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.