before, on the most memorable day of his life, David had beheld a
+winter sunset like that; but then across the roofs of a town--roofs
+half white, half brown with melting snow, and with lengthening icicles
+dripping in the twilight.
+
+Suddenly, as if to shut out troubled thoughts, he stooped and, throwing
+his big, long arms about the hemp, lifted it to his shoulder. "Come,
+Captain," he called to his companion, and stalked heavily away. As he
+went, 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 rocklike
+basis 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 right
+to indulge himself even in this, it died on the air; and only the noise
+of his thick, stiffened boots could have been heard crushing the frozen
+stubble, as he went staggering under his load toward the barn.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+When he reached the worm fence of the hemp field, he threw his load
+from his shoulder upon the topmost rail, and, holding it there with one
+hand, 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 the
+sheep of the farm, several in number and of the common sort. At the
+sight of him, they always bleated familiarly, but this evening their
+long, quavering, gray notes were more penetrating, more insistent than
+usual. These sensitive, gentle creatures, whose instincts represent the
+accumulating and inherited experiences of age upon age of direct
+contact with nature, run far ahead of us in our forecasting wisdom; and
+many a time they utter their disquietude and warning in language that
+is understood only by themselves. The scant flock now fell into the
+wake of David, their voices blending in a chorus of meek elegiacs,
+their fore feet crowding close upon his heels. The dog, yielding his
+place, fell into their wake, as though covering the rear; and so this
+little procession of friends moved in a close body toward the barn.
+
+David put his hemp in the saddle-house; a separate hemp-house they were
+not rich enough to own. He had chosen this particular part of the barn
+because it was dryest in roof and floor. Several bales of hemp were
+already piled against the logs on one side; and besides these, the room
+contained the harness, the cart and the wagon gear, the box of tar, his
+maul and wedges, his saddle and bridle, and sundry implements used in
+the garden or on the farm. It was almost dark in there now, and he
+groped his way.
+
+The small estate of his father, comprising only some fifty or sixty
+acres, supported little live stock: the sheep just mentioned, a few
+horses, several head of cattle, a sow and pigs. Every soul of these
+inside 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 quit
+work in the field. Now, although it was not much later than usual, the
+heavy cloud made it appear so; and all these creatures, like ourselves,
+are deceived by appearances and suffer greatly from imagination. They
+now believed that it was far past the customary time for him to appear,
+that they were nearing the verge of starvation; and so they were
+bewailing in a dejected way his unaccountable absence and their
+miserable lot--with no one to listen.
+
+Scarcely had the rattling of the iron latch of the saddle-house
+apprised them of his arrival before every dumb brute--dumb, as dumb men
+say--experienced a cheerful change of mind, and began to pour into his
+ears the eager, earnest, gratifying tale of its rights and its wrongs.
+What honest voices as compared with the human--sometimes. No question
+of sincerity could have been raised by any one who heard THEM speak. It
+may 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 that
+rejoicing uproar. But he was touched, also. To them he was the answerer
+of prayer. Not one believed that he ever refused to succor in time of
+need, or turned a deaf ear to supplication. If he made poor provision
+for them sometimes, though they might not feel satisfied, they never
+turned against him. The barn was very old. The chemical action of the
+elements had first rotted away the shingles at the points where the
+nails pinned them to the roof; and, thus loosened, the winds of many
+years had dislodged and scattered them. Through these holes, rain could
+penetrate to the stalls of the horses, so that often they would get up
+mired and stiff and shivering; but they never reproached him. On the
+northern side of the barn the weather-boarding was quite gone in
+places, and the wind blew freely in. Of winter mornings the backs of
+the cows would sometimes be flecked with snow, or this being stubbornly
+melted by their own heat, their hides would be hung with dew-drops:
+they never attributed that fact to him as a cruelty. In the whole
+stable there was not one critic of his providence: all were of the
+household of faith: the members being in good standing and full
+fellowship.
+
+Remembrance of this lay much in his mind whenever, as often, he
+contrasted his association with his poor animals, and the troublous
+problem of faith in his own soul. It weighed with especial heaviness
+upon his heart, this nightfall in the barn, over which hung that
+threatening sky. Do what he could for their comfort, it must be
+insufficient in a rotting, windswept shelter like that. And here came
+the pinch of conscience, the wrench of remorse: the small sums of money
+which his father and mother had saved up at such a sacrifice on the
+farm,--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 part
+of that had been applied to the roof and weather-boarding of the
+stable, the stock this night might have been housed in warmth and
+safety.
+
+The feeding and bedding attended to, with a basket of cobs in his hand
+for his mother, he hurried away to the woodpile. This was in the yard
+near the negro cabin and a hundred yards or more from the house. There
+he began to cut and split the wood for the fires that night and for
+next morning. Three lengths of this: first, for the grate in his
+father's and mother's room--the best to be found among the logs of the
+woodpile: good dry hickory for its ready blaze and rousing heat; to be
+mixed with seasoned oak, lest it burn out too quickly--an expensive
+wood; and perhaps also with some white ash from a tree he had felled in
+the autumn. Then sundry back-logs and knots of black walnut for the
+cabin of the two negro women (there being no sense of the value of this
+wood 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 the
+stumps were often grubbed up and burned on the spot). Then fuel of this
+same sort for the kitchen stove. Next, two or three big armfuls of very
+short sticks for the small grate in his own small room above stairs--a
+little 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 the
+general 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 by
+sight. Loud and rapid the strokes resounded; for he went at it with a
+youthful will, and with hunger gnawing him; and though his arms were
+stiff and tired, the axe to him was always a plaything--a plaything
+that he loved. At last, from under the henhouse near by he drew out and
+split some pieces of kindling, and then stored his axe in that dry
+place with fresh concern about soft weather: for more raindrops were
+falling and the wind was rising.
+
+Stooping down now, he piled the fagots in the hollow of his arm, till
+the wood rose cold and damp against his hot neck, against his ear, and
+carried first some to the kitchen; and then some to the side porch of
+the house, where he arranged it carefully against the wall, close to
+the door, and conveniently for a hand reaching outward from within. As
+he was heaping up the last of it, having taken three turns to the
+woodpile, the door was opened slowly, and a slight, slender woman
+peered 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 than
+usual; it's the clouds. Here's some good kindling for you in the
+morning and a basket of cobs," he added tenderly.
+
+She received in silence the feed basket he held out to her, and watched
+him as he kneeled, busily piling up the last of the fagots.
+
+"I hope you haven't cut any more of that green oak; your father
+couldn't keep warm."
+
+"This is hickory, dead hickory, with some seasoned oak. Father'll have
+to 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 grate
+upstairs, making two trips of it. The stairway was dark; his room dark
+and damp, and filled with the smell of farm boots and working clothes
+left wet in the closets. Groping his way to the mantelpiece, he struck
+a sulphur match, lighted a half-burned candle, and kneeling down, began
+to kindle his fire.
+
+As it started and spread, little by little it brought out of the
+cheerless darkness all the features of the rough, homely, kind face,
+bent over and watching it so impatiently and yet half absently. It gave
+definition to the shapeless black hat, around the brim of which still
+hung filaments of tow, in the folds of which lay white splinters of
+hemp stalk. There was the dust of field and barn on the edges of the
+thick hair about the ears; dust around the eyes and the nostrils. He
+was resting on one knee; over the other his hands were
+crossed--enormous, powerful, coarsened hands, the skin so frayed and
+chapped that around the finger-nails and along the cracks here and
+there a little blood had oozed out and dried.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+When David came down to his supper, all traces of the day's labor that
+were removable had disappeared. He was clean; and his working clothes
+had been laid aside for the cheap black-cloth suit, which he had been
+used to wear on Sundays while he was a student. Grave, gentle, looking
+tired but looking happy, with his big shock head of hair and a face
+rugged and majestical like a youthful Beethoven. A kind mouth, most of
+all, and an eye of wonderfully deep intelligence.
+
+The narrow, uncarpeted stairway down which he had noisily twisted his
+enormous figure, with some amusement, as always, had brought him to the
+dining room. This was situated between the kitchen and his father's and
+mother's bedroom. The door of each of these stood ajar, and some of the
+warmth of the stove on one side and of the grate on the other dried and
+tempered the atmosphere.
+
+His mother sat in her place at the head of the table, quietly waiting
+for him, and still holding in one hand the partially eaten biscuit As
+he took his seat, she rose, and, walking listlessly to the kitchen
+door, made a listless request of one of the two negro women. When the
+coffee had been brought in, standing, she poured out a cup, sweetened,
+stirred, and tasted it, and putting the spoon into it, placed it before
+him. Then she resumed her seat (and the biscuit) and looked on,
+occasionally scrutinizing his face, with an expression perhaps the most
+tragic that can ever be worn by maternal eyes: the expression of a
+lowly mother who has given birth to a lofty son, and who has neither
+the power to understand him, nor the grace to realize her own
+inferiority.
+
+She wore, as usual, a dress of plain mourning, although she had not the
+slightest occasion to mourn--at least, from the matter of death. In the
+throat 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 when
+an infant, and long before the parents discovered how unlike their
+child was to themselves. This breastpin, with the hair of the three
+heads of the house intertwined, was the only symbol in all the world of
+their harmony or union.
+
+Around her shoulders she had thrown, according to her wont, a home-knit
+crewel shawl of black and purple. Her hair, thick and straight and
+pasted down over the temples of her small head, looked like a long-used
+wig. Her contracted face seemed to have accumulated the wrinkles of the
+most drawn-out, careworn life. Yet she was not old; and these were not
+the lines of care; for her years had been singularly uneventful
+and--for her--happy. The markings were, perhaps, inherited from the
+generations of her weather-beaten, toiling, plain ancestors--with the
+added creases of her own personal habits. For she lived in her house
+with the regularity and contentment of an insect in a dead log. And few
+causes age the body faster than such wilful indolence and monotony of
+mind 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 too
+great rankness breaking down at once the framework on which it has been
+reared, or afterward causing this to give way slowly under the fruitage
+of thoughts, too heavy any longer to be borne.
+
+That from so dark a receptacle as this mother there should have emerged
+such a child of light, was one of those mysteries that are the
+perpetual delight of Nature and the despair of Science. This did not
+seem one of those instances--also a secret of the great Creatress--in
+which she produces upon the stem of a common rose a bud of alien
+splendor. It was as if potter's clay had conceived marble. The
+explanation of David did not lie in the fact that such a mother had
+produced him.
+
+One of the truest marks of her small, cold mind was the rigid tyranny
+exercised over it by its own worthless ideas. Had she not sat beside
+her son while he ate, had she not denied herself the comfort of the
+fireside in the adjoining room, in order that she might pour out for
+him the coffee that was unfit to be drunk, she would have charged
+herself with being an unfaithful, undutiful mother. But this done, she
+saw no further, beheld nothing of the neglect, the carelessness, the
+cruelty, of all the rest, part of which this very moment was outspread
+beneath her eyes.
+
+For at the foot of the table, where David's father had sat, were two
+partly eaten dishes: one of spare-rib, one of sausage. The gravy in
+each had begun to whiten into lard. Plates heaped with cornbread and
+with biscuit, poorly baked and now cold, were placed on each side. In
+front of him had been set a pitcher of milk; this rattled, as he poured
+it, with its own bluish ice. On all that homely, neglected board one
+thing only put everything else to shame. A single candle, in a low,
+brass candlestick in the middle of the table, scarce threw enough light
+to reveal the scene; but its flame shot deep into the golden,
+crystalline depths of a jar of honey standing close beside it--honey
+from the bees in the garden--a scathing but unnoticed rebuke from the
+food and housekeeping of the bee to the food and housekeeping of the
+woman.
+
+Work in the hemp fields leaves a man's body calling in every tissue for
+restoration of its waste. David had hardly taken his seat before his
+eye swept the prospect before him with savage hope. In him was the
+hunger, not of toil alone, but of youth still growing to manhood, of
+absolute health. Whether he felt any mortification at his mother's
+indifference is doubtful. Assuredly life-long experience had taught him
+that nothing better was to be expected from her. How far he had
+unconsciously grown callous to things as they were at home, there is no
+telling. Ordinarily we become in such matters what we must; but it is
+likewise true that the first and last proof of high personal
+superiority is the native, irrepressible power of the mind to create
+standards which rise above all experience and surroundings; to carry
+everywhere with itself, whether it will or not, a blazing, scorching
+censorship of the facts that offend it. Regarding the household
+management of his mother, David at least never murmured; what he
+secretly felt he alone knew, perhaps not even he, since he was no
+self-examiner. As to those shortcomings of hers which he could not fail
+to 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 apathetic
+surface; and she did not hesitate to recur to any one of these any
+number 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 wood
+to 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 his
+mother's habit was to utter one sentence at a time.
+
+"I got three fresh eggs to-day; one had dropped from the roost and
+frozen; 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: THEY
+know. 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 that
+had begun to manifest itself in him since his return from college. She,
+however, did not understand the reasons of this and viewed it
+unfavorably.
+
+"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's
+smoked enough."
+
+"Very well, then. You shall have every basketful of them for your own
+fire."
+
+"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 catch
+them 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 hand
+it over to me, please."
+
+She looked dryly down at the bread in her fingers: humor was denied
+her--that playfulness of purest reason.
+
+David had commenced to collect a plateful of scraps--the most
+appetizing of the morsels that he himself had not devoured. He rose and
+went out into the porch to the dog.
+
+"Now, mother," he said, reentering; and with quiet dignity he preceded
+her into the room adjoining.
+
+His father sat on one side of the fireplace, watching the open door for
+the 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 and
+carriage of the head--in the expression of the eye most of all,
+perhaps,--the not wholly obliterated markings of a thoughtful and
+powerful breed of men. His appearance suggested that some explanation
+of David might be traceable in this quarter. For while we know nothing
+of these deep things, nor ever shall, in the sense that we can supply
+the proofs of what we conjecture; while Nature goes ever about her
+ancient work, and we cannot declare that we have ever watched the
+operations of her fingers, think on we will, and reason we must, amid
+her otherwise intolerable mysteries. Though we accomplish no more in
+our philosophy than the poor insect, which momentarily illumines its
+wandering through the illimitable night by a flash from its own body.
+
+Lost in obscurity, then, as was David's relation to his mother, there
+seemed 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 own
+offspring not with themselves but with earlier sires. They are like
+sluggish canals running between far-separated oceans--from the deeps of
+life to the deeps of life, allowing the freighted ships to pass. And no
+more does the stream understand what moves across its surface than do
+such commonplace agents comprehend the sons who have sprung from their
+own loins. Here, too, is one of Nature's greatest cruelties to the
+parent.
+
+As David's father would not have recognized his remote ancestors if
+brought face to face, so he did not discover in David the image of
+them--the reappearance in the world, under different conditions, of
+certain elements of character found of old in the stock and line. He
+could not have understood how it was possible for him to transmit to
+the boy a nature which he himself did not actively possess. And,
+therefore, instead of beholding here one of Nature's mysterious
+returns, after a long period of quiescence, to her suspended activities
+and the perpetuation of an interrupted type, so that his son was but
+another strong link of descent joined to himself, a weak one; instead
+of this, he saw only with constant secret resentment that David was at
+once unlike him and his superior.
+
+These two had worked side by side year after year on the farm; such
+comradeship in labor usually brings into consciousness again the
+primeval bond of Man against Nature--the brotherhood, at least, of the
+merely human. But while they had mingled their toil, sweat, hopes, and
+disappointments, their minds had never met. The father had never felt
+at home with his son; David, without knowing why--and many a sorrowful
+hour it had cost him--had never accepted as father the man who had
+brought him into the world. Each soon perceived that a distance
+separated them which neither could cross, though vainly both should
+try, and often both did try, to cross it.
+
+As he sat in the chimney-corner to-night, his very look as he watched
+the door made it clear that he dreaded the entrance of his son; and to
+this feeling had lately been added deeper estrangement.
+
+When David walked in, he took a seat in front of the fire. His mother
+followed, bringing the sugar-bowl and the honey, which she locked in a
+closet in the wall: the iron in her blood was parsimony. Then she
+seated herself under the mantelpiece on the opposite side and looked
+silently across at the face of her husband. (She was his second wife.
+His offspring by his first wife had died young. David was the only
+child of mature parents.) She looked across at him with the complacent
+expression of the wife who feels that she and her husband are one, even
+though 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, a
+moment 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 the
+mechanism of their minds moved much like the two wall-clocks in
+adjoining rooms of the house; which ticked and struck, year after year,
+never quite together and never far apart. When David was first with one
+and then with another, he was often obliged to answer the same
+questions twice--sometimes thrice, since his mother alone required two
+identical responses. He replied now with his invariable and patient
+courtesy--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 her
+husband.
+
+"John Bailey was here after dinner," remarked David's father. "He has
+sold his crop of twenty-seven acres for four thousand dollars. Ten
+dollars a hundred."
+
+"That's fine," said David with enthusiasm, thinking regretfully of
+their two or three acres.
+
+"Good hemp lands are going to rent for twenty or twenty-five dollars an
+acre in the spring," continued his father, watching the effect of his
+words.
+
+David got up, and going to the door, reached around against the wall
+for two or three sticks of the wood he had piled there. He replenished
+the fire, which was going down, and resumed his seat.
+
+For a while father and son discussed in a reserved way matters
+pertaining to the farm: the amount of feed in the barn and the chances
+of its lasting; crops to be sown in the spring, and in what fields; the
+help 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 wages
+they now demanded, and nearly everywhere seeking employment from any
+one in preference to their former masters as part of the proof that
+they were no longer in slavery. David's father had owned but a single
+small family of slaves: the women remained, the man had sought work on
+one of the far richer estates in the neighborhood.
+
+They threshed over once more the straw of these familiar topics and
+then fell into embarrassed silence. The father broke this with an
+abrupt, 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 ground
+to 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, of
+bitterness. "And if I'm not able to hire the hands to clear it, then
+I'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'd
+rather buy it than rent."
+
+"How could we do without the woods?" inquired the son, looking like one
+dazed,--"without the timber and the grazing?"
+
+"What will we do without the woods?" cried his father, catching up the
+words excitedly. "What will we do without the FARM?"
+
+"What do you mean by all this, father? What is back of it?" cried
+David, suddenly aroused by vague fears.
+
+"I mean," exclaimed the father, with a species of satisfaction in his
+now plain words, "I mean that Bailey wants to buy the farm. I mean that
+he urges me to sell out for my own good! tells me I must sell out! must
+move! leave Kentucky! go to Missouri--like other men when they fail."
+
+"Go to Missouri," echoed the wife with dismal resignation, smiling at
+her 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 from
+you. You and mother shall never sell your home and move to Missouri on
+my account."
+
+The son sat looking into the fire, controlling his feelings. The father
+sat looking at the son, making a greater effort to control his. Both of
+them realized the poverty of the place and the need of money.
+
+The hour was already past the father's early bed-time. He straightened
+himself up now, and turning his back, took off his coat, hung it on the
+back of his chair, and began to unbutton his waistcoat, and rub his
+arms. The mother rose, and going to the high-posted bed in a corner of
+the 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 she
+drew out a candle. No good-night was spoken; and David, with a look at
+his father and mother which neither of them saw, opened and closed the
+door of their warm room, and found himself in the darkness outside at
+the foot of the cold staircase.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+A bed of crimson coals in the bottom of the grate was all that survived
+of 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 the
+hearth-stones. The sashes of the windows loose in the frames and shaken
+to-night by twisty gusts. A pane of glass in one had been broken and
+the opening pasted over with a sheet of letter paper. This had been
+burst by an indolent hand, thrust through to close the shutters
+outside; and a current of cold air now swept across the small room. The
+man felt it, shook himself free of depressing thoughts, rose
+resolutely. He took from a closet one of his most worthless coats, and
+rolling it into a wad, stopped the hole. Going back to the grate, he
+piled on the wood, watching the blaze as it rushed up over the logs,
+devouring the dried lichens on the bark; then sinking back to the
+bottom rounds, where it must slowly rise again, reducing the wood to
+ashes. Beside him as he sat in his rush-bottomed chair stood a small
+square table and on this a low brass candlestick, the companion of the
+one in the dining room. A half-burnt candle rose out of the socket. As
+David now lighted it and laid the long fresh candle alongside the
+snuffers, he measured with his eye the length of his luminaries and the
+amount of his wood--two friends. The little grate had commenced to roar
+at him bravely, affectionately; and the candle sputtered to him and
+threw sparks into the air--the rockets of its welcoming flame.
+
+It was not yet ten o'clock: two hours of the long winter evening
+remained. 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's
+books--the great grave books which had been the making of him, or the
+undoing of him, according as one may have enough of God's wisdom and
+mercy to decide whether it were the one or the other.
+
+As the man now moved his chair over, lifted the lid, and sat gazing
+down 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 of
+their power over him. The coarse toil of the day was forgotten; his
+loved dependent animals in the wind-swept barn forgotten; the evening
+with his father and mother, the unalterable emptiness of it, the
+unkindness, the threatening tragedy, forgotten. Not that desolate room
+with firelight and candle; not the poor farmhouse; not the meagre farm,
+nor the whole broad Kentucky plateau of fields and woods, heavy with
+winter wealth, heavy with comfortable homesteads--any longer held him
+as domicile, or native region: he was gone far away into the company of
+his high-minded masters, the writers of those books. Choosing one, he
+closed the lid of the trunk reluctantly over the rest, and with the
+book 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 side
+of his face supported in the palm of his hand, he read, scarce moving
+except to snuff the wick or to lay on a fresh fagot. At the end of this
+time other laws than those which the writer was tracing began to assert
+their supremacy over David--the laws of strength and health, warmth and
+weariness. Sleep was descending on him, relaxing his limbs, spreading a
+quiet mist through his brain, caressing his eyelids. He closed the
+pages and turned to his dying fire. The book caused him to wrestle; he
+wanted rest.
+
+And now, floating to him through that mist in his brain, as softly as a
+nearing melody, as radiantly as dawning light, came the image of
+Gabriella: after David had pursued Knowledge awhile he was ready for
+Love. But knowledge, truth, wisdom before every other earthly
+passion--that was the very soul of him. His heart yearned for her now
+in this closing hour, when everything else out of his way, field-work,
+stable-work, wood-cutting, filial duties, study, he was alone with the
+thought of her, the newest influence in his life, taking heed of her
+solely, hearkening only to his heart's need of her. In all his rude
+existence she was the only being he had ever known who seemed to him
+worthy of a place in the company of his great books. Had the summons
+come to pack his effects to-morrow and, saying good-by to everything
+else, start on a journey to the congenial places where his mighty
+masters lived and wrought, he would have wished her alone to go with
+him, sharer of life's loftiness. Her companionship wherever he might
+be--to have just that; to feel that she was always with him, and always
+one with him; to be able to turn his eyes to hers before some vanishing
+firelight 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 memorable
+twilight 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 trial
+had taken place, and where he had learned that it was all over with
+him. He was passing along one of the narrow cross streets, when at a
+certain point his course was barred by a heap of fresh cedar boughs,
+just thrown out of a wagon. Some children were gay and busy, carrying
+them through the side doors, the sexton aiding. Other children inside
+the lighted church were practising a carol to organ music; the choir of
+their voices swelled out through the open doors, and some of the little
+ones, tugging at the cedar, took up the strain.
+
+She was standing on the low steps of the church, in charge of the
+children. In one hand she held an unfinished wreath, and she was
+binding the dark, shining leaves with the other. A swarm of snowflakes,
+scarce more than glittering crystals, danced merrily about her head and
+flecked her black fur on one shoulder. As David, not very mindful just
+then of whither he was going, stepped forward across the light and
+paused before the pile of cedar boughs, she glanced at him with a
+smile, 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 seem
+a stranger to her. He instantly became a human brother, next of kin to
+her--that was all; she was wholly under the influence of the innocence
+and purity within and without.
+
+As he made no reply and for a moment did not move, she glanced quickly
+at him, regretting the smile. When she saw his face, he saw the joy go
+down out of hers; and he felt, as he turned off, that she went with him
+along the black street: alone, he seemed not alone any more.
+
+Though he had been with her many times since, no later impression had
+effaced 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 her
+snow-sprinkled shoulder, the children carolling among the fragrant
+cedar boughs scattered at her feet; she there, decorating the church,
+happy to be of pious service. Ah, to have her there in the room with
+him now; to be able to turn his eyes to hers in the vanishing
+firelight, near sleep awaiting them, side by side.
+
+There was the sound of a scratching on David's window shutters, as
+though a stiff brush were being moved up and down across the slats. He
+became aware that this sound had reached him at intervals several times
+already, but as often happens, had been disregarded by him owing to his
+preoccupation. Now it was so loud as to force itself positively upon
+his attention.
+
+He listened, puzzled, wondering. His window stood high from the ground
+and clear of any object. In a few moments, the sound made itself
+audible again. He sprang up, wide awake now, and raising the sash,
+pushed open the shutters--one of them easily; against the other there
+was resistance from outside. This yielded before his pressure; and as
+the shutter was forced wide open and David peered out, there swung
+heavily 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 tree
+which stood several feet from his window on one side, and close to the
+wall of the house. Before David was born, it had been growing there, a
+little higher, more far-reaching laterally, every year, until several
+topmost boughs had long since risen above the level of the eaves and
+dropped their dry needles on the rotting shingles. Now one of the
+limbs, 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 all
+day had made man and beast foreboding and distressed. David held out
+his hand: rain was falling steadily, each drop freezing on whatsoever
+it fell, adding ice to ice. The moon rode high by this time; and its
+radiance pouring from above on the roof of riftless cloud, diffused
+enough light below to render large objects near at hand visible in bulk
+and outline. A row of old cedars stretched across the yard. Their
+shapes, so familiar to him, were already disordered. The sleet must
+have been falling for hours to have weighed them down this way and
+that. A peculiarity of the night was the wind, which increased
+constantly, but with fitful violence, giving no warning of its high
+swoop, seizure, and wrench.
+
+Sleet! Scarce a winter but he had seen some little: once, in his
+childhood, a great one. He had often heard his father talk of others
+which HE remembered--with comment on the destruction they had wrought
+far and wide, on the suffering of all stock and of the wild creatures.
+The ravage had been more terrible in the forests, his father had
+thought, than what the cyclones cause when they rush upon the trees,
+heavy in their full summer-leaves, and sweep them down as easily as
+umbrellas set up on the ground. So much of the finest forests of
+Kentucky had been lost through its annual summer tempests and its rarer
+but more awful wintry sleets.
+
+No work for him in the hemp fields to-morrow, nor for days. No school
+for Gabriella; the more distant children would be unable to ride; the
+nearest unable to foot it through the mirrored woods; unless the
+weather should moderate before morning and melt the ice away as quickly
+as it had formed--as sometimes was the case. A good sign of this, he
+took it, was the ever rising wind: for a rising wind and a falling
+temperature seldom appeared together. As he bent his ear listening, he
+could hear the wild roar of the surges of air breaking through the
+forest, the edge of which was not fifty yards away.
+
+David sprang from his chair; there was a loud crack, and the great limb
+of the cedar swept rattling down across his shutters, twisted, snapped
+off at the trunk, rolled over in the air, and striking the ground on
+its back, lay like a huge animal knocked lifeless.
+
+He forgot bed and sleep and replenished his fire. His ear, trained to
+catch and to distinguish sounds of country life, was now becoming alive
+to the commencement of one of those vast appalling catastrophes in
+Nature, for which man sees no reason and can detect the furtherance of
+no plan--law being turned with seeming blindness, and in the spirit of
+sheer wastage, upon what it has itself achieved, and spending its
+sublime forces in a work of self-desolation.
+
+Of the two windows in his room, one opened upon the back yard, one upon
+the front. Both back yard and front contained, according to the custom
+of the country, much shrubbery, with aged fruit trees, mostly cherry
+and peach. There were locusts also at the rear of the house, the
+old-time yard favorite of the people; other forest trees stood around.
+Through both his windows there began to reach him a succession of
+fragile sounds; the snapping of rotten, weakest, most overburdened
+twigs. On fruit tree and forest tree these went down first--as is also
+the law of storm and trial of strength among men. The ground was now as
+one flooring of glass; and as some of these small branches dropped from
+the tree-tops, they were broken into fragments, like icicles, and slid
+rattling away into the nearest depressions of the ground. Starting far
+up in the air sometimes, they struck sheer upon other lower branches,
+bringing them along also; this gathering weight in turn descended upon
+others lower yet, until, so augmented, the entire mass swept downward
+and fell, shivered against crystal flooring.
+
+But soon these more trivial facts held his attention no longer: they
+were the mere reconnaissance of the elements--the first light attack of
+Nature upon her own weakness. By and by from the surging, roaring
+depths of the woods, there suddenly reverberated to him a deep boom as
+of a cannon: one of the great trees--two-forked at the mighty summit
+and already burdened in each half by its tons of timber, split in twain
+at the fork as though cleft by lightning; and now only the pointed
+trunk stood like a funeral shaft above its own ruins. For hours this
+went 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 the
+fire. His last bit of candle flickered blue, deep in the socket, and
+sent up its smoke. His wood was soon burnt out: only red coals in the
+bottom of the grate then, and these fast whitening. More than once he
+strode across and stood over his trunk in the shadowy corner--looking
+down at his books--those books that had guided him thus far, or
+misguided him, who can say?
+
+When his candle gave out and later his fire, he jerked off his clothes
+and getting into bed, rolled himself in the bedclothes and lay
+listening to the mournful sublimity of the storm.
+
+Toward three o'clock the weather grew colder, the wind died down, the
+booming ceased; and David, turning wearily, over, with an impulse to
+prayer, but with no prayer, went to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+When David awoke late and drowsily the next morning after the storm, he
+lay awhile, listening. No rending, crashing, booming in the woods now,
+nor rattling of his window-frames. No contemplative twitter of winter
+birds about the cedars in the yard, nor caw of crow, crossing the house
+chimneys toward the corn shocks. All things hushed, silent, immovable.
+
+Following so quickly upon the sublime roar and ravage of the night
+before, the stillness was disturbing. He sprang up and dressed
+quickly--admonished by the coldness of his room--before hurrying to his
+window to look out. When he tried the sash, it could not be raised. He
+thrust his hand through the broken pane and tugged at the shutters;
+they could not be shaken. Running downstairs to the kitchen and
+returning with hot water, he melted away the ice embedding the bolts
+and hinges.
+
+A marvel of nature, terrible, beautiful, met his eyes: ice-rain and a
+great frost Cloud, heavy still, but thinner than on the day before,
+enwrapped the earth. The sun, descending through this translucent roof
+of gray, filled the air beneath with a radiance as of molten pearl; and
+in this under-atmosphere of pearl all earthly things were tipped and
+hung in silver. Tree, bush, and shrub in the yard below, the rose
+clambering the pillars of the porch under his window, the scant ivy
+lower down on the house wall, the stiff little junipers, every blade of
+grass--all encased in silver. The ruined cedars trailed from sparlike
+tops their sweeping sails of incrusted emerald and silver. Along the
+eaves, like a row of inverted spears of unequal lengths, hung the
+argent icicles. No; not spun silver all this, but glass; all things
+buried, not under a tide of liquid silver, but of flowing and then
+cooling glass: Nature for once turned into a glass house, fixed in a
+brittle mass, nowhere bending or swaying; but if handled roughly, sure
+to be shivered.
+
+The ground under every tree in the yard was strewn with boughs; what
+must be the ruin of the woods whence the noises had reached him in the
+night? Looking out of his window now, he could see enough to let him
+understand the havoc, the wreckage.
+
+He went at once to the stable for the feeding and found everything
+strangely quiet--the stilling influence of a great frost on animal
+life. There had been excitement and uneasiness enough during the night;
+now ensued the reaction, for man is but one of the many animals with
+nerves and moods. A catastrophe like this which covers with ice the
+earth--grass, winter edible twig and leaf, roots and nuts for the brute
+kind that turns the soil with the nose, such putting of all food
+whatsoever out of reach of mouth or hoof or snout--brings these
+creatures face to face with the possibility of starving: they know it
+and are silent with apprehension of their peril; know it perhaps by the
+survival of prehistoric memories reverberating as instinct still. And
+there is another possible prong of truth to this repression of their
+characteristic cries at such times of frost: then it was in ages past
+that the species which preyed on them grew most ravenous and far
+ranging. The silence of the modern stable in a way takes the place of
+that primeval silence which was a law of safety in the bleak
+fastnesses, hunted over by flesh eating prowlers. It is the prudent
+noiselessness of many a species to-day, as the deer and the moose.
+
+The sheep, having enjoyed little shelter beside the hayrick, had
+encountered the worst of the storm. When David appeared in the stable
+lot, they beheld him at once; for their faces were bunched expectantly
+toward the yard gate through which he must emerge. But they spoke not a
+word to one another or to him as they hurried slipping forward. The man
+looked them over pityingly, yet with humor; for they wore many
+undesirable pendants of glass and silver dangling under their bellies
+and 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 in
+those simple words. Breakfast was ready when, carrying his customary
+basket of cobs for his mother, he returned to the house. One good
+result at least the storm had wrought for the time: it drew the members
+of the household more closely together, as any unusual event--danger,
+disaster--generally does. So that his father, despite his outburst of
+anger the night previous, forgot this morning his wrongs and
+disappointments and relaxed his severity. During the meal he had much
+to recount of other sleets and their consequences. He inferred similar
+consequences now if snow should follow, or a cold snap set in: no work
+in the fields, therefore no hemp-breaking, and therefore delay in
+selling the crop; the difficulty of feeding and watering the stock; no
+hauling along the mud roads, and little travel of any sort between
+country and town; the making of much cord wood out of the fallen
+timber, with plenty of stuff for woodpiles; the stopping of mill wheels
+on the frozen creeks, and scarcity of flour and meal.
+
+"The meal is nearly out now," said David's mother. "The negroes waste
+it."
+
+"We might shell some corn to-day," suggested David's father,
+hesitatingly. It was the first time since his son's return from college
+that he had ever proposed their working together.
+
+"I'll take a look at the woods first," said David; "and then I want to
+make a place in the stable for the sheep, father. They must come under
+shelter to-night I'll fix new stalls for the horses inside where we
+used 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 the
+creeping, spreading poverty. His father made no rejoinder; and having
+finished his breakfast in silence, left the table.
+
+His mother, looking across her coffeecup and biscuit at David, without
+change 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 soup
+to-day. Will you get it?"
+
+"No, mother; I will not get the hen for the cook; the cook will
+probably 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 terrible
+principle to apply indiscriminately!"
+
+"The cook wants to know how she is to get the vegetables out of the
+holes in the garden to-day--under all this ice."
+
+"How would she get the vegetables out of the garden under all this ice
+if there were no one on the place but herself? I warrant you she'd have
+every variety."
+
+"It's a pity we are not able to hire a man. If we could hire a man to
+help her, I wouldn't ask you. It's hard on the cook, to make her suffer
+for our poverty."
+
+"A little suffering in that way will do her a world of good," said
+David, cheerily.
+
+His mother did not hesitate, provocation or no provocation, to sting
+and 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: she
+escaped by smallness. Nothing would have made her very miserable but
+hunger and bodily pains. Against hunger she exercised ceaseless
+precautions; bodily pains she had none. The one other thing that could
+have agitated her profoundly was the idea that she would be compelled
+to leave Kentucky. It was hard for her to move about her house, much
+less move to Missouri. Not in months perhaps did she even go upstairs
+to bestow care upon, the closets, the bed, the comforts of her son. As
+might be expected, she considered herself the superior person of the
+family; and as often happens, she imposed this estimate of herself upon
+her husband. The terrifying vanity and self-sufficiency of the
+little-minded! Nature must set great store upon this type of human
+being, since it is regularly allowed to rule its betters.
+
+But his father! David had been at home two months now, for this was the
+last of February, and not once during that long ordeal of daily living
+together had his father opened his lips either to reproach or question
+him.
+
+Letters had been received from the faculty, from the pastor; of that
+David was aware; but any conversation as to these or as to the events
+of which they were the sad consummation, his father would not have. The
+gulf between them had been wide before; now it was fathomless.
+
+Yet David well foreknew that the hour of reckoning had to come, when
+all that was being held back would be uttered. He realized that both
+were silently making preparations for that crisis, and that each day
+brought it palpably nearer. Sometimes he could even see it threatening
+in his father's eye, hear it in his voice. It had reached the verge of
+explosion the night previous, with that prediction of coming
+bankruptcy, the selling of the farm of his Kentucky ancestors, the
+removal to Missouri in his enfeebled health. Not until his return had
+David realized how literally his father had begun to build life anew on
+the hopes of him. And now feel with him in his disappointment as deeply
+as he might, sympathy he could not openly offer, explanation he could
+not possibly give. His life-problem was not his father's problem; his
+father was simply not in a position to understand. Doubt anything in
+the Bible--doubt so-called orthodox Christianity--be expelled from the
+church and from college for such a reason--where could his father find
+patience or mercy for wilful folly and impiety like that?
+
+Meantime he had gone to work; on the very day after his return he had
+gone to work. Two sentences of his father's, on the afternoon of his
+coming 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 IN
+YOU?" The first assured him of the new footing on which he stood: he
+was no longer desired under that roof. The second summed up the
+life-long estimate which had been formed of his character before he had
+gone away.
+
+Therefore he had worked as never even in the old preparatory days. So
+long as he remained there, he must at least earn daily bread. More than
+that, he must make good, as soon as possible, the money spent at
+college. So he sent away the hired negro man; he undertook the work
+done 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. Of
+bright days he broke hemp. Nothing had touched David so deeply as the
+discovery in one corner of the farm of that field of hemp: his father
+had secretly raised it to be a surprise to him, to help him through his
+ministerial studies. This David had learned from his mother; his father
+had avoided mention of it: it might rot in the field! In equal silence
+David had set about breaking it; and sometimes at night his father
+would show enough interest merely to ask some questions regarding the
+day's work.
+
+Yet, notwithstanding this impending tragedy with his father, and
+distress at their reduced circumstances caused by his expenses at
+college, David, during these two months, had entered into much new
+happiness.
+
+The doubts which had racked him for many months were ended. He had
+reached a decision not to enter the ministry; had stripped his mind
+clean and clear of dogmas. The theologies of his day, vast, tangled
+thickets of thorns overspreading the simple footpath of the pious
+pilgrim mind, interfered with him no more. It was not now necessary for
+him to think or preach that any particular church with which he might
+identify himself was right, the rest of the human race wrong. He did
+not now have to believe that any soul was in danger of eternal
+damnation for disagreeing with him. Release from these things left his
+religious spirit more lofty and alive than ever.
+
+For, moreover, David had set his feet a brief space on the wide plains
+of living-knowledge; he had encountered through their works many of the
+great minds of his century, been reached by the sublime
+thought-movements of his time, heard the deep roar of the spirit's
+ocean. Amid coarse, daily labor once more, amid the penury and discord
+in that ruined farmhouse, one true secret of happiness with David was
+the recollection of all the noble things of human life which he had
+discovered, and to which he meant to work his way again as soon as
+possible. And what so helps one to believe in God as knowledge of the
+greatness of man?
+
+Meantime, also, his mind was kept freshly and powerfully exercised. He
+had 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 given
+than the way in which he regarded the storm, as he left the
+breakfast-table this morning and went to the woods.
+
+The damage was unreckonable. The trees had not been prepared against an
+event like that. For centuries some of them had developed strength in
+root and trunk and branch to resist the winds of the region when clad
+in all their leaves; or to carry the load of these leaves weighted with
+raindrops; or to bear the winter snows. Wise self-physicians of the
+forest! Removing a weak or useless limb, healing their own wounds and
+fractures! But to be buried under ice and then wrenched and twisted by
+the blast--for this they had received no training: and thus, like so
+many 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 I
+should have seen in this storm some direct intention of the Creator
+toward 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 as
+communications from the Almighty, as they did pestilence and famine.
+There still may be in this neighborhood people who will derive some
+such lesson from this. My father may in his heart believe it a judgment
+sent on us and on our neighbors for my impiety. Have not cities been
+afflicted on account of the presence of one sinner? Thankful I am not
+to think in this way now of physical law--not so to misconceive man's
+place in Nature. I know that this sleet, so important to us, is but one
+small incident in the long history of the planet's atmosphere and
+changing surface. It is the action of natural laws, operating without
+regard 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 death
+to me; but that would be among the results, not in the intention."
+
+He set his face to cross the wood--sliding, skating, steadying himself
+against the trunks, driving his heels through the ice crust The
+exercise was heating; his breath rose as a steam before his face.
+Beyond the woods he crossed a field; then a forest of many acres and
+magnificent timber, on the far edge of which, under the forest trees
+and fronting a country lane, stood the schoolhouse of the district.
+David looked anxiously, as he drew near, for any signs of injury that
+the storm might have done. One enormous tree-top had fallen on the
+fence. A limb had dropped sheer on the steps. The entire yard was
+little better than a brush heap. He soon turned away home relieved: he
+would be able to tell Gabriella to-night that none of the windows had
+been broken nor the roof; only a new woods scholar, with little feet
+and a big hard head and a bunch of mistletoe in one hand, was standing
+on the steps, waiting for her to open the door.
+
+David's college experience had effected the first great change in him
+as 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; the
+latter was the drama of his heart with woman.
+
+It had begun the day the former ended--in the gloom of that winter
+twilight day, when he had quit the college after his final interview
+with the faculty, and had wandered forlorn and dazed into the happy
+town, just commencing to celebrate its season of peace on earth and
+good will to man. He had found her given up heart and soul to the work
+of 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 return
+home. He was at work in the smoke-house. The meat had been salted down
+long enough after the killing: it must be hung, and he was engaged in
+hanging it. Several pieces lay piled inside the door suitably for the
+hand. He stood with his back to these beside the meat bench, scraping
+the saltpetre off a large middling and rubbing it with red pepper.
+Suddenly the light of the small doorway failed; and turning he beheld
+his mother, and a few feet behind her--David said that he did not
+believe in miracles--but a few feet behind his mother there now stood a
+divine presence. Believe it or not, there she was, the miracle! All the
+bashfulness of his lifetime--it had often made existence well-nigh
+insupportable--came crowding into that one moment. The feeblest little
+bleat of a spring lamb too weak to stand up for the first time would
+have been a deafening roar in comparison with the silence which now
+penetrated 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 took
+it for granted that every one present knew. The visitor at once
+relieved the situation.
+
+"This is the school-teacher," she said, coloring and smiling. "I have
+been teaching here ever since you went away. And I am now an old
+resident of this neighborhood."
+
+Not a thing moved about David except a little smoke in the chimney of
+his throat. But the young lady did not wait for more silence to render
+things more tense. She stepped forward into the doorway beside his
+mother and peered curiously in, looking up at the smoke-blackened
+joists, at the black cross sticks on which the links of sausages were
+hung, at the little heap of gray ashes in the ground underneath with a
+ring of half-burnt chips around them, at the huge meat bench piled with
+salted joints.
+
+"And this is the way you make middlings?" she inquired, smiling at him
+encouragingly.
+
+The idea of that archangel knowing anything about middlings! David's
+mind executed a rudimentary movement, and his tongue and lips responded
+feebly:--
+
+"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 while
+strength 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 seen
+bacon hanged--or hung. I suppose as I teach grammar, I must use both
+participles."
+
+David caught up the huge middling by the string and swung it around in
+front of him, whereupon it slipped out of his nerveless fingers and
+fell over in the ashes. It did not break the middling, but it broke the
+ice.
+
+"Can I help you?"
+
+Those torturing, blistering words! David's face got as red as though it
+had been rubbed with red pepper and saltpetre both. The flame of it
+seemed to kindle some faint spark of spirit in him. He picked up the
+middling, and as he looked her squarely in the eye, with a humorous
+light 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 red
+hands a pair of arms like marble for lustre and whiteness (for he had
+his sleeves rolled far back)--as massive a pair of man's arms as ever
+were formed by life-long health and a life-long labor and life-long
+right living.
+
+"Thank you," she said, retreating through the door. "It's all very
+interesting. I have never lived in the country before. Your mother told
+me 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 in
+my 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 such
+an instinct for truth himself, that truth in others was bare to him.
+Those gentle, sympathetic eyes seemed to declare: "I know about your
+troubles. I am the person for whom, without knowing it, you have been
+looking. With me you can break silence about the great things. We can
+meet far above the level of such poor scenes as this. I have sought you
+to 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 charge
+of the school the autumn he had gone away; that she was liked as a
+teacher, liked by the old people. She had taken great interest in HIM,
+his mother said reproachfully, and the idea of his studying for the
+ministry. She had often visited the house, had been good to his father
+and to her. This was her first visit since she had gotten back; she had
+been in town spending the holidays.
+
+David had begun to go to see Gabriella within a week. At first he went
+once a week--on Saturday nights. Soon he went twice a week--Wednesdays
+and Saturdays invariably. On that last day at college, when he had
+spoken out for himself, he had ended the student and the youth; when he
+met her, it was the beginning of the man: and the new reason of the
+man's happiness.
+
+As he now returned home across the mile or more of country, having
+satisfied himself as to the uninjured condition of the schoolhouse,
+which had a great deal to do with Gabriella's remaining in that
+neighborhood, he renewed his resolve to go to see her to-night, though
+it was only Friday. Had not the storm upset all regular laws and
+customs?
+
+Happily, then, on reaching the stable, he fell to work upon his plan of
+providing a shelter for the sheep.
+
+David felt much more at home in the barn than at the house. For the
+stock 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 more
+provender, had in part been spent on books describing the fauna of the
+earth and the distribution of species on its surface. Some had gone for
+treatises on animals under domestication, while his own animals under
+domestication were allowed to go poorly fed and worse housed. He had
+had the theory; they had had the practice. But they apprehended nothing
+of all this. How many tragedies of evil passion brutes escape by not
+understanding their owners! We of the human species so often regret
+that individuals read each other's natures so dimly: let us be
+thankful! David was glad, then, that this little aggregation of
+dependent creatures, his congregation of the faithful, neither
+perceived the change in him, nor were kept in suspense by the tragedy
+growing at the house.
+
+They had been glad to see him on his return. Captain, who had met him
+first, was gladdest, perhaps. Then the horses, the same old ones. One
+of them, he fancied, had backed up to him, offering a ride. And the
+cows were friendly. They were the same; their calves were different.
+The sheep about maintained their number, their increase by nature
+nearly 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 represented
+by a saddle blanket. After his departure for college, his mother had
+conceived of this fine young wether in terms of sweetbreads, tallow for
+chapped noses, and a soft seat for the spine of her husband. Even the
+larded dame of the snow-white sucklings had remembered him well, and
+had touched her snout against his boots; so that hardly had he in the
+old way begun to stroke her bristles, before she spoke comfortably of
+her joy, and rolled heavily over in what looked like a grateful swoon.
+
+No: his animals had not changed in their feelings toward him; but how
+altered he in his understanding of them! He had formerly believed that
+these creatures were created for the use of man--that old conceited
+notion that the entire earth was a planet of provisions for human
+consumption. It had never even occurred to him to think that the horses
+were made but to ride and to work. Cows of course gave milk for the
+sake of the dairy; cream rose on milk for ease in skimming; when
+churned, it turned sour, that the family might have fresh buttermilk.
+Hides were for shoes. The skin on sheep, it was put there for Man's
+woollens.
+
+Now David declared that these beings were no more made for Man than Man
+was made for them. Man might capture them, keep them in captivity,
+break, train, use, devour them, occasionally exterminate them by
+benevolent assimilation. But this was not the reason of their being
+created: what that reason was in the Creator's mind, no one knew or
+would 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 dependent
+creatures: who has made you dependent? In a state of wild nature, there
+is not one of you that Man would dare meet: not the wild stallion, not
+the wild bull, not the wild boar, not even an angry ram. The argument
+that Man's whole physical constitution--structure and function-shows
+that he was intended to live on beef and mutton, is no better than the
+argument that the tiger finds man perfectly adapted to his system as a
+food, and desires none better. Every man-eating creature thinks the
+same: the wolf believes Man to be his prey; the crocodile believes him
+to be his; an old lion is probably sure that a man's young wife is
+designed 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 novel
+revery, forgetting philosophy and brute kind. It was late when David
+finished his work that day. Toward nightfall the cloud had parted in
+the west; the sun had gone down with dark curtains closing heavily over
+it. Later, the cloud had parted in the east, and the moon had arisen
+amid white fleeces and floated above banks of pearl. Shining upon all
+splendid things else, it illumined one poor scene which must not be
+forgotten: 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 big
+thoughtful 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 had
+been, and the sheep under the shed of the cows. (It is the horse that
+always gets the best of everything in a stable.) He reproached himself
+that he did least for the creatures that demanded least.
+
+"That's the nature of man," he said disapprovingly, "topmost of all
+brutes."
+
+When he stepped out of doors after supper that night, the clouds had
+hidden the moon. But there was light enough for him to see his way
+across the ice fields to Gabriella. The Star of Love shone about his
+feet.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+When Gabriella awoke on that same morning after the storm, she too
+ascertained that her shutters could not be opened. But Gabriella did
+not go down into the kitchen for hot water to melt the ice from the
+bolts and hinges. She fled back across the cold matting to the
+high-posted big bed and cuddled down solitary into its warmth again,
+tucking the counterpane under her chin and looking out from the pillows
+with eyes as fresh as flowers. Flowers in truth Gabriella's eyes
+were--the closing and disclosing blossoms of a sweet nature. Somehow
+they made you think of earliest spring, of young leaves, of the
+flutings of birds deep within a glade sifted with golden light,
+fragrant with white fragrance. They had their other seasons: their
+summer hours of angry flash and swift downpour; their autumn days of
+still depths and soberness, and autumn nights of long, quiet rainfalls
+when no one knew. One season they lacked: Gabriella's eyes had no
+winter.
+
+Brave spirit! Had nature not inclined her to spring rather than autumn,
+had she not inherited joyousness and the temperamental gayety of the
+well-born, she must long ago have failed, broken down. Behind her were
+generations of fathers and mothers who had laughed heartily all their
+days. The simple gift of wholesome laughter, often the best as often
+the only remedy for so many discomforts and absurdities in life--this
+was perhaps to be accounted among her best psychological heirlooms.
+
+Her first thought on awaking late this morning (for she too had been
+kept awake by the storm) was that there could be no school. And this
+was only Friday, with Saturday and Sunday to follow--three whole
+consecutive days of holiday! Gabriella's spirits invariably rose in a
+storm; her darkest days were her brightest. The weather that tried her
+soul was the weather which was disagreeable, but not disagreeable
+enough to break up school. When she taught, she taught with all her
+powers and did it well; when not teaching, she hated it with every
+faculty and capacity of her being. And to discharge patiently and
+thoroughly a daily hated work--that takes noble blood.
+
+Nothing in the household stirred below. The members of the family had
+remained up far into the night. As for the negroes, they understand how
+to get a certain profit for themselves out of all disturbances of the
+weather. Gabriella was glad of the chance to wait for the house-girl to
+come up and kindle her fire--grateful for the luxury of lying in bed on
+Friday morning, instead of getting up to a farmer's early breakfast,
+when sometimes there were candles on the table to reveal the localities
+of 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 hated
+them in the morning--those early-breakfast candles!
+
+In high spirits, then, with the certainty of a late breakfast and no
+school, she now lay on the pillows, looking across with sparkling eyes
+at last night's little gray ridge of ashes under the bars of her small
+grate. Those hearthstones!--when her bare soles accidentally touched
+one on winter mornings, Gabriella was of the opinion that they were the
+coldest bricks that ever came from a fiery furnace. There was one thing
+in the room still colder: the little cherrywood washstand away over on
+the other side of the big room between the windows,--placed there at
+the greatest possible distance from the fire! Sometimes when she peeped
+down into her wash-pitcher of mornings, the ice bulged up at her like a
+white cannon-ball that had gotten lodged on the way out. She jabbed at
+it with the handle of her toothbrush; or, if her temper got the best of
+her (or the worst), with the poker. Often her last act at night was to
+dry her toothbrush over the embers so that the hair in it would not be
+frozen in the morning.
+
+Gabriella raised her head from the pillows and peeped over at the
+counterpane covering her. It consisted of stripes of different colors,
+starting from a point at the middle of the structure and widening
+toward the four sides. Her feet were tucked away under a bank of plum
+color sprinkled with salt; up her back ran a sort of comet's tail of
+puddled green. Over her shoulder and descending toward her chin, flowed
+a broadening delta of well-beaten egg.
+
+She was thankful for these colors. The favorite hue of the farmer's
+wife was lead. Those hearthstones--lead! The strip of oilcloth covering
+the washstand--lead! The closet in the wall containing her
+things--lead! The stair-steps outside--lead! The porches down
+below--lead! Gabriella sometimes wondered whether this woman might not
+have had lead-colored ancestors.
+
+A pair of recalcitrant feet were now heard mounting the stair: the
+flowers on the pillow closed their petals. When the negro girl knelt
+down before the grate, with her back to the bed and the soles of her
+shoes set up straight side by side like two gray bricks, the eyes were
+softly opened again, Gabriella had never seen a head like this negro
+girl's, that is, never until the autumn before last, when she had come
+out into this neighborhood of plain farming people to teach a district
+school. Whenever she was awake early enough to see this curiosity, she
+never failed to renew her study of it with unflagging zest. It was such
+a mysterious, careful arrangement of knots, and pine cones, and the
+strangest-looking little black sticks wrapped with white packing
+thread, and the whole system of coils seemingly connected with a
+central mental battery, or idea, or plan, within. She studied it now,
+as the fire was being kindled, and the kindler, with inflammatory blows
+of the poker on the bars of the grate, told her troubles over audibly
+to herself: "Set free, and still making fires of winter mornings; how
+was THAT? Where was any freedom in THAT? Her wages? Didn't she work for
+her wages? Didn't she EARN her wages? Then where did freedom come in?"
+
+One must look low for high truth sometimes, as we gather necessary
+fruit on nethermost boughs and dig the dirt for treasure. The
+Anglo-Saxon girl lying in the bed and the young African girl kindling
+her fire--these two, the highest and the humblest types of womanhood in
+the American republic--were inseparably connected in that room that
+morning as children of the same Revolution. It had cost the war of the
+Union, to enable this African girl to cast away the cloth enveloping
+her head--that detested sign of her slavery--and to arrange her hair
+with ancestral taste, the true African beauty sense. As long as she had
+been a slave, she had been compelled by her Anglo-Saxon mistress to
+wear her head-handkerchief; as soon as she was set free, she, with all
+the women of her race in the South, tore the head-handkerchief
+indignantly off. In the same way, it cost the war of the Union to
+enable Gabriella to teach school. She had been set free also, and the
+bandage removed from her liberties. The negress had been empowered to
+demand wages for her toil; the Anglo-Saxon girl had been empowered to
+accept without reproach the wages for hers.
+
+Gabriella's memoirs might be writ large in four parts that would really
+be the history of the United States, just as a slender seam of gold can
+only be explained through the geology of the earth. But they can also
+be writ so small that each volume may be dropped, like certain
+minute-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 from
+Gabriella's birth to the beginning of the Civil War, by which time she
+was fourteen years old: it was fairy tale. These earliest recollections
+went back to herself as a very tiny child living with her mother and
+grandmother in a big white house with green window-shutters, in
+Lexington--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 to
+her bosom and leaving tears on her face or lilylike hands. One day--she
+could not remember very well--but the house had been darkened and the
+servants never for a moment ceased amusing her--one day the house was
+all opened again and Gabriella could not find her mother; and her
+grandmother, everybody else, was kinder to her than ever. She did not
+think what kindness was then, but years afterward she learned perfectly.
+
+Very slowly Gabriella's knowledge began to extend over the house and
+outside it. There were enormous, high-ceiled halls and parlors, and
+bedrooms and bedrooms and bedrooms. There were verandas front and back,
+so long that it took her breath away to run the length of one and
+return. Upstairs, front and back, verandas again, balustraded so that
+little girls could not forget themselves and fall off. The pillars of
+these verandas at the rear of the house were connected by a network of
+wires, and trained up the pillars and branching over the wires were
+coiling twisting vines of wisteria as large as Gabriella's neck. This
+was the sunny southern side; and when the wisteria was blooming,
+Gabriella moved her establishment of playthings out behind those sunlit
+cascades of purple and green, musical sometimes with goldfinches.
+
+The front of the house faced a yard of stately evergreens and great
+tubs of flowers, oleander, crepe myrtle, and pomegranate. Beyond the
+yard, a gravelled carriage drive wound out of sight behind cedars,
+catalpa, and forest trees, shadowing a turfy lawn. At the end of the
+lawn was the great entrance gate and the street of the town, Gabriella
+long knew this approach only by her drives with her grandmother. At the
+rear of the house was enough for her: a large yard, green grazing lots
+for the stable of horses, and best of all a high-fenced garden
+containing everything the heart could desire: vegetables, and flowers;
+summer-houses, and arbors with seats; pumps of cold water, and
+hot-houses of plants and grapes, and fruit trees, and a swing, and
+gooseberry bushes--everything.
+
+In one corner, the ground was too shaded by an old apple tree to be of
+use: they gave this to Gabriella for her garden. She had attached
+particularly to her person a little negress of about the same age--her
+Milly, the color of a ripe gourd. So when in spring the gardener began
+to make his garden, with her grandmother sometimes standing over him,
+directing, Gabriella, taking her little chair to the apple tree,--with
+some pretended needle-work and a real switch,--would set Milly to work
+making hers. Nothing that they put into the earth ever was heard of
+again, though they would sometimes make the same garden over every day
+for a week. So that more than once, forsaking seed, they pulled off the
+tops of green things near by, planted these, and so had a perfect
+garden in an hour.
+
+Then Gabriella, seated under the apple tree, would order Milly to water
+the flowers from the pump; and taking her switch and calling Milly
+close, she would give her a sharp rap or two around the bare legs (for
+that was expected), and tell her that if she didn't stop being so
+trifling, she would sell her South to the plantations. Whereupon Milly,
+injured more in heart than legs, and dropping the watering-pot, would
+begin to bore her dirty fists into her eyes. Then Gabriella would say
+repentantly:--
+
+"No, I won't, Milly! And you needn't work any more to-day. And you can
+have 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 she
+WILL do it sometimes. Our cotton's got to be picked by SOMEBODY, and
+who's to do it but you lazy negroes?"
+
+In those days the apple tree would be blooming, and the petals would
+sift 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 of
+doors 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 exhibit
+was connected with this garden. So long as everything was sour and
+green, she could play there by the hour; but as soon as anything got
+ripe and delicious, the gate with the high latch was shut and she could
+never enter it unguarded. What tears she shed outside the fence as she
+peeped through! When they did take her in, they always held her by the
+hand.
+
+"DON'T hold my hand, Sam," pleadingly to the negro gardener. "It's so
+HOT!"
+
+"You fall down and hurt yourself."
+
+"How absurd, Sam! The idea of my falling down when I am walking along
+slowly!"
+
+"You get lost."
+
+"How can you say anything so amusing as that, Sam! Did I ever get lost
+in here?"
+
+"Snakes bite you."
+
+"Why do you think they'd bite ME, Sam? They have never been known to
+bite 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 harp
+on 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 of
+purple Hamburgs, and of translucent Malagas, big enough to have been an
+armful!
+
+"Just one, Sam, please."
+
+"Make you sick."
+
+"They never make me sick when I eat them in the house. They are good
+for me! One COULDN'T make me sick. I'm sick because you DON'T give it
+to me. Don't I LOOK sick, Sam?"
+
+The time came when Gabriella began to extend her knowledge to the
+country, as she drove out beside her grandmother in the balmy spring
+and early summer afternoons.
+
+"What is that, grandmother?" she would say, pointing with her small
+forefinger 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 is
+what bales all our cotton."
+
+"Oh, grandmother, smell it!"
+
+After this sometimes Gabriella would order the driver to turn off into
+some green lane about sunset and press on till they found a field by
+the way. As soon as they began to pass it, over into their faces would
+be wafted the clean, cooling, velvet-soft, balsam breath of the hemp.
+The carriage would stop, and Gabriella, standing up and facing the
+field, would fill her lungs again and again, smiling at her grandmother
+for 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 early
+summer only. Full summer brought up from their plantations in
+Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, her uncles and the wives and
+children of some of them. All the bedrooms in the big house were
+filled, and Gabriella was nearly lost in the multitude, she being the
+only child of the only daughter of her grandmother. And now what happy
+times there were. The silks, and satins, and laces! The plate, the
+gold, the cut glass! The dinners, the music, the laughter, the wines!
+
+Later, some of her uncles' families might travel on with their servants
+to watering places farther north. But in September all were back again
+under the one broad Kentucky roof, stopping for the beautiful Lexington
+fair, then celebrated all over the land; and for the races--those days
+of the thoroughbred only; and until frost fall should make it safe to
+return to the swamps and bayous, loved by the yellow fever.
+
+When all were departed, sometimes her grandmother, closing the house
+for the winter, would follow one of her sons to his plantation; thence
+later proceeding to New Orleans, at that time the most brilliant of
+American capitals; and so Gabriella would see the Father of Waters, and
+the 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 those
+last deep, rich years of the old social order, was Gabriella's: the
+extravagance, the gayety, the pride, the lovely manners, the
+selfishness 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 over
+fifty years. Everything was ripe, sweet, mellow, dropping, turning
+rotten.
+
+O ye who have young children, if possible give them happy memories!
+Fill their earliest years with bright pictures! A great historian many
+centuries ago wrote it down that the first thing conquered in battle
+are the eyes: the soldier flees from what he sees before him. But so
+often 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 of
+life. The time arrived for Gabriella when the gorgeous fairy tale of
+her childhood was all that she had to sustain her: when it meant
+consolation, courage, fortitude, victory.
+
+A war volume, black, fiery, furious, awful--this comprised the second
+part of her history: it contained the overthrow of half the American
+people, and the downfall of the child princess Gabriella. An idea--how
+negative, nerveless, it looks printed! A little group of four
+ideas--how should they have power of life and death over millions of
+human beings! But say that one is the idea of the right of
+self-government--much loved and fought for all round the earth by the
+Anglo-Saxon race. Say that a second is the idea that with his own
+property a man has a right to do as he pleases: another notion that has
+been warred over, world without end. Let these two ideas run in the
+blood and passions of the Southern people. Say that a third idea is
+that of national greatness (the preservation of the Union), another
+idol of this nation-building race. Say that the fourth idea is that of
+evolving humanity, or, at least, that slave-holding societies must be
+made non-slave-holding--if not peaceably, then by force of arms. Let
+these two ideas be running in the blood and passions of the Northern
+people. Bring the first set of ideas and the second set together in a
+struggle for supremacy. By all mankind it is now known what the result
+was for the nation. What these ideas did for one little girl, living in
+Lexington, Kentucky, was part of that same sad, sublime history.
+
+They ordered the grandmother across the lines, as a wealthy sympathizer
+and political agent of the Southern cause; they seized her house,
+confiscated it, used it as officers' headquarters: in the end they
+killed her with grief and care; they sent her sons, every man of them,
+into the Southern armies, ravaged their plantations, liberated their
+slaves, left them dead on the fields of battle, or wrecked in health,
+hope, fortune. Gabriella, placed in a boarding-school in Lexington at
+that last hurried parting with her grandmother, stayed there a year.
+Then the funds left to her account in bank were gone; she went to live
+with near relatives; and during the remaining years of the war was
+first in one household, then another, of kindred or friends all of whom
+contended for the privilege of finding her a home. But at the close of
+the war, Gabriella, issuing from the temporary shelters given her
+during the storm, might have been seen as a snow-white pigeon flying
+lost and bewildered across a black cloud covering half the sky.
+
+The third volume--the Peace Book in which there was no Peace: this was
+the beginning of Gabriella, child of the Revolution. She did not now
+own a human being except herself; could give orders to none but
+herself; 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 another
+had wrought the overthrow of slavery, she had now been placed with a
+generation unique in history: a generation of young Southern girls, of
+gentle birth and breeding, of the most delicate nature, who, heiresses
+in slaves and lands at the beginning of the war, were penniless and
+unrecognized wards of the federal government at its close, their slaves
+having been made citizens and their plantations laid waste. On these
+unprepared and innocent girls thus fell most heavily not only the
+mistakes and misdeeds of their own fathers and mothers but the common
+guilt of the whole nation, and particularly of New England, as respects
+the original traffic in human souls. The change in the lives of these
+girls was as sudden and terrible as if one had entered a brilliant
+ballroom and in the voice of an overseer ordered the dancers to go as
+they were to the factories.
+
+To the factories many of them went, in a sense: to hard work of some
+sort--to wage-earning and wage-taking: sometimes becoming the mainstay
+of aged or infirm parents, the dependence of younger brothers and
+sisters. If the history of it all is ever written, it will make
+pitiful, heroic, noble reading.
+
+The last volume of Gabriella's memoirs showed her in this field of
+struggle--of new growth to suit the newer day. It was so unlike the
+first volume as to seem no continuation of her own life. It began one
+summer morning about two years after the close of the war--an interval
+which she had spent in various efforts at self-help, at self-training.
+
+On that morning, pale and trembling, but resolute, her face heavily
+veiled, she might have been seen on her way to Water Street in
+Lexington--a street she had heard of all her life and had been careful
+never to enter except to take or to alight from a train at the station.
+Passing quickly along until she reached a certain ill-smelling little
+stairway which opened on the foul sidewalk, she mounted it, knocked at
+a low black-painted plank door, and entered a room which was a
+curiosity shop. There she was greeted by an elderly gentleman, who
+united 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 her
+grandmother and her uncles: they had been connoisseurs; they had for
+years bought liberally of his mustard. Her uncles had used it first on
+their dinner tables as a condiment and afterward on their foreheads and
+stomachs as a plaster. They had never failed to praise it to his
+face--both for its power to draw an appetite and for its power to
+withdraw an ache. In turn he now praised them and asked the easiest
+questions. Gabriella, whose knowledge of arithmetic was as a grain of
+mustard seed, and who spoke beautiful English, but could not have
+parsed, "John, come here!"--received a first-class certificate for the
+sake 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 set
+out to a remote neighborhood, where, after many failures otherwise, she
+had secured a position to teach a small country school. She was glad
+that it was distant; she had a feeling that the farther away it was
+from Lexington, the easier it would be to teach.
+
+Nearly all that interminable day, the mechanism of the stage and the
+condition of the pike (much fresh-cracked limestone on it) administered
+to Gabriella's body such a massage as is not now known to medical
+science. But even this was as nothing in comparison to the rack on
+which she stretched every muscle of her mind. What did she know about
+teaching? What kind of people would they be?
+
+Late that mild September afternoon she began to find out The stage
+stopped 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 of
+butternut jeans and a yellow straw hat with the wide brim turned up
+like a cow's horns.
+
+"Have you got my school-teacher in there?" he called out in a voice
+that carried like a heavy, sweet-sounding bell. "And did you bring me
+them things I told you to get?"
+
+"Which is she?" he asked as he came over to the stage window and peered
+in at the several travellers.
+
+"How do you do, Miss Gabriella?" he said, taking his hat clear off his
+big, honest, hairy, brown head and putting in a hand that would have
+held several of Gabriella's. "I'm glad to see you; and the children
+have been crying for you. Now, if you will just let me help you to a
+seat in the buggy, and hold the lines for a minute while I get some
+things Joe's brought me, we'll jog along home. I'm glad to see you. I
+been hearing a heap about you from the superintendent."
+
+Gabriella already loved him! When they were seated in the buggy, he
+took up six-sevenths of the space. She was so close to him that it
+scared her--so close that when he turned his head on his short, thick
+neck to look at her, he could hardly see her.
+
+"He has a little slip of a wife," explained Gabriella to herself. "I'm
+in 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 to
+nestle 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 from
+pasture, with long, ragged hoofs, burrs in mane and tail, and a wild
+desire to get home to her foal; so that she fled across the
+country--bridges, ditches, everything, frantic with maternal passion.
+One circumstance made for Gabriella's security: the buggy tilted over
+toward him so low, that she could not conveniently roll out: instead
+she 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. They
+had all heard from the superintendent what a fine teacher she was (not
+for 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 she
+were an old friend--a sort of old sweetheart of his whom for some
+reason 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 away
+off a big comfortable-looking two-story brick dwelling with
+white-washed fences around it and all sorts of white-washed houses on
+one side or the other--a plain, sweet, country, Kentucky home, God
+bless it! The whiteness won Gabriella at once; and with the whiteness
+went other things just as good: the assurance everywhere of thrift,
+comfort. Not a weed in sight, but September bluegrass, deep flowing, or
+fresh-ploughed fields or clean stubble. Every rail in its place on
+every fence; every gate well swung. Everything in sight in the way of
+live stock seemed to Gabriella either young or just old enough. The
+very stumps they passed looked healthy.
+
+Her conjecture had been correct: the slender slip of a woman met her at
+the side porch a little diffidently, with a modest smile; then kissed
+her on the mouth and invited her in. The supper table was already set
+in the middle of the room; and over in one corner was a big white
+bed--with a trundle bed (not visible) under it. Gabriella "took off her
+things" and laid them on the snowy counterpane; and the housewife told
+her she would let the children entertain her for a few minutes while
+she saw about supper.
+
+The children accepted the agreement. They swarmed about her as about a
+new cake. Two or three of the youngest began to climb over her as they
+climbed over the ice-house, to sit on her as they sat on the stiles.
+The oldest produced their geographies and arithmetics and showed her
+how far they had gone. (They had gone a great deal farther than
+Gabriella!) No one paid the least attention to any one else, or stood
+in awe of anything or anybody: Fear had never come to that Jungle!
+
+But trouble must enter into the affairs of this world, and it entered
+that night into Gabriella.
+
+At supper the farmer, having picked out for her the best piece of the
+breast of the fried chicken, inquired in a voice which implied how
+cordially 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 teacher
+was 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 his
+head 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 into
+Gabriella's cup and was in the act of pouring the coffee. She hastily
+emptied the sugar back into the sugar-dish and asked with look of
+dismay:--
+
+"Will you have sugar in your coffee?"
+
+The situation grew worse at breakfast. In a voice to which confidence
+had been mysteriously restored during the night--a voice that seemed to
+issue from a honey-comb and to drip sweetness all the way across the
+table, 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 announcing
+that 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 feeling
+itself deeply wounded because perfectly innocent, burst into frantic
+crying.
+
+Gabriella could have outcried the baby! She resolved that if they had
+it for dinner, she would take it though it were the dessert. A moment
+later 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, but
+resentful. But every child now determined to watch and see what else
+she didn't take. They watched in vain: she took everything. So that in
+a few days they recovered their faith in her and resumed their
+crawling. Gabriella had never herself realized how many different
+routes and stations she had in her own body until it had been thus
+travelled 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 made
+only two demands: that she eat whatever was put on the table and love
+them. Whatever was put on the table was good; and they were all
+lovable. They were one live, disorderly menagerie of nothing but love.
+But love is not the only essential of life; and its phenomena can be
+trying.
+
+Here, then, in this remote neighborhood of plain farmers, in a little
+district school situated on a mud road, Gabriella began alone and
+without training her new life,--attempt of the Southern girl to make
+herself self-supporting in some one of the professions,--sign of a vast
+national movement among the women of her people. In her surroundings
+and ensuing struggles she had much use for that saving sense of humor
+which had been poured into her veins out of the deep clear wells of her
+ancestors; need also of that radiant, bountiful light which still fell
+upon her from the skies of the past; but more than these as staff to
+her young hands, cup to her lips, lamp to her feet, oil to her daily
+bruises, rest to her weary pillow, was reliance on Higher Help. For the
+years--and they seemed to her many and wide--had already driven
+Gabriella, as they have driven countless others of her sex, out of the
+cold, 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. She
+was now fitted for any of those merciful and heroic services which keep
+fresh on earth the records of devoted women. The inner supporting stem
+of her nature had never been snapped; but it had been bruised enough to
+give off life-fragrance. Adversity had ennobled her. In truth, she had
+so weathered the years of a Revolution which had left her as destitute
+as it had left her free, that she was like Perdita's rosemary: a flower
+which keeps seeming and savor all the winter long. The North Wind had
+bolted about her in vain his whitest snows; and now the woods were
+turning green.
+
+It was merely in keeping with Gabriella's nature, therefore, that as
+she grew to know the people among whom she had come to stay, their
+homes, their family histories, one household and one story should have
+engaged her deep interest: David's parents and David's career. As she
+drove about the country, visiting with the farmer's wife, there had
+been pointed out a melancholy remnant of a farm, desperately resisting
+absorption by some one of three growing estates touching it on three
+sides. She had been taken to call on the father and mother; had seen
+the poverty within doors, the half-ruined condition of the outhouses;
+had heard of their son, now away at the university; of how they had
+saved and he had struggled. A proud father it was who now told of his
+son's magnificent progress already at college.
+
+"Ah," she exclaimed, thinking it over in her room that night, "this is
+something worth hearing! Here is the hero in life! Among these
+easy-going people this solitary struggler. I, too, am one now; I can
+understand him."
+
+During the first year of her teaching, there had developed in her a
+noble desire to see David; but one long to be disappointed. He did not
+return home during his vacation; she went away during hers. The autumn
+following he was back in college; she at her school. Then the Christmas
+holidays and his astounding, terrible home-coming, put out of college
+and church. As soon as she heard of that awful downfall, Gabriella felt
+a desire to go straight to him. She did not reason or hesitate: she
+went.
+
+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 and
+David had been jostled violently together. They were the children of
+two revolutions, separate yet having a common end: she produced by the
+social revolution of the New World, which overthrew mediaeval slavery;
+he by the intellectual revolution of the Old World, which began to put
+forth scientific law, but in doing this brought on one of the greatest
+ages of religious doubt. So that both were early vestiges of the same
+immeasurable race evolution, proceeding along converging lines. She,
+living on the artificial summits of a decaying social order, had
+farthest to fall, in its collapse, ere she reached the natural earth;
+he, toiling at the bottom, had farthest to rise before he could look
+out upon the plains of widening modern thought and man's evolving
+destiny. Through her fall and his rise, they had been brought to a
+common level. But on that level all that had befallen her had driven
+her as out of a blinding storm into the church, the seat and asylum of
+religion; all that had befallen him had driven him out of the churches
+as the fortifications of theology. She had been drawn to that part of
+worship which lasts and is divine; he had been repelled by the part
+that passes and is human.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+Although Gabriella had joyously greeted the day, as bringing exemption
+from stifling hours in school, her spirits had drooped ere evening with
+monotony. There were no books in use among the members of that lovable
+household except school-books; they were too busy with the primary joys
+of life to notice the secondary resources of literature. She had no
+pleasant sewing. To escape the noise of the pent-up children, she must
+restrict herself to that part of the house which comprised her room. A
+walk out of doors was impracticable, although she ventured once into
+the yard to study more closely the marvels of the ice-work; and to the
+edge of the orchard, to ascertain how the apple trees were bearing up
+under those avalanches of frozen silver slipped from the clouds.
+
+So there were empty hours for her that day; and always the emptiest are
+the heaviest--those unfilled baskets of time which strangely become
+lightest 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 whose
+movements about the house she vainly tried to follow in imagination.
+
+Two months of close association with him in that dull country
+neighborhood had wrought great changes in the simple feeling with which
+she had sought him at first. He had then been to her only a Prodigal
+who had squandered his substance, tried to feed his soul on the swinish
+husks of Doubt, and returning to his father's house unrepentant, had
+been admitted yet remained rejected: a Prodigal not of the flesh and
+the world but of the spirit and the Lord. But what has ever interested
+the heart of woman as a prodigal of some kind?
+
+At other times he was figured by her sympathies as a young Samaritan
+gone travelling into a Divine country but fallen among spiritual
+thieves, who had stripped him of his seamless robe of Faith and left
+him bruised by Life's wayside: a maltreated Christ-neighbor whom it was
+her duty to succor if she could. But a woman's nursing of a man's
+wound--how often it becomes the nursing of the wounded! Moreover,
+Gabriella had now long been aware of what she had become to her
+prodigal, her Samaritan; she saw the truth and watched it growing from
+day to day; for he was incapable of disguises. But often what effect
+has such watching upon the watcher, a watcher who is alone in the
+world? So that while she fathomed with many feminine soundings all that
+she was to David, Gabriella did not dream what David had become to her.
+
+Shortly after nightfall, when she heard his heavy tread on the porch
+below, the tedium of the day instantly vanished. Happiness rose in her
+like a clear fountain set suddenly playing--rose to her eyes--bathed
+her in refreshing vital emotions.
+
+"I am so glad you came," she said as she entered the parlor, gave him
+her hand, and stood looking up into his softened rugged face, at his
+majestical head, which overawed her a little always. Large as was the
+mould in which nature had cast his body, this seemed to her dwarfed by
+the inner largeness of the man, whose development she could note as now
+going forward almost visibly from day to day: he had risen so far
+already and was still so young.
+
+He did not reply to her greeting except with a look. In matters which
+involved his feeling for her, he was habitually hampered and ill at
+ease; only on general subjects did she ever see him master of his
+resources. Gabriella had fallen into the habit of looking into his eyes
+for the best answers: there he always spoke not only with ideas but
+emotions: a double speech much cared for by woman.
+
+They seated themselves on opposite sides of the wide deep fire-place: a
+grate 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 do
+YOU 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: it
+suggested his being kind because she had been kind; and a woman likes
+nothing as reward, everything as tribute.
+
+"And now if the apple trees are only not killed!" she exclaimed
+joyously, changing the subject.
+
+"Why the apple trees?"
+
+"If you had been here last spring, you would have understood. When they
+bloom, they are mine, I take possession." After a moment she added:
+"They bring back the recollection of such happy times--springs long
+ago. 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 an
+undertone, looking into the fire.
+
+Gabriella reflected how impossible this would have been: the thought
+caused her sharp pain.
+
+Some time later, David, who had appeared more and more involved in some
+inward 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 to
+tell a story he is secretly fond of.
+
+"Do you remember standing on the steps of a church the Friday evening
+before Christmas--a little after dark?"
+
+Gabriella's eyes began to express remembrance. "A wagon-load of cedar
+had just been thrown out on the sidewalk, the sexton was carrying it
+into 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 at
+his difficulty. Not unkindly," he added, smiling not unkindly himself.
+
+"And that was you? This explains why I have always believed I had seen
+you 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 far
+from a happy one.
+
+"That day," continued David, quickly grave also, "that day I saw my
+professors and pastor for the last time; it ended me as a Bible
+student. I had left the University and the scene of my trial only a
+little while before."
+
+He rose as he concluded and took a turn across the room. Then he faced
+her, smiling a little sadly.
+
+"Once I might have thought all that Providential. I mean, seeing the
+faces 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, of
+her influence over him. It was embarrassing; it declared so much,
+assumed so much, that had never been declared or assumed in any other
+way. But her stripped and beaten young Samaritan was no labyrinthine
+courtier, bescented and bedraped and bedyed with worldliness and
+conventions: he came ever in her presence naked of soul. It was this
+that empowered her to take the measure of his feeling for her: it had
+its effect.
+
+David returned to his chair and looked across with a mixture of
+hesitancy 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 not
+realize 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 been
+afraid of."
+
+"Why should you have been?"
+
+"I dreaded to know how you might feel. It has caused a difficulty with
+every one so far. It separated me from my friends among the Bible
+students. It separated me from my professors, my pastor. It has
+alienated 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 a
+question with me how far your toleration will go--what is back of your
+toleration! We tolerate so much in people who are merely
+acquaintances--people that we do not care particularly for and that we
+are never to have anything to do with in life. But if the tie begins to
+be closer, then the things we tolerated at a distance--what becomes of
+them then?"
+
+He was looking at her steadily, and she dropped her eyes. This was
+another one of the Prodigal's assumptions--but never before put so
+pointedly.
+
+"So I have feared that when I myself told you what I believe and what I
+do not believe, it might be the end of me. And when you learned my
+feelings 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 times
+across 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 him
+glimpses of the world in which she had been reared, he taking her into
+his world which was equally unfamiliar--on this subject silence between
+them had never been broken. She had often sought to pass the guard he
+placed around this tragical episode but had always been turned away.
+The only original ground of her interest in him, therefore, still
+remained a background, obscure and unexplored. She regretted this for
+many reasons. Her belief was that he was merely passing through a phase
+of religious life not uncommon with those who were born to go far in
+mental travels before they settled in their Holy Land. She believed it
+would be over the sooner if he had the chance to live it out in
+discussion; and she herself offered the only possibility of this.
+Gabriella was in a position to know by experience what it means in
+hours of trouble to need the relief of companionship. Ideas, she had
+learned, long shut up in the mind tend to germinate and take root.
+There had been discords which had ceased sounding in her own ear as
+soon as they were poured into another.
+
+"I have always hoped," she repeated, as he seated himself, "that you
+would talk with me about these things." And then to divert the
+conversation into less difficult channels, she added:--
+
+"As to what you may think of my beliefs, I have no fear; they need not
+be discussed and they cannot be attacked."
+
+"You are an Episcopalian," he suggested hesitatingly. "I do not wish to
+be rude, but--your church has its dogmas."
+
+"There is not a dogma of my church that I have ever thought of for a
+moment: 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 the
+whole history of the world's opinions, no dogma of any weight has ever
+originated with a woman; wherein, as in many other ways, she shows
+points of superiority in her intellect. It is a man who tries to
+apprehend God through his logic and psychology; a woman understands Him
+better through emotions and deeds. It is the men who are concerned
+about the cubits, the cedar wood, the Urim and Thummim of the
+Tabernacle; woman walks straight into the Holy of Holies. Men
+constructed the Cross; women wept for the Crucified. It was a man--a
+Jew defending his faith in his own supernatural revelation--who tried
+to ram a sponge of vinegar into the mouth of Christ, dying; it was
+women who gathered at the sepulchre of Resurrection. If Christ could
+have had a few women among his Apostles, there might have been more of
+His religion in the world and fewer creeds barnacled on the World's
+Ship of Souls.
+
+"How can you remain in your church without either believing or
+disbelieving its dogmas?" asked David, squarely.
+
+"My church is the altar of Christ and the house of God," replied
+Gabriella, simply. "And so is any other church." That was all the logic
+she had and all the faith she needed; beyond that limit she did not
+even 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 reverence
+for her.
+
+"What I regret is that you should have thrown away your religion on
+account of your difficulties with theology. Nothing more awful could
+have befallen you than that."
+
+"It was the churches that made the difficulties," said David, "I did
+not. But there is more than theology in it. You do not know what I
+think about religions--revelations--inspirations--man's place in
+nature."
+
+"What DO you think?" she asked eagerly. "I suppose now I shall hear
+something about those great books."
+
+She put herself at ease in her chair like one who prepares to listen
+quietly.
+
+"Shall I tell you how the whole argument runs as I have arranged it? I
+shall 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 call
+the physical universe as a whole--our heavens--the stars--and discusses
+the little that man knows about it. I used to think the earth was the
+centre of this universe, the most important world in it, on account of
+Man. That is what the ancient Hebrews thought. In this room float
+millions of dust-particles too small to be seen by us. To say that the
+universe is made for the sake of the earth would be something like
+saying that the earth was created for the sake of one of these
+particles of its own dust."
+
+He paused to see how she received this.
+
+"That ought to be a great book," she said approvingly. "I should like
+to study it."
+
+"The second takes up that small part of the universe which we call our
+solar system and sums up the little we have learned regarding it. I
+used to think the earth the most important part of the solar system, on
+account of Man. So the earliest natural philosophers believed. That is
+like 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 see
+THAT."
+
+"The third detaches for study one small planet of that system--our
+earth--and reviews our latest knowledge of that: as to how it has been
+evolved into its present stage of existence through other stages
+requiring unknown millions and millions and millions of years. Once I
+thought it was created in six days. So it is written. Do you believe
+that?"
+
+There was silence.
+
+"What is the next book?" she asked.
+
+"The fourth," said David, with a twinkle in his eye at her refusal to
+answer his question, "takes up the history of the earth's surface--its
+crust--the layers of this--as one might study the skin of an apple as
+large as the globe. In the course of an almost infinite time, as we
+measure things, it discovers the appearance of Life on this crust, and
+then tries to follow the progress of Life from the lowest forms upward,
+always upward, to Man: another time infinitely vast, according to our
+standards."
+
+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 myriads
+of forms of Life that have grown on the earth's crust, and gives the
+best of what we know of him viewed as a species of animal. Does this
+tire you?"
+
+Gabriella made the only gesture of displeasure he had ever seen.
+
+"Now," said David, straightening himself up, "I draw near to the root
+of the matter. A sixth book takes up what we call the civilization of
+this animal species, Man. It subdivides his civilization into different
+civilizations. It analyzes these civilizations, where it is possible,
+into their arts, governments, literatures, religions, and other
+elements. And the seventh," he resumed after a grave pause,
+scrutinizing her face most eagerly, "the seventh takes up just one part
+of his civilizations--the religions of the globe--and gives an account
+of these. It describes how they have grown and flourished, how some
+have passed as absolutely away as the civilizations that produced them.
+It teaches that those religions were as natural a part of those
+civilizations as their civil laws, their games, their wars, their
+philosophy; that the religious books of these races, which they
+themselves often thought inspired revelations, were no more inspired
+and no more revelations than their secular books; that Buddha's faith
+or Brahma's were no more direct from God than Buddhistic or Brahman
+temples were from God; that the Koran is no more inspired than Moorish
+architecture is inspired; that the ancient religion of the Jewish race
+stands on the same footing as the other great religions of the
+globe--as to being Supernatural; that the second religion of the
+Hebrews, starting out of them, but rejected by them, the Christian
+religion, the greatest of all to us, takes its place with the others as
+a perfectly natural expression of the same human desire and effort to
+find God and to worship Him through all the best that we know in
+ourselves and of the universe outside us."
+
+"Ah," said Gabriella, suddenly leaning forward in her chair, "that is
+the book that has done all the harm."
+
+"One moment! All these books," continued David, for he was aroused now
+and did not pause to consider her passionate protest, "have this in
+common: that they try to discover and to trace Law. The universe--it is
+the expression of Law. Our solar system--it has been formed by Law, The
+sun--the driving force of Law has made it. Our earth--Law has shaped
+that; brought Life out of it; evolved Life on it from the lowest to the
+highest; lifted primeval Man to modern Man; out of barbarism developed
+civilization; out of prehistoric religions, historic religions. And
+this one order--method--purpose--ever running and unfolding through the
+universe, is all that we know of Him whom we call Creator, God, our
+Father. So that His reign is the Reign of Law. He, Himself, is the
+author of the Law that we should seek Him. We obey, and our seekings
+are 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 the
+Egyptians, of the Greeks, of the Romans, of all men. But if you ask
+whether I believe what the Hebrews wrote of God, or what any other age
+or people thought of God, I say 'No.' I believe what the best thought
+of my own age thinks of Him in the light of man's whole past and of our
+greater 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 be
+interrupted, "I know of no book that has undertaken to number them.
+They, too, are part of Man's nature and civilization, of his never
+ceasing search. But they are merely what he thinks of God--never
+anything more. They often contain the highest thought of which he is
+capable in his time and place; but the awful mistake and cruelty of
+them is that they have regularly been put forth as the voice of God
+Himself, authoritative, inviolable, and unchanging. An assemblage of
+men have a perfect right to turn a man out of their church on
+theological grounds; but they have no right to do it in the name of
+God. With as much propriety a man might be expelled from a political
+party in the name of God. In the long life of any one of the great
+religions of the globe, how many brief theologies have grown up under
+it like annual plants under a tree! How many has the Christian religion
+itself sprouted, nourished, and trampled down as dead weeds! What do we
+think now of the Christian theology of the tenth century? of the
+twelfth? of the fifteenth? In the nineteenth century alone, how many
+systems of theology have there been? In the Protestantism of the United
+States, how many are there to-day? Think of the names they bear--older
+and newer! According to founders, and places, and sources, and
+contents, 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 little
+like Polonius," said David, stopping suddenly, "but there is no
+humor in it! One great lesson in the history of them all is not to be
+neglected: that through them also runs the great Law of Evolution, of
+the widening thoughts of men; so that now, in civilized countries at
+least, the churches persecute to the death no longer. You know what the
+Egyptian Priesthood would have done with me at my trial. What the
+Mediaeval hierarchy would have done. What the Protestant or the
+Catholic theology of two centuries ago might have done. Now mankind is
+developing better ideas of these little arrangements of human
+psychology on the subject of God, though the churches still try to
+enforce them in His name. But the time is coming when the churches will
+be deserted by all thinking men, unless they cease trying to uphold, as
+the teachings of God, mere creeds of their ecclesiastical founders.
+Very few men reject all belief in God; and it is no man's right to
+inquire in what any man's belief consists; men do reject and have a
+right to reject what some man writes out as the eternal truth of the
+matter."
+
+"And now," he said, turning to her sorrowfully, "that is the best or
+the worst of what I believe--according as one may like it or not like
+it. I see all things as a growth, a sublime unfolding by the Laws of
+God. The race ever rises toward Him. The old things which were its best
+once die off from it as no longer good. Its charity grows, its justice
+grows. All the nobler, finer elements of its spirit come forth more and
+more--a continuous advance along the paths of Law. And the better the
+world, the larger its knowledge, the easier its faith in Him who made
+it and who leads it on. The development of Man is itself the great
+Revelation of Him! But I have studied these things ignorantly, only a
+little while. I am at the beginning of my life, and hope to grow. Still
+I 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 stuff
+of martyrs and was prepared to stand by his faith at the cost of all
+things.
+
+The silence in the room lasted. Her feeling for him was so much deeper
+than all this--so centred, not in what his faith was to her but in what
+HE was to her, that she did not trust herself to speak. He was not on
+trial in these matters in the least: without his knowing it, he had
+been on trial in many other ways for a long time.
+
+He misunderstood her silence, read wrongly her expression which was
+obeying with some severity the need she felt to conceal what she had no
+right 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, it
+was the face she had first seen in the dark street. It had stopped her
+singing then; it drew an immediate response from her now. She crossed
+over to him and took one of his hands in both of hers. Her cheeks were
+flushed, her voice trembled.
+
+"I am not your judge," she said, "and in all this there is only one
+thing that is too sad, too awful, for me to accept. I am sorry you
+should have been misled into believing that the Christian religion is
+nothing more than one of the religions of the world, and Christ merely
+one of its religious teachers. I wish with all my strength you believed
+as you once believed, that the Bible is a direct Revelation from God,
+making known to us, beyond all doubt, the Resurrection of the dead, the
+Immortality of the Soul, in a better world than this, and the presence
+with us of a Father who knows our wants, pities our weakness, and
+answers 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 a
+woman, and these questions never trouble us; but is it not a common
+occurrence that men who think deeply on such mysteries pass through
+their period of doubt?"
+
+"But suppose I never pass through mine! You have not answered my
+question," he said determinedly. "Does this make no difference in your
+feeling 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 either
+with 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 then
+went out to get his overcoat.
+
+"Bring your things in here," she said, "it is cold in the hall. And
+wrap up warmly! That is more important than all the Genevan and the
+homiletical!"
+
+He bade her good night, subdued with happiness that seemed to blot out
+the troublous past, to be the beginning of new life. New happiness
+brought new awkwardness:--
+
+"This was not my regular night," he said threateningly. "I came
+to-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 is
+best to be through with suffering."
+
+He looked as if cold water and hot water had been thrown on him at the
+same time: he received shocks of different kinds and was doubtful as to
+the 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 thinks
+about when he begins to probe his Destiny!"
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+David slept peacefully that night, like a man who has reached the end
+of long suspense. When he threw his shutters open late, he found that
+the storm had finished its work and gone and that the weather had
+settled stinging cold. The heavens were hyacinth, the ground white with
+snow; and the sun, day-lamp of that vast ceiling of blue, made the
+earth 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, the
+cruelty."
+
+All day then those three: the hyacinthine sky, the flashing lamp, the
+white earth, with not one crystal thawing.
+
+It being Saturday, there was double work for him. He knocked up the
+wood for that day and for Sunday also, packed and stored it; cut double
+the quantity of oats; threw over twice the usual amount of fodder. The
+shocks were buried. He had hard kicking to do before he reached the
+rich brown fragrant stalks. Afterwards he made paths through the snow
+about the house for his mother; to the dairy, to the hen-house. In the
+wooden monotony of her life an interruption in these customary visits
+would have been to her a great loss. The snow being over the cook's
+shoe-tops, he took a basket and dug the vegetables out of the holes in
+the garden.
+
+In the afternoon he had gone to the pond in the woods to cut a drinking
+place 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 the
+stable lot, the one of their neighbors who was causing him so much
+trouble about the buying of the farm. He stopped hot with anger and
+watched him.
+
+In those years a westward movement was taking place among the
+Kentuckians--a sad exodus. Many families rendered insolvent or bankrupt
+by the war and the loss of their slaves, while others interspersed
+among them had grown richer by Government contracts, were now being
+bought out, forced out, by debt or mortgage, and were seeking new homes
+where lay cheaper lands and escape from the suffering of living on,
+ruined, amid old prosperous acquaintances. It was a profound historic
+disturbance of population, destined later on to affect profoundly many
+younger commonwealths. This was the situation now bearing heavily on
+David's father, on three sides of whose fragmentary estate lay rich
+neighbors, one of whom especially desired it.
+
+The young man threw his axe over his shoulder again and took a line
+straight 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 reduce
+him to this want."
+
+He felt sure that this pressure upon his father lay in part back of the
+feeling of his parents toward him. His expulsion from college and their
+belief that he was a failure; the fact that for three years repairs had
+been neglected and improvements allowed to wait, in order that all
+possible revenues might be collected for him; even these caused them
+less acute distress than the fear that as a consequence they should now
+be forced so late in life to make that mournful pilgrimage into strange
+regions. David was saddened to think that ever at his father's side sat
+his mother, irritating him by dropping all day into his ear the half
+idle, half intentional words which are the water that wears out the
+rock.
+
+The young man walked in a straight line toward the house, determined to
+ascertain the reason of this last visit, and to have out the
+long-awaited talk with his father. He reached the yard gate, then
+paused and wheeled abruptly toward the barn.
+
+"Not to-day," he said, thinking of Gabriella and of his coming visit to
+her now but a few hours off. "To-morrow! Day after to-morrow! Any time
+after this! But no quarrels to-day!" and his face softened.
+
+Before the barn door, where the snow had been tramped down by the stock
+and 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 threw
+open the barn doors, a few more, shyer still, darted swiftly into
+hiding. He heard the quick heavy flap of wings on the joists of the
+oats loft overhead, and a hawk swooped out the back door and sailed low
+away.
+
+The barn had become a battle-field of hunger and life. This was the
+second day of famine--all seeds being buried first under ice and now
+under snow; swift hunger sending the littler ones to this granary, the
+larger following to prey on them. To-night there would be owls and in
+the darkness tragedies. In the morning, perhaps, he would find a
+feather which had floated from a breast. A hundred years ago, he
+reflected, the wolves would have gathered here also and the cougar and
+the wildcat for bigger game.
+
+It was sunset as he left the stable, his work done. Beside the yard
+gate there stood a locust tree, and on a bough of this, midway up, for
+he never goes to the tree-tops at this season, David saw a cardinal. He
+was sitting with his breast toward the clear crimson sky; every twig
+around him silver filigree; the whole tree glittering with a million
+gems of rose and white, gold and green; and wherever a fork, there a
+hanging of snow. The bird's crest was shot up. He had come forth to
+look abroad upon this strange wreck of nature and peril to his kind.
+David had scarcely stopped before him when with a quick shy movement he
+dived down into one of his ruined winter fortresses-a cedar dismembered
+and flattened out, never to rise again.
+
+The supper that evening was a very quiet one. David felt that his
+father's eyes were often on him reproachfully; and that his mother's
+were approvingly on his father's. Time and again during the meal the
+impulse 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 of
+Gabriella restrained him. It was for peace; and his heart shut out all
+discord from around that new tenderer figure of her which had come
+forth within him this day.
+
+Soon even the trouble at home was forgotten; he was on his way through
+the 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 her
+library of the mind; and deep joy she drew from its invisible volumes.
+She had transported a fine collection of the heroes and heroines of
+good fiction (Gabriella, according to the usage of her class and time,
+had never read any but standard works). These, when the earlier years
+of adversity came on, had been her second refuge from the world:
+religion was the first. Now they were the means by which she returned
+to the world in imagination. The failure to gather together so durable
+a company of friends leaves every mind the more destitute--especially a
+woman's, which has greater need to live upon ideals, and cannot always
+find these in actual life. Then there were short poems and parts of
+long poems, which were as texts out of a high and beautiful Gospel of
+Nature. One of these was on the snowstorm; and this same morning her
+memory long was busy, fitting the poem within her mind to the scenery
+around 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: that
+masonry out of an unseen quarry, that frolic architecture of the snow,
+nightwork of the North Wind, fierce artificer. In a few hours he had
+mimicked with wild and savage fancy the structures which human art can
+scarce rear, stone by stone, in an age: white bastions curved with
+projected roof round every windward stake or tree or door; the gateway
+overtopped with tapering turrets; coop and kennel hung mockingly with
+Parian wreaths; a swanlike form investing the hidden thorn.
+
+From one upper window under the blue sky in the distance she could see
+what the poet had never beheld: a field of hemp shocks looking like a
+winter camp, dazzlingly white. The scene brought to her mind some
+verses 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-awakened
+happiness. Had Gabriella been some strong-minded, uncompromising New
+England woman, she might have ended her association with David the
+night 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, that
+she 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 no
+thought of rejecting the whole on account of some peculiarity in one of
+its parts; the white flock was more to her than one dark member.
+Inexpressibly dear and sacred as was her own church, her own faith, she
+had never been taught to estimate a man primarily with reference to
+his. What was his family, how he stood in his profession, his honorable
+character, his manners, his manhood--these were what Gabriella had
+always been taught to look for first in a man.
+
+In many other ways than in his faith and doubt David was a new type of
+man to her. He was the most religious, the only religious, one she had
+ever known--a new spiritual growth arising out of his people as a young
+oak out of the soil. Had she been familiar with the Greek idea, she
+might have called him a Kentucky autochthon. It was the first time also
+that she had ever encountered in a Kentuckian the type of student
+mind--that fitness and taste for scholarship which sometimes moves so
+unobtrusively and rises so high among that people, but is usually
+unobserved unless discovered pre-eminent and commanding far from the
+confines of the state.
+
+Touching his scepticism she looked upon him still as she had thought of
+him at first,--as an example of a sincere soul led astray for a time
+only. Strange as were his views (and far stranger they seemed in those
+years than now), she felt no doubt that when the clouds marshalled
+across his clear vision from the minds of others had been withdrawn, he
+would once more behold the Sun of Righteousness as she did. Gabriella
+as by intuition reasoned that a good life most often leads to a belief
+in the Divine Goodness; that as we understand in others only what we
+are in ourselves, so it is the highest elements of humanity that must
+be relied upon to believe in the Most High: and of David's lofty nature
+she possessed the whole history of his life as evidence.
+
+Her last act, then, the night before had been, in her nightgown, on her
+knees, to offer up a prayer that he might be saved from the influences
+of false teachers and guided back to the only Great One. But when a
+girl, with all the feelings which belong to her at that hour, seeks
+this pure audience and sends upward the name of a man on her spotless
+prayers, 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 itself
+was exhilarating. It spread around her an enchanted land. It buried out
+of sight in the yard and stable lots all mire, all ugly things. This
+ennoblement of eternal objects reacted with comic effect on the
+interior of the house itself; outside it was a marble palace,
+surrounded by statuary; within--alas! It provoked her humor, that
+innocent fun-making which many a time had rendered her environment the
+more tolerable.
+
+When she went down into the parlor early that evening to await David's
+coming, this gayety, this laughter of the generations of men and women
+who made up her past, possessed her still. She made a fresh
+investigation of the parlor, took a new estimate of its peculiar
+furnishings. The hearthstones--lead color. The mohair furniture--cold
+at all temperatures of the room and slippery in every position of the
+body. The little marble-top table on which rested a glass case holding
+a stuffed blue jay clutching a varnished limb: tail and eyes stretched
+beyond the reach of muscles. Near the door an enormous shell which, on
+summer 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 the
+sitter to look as though the sun was shining in his eyes. The violence
+of the Brussels carpet. But the cheap family portraits in thin wooden
+frames--these were Gabriella's delight in a mood like this.
+
+The first time she saw these portraits, she turned and walked rapidly
+out of the parlor. She had enough troubles of her own without bearing
+the troubles of all these faces. Later on she could confront them with
+equanimity--that company of the pallid, the desperately sick, the
+unaccountably uncomfortable. All looked, not as though there had been a
+death in the family, but a death in the collection: only the same grief
+could have so united them as mourners. And whatever else they lacked,
+each showed two hands, the full number, placed where they were sure to
+be counted.
+
+She was in the midst of this psychological reversion to ancestral
+gayety when David arrived. Each looked quickly at the other with
+unconscious fear. Within a night and a day each had drawn nearer to the
+other; and each secretly inquired whether the other now discovered this
+nearness. Gabriella saw at least that he, too, was excited with
+happiness.
+
+He appeared to her for the first time handsome. He WAS better looking.
+When one approaches the confines of love, one nears the borders of
+beauty. Nature sets going a certain work of decoration, of
+transformation. Had David about this time been a grouse, he would
+probably have displayed a prodigious ruff. Had he been a bulbul and
+continued to feel as he did, he would have poured into the ear of night
+such roundelays as had never been conceived of by that disciplined
+singer. Had he been a master violinist, he would have been unable to
+play a note from a wild desire to flourish the bow. He had long stood
+rooted passively in the soil of being like a century plant when it is
+merely keeping itself in existence. But latterly, feeling in advance
+the approach of the Great Blossoming Hour, he had begun to shoot up
+rapidly into a lofty life-stalk; there were inches of the rankest
+growth on him within the last twenty-four hours. To-night he was not
+even serious in his conversation; and therefore he was the more
+awkward. His emotions were unmanageable; much more his talk. But she
+who witnesses this awkwardness and understands--does she ever fail to
+pardon?
+
+"Last night," he said with a droll twinkle, after the evening was about
+half spent, "there was one subject I did not speak to you about--Man's
+place in Nature. Have you ever thought about that?"
+
+"I've been too busy thinking about my place in the school!" said
+Gabriella, laughing--Gabriella who at all times was simplicity and
+clearness.
+
+"You see Nature does nothing for Man except what she enables him to do
+for himself. In this way she has made a man of him; she has given him
+his resources and then thrown him upon them. Beyond that she cares
+nothing, does nothing, provides, arranges nothing. I used to think, for
+instance, that the greenness of the earth was intended for his
+eyes--all the loveliness of spring. On the contrary, she merely gave
+him an eye which has adapted itself to get pleasure out of the
+greenness. The beauty of spring would have been the same, year after
+year, century after century, had he never existed. And the blue of the
+sky--I used to think it was hung about the earth for his sake; and the
+colors of the clouds, the great sunsets. But the blueness of the sky is
+nothing but the dust of the planet floating deep around it, too light
+to sink through the atmosphere, but reflecting the rays of the sun.
+These rays fall on the clouds and color them. It would all have been
+so, had Man never been born. The earth's springs of drinking water,
+refreshing showers, the rainbow on the cloud,--they would have been the
+same, had no human being ever stood on this planet to claim them for
+ages 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, who
+seemed to have some ulterior purpose in all this. "I used to think the
+structure and nature of the ass were given him that he might be adapted
+to bear Man's burdens; they were given him that he might bear his own
+burdens. Horses were not made for cavalry. And a camel--I never doubted
+that he was a wonderful contrivance to enable man to cross the desert;
+he is a wonderful contrivance in order that the contrivance itself may
+cross the desert."
+
+"I hope I may never have to use one," said Gabriella, "when I commence
+to ride again. I prefer horses and carriages--though I suppose you
+would say that only the carriage was designed for me and that I had no
+right to be drawn in that way."
+
+"Some day a horse may be designed for you, just as the carriage is. We
+do not use horses on railroads now; we did use them at first in
+Kentucky. Sometime you may not use horses in your carriage. You may
+have a horse that was designed for you."
+
+"I think," said Gabriella, "I should prefer a horse that was designed
+for itself."
+
+"And so," resumed David, moving straight on toward his concealed
+climax, "if I were a poet, I'd never write poems about flowers and
+clouds and lakes and mountains and moonbeams and all that; those things
+are not for a man. If I were a novelist, I'd never write stories about
+a grizzly bear, or a dog, or a red bird. If I were a sculptor, I'd not
+carve a lynx or a lion. If I were a painter, I'd never paint sheep. In
+all this universe there is only one thing that Nature ever created for
+a 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 of
+silence he went on, still advancing with rough paces toward his goal:--
+
+"Sometimes," he said mournfully, "it's harder for a man to get the only
+thing in the world that was ever made for him than anything else! This
+difficulty, however, appertains exclusively to the human species."
+
+Gabriella touched her handkerchief quickly to her lips and held it
+there.
+
+"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 never
+occur elsewhere. A man, for instance, is the only animal that will
+settle comfortably down for the rest of its days to live on the
+exertions of the female."
+
+"It shows how a woman likes to be depended on," said Gabriella, with
+her deep womanliness.
+
+"Tom-cats of the fireside," said David, "who are proud of what fat mice
+their wives feed them on. It may show what you say in the nature of the
+woman. 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 of
+the results of Christianity or a survival of barbarism. As one of the
+results of Christianity, it demonstrates what women will endure when
+they are imposed upon. As a relic of barbarism--when it happens in our
+country--why not regard it as derived from the North American Indians?
+The chiefs lounged around the house and smoked the best tobacco and
+sent the squaws out to work for them. Occasionally they broke silence
+by briefly declaring that they thought themselves immortal."
+
+Gabriella tried to draw the conversation into other channels, but David
+was not to be diverted.
+
+"It has been a great fact in the history of your sex," he said, looking
+across at her, with a shake of his head, as though she did not
+appreciate the subject, "that idea that everything in the universe was
+made for Man."
+
+"Why?" inquired Gabriella, resigning herself to the perilous and the
+irresistible.
+
+"Well, in old times it led men to think that since everything else
+belonged to them, so did woman: therefore when they wanted her they did
+not 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 David
+turned red again and knotted his hands.
+
+"I am so glad the schoolhouse was not damaged by the storm," observed
+Gabriella, reflecting.
+
+David fell into a revery but presently awoke.
+
+"There are more men than women in the world. On an average, that is
+only a fraction of a woman to every man. Still the men cannot take care
+of them. But it ought to be a real pleasure to every man to take care
+of 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 his
+loneliness without her so much more deeply. They ought to be very good
+and true to each other--a man and a woman--since they two are alone in
+the universe."
+
+He gulped down his words and stood up, trembling.
+
+"I must be going," he said, without even looking at Gabriella, and went
+out into the hall for his coat.
+
+"Bring it in here." she called. "It is cold out there." She watched how
+careless he was about making himself snug for his benumbing walk. He
+had a woollen comforter which he left loosely tied about his neck.
+
+"Tie it closer," she commanded. "You had a cold last night, and it is
+worse 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 her
+own neck and collar.
+
+He tried again and failed, standing before her with a mingling of
+embarrassment and stubborn determination.
+
+"That will never do!" she cried with genuine concern. She took hold of
+the comforter by the ends and drew the knot up close to his throat, he
+lifting his head to receive it as it came. Then David with his eyes on
+the ceiling felt his coat collar turned up and her soft warm fingers
+tucking the comforter in around his neck. When he looked down, she was
+standing over by the fireplace.
+
+"Good night," she said positively, with a quick gesture of dismissal as
+she saw the look in his eyes.
+
+Each of the million million men who made up the past of David, that
+moment reached a hand out of the distance and pushed him forward. But
+of them all there was none so helpless with modesty,--so in need of
+hiding 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 down
+quickly 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 a
+desire for peace. One immediate effect of new happiness, new love, is
+to make us turn toward the past with a wish to straighten out its
+difficulties, heal its breaches, forgive its wrongs. We think most
+hopefully of distressing things which may still be remedied, most
+regretfully of others that have passed beyond our reach and will.
+
+It was between ten and eleven o'clock of the next day--Sunday. David's
+cold had become worse. He had turned over necessary work to the negro
+man and stayed quietly in his room since the silent breakfast Two or
+three books chosen carelessly out of the trunk lay on his table before
+the fire: interest had gone out of them this day. With his face red and
+swollen, he was sitting beside this table with one hand loosely
+covering the forgotten books, his eyes turned to the window, but
+looking upon distant inward scenes.
+
+Sunday morning between ten and eleven o'clock! the church-going hour of
+his Bible-student life. In imagination he could hear across these wide
+leagues of winter land the faint, faint peals of the church bells which
+were now ringing. He was back in the town again--up at the college--in
+his room at the dormitory; and it was in the days before the times of
+his trouble. The students were getting ready for church, with freshly
+shaved faces, boots well blacked, best suits on, not always good ones.
+He could hear their talk in the rooms around his, hear fragments of
+hymns, the opening and shutting of doors along the hallways, and the
+running of feet down the stairs. By ones and twos and larger groups
+they passed down and out with their hymnals, Testaments, sometimes
+blank books for notes on the sermon. Several thrust bright, cordial
+faces in at the door, as they passed, to see whether he and his
+roommate had started.
+
+The scene changed. He was in the church, which was crowded from pulpit
+to walls. He was sitting under the chandelier in the choir, the number
+of the first hymn had just been whispered along, and he began to sing,
+with hundreds of others, the music which then released the pinions of
+his love and faith as the air releases the wings of a bird. The hymn
+ceased; he could see the pastor rise from behind the pulpit, advance,
+and with a gesture gather that sea of heads to prayer. He could follow
+the sermon, most of all the exhortation; around him was such stillness
+in the church that his own heart-beats were audible. Then the Supper
+and then home to the dormitory again--with a pain of happiness filling
+him, the rest and the unrest of consecration.
+
+Many other scenes he lived through in memory this morning--once lived
+in reality amid that brotherhood of souls. His tenderest thoughts
+perhaps dwelt on the young men's prayer-meetings of Sunday afternoons
+at the college. There they drew nearest to the Eternal Strength which
+was behind their weakness, and closest to each other as student after
+student lifted a faltering, stumbling petition for a common blessing on
+their work. The Immortal seemed to be in that bare room, filling their
+hearts with holy flame, drawing around them the isolation of a devoted
+band. They were one in One. Then had followed the change in him which
+produced the change in them: no fellowship, no friendship, with an
+unbeliever; 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? Who
+sat a little while, after the studies of the night were over, talking
+to his room-mate? Who knelt down across the room at his prayers when
+the lights were put out? And his professors--what bulwarks of knowledge
+and rectitude and kindness they were!--all with him at first, all
+against him at last, as in duty bound.
+
+To one man alone among those hundreds could David look back as having
+begun to take interest in him toward the close of his college days.
+During that vacation which he had spent in reading and study, he had
+often refreshed himself by taking his book out to the woodland park
+near the city, which in those days was the grounds of one of the
+colleges of the University. There he found the green wild country
+again, a forest like his pioneer ancestor's. Regularly here he observed
+at out-of-door work the professor of Physical Science, who also was
+pressing his investigations forward during the leisure of those summer
+months. An authority from the north, from a New England university, who
+had resigned his chair to come to Kentucky, attracted by the fair
+prospects of the new institution. A great gray-bearded, eagle-faced,
+square-shouldered, big-footed man: reserved, absorbed, asking to be let
+alone, one of the silent masters. But David, desperate with
+intellectual loneliness himself, and knowing this man to be a student
+of the new science, one day had introduced himself and made inquiry
+about entering certain classes in his course the following session.
+
+The professor shook his head. He was going back to New England himself
+the next year; and he moved away under the big trees, resuming his work.
+
+As troubles had thickened about David, his case became discussed in
+University circles; and he was stopped on the street one day by this
+frigid professor and greeted with a man's grasp and a look of fresh
+beautiful affection. His apostasy from dogmatism had made him a friend
+of that lone thinker whose worship of God was the worship of Him
+through the laws of His universe and not through the dogmas of men.
+
+This professor--and Gabriella: they alone, though from different
+motives, had been drawn to him by what had repelled all others. It was
+his new relation to her beyond anything else that filled David this day
+with his deep desire for peace with his past. She had such peace in
+herself, such charity of feeling, such simple steadfast faith: she cast
+the music of these upon the chords of his own soul. To the influence of
+her religion she was now adding the influence of her love; it filled
+him, subdued, overwhelmed him. And this morning, also out of his own
+happiness he remembered with most poignant suffering the unhappiness of
+his father. His own life was unfolding into fulness of affection and
+knowledge and strength; his father's was closing amid the weakness and
+troubles that had gathered about him; and he, David, had contributed
+his share to these. To be reconciled to his father this day--that was
+his sole thought.
+
+It was about four o'clock. The house held that quiet which reigns of a
+Sunday afternoon when the servants have left the kitchen for the cabin,
+when all work is done, and the feeling of Sunday rest takes possession
+of our minds. The winter sunshine on the fields seems full of rest; the
+brutes rest--even those that are not beasts of burden. The birds appear
+to know the day, and to make note of it in quieter twitter and slower
+flight.
+
+David rose resolutely and started downstairs. As he entered his
+father's room, his mother was passing out She looked at her son with
+apprehension, as she closed the door. His father was sitting by a
+window, reading, as was his Sunday wont, the Bible. He had once written
+to David that his had always been a religious people; it was true. A
+grave, stern man--sternest, gravest on Sunday. When it was not possible
+to go to church, the greater to him the reason that the house itself
+should become churchlike in solemnity, out of respect to the day and
+the duty of self-examination. A man of many failings, but on this
+subject strong.
+
+David sat down and waited for him to reach the end of the page or
+chapter. But his father read on with a slow perceptible movement of his
+lips.
+
+"Father."
+
+The gray head was turned slowly toward him in silent resentment of the
+interruption.
+
+"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 to
+right, left to right.
+
+"Father, things ought not to go on in this way between us. I have been
+at home now for two months. I have waited, hoping that you would give
+me the chance to talk about it all. You have declined, and meantime I
+have simply been at work, as I used to be. But this must not be put off
+longer for several reasons. There are other things in my life now that
+I have to think of and care for." The tone in which David spoke these
+last words was unusual and significant.
+
+The eyes stopped at a point on the page. The lips were pressed tightly
+together.
+
+David rose and walked quietly out of the room. After he had closed the
+door behind him and put his foot on the stairs, he stopped and with
+fresh 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 the
+middle of the room with his eyes on the door through which David had
+passed. He pointed to his son to be seated, and resumed his chair. He
+drew his penknife from his pocket and slowly trimmed the ravellings
+from his shirt-cuffs, blowing them off his wrists. David saw that his
+hands were trembling violently. The tragedy in the poor action cut him
+to 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; but
+I could not have done differently."
+
+"YOU not believe in Christianity! YOU not believe the Bible!"
+
+The suppressed enraged voice summed up again the old contemptuous
+opinion.
+
+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 am
+as sincere as you are. As to the goodness of my mind, I did not derive
+it from myself and am not to blame. I have only made an earnest and an
+honest use of what mind was given me. But I have not relied upon it
+alone. 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 believed
+it. Now these men tell you not to believe it and you believe them. And
+then you complain that I do not think more highly of you."
+
+"Father," cried David, "there is one man whose name is very dear to us
+both. The blood of that man is in me as it is in you. Sir, it is your
+grandfather. Do you remember what the church of his day did with him?
+Do you forget that, standing across the fields yonder, is the church he
+himself built to freedom of opinion in religious matters? I grew up,
+not under the shadow of that church, for it casts none, but in the
+light of it. I have seen many churches worship there. I have had before
+me, from the time I could remember, my great-grandfather's words: they
+seemed to me the voice of God by whom all men were created, and the
+spirit 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 done
+with 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 is
+that you think me as sincere in my belief as I think you in yours. I do
+ask for your toleration, your charity. Everything else between us will
+be easy, if you can see that I have done only what I could. The faith
+of the world grows, changes. Sons cannot always agree with their
+fathers; otherwise the world would stand still. You do not believe many
+things your own grandfather believed--the man of whose memory you are
+so proud. The faith you hold did not even exist among men in his day. I
+can no longer agree with you: I do not think the less of you because I
+believe differently; do not think the less of me!"
+
+The young man could not enter into any argument with the old one. He
+would not have disturbed if he could his father's faith: it was too
+late in life for that. Neither could he defend his own views without
+attacking his father's: that also would have been cruelty in itself and
+would have been accepted as insulting. Still David could not leave his
+case 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 to
+believe the Almighty. Perhaps He knows better than you and the
+scholars."
+
+David fell into sorrowful silence. "There are some other matters about
+which I should like to speak with you, father," he said, changing the
+subject. "I recall one thing you said to me the day I came home. You
+asked 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. You
+are out of place under this roof and in this neighborhood. Life was
+hard enough for your mother and me before. But we did for you what we
+could; you were pleased to make us this return. It will be better for
+you to go."
+
+Every word seemed to have been hammered out of iron, once melted in the
+forge, but now cold and unchangeably shaped to its heavy purpose. The
+young man writhed under the hopelessness of the situation:--
+
+"Sir, is it all on one side? Have I done nothing for you in all these
+years? Until I was nearly a man's age, did I not work? For my years of
+labor did I receive more than a bare living? Did you ever know a slave
+as faithful? Were you ever a harsh master to this slave? Do you owe me
+nothing 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 I
+work for you? Did you owe us nothing for all that?"
+
+"I did! I do! I always shall! But do you count it against me that
+Nature brought me forth helpless and kept me helpless for so many years
+afterwards? If my being born was a fault, whose was it? Is the
+dependence 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 a
+quietude which was terrible, on account of the passion raging beneath.
+But now he sprang to his feet, strode across, and, pulling a ragged
+shirt-cuff down from under his coat-sleeve, shook it in his son's
+eyes--poverty. He went to one of the rotting doors and jerking it open
+without turning the knob, rattled it on its loose hinges--poverty. He
+turned to the window, and with one gesture depicted ruined outhouses
+and ruined barn, now hidden under the snow, and beautiful in the Sunday
+evening light--poverty. He turned and faced his son, majestic in
+mingled grief and care.
+
+"Kind! just! you who have trifled with your advantages, you who are
+sending 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 much
+influenced by my mother's fears. This is Bailey's doing. It is about
+this 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 other
+hard words that were coming, turned quickly and left the room.
+
+He did not go down to supper. Toward bedtime, as he sat before his
+fire, he heard a slow, unfamiliar step mounting the stair. Not often in
+a year did he have the chance to recognize that step. His mother
+entered, holding a small iron stewpan, from under the cover of which
+steamed a sweet, spicy odor.
+
+"This will do your cold good," she said, tasting the stew out of a
+spoon which she brought in her other hand, and setting it down on the
+hot hearth. Then she stood looking a little fearfully at her son, who
+had not moved. Ah, that is woman's way! She incites men to a
+difficulty, and then appears innocently on the battle-field with
+bandages for the belligerents. How many of the quarrels of this world
+has 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, and
+observed 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 pane
+of glass in?"
+
+"I will sometime," said David, absently. She went over to his bed and
+beat up the bolster and made everything ready for him.
+
+"You ought to have clean sheets and pillow-cases," she remarked
+confidently; "the negroes are worthless. Good night," she said, with
+her hand on the door, looking back at him timidly.
+
+He sprang up and went over to her. "Oh, mother! mother! mother!" he
+cried, and then he checked the useless words that came rushing in a
+flood.
+
+"Good night! and thank you for coming. Good night! Be careful, I'll
+bring 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 off
+his clothes, drank the mixture, and got into bed.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+At dead of night out in a lonely country, what sound freezes the blood
+like the quick cry of an animal seized and being killed? The fright,
+the pain, the despair: whosoever has heard these notes has listened to
+the wild death-music of Nature, ages old.
+
+On the still frozen air near two or three o'clock of next morning, such
+a cry rang out from inside the barn. There were the short rushes to and
+fro, round and round; then violent leapings against the door, the
+troughs, and sides of the stable; then mad plunging, struggling,
+panting; then a long, terrified, weakened wail, which told everything
+beyond the clearness of words.
+
+Up in his room, perfectly dark, for the coals in the grate were now
+sparkless, David was lying on his back, sleeping heavily and bathed in
+perspiration. Overheated, he had pushed the bed covers off from his
+throat; he had hollowed the pillow away from his face. So deep was the
+stillness of the house and of the night air outside, that almost the
+first sounds had reached his ear and sunk down into his brain: he
+stirred slightly. As the tumult grew louder, he tossed his head from
+side 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 kennel
+behind the house, was howling, roaring to get loose. Would he never
+waken? Would the tragedy which he himself had unwittingly planned and
+staged be played to its end without his hearing a word? (So often it is
+that way in life.) At last, as one who has long tugged at his own
+sleep, striving to rend it as a smothering blanket and burst through
+into 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 he
+would never find them. As he dressed, he muttered remorsefully to
+himself:--"I simply put them into a trap."
+
+When he had drawn on socks, boots, and trousers, he slipped into his
+overcoat, felt for his hat, and hurried down. He released the dog,
+which instantly was off in a noiseless run, and followed, buttoning the
+coat about him as he went: the air was like ice against his bare, hot
+throat. Another moment and he could hear the dogs fighting. When he
+reached the door of the shed and threw it open, the flock of sheep
+bounded out past him in a wild rush for the open. He stepped inside,
+searching around with his foot as he groped. Presently it struck
+against something large and soft close to the wall in a corner. He
+reached down and taking it by the legs, pulled the sheep out into the
+moonlight, several yards across the snow: a red track followed, as
+though 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 dog
+or man? The dog killing you from instinct and famine; a man killing you
+as a luxury and with a fine calculation? And who is to blame now for
+your death, if blame there be? I who went to college instead of
+building a stable? Or the storm which deprived these prowlers of nearer
+food and started them on a far hunt, desperate with hunger? Or man who
+took you from wild Nature and made you more defenceless under his
+keeping? Or Nature herself who edged the tooth and the mind of the
+dog-wolf in the beginning that he might lengthen his life by shortening
+yours? Where and with what purpose began on this planet the taking of
+life that there might be life? Poor questions that never troubled you,
+poor sheep! But that follow, as his shadow, pondering Man, who no more
+knows the reason of it all than you did."
+
+The fighting of the dogs had for the first few moments sounded farther
+and farther away, retreating through the barn and thence into the lot;
+and by and by the shepherd ran around and stood before David, awaiting
+orders. David seized the sheep by the feet and dragged it into the
+saddle-house; sent the dog to watch the rest of the flock; and ran back
+to the house, drawing his overcoat more tightly about him. As quickly
+as possible he got into bed and covered up warmly. Something caused him
+to 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 he
+lay there very anxious in the night.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Twilight had three times descended on the drear land. Three times
+Gabriella, standing at her windows and looking out upon the snow and
+ice, had seen everything disappear. How softly white were the
+snow-covered trees; how soft the black that thickened about them till
+they were effaced. Gabriella thought of them as still perfectly white
+out there in the darkness. Three evenings with her face against the
+pane she had watched for a familiar figure to stalk towering up the
+yard path, and no familiar figure had come. Three evenings she had
+returned to her firelight, and sat before it with an ear on guard for
+the sound of a familiar step on the porch below; but no step had been
+heard.
+
+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 an
+unendurable joy. But the second night she had begun to expect him
+confidently; and when the hour had passed and he had not come,
+Gabriella sat long before her fire with a new wound--she who had felt
+so many. By the third day she had reviewed all that she had ever heard
+of him or known of him: gathered it all afresh as a beautiful thing for
+receiving him with when he should come to her that night. Going early
+to her room she had taken her chair to the window and with her face
+close to the pane had watched again--watched that white yard; and again
+nothing 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 anything
+were to happen to HIM! I must not think of it! I have borne many
+things; 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 heavy
+boots--a tapping of the toes against the pillars, to knock off the
+snow, and then the slow creaking of soles across the frozen boards. She
+started 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 her
+sides, her eyes stretched wide.
+
+The house girl's steps were heard running upstairs. Gabriella jerked
+the 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?" she
+asked.
+
+His Marse David had sent for her and wanted her to come at once. He had
+brought 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 the
+doctor.
+
+"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 better
+for him to go back with her.
+
+"Don't lose time," she said, "and don't keep me waiting. Go! as quickly
+as you can!"
+
+The negro cautioned her to dismount at the frozen creek.
+
+When Gabriella, perhaps an hour later, knocked at the side door of
+David's home,--his father's and mother's room,--there was no summons to
+enter. She turned the knob and walked in. The room was empty; the fire
+had burned low; a cat lay on the hearthstones. It raised its head
+halfway and looked at her through the narrow slits of its yellow eyes
+and 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 she
+noticed 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 summoned
+all 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 eyes
+fixed restlessly on the door. As soon as he saw her, he lifted himself
+with an effort and stretched out his arms and shook them at her with
+hoarse 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 slight
+gesture 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 against
+his cheek and lay looking at her piteously.
+
+Gabriella saw the change in him: his anxious expression, his cheeks
+flushed with a red spot, his restlessness, his hand burning. She could
+feel the big veins throbbing too fast, too crowded. But a woman smiles
+while her heart breaks.
+
+He propped himself a little higher on the pillows and turned on his
+side, clutching at his lung.
+
+"Don't be frightened," he said, searching her face, "I've got something
+to tell you. Promise."
+
+"I promise."
+
+"I am going to have pneumonia, or I have it now. You are not
+frightened?"
+
+Her eyes answered for her.
+
+"I had a cold. I had taken something to throw me into a sweat--that was
+the night after I saw you."
+
+At the thought of their last interview, he took her hand again and
+pressed it to his lips, looking tenderly at it.
+
+"The dogs were killing the sheep, and I got up and went out while I was
+in a perspiration. I know it's pneumonia. I have had a long, hard
+chill. 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. I
+helped to nurse him. Oh, he got well," he said, shaking his head at her
+with 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 here
+by me through it all. I have to tell you something else: I may be
+delirious 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. I
+know that he goes wherever he is called and stays till the danger is
+past or--or--till it is settled. Don't spare anything that can be done
+for me. I am in danger, and I must live. I must not lose all the
+greatness of life and lose you."
+
+"Ah," she implored, seeing how ill he was. "Everything that can be done
+shall be done. Now oughtn't you to be quiet and let me make you
+comfortable till the doctor comes?"
+
+"I must say something else while I can, and am sure. I might not get
+over this--"
+
+"Ah--"
+
+"Let me say this: I MIGHT not! If I should not, have no fear about the
+future; 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 the
+bed. The flood of tears would come. He turned over, and seeing it laid
+his hand on it very lightly.
+
+"If it be so, Gabriella, I hope all the rest of your life you will be
+happy. I hope no more trouble will ever come to you."
+
+Suddenly he sat up, lifted her head, and threw his arms around her
+again. "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 word
+that perhaps they had never quite understood me and so had never been
+able to do me justice. Now, will you call my mother?"
+
+"Mother," he said, taking her by the hand and placing it in
+Gabriella's, "this is my wife, as I hope she will be, and your
+daughter; and I have asked her to stay and help you to nurse me through
+this cold."
+
+Three twilights more and there was a scene in the little upper room of
+the farmhouse: David drawn up on the bed; at one side of it, the poor
+distracted mother, rocking herself and loudly weeping; for though
+mothers may not greatly have loved their grown sons, when the big men
+lie stricken and the mothers once more take their hands to wash them,
+bathe their faces with a cloth, put a spoon to their lips, memory
+brings back the days when those huge erring bodies lay across their
+breasts. They weep for the infant, now an infant again and perhaps
+falling 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 at
+swift turns of the different will he would have to make and of who
+would write it; of his own harshness; and also not free from the awful
+dread that this was the summons to his son to enter Eternity with his
+soul 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 was
+not there.
+
+Gabriella had gone once more to where she had been many times: gone to
+pour out in secret the prayer of her church, and of her own soul for
+the sick--with faith that her prayer would be answered.
+
+A dark hour: a dog howling on the porch below; at the stable the cries
+of hungry, neglected animals; the winter hush settling over the great
+evening land.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+When one sets out to walk daily across a wood or field in a fresh
+direction, starting always at the same point and arriving always at the
+same, without intention one makes a path; it may be long first, but in
+time the path will come. It commences at the home gate or bars and
+reaches forward by degrees; it commences at the opposite goal and
+lengthens backward thence: some day the ends meet and we discover with
+surprise how slightly we have deviated in all those crossings and
+recrossings. The mind has unconsciously marked a path long before the
+feet have traced it.
+
+When Gabriella had begun teaching, she passed daily out of the yard
+into an apple orchard and thence across a large woodland pasture, in
+the remote corner of which the schoolhouse was situated. Through this
+woods the children had made their path: the straight instinctive path
+of childhood. But Gabriella, leaving this at the woods-gate, had begun
+to make one for herself. She followed her will from day to day; now led
+in this direction by some better vista; now drawn aside toward a group
+of finer trees; or seeing, farther on, some little nooklike place. In
+time, 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 walk
+along this braced her mind for the day; in the evening it quieted
+jangled nerves and revived a worn-out spirit: shedding her toil at the
+schoolhouse door as a heavy suffocating garment, she stepped gratefully
+out into its largeness, its woodland odors, and twilight peace.
+
+On the night of the sleet tons of timber altogether had descended
+across this by-way. When the snow fell the next night, it brought down
+more. But the snow melted, leaving the ice; the ice melted, leaving the
+dripping boughs and bark. In time these were warmed and dried by sun
+and wind. New edges of greenness appeared running along the path. The
+tree-tops above were tossing and roaring in the wild gales of March,
+Under loose autumn leaves the earliest violets were dim with blue. But
+Gabriella had never once been there to realize how her path had been
+ruined, or to note the birth of spring.
+
+It was perhaps a month afterward that one morning at the usual school
+hour her tall lithe figure, clad in gray hood and cloak, appeared at
+last walking along this path, stepping over or passing around the
+fallen boughs. She was pale and thin, but the sweet warm womanliness of
+her, if possible, lovelier. There was a look of religious gratitude in
+the eyes, but about her mouth new happiness.
+
+Her duties were done earlier than usual that afternoon, for not much
+could be accomplished on this first day of reassembling the children.
+They were gone; and she stood on the steps of the school-house, facing
+toward a gray field on a distant hillside, which caught the faint
+sunshine. It drew her irresistibly in heart and foot, and she set out
+toward it.
+
+The day was one of those on which the seasons meet. Strips of snow
+ermined the field; but on the stumps, wandering and warbling before
+Gabriella as she advanced, were bluebirds, those wings of the sky,
+those breasts of earth. She reached the spot she was seeking, and
+paused. There it was--the whole pitiful scene! His hemp brake; the
+charred 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 last
+afternoon; trailing across his brake a handful of hemp partly broken
+out.
+
+She surveyed it all with wistful tenderness. Then she looked away to
+the house. She could see the window of his room at which she had sat
+how many days, gazing out toward this field! On his bed in that room he
+was now stretched weak and white, but struggling back into health.
+
+She came closer and gazed down at his frozen boot prints. How near his
+feet had drawn to that long colder path which would have carried him
+away from her. How nearly had his young life been left, like the hand
+of hemp he last had handled--half broken out, not yet ready for strong
+use and good service. At that moment one scene rose before her memory:
+a day at Bethlehem nigh Jerusalem; a young Hebrew girl issuing from her
+stricken house and hastening to meet Him who was the Resurrection and
+the Life; then in her despair uttering her one cry:--"Lord, if Thou
+hadst been here, my brother had not died."
+
+The mist of tears blinded Gabriella, whose love and faith were as
+Martha's. She knelt down and laid her cheek against the coarse hemp
+where it had been wrapped about his wrist.
+
+"Lord," she said, "hadst Thou not been here, hadst Thou not heard my
+prayer for him, he would have died!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+Spring, who breaks all promises in the beginning to keep them in the
+end, had ceased from chilling caprice and withdrawals: the whole land
+was now the frank revelation of her loveliness. Autumn--the hours of
+falling and of departing; spring--season of rise and of return. The
+rise 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 to
+hearing: 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 the
+orchard slope, whose red-cheeked children are autumn apples, had not
+let themselves be fatally surprised by the great February frost: their
+bark-cradled bud-infants had only been wrapped away the more warmly
+till danger was over. For many days now the hillside had been a grove
+of pink and white domes under each of which hung faint fragrance: the
+great 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 of
+the house. The hill sloped down into a wide green valley winding away
+toward the forest below. Through this valley a stream of white spring
+water, drunk by the stock, ran within banks of mint and over a bed of
+rocks and moss. On the hillside opposite was a field of young hemp
+stretching westward--soon to be a low sea of rippling green. Beyond
+this field was the sunset; over it flashed the evening star; and for
+the past few days beside the star had hung the inconstant, the
+constant, crescent of ages.
+
+She liked to spread her shawl on the edge of the orchard overlooking
+the valley--a deep carpet of grass sprinkled with wind-blown petals; to
+watch the sky kindle and burn out; see the recluse Evening come forth
+before the Night and walk softly down the valley toward the woods; feel
+as an elixir about her the air, sweet from the trees, sweet with earth
+odors, sweet with all the lingering history of the day. Nearer, ever
+nearer would swing the stars into her view. The moon, late a bow of
+thinnest, mistiest silver, now of broadening, brightening gold, would
+begin to drive the darkness downward from the white domes of the trees
+till it lay as a faint shadow beneath them. These were hours fraught
+with peace and rest to her tired mind and tired body.
+
+One day she was sitting thus, absently knitting herself some bleaching
+gloves, (Gabriella's hands were as if stained by all the mixed petals
+of the boughs.) The sun was going down beyond the low hills, In the
+orchard behind her she could hear the flutter of wings and the last
+calls of quieting birds.
+
+She had dropped the threads of her handiwork into her lap, and with
+folded hands was knitting memories.
+
+At twilights such as this in years gone by, she, a little girl, had
+been used to drive out into the country with her grandmother--often
+choosing the routes herself and ordering the carriage to be stopped on
+the road as her fancy pleased. For in those aristocratic days, Southern
+children, like those of royal families, were encouraged early in life
+to learn how to give orders and to exact obedience and to rule: when
+they grew up they would have many under them: and not to reign was to
+be ruined. So that the infantile autocrat Gabriella was being
+instructed in this way and in that way by the powerful, strong-minded,
+efficient grandmother as a tender old lioness might train a cub for the
+mastering of its dangerous world. She recalled these twilight drives
+when the fields along the turnpikes were turning green with the young
+grain; the homeward return through the lamp-lit town to the big iron
+entrance-gate, the parklike lawn; the brilliant supper in the great
+house, the noiseless movements, the perfect manners of the many
+servants; later in the evening the music, the dancing, the wild
+joy--fairyland once more. But how far, far away now! And how the forces
+of life had tossed things since then like straws on the eddies of a
+tempest: her grandmother killed, thousands of miles away, with sorrow;
+her uncles with their oldest sons, mere boys, fighting and falling
+together; tears, poverty, ruin everywhere: and she, after years of
+struggle, cast completely out of the only world she had ever known into
+another that she had never imagined.
+
+Gabriella felt this evening what often came to her at times: a deep
+yearning for her own people of the past, for their voices, their ways
+of looking at life; for the gentleness and courtesy, and the thousand
+unconscious moods and acts that rendered them distinguished and
+delightful. She would have liked to slip back into the old elegance, to
+have been surrounded by the old rich and beautiful things. The
+child-princess who was once her sole self was destined to live within
+Gabriella always.
+
+But she knew that the society in which she had moved was lost to her
+finally. Not alone through the vicissitudes of the war; for after the
+war, despite the overthrow, the almost complete disappearance, of many
+families, it had come together, it had reconstituted itself, it
+flourished still. It was lost to her because she had become penniless
+and because she had gone to work. When it transpired that she had
+declined all aid, thrown off all disguises, and taken her future into
+her own hands, to work and to receive wages for her work, in the social
+world where she was known and where the generations of her family had
+been leaders, there were kind offers of aid, secret condolences,
+whispered regrets, visible distress: her resolve was a new thing for a
+girl 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 she
+would have been welcomed--and discarded. She made trial of this a few
+times 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 who
+had dropped out of it.
+
+Her church and the new life--these two had been left her. She no longer
+had a pew, but she had her faith and this was enough; for it always
+gave her, wherever she was, some secret place in which to kneel and
+from which to rise strengthened and comforted. As for the fearful
+fields 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 another
+self within herself; and here found her mission for the future--David.
+So that looking upon the disordered and planless years, during which it
+had often seemed that she was struggling unwatched, Gabriella now
+believed that through them she had most been guided, When many hands
+had let hers go, One had taken it; when old pathways were closed, a new
+one was opened; and she had been led along it--home.
+
+David's illness had deepened beyond any other experience her faith in
+an overruling Providence. His return to health was to her a return from
+death: 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 work
+aright. 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 of
+prayer, days and nights at his bedside had made him hers: vigils,
+nursing, suffering, helplessness, dependence--all these had been as
+purest oil to that alabaster lamp of love which burned within her
+chaste soul.
+
+The sun had gone down. The hush of twilight was descending from the
+clear sky, in the depths of which the brightest stars began to appear
+as points of silvery flame. The air had the balm of early summer, the
+ground was dry and warm.
+
+Gabriella began to watch. The last time she had gone to see him, as he
+walked 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 a
+rough, 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 a
+place for him. She moved it back a little, for safety, so that it was
+under the boughs of one of the trees.
+
+How quiet the land was, how beautiful the evening light, how sweet the
+air!
+
+Now and then a petal from some finished blossom sifted down on
+Gabriella.
+
+They were at such peace: their talk was interrupted by the long
+silences 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 toward
+her uneasily:--
+
+"Our different ways of looking at things--will they never make any
+difference 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 in
+the old things."
+
+"I expect you to believe in God, in the New Testament, in the
+Resurrection, 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 came
+down.
+
+"It is a nest," said David, softly, "a good thing to go home to, a
+night like this."
+
+"And now," he continued, "there are matters about which I must consult
+you. You will be glad to know that things are pleasanter at home. Since
+my illness my father and mother have changed toward me. Sickness,
+nearness to death, is a great reconciler. Your being in the house had
+much to do with this--especially your influence over my mother. My
+father was talked to by the doctor from town. During the days and
+nights he stayed with me, he got into my trunk of books, for he is a
+great reader; and--as he told me before leaving--a believer in the New
+Science, an evolutionist. He knew of my expulsion, of course, and of
+the reasons. I think he explained a great deal to my father, who said
+to 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 is
+not the best, but the best possible. When I came home from college, I
+brought with me almost half the money I had accumulated. I turned this
+over to my father, of course. It will go toward making necessary
+repairs. But it was not enough, and the woods has had to go. The farm
+shall not be sold, but the woods is rented for a term of years as hemp
+land, the trees must be deadened and cut down. I am sorry; it is the
+last of the forest of my great-grandfather. But with the proceeds, the
+place can be put into fairly good condition, and this is the greatest
+relief 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 to
+go away. My father was right: this is no place for me. I must be where
+people think as I do--must live where I shall not be alone. There will
+soon be plenty of companions everywhere. The whole world will believe
+in Evolution before I am an old man."
+
+"I think you are right," she said quietly. "It is best for you to go
+and to go at once."
+
+When he spoke again, plainly he was inspired with fresh confidence by
+her support of his plans.
+
+"And now, Gabriella, I must tell you what I have determined to do in
+life: 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. It
+is very important. Your whole future depends on a wise choice."
+
+"I am going to some college--to some northern university, as soon as
+possible. I shall have to work my way through, sometimes by teaching,
+in whatever way I can. I want to study physical science. I want to
+teach some branch of it. It draws me, draws all that is in me. That is
+to 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 know
+what I should have done! Science! Science! There is the fresh path for
+the faith of the race! For the race henceforth must get its idea of
+God, and build its religion to Him, from its knowledge of the laws of
+His universe. A million years from now! Where will our dark theological
+dogmas be in that radiant time? The Creator of all life, in all life He
+must be studied! And in the study of science there is least wrangling,
+least tyranny, least bigotry, no persecution. It teaches charity, it
+teaches a well-ordered life, it teaches the world to be more kind. It
+is the great new path of knowledge into the future. All things must
+follow whither it leads. Our religion will more and more be what our
+science is, and some day they will be the same."
+
+She had no controversy to raise with him about this. She was too
+intently 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 separate
+me from you!"
+
+"No!" she exclaimed, her whole nature starting up, terrified. "What do
+you mean? No!"
+
+"I mean while I am going through college; while I am preparing a place
+for you."
+
+"Preparing a place FOR ME! You have prepared a place for me and I have
+taken 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 wounded
+me!"
+
+"How can I--"
+
+"How can you go away and leave me
+here--here--anywhere--alone--struggling in the world alone? And you
+somewhere else alone? Lose those years of being together? Can you even
+bear 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 way
+through college with his wife beside him. His heart melted in joy and
+tenderness--before the possibility of life with her so near. He could
+not speak.
+
+"I will never be separated from you!"
+
+And then, feeling her victory won, she added joyously: "And what I have
+shall 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 it
+behind 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! Two
+children of vast and distant revolutions guided together into one
+life--a young pair facing toward a future of wider, better things for
+mankind.
+
+"Gabriella, when a man has heard the great things calling to him, how
+they 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 often
+the pathos and the happiness of a woman's love. For even in these
+moments he could not forget Truth for her. And so, she said to herself
+with a hidden tear, it would be always. She would give him her all, she
+could never be all to him. Her life would be enfolded completely in
+his; but he would hold out his arms also toward a cold Spirit who would
+forever elude him--Wisdom.
+
+The golden crescent dropped behind the dark green hills of the silent
+land. 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 across
+the 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 bloom
+and in our passions; by which our poor brief lives are led upward out
+of the earth for a season, then cut down, rotted and broken--for Thy
+long service!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Reign of Law, by James Lane Allen
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