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+Project Gutenberg's The Reign Of Law, by James Lane Allen
+#2 in our series by James Lane Allen
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+Title: The Reign of Law
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+Author: James Lane Allen
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+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
+
+
+
+
+HEMP
+
+THE REIGN OF LAW
+
+A TALE OF THE KENTUCKY HEMP FIELDS
+
+
+
+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 Project Gutenberg's The Reign Of Law, by James Lane Allen
+