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The Reign of Law; a tale of the Kentucky hemp fields

by James Lane Allen · English · Gutenberg #3791 · 380,476 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Reign of Law; a tale of the Kentucky hemp fields

Author: James Lane Allen


        
Release date: February 1, 2003 [eBook #3791]
                Most recently updated: January 9, 2021

Language: English

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THE REIGN OF LAW

A TALE OF THE KENTUCKY HEMP FIELDS


BY

JAMES LANE ALLEN




  DEDICATION

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


JTABLE 5 23 1

THE REIGN OF LAW


HEMP


The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold,
freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of
hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral
Britain. Away back in the days when they lived with wife, child, flock
in frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured forth for water,
salt, game, tillage--in the very summer of that wild daylight ride of
Tomlinson and Bell, by comparison with which, my children, the midnight
ride of Paul Revere, was as tame as the pitching of a rocking-horse in
a boy's nursery--on that history-making twelfth of August, of the year
1782, when these two backwoods riflemen, during that same Revolution
the Kentuckians then fighting a branch of that same British army,
rushed out of Bryan's Station for the rousing of the settlements and
the saving of the West--hemp was growing tall and thick near the walls
of the fort.

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

What history it wrought in those years, directly for the republic,
indirectly for the world! What ineffaceable marks it left on Kentucky
itself, land, land-owners! To make way for it, a forest the like of
which no human eye will ever see again was felled; and with the forest
went its pastures, its waters. The roads of Kentucky, those long
limestone turnpikes connecting the towns and villages with the
farms--they were early made necessary by the hauling of the hemp. For
the sake of it slaves were perpetually being trained, hired, bartered;
lands perpetually rented and sold; fortunes made or lost. The advancing
price of farms, the westward movement of poor families and consequent
dispersion of the Kentuckians over cheaper territory, whither they
carried the same passion for the cultivation of the same plant,--thus
making Missouri the second hemp-producing state in the Union,--the
regulation of the hours in the Kentucky cabin, in the house, at the
rope-walk, in the factory,--what phase of life went unaffected by the
pursuit and fascination of it. Thought, care, hope of the farmer
oftentimes throughout the entire year! Upon it depending, it may be,
the college of his son, the accomplishments of his daughter, the
luxuries of his wife, the house he would build, the stock he could own.
His own pleasures also: his deer hunting in the South, his fox hunting
at home, his fishing on the great lakes, his excursions on the old
floating palaces of the Mississippi down to New Orleans--all these
depending in large measure upon his hemp, that thickest gold-dust of
his golden acres.

With the Civil War began the long decline, lasting still. The record
stands that throughout the one hundred and twenty-five odd years
elapsing from the entrance of the Anglo-Saxon farmers into the
wilderness down to the present time, a few counties of Kentucky have
furnished army and navy, the entire country, with all but a small part
of the native hemp consumed. Little comparatively is cultivated in
Kentucky now. The traveller may still see it here and there, crowning
those ever-renewing, self-renewing inexhaustible fields. But the time
cannot be far distant when the industry there will have become extinct.
Its place in the nation's markets will be still further taken by
metals, by other fibres, by finer varieties of the same fibre, by the
same variety cultivated in soils less valuable. The history of it in
Kentucky will be ended, and, being ended, lost.

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

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

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

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

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

A hundred days from the sowing, and those flowering heads have come
forth with their mass of leaves and bloom and earliest fruits, elastic,
swaying six, ten, twelve feet from the ground and ripe for cutting. A
hundred days reckoning from the last of March or the last of April, so
that it is July, it is August. And now, borne far through the steaming
air floats an odor, balsamic, startling: the odor of those plumes and
stalks and blossoms from which is exuding freely the narcotic resin of
the great nettle. The nostril expands quickly, the lungs swell out
deeply to draw it in: fragrance once known in childhood, ever in the
memory afterward and able to bring back to the wanderer homesick
thoughts of midsummer days in the shadowy, many-toned woods, over into
which is blown the smell of the hemp-fields.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the fields, too, the sights and sounds of falling, the fall of the
standing fatness. The silent fall of the tobacco, to be hung head
downward in fragrant sheds and barns. The felling whack of the
corn-knife and the rustling of the blades, as the workman gathers
within his arm the top-heavy stalks and presses them into the bulging
shock. The fall of pumpkins into the slow-drawn wagons, the shaded side
of them still white with the morning rime. In the orchards, the fall of
apples shaken thunderously down, and the piling of these in sprawling
heaps near the cider mills. In the vineyards the fall of sugaring
grapes into the baskets and the bearing of them to the winepress in the
cool sunshine, where there is the late droning of bees about the sweet
pomace.

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

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

The rakers reappear at intervals of dry weather, and draw the hemp into
armfuls and set it up in shocks of convenient size, wide flared at the
bottom, well pressed in and bound at the top, so that the slanting
sides may catch the drying sun and the sturdy base resist the strong
winds. And now the fields are as the dark brown camps of armies--each
shock a soldier's tent. Yet not dark always; at times snow-covered; and
then the white tents gleam for miles in the winter sunshine--the
snow-white tents of the camping hemp.

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

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

And now along the turnpikes the great loaded creaking wagons pass
slowly to the towns, bearing the hemp to the factories, thence to be
scattered over land and sea. Some day, when the winds of March are
dying down, the sower enters the field and begins where he began twelve
months before.

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

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




I


The century just past had not begun the race of its many-footed years
when a neighborhood of Kentucky pioneers, settled throughout the green
valleys of the silvery Elkhorn, built a church in the wilderness, and
constituted themselves a worshipping association. For some time peace
of one sort prevailed among them, if no peace of any other sort was
procurable around. But by and by there arose sectarian quarrels with
other backwoods folk who also wished to worship God in Kentucky, and
hot personal disputes among the members--as is the eternal law. So that
the church grew as grow infusorians and certain worms,--by fissure, by
periodical splittings and breakings to pieces, each spontaneous
division becoming a new organism. The first church, however, for all
that it split off and cast off, seemed to lose nothing of its vitality
or fighting qualities spiritual and physical (the strenuous life in
those days!); and there came a time when it took offence at one
particular man in its membership on account of the liberality of his
religious opinions. This settler, an old Indian fighter whose vast
estate lay about halfway between the church and the nearest village,
had built himself a good brick house in the Virginian style; and it was
his pleasure and his custom to ask travelling preachers to rest under
his roof as they rode hither and thither throughout the
wilderness--Zion's weather-beaten, solitary scouts.

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

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

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

"My brethren," he said at length slowly, for he would not speak until
he had himself under control, "I think we all remember what it is to be
persecuted for religion's sake. Long before we came together in
Spottsylvania County, Virginia, and organized ourselves into a church
and travelled as a church over the mountains into this wilderness,
worshipping by the way, we knew what it was to be persecuted. Some of
us were sent to jail for preaching the Gospel and kept there; we
preached to the people through the bars of our dungeons. Mobs were
collected outside to drown our voices; we preached the louder and some
jeered, but some felt sorry and began to serve God. They burned matches
and pods of red pepper to choke us; they hired strolls to beat drums
that we might not be heard for the din. Some of us knew what it was to
have live snakes thrown into our assemblages while at worship; or nests
of live hornets. Or to have a crowd rush into the church with farming
tools and whips and clubs. Or to see a gun levelled at one of us in the
pulpit, and to be dispersed with firearms. Harder than any of these
things to stand, we have known what it is to be slandered. But no
single man of us, thank God, ever stopped for these things or for
anything. Thirty years and more this lasted, until we and all such as
we found a friend in Patrick Henry. Now, we hear that by statute all
religious believers in Virginia have been made equal as respects the
rights and favors of the law.

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

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

He paused, for the memories hurt him cruelly.

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

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

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

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

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

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




II


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

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

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

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

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

The heat of his work, the stifling air, the many-toned woods, the sense
of the vast summering land--these things were not in his thoughts. Some
days before, despatched from homestead to homestead, rumors had reached
him away off here at work on his father's farm, of a great university
to be opened the following autumn at Lexington. The like of it with its
many colleges Kentucky, the South, the Mississippi valley had never
seen. It had been the talk among the farming people in their harvest
fields, at the cross-roads, on their porches--the one deep sensation
among them since the war.

For solemn, heart-stirring as such tidings would have been at any other
time, more so at this. Here, on the tableland of this unique border
state, Kentucky--between the halves of the nation lately at
strife--scene of their advancing and retreating armies--pit of a
frenzied commonwealth--here was to arise this calm university, pledge
of the new times, plea for the peace and amity of learning, fresh
chance for study of the revelation of the Lord of Hosts and God of
battles. The animosities were over, the humanities re-begun.

Can you remember your youth well enough to be able to recall the time
when the great things happened for which you seemed to be waiting? The
boy who is to be a soldier--one day he hears a distant bugle: at once
HE knows. A second glimpses a bellying sail: straightway the ocean path
beckons to him. A third discovers a college, and toward its kindly
lamps of learning turns young eyes that have been kindled and will stay
kindled to the end.

For some years this particular lad, this obscure item in Nature's plan
which always passes understanding, had been growing more unhappy in his
place in creation. By temperament he was of a type the most joyous and
self-reliant--those sure signs of health; and discontent now was due to
the fact that he had outgrown his place. Parentage--a farm and its
tasks--a country neighborhood and its narrowness--what more are these
sometimes than a starting-point for a young life; as a flowerpot might
serve to sprout an oak, and as the oak would inevitably reach the hour
when it would either die or burst out, root and branch, into the whole
heavens and the earth; as the shell and yolk of an egg are the
starting-point for the wing and eye of the eagle. One thing only he had
not outgrown, in one thing only he was not unhappy: his religious
nature. This had always been in him as breath was in him, as blood was
in him: it was his life. Dissatisfied now with his position in the
world, it was this alone that kept him contented in himself. Often the
religious are the weary; and perhaps nowhere else does a perpetual
vision of Heaven so disclose itself to the weary as above lonely
toiling fields. The lad had long been lifting his inner eye to this
vision.

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

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

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

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




III


The church which David's grim old Indian-fighting great-grandfather had
dedicated to freedom of belief in the wilderness, cutting off a parcel
of his lands as he had hotly sworn and building on it a schoolhouse
also, stood some miles distant across the country. The vast estate of
the pioneer had been cut to pieces for his many sons. With the next
generation the law of partible inheritance had further subdivided each
of these; so that in David's time a single small farm was all that had
fallen to his father; and his father had never increased it. The church
was situated on what had been the opposite boundary of the original
grant. But he with most of the other boys in the neighborhood had
received his simple education in that school; and he had always gone to
worship under that broad-minded roof, whatsoever the doctrines and
dogmas haply preached.

These doctrines and dogmas of a truth were varied and conflicting
enough; for the different flocks and herds of Protestant believers with
their parti-colored guides had for over fifty years found the place a
very convenient strip of spiritual pasture: one congregation now
grazing there jealously and exclusively; afterwards another.

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

He bade them understand now, if they had never realized it before, that
from the entrance of educated men and women into the western
wilderness, those real founders and builders of the great commonwealth,
the dream of the Kentuckians had been the establishment of a broad,
free institution of learning for their sons. He gave the history of the
efforts and the failures to found such an institution, from the year
1780 to the beginning of the Civil War; next he showed how, during
those few awful years, the slow precious accumulations of that
preceding time had been scattered; books lost, apparatus ruined, the
furniture of lecture rooms destroyed, one college building burned,
another seized and held as a hospital by the federal government; and he
concluded with painting for them a vision of the real university which
was now to arise at last, oldest, best passion of the people, measure
of the height and breadth of the better times: knowing no North, no
South, no latitude, creed, bias, or political end. In speaking of its
magnificent new endowments, he dwelt upon the share contributed by the
liberal-minded farmers of the state, to some of whom he was speaking:
showing how, forgetful of the disappointments and failures of their
fathers, they had poured out money by the thousands and tens of
thousands, as soon as the idea was presented to them again--the rearing
of a great institution by the people and for the people in their own
land for the training of their sons, that they might not be sent away
to New England or to Europe.

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

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

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

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

"If I had only had a son to have been proud of!" he muttered. "It's of
no use; he wouldn't go. It isn't in him to take an education."

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

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

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

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

"Father!"--

There was filial dutifulness in the voice, but what they had never
heard from those lips--authority.

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

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

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

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

The father and mother followed his figure with their eyes, forgetting
each other, as long as it remained in sight. If the flesh of their son
had parted and dissolved away into nothingness, disclosing a hidden
light within him like the evening star, shining close to their faces,
they could scarce have been struck more speechless. But after a few
moments they had adjusted themselves to this lofty annunciation. The
mother, unmindful of what she had just said, began to recall little
incidents of the lad's life to show that this was what he was always
meant to be. She loosened from her throat the breast-pin containing the
hair of the three heads braided together, and drew her husband's
attention to it with a smile. He, too, disregarding his disparagement
of the few minutes previous, now began to admit with warmth how good a
mind David had always had. He prophesied that at college he would
outstrip the other boys from that neighborhood. This, in its way, was
also fresh happiness to him; for, smarting under his poverty among rich
neighbors, and fallen from the social rank to which he was actually
entitled, he now welcomed the secondary joy which originates in the
revenge men take upon each other through the superiority of their
children.

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

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

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




IV


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

All that day a lad, alone at his field work away off on the edge of the
bluegrass lands, toiled as one listening to a sublime sound in the
distance--the tramping, tramping, tramping of the students as they
assembled from the farms of the state and from other states. Some boys
out of his own neighborhood had started that morning, old
schoolfellows. He had gone to say good-by; had sat on the bed and
watched them pack their fine new trunks--cramming these with fond
maternal gifts and the thoughtless affluence of necessary and
unnecessary things; had heard all the wonderful talk about classes and
professors and societies; had wrung their hands at last with eyes
turned away, that none might see the look in them--the immortal hunger.

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

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

So back to his briers. And back to the autumn soil, days of hard
drudging, days of hard thinking. The chief problem for the nigh future
being, how soonest to provide the raiment, fill the scrip; and so with
time enough to find out what, on its first appearance, is so terrible a
discovery to the young, straining against restraint: that just the lack
of a coarse garment or two--of a little money for a little plain
food--of a few candles and a few coverlets for light and warmth with a
book or two thrown in--that a need so poor, paltry as this, may keep
mind and heart back for years. Ah, happy ye! with whom this last not
too long--or for always!

Yet happy ye, whether the waiting be for short time or long time, if
only it bring on meanwhile, as it brought on with him, the struggle!
One sure reward ye have, then, as he had, though there may be none
other--just the struggle: the marshalling to the front of rightful
forces--will, effort, endurance, devotion; the putting resolutely back
of forces wrongful; the hardening of all that is soft within, the
softening of all that is hard: until out of the hardening and the
softening results the better tempering of the soul's metal, and higher
development of those two qualities which are best in man and best in
his ideal of his Maker--strength and kindness, power and mercy. With an
added reward also, if the struggle lead you to perceive (what he did
not perceive), as the light of your darkness, the sweet of bitter, that
real struggling is itself real living, and that no ennobling thing of
this earth is ever to be had by man on any other terms: so teaching
him, none too soon, that any divine end is to be reached but through
divine means, that a great work requires a great preparation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was increased that summer from the sale of cord wood, through
driblets saved by his father and mother; and when, autumn once more
advanced with her days of shadow and thoughtfulness--two years having
now passed--he was in possession of his meagre fortune, wrung out of
earth, out of sweat and strength and devotion.

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

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

As soon as he had made up his mind to study for the ministry, he had
begun to read his Bible absorbingly, sweeping through that primitive
dawn of life among the Hebrews and that second, brilliant one of the
Christian era. He had few other books, none important; he knew nothing
of modern theology or modern science. Thus he was brought wholly under
the influence of that view of Man's place in Nature which was held by
the earliest Biblical writers, has imposed itself upon countless
millions of minds since then, and will continue to impose itself--how
much longer?

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

This conception of Man's place in Nature has perhaps furnished a very
large part of the history of the world. Even at this close of the
nineteenth century, it is still, in all probability, the most important
fact in the faith and conduct of the race, running with endless
applications throughout the spheres of practical life and vibrating
away to the extremities of the imagination. In the case of this poor,
devout, high-minded Kentucky boy, at work on a farm in the years 1866
and 1867, saving his earnings and reading his Bible as the twofold
preparation for his entrance into the Christian ministry, this belief
took on one of its purest shapes and wrought out in him some of its
loftiest results.

Let it be remembered that he lived in a temperate, beautiful, bountiful
country; that his work was done mostly in the fields, with the aspects
of land and sky ever before him; that he was much alone; that his
thinking was nearly always of his Bible and his Bible college. Let it
be remembered that he had an eye which was not merely an opening and
closing but a seeing eye--full of health and of enjoyment of the
pageantry of things; and that behind this eye, looking through it as
through its window, stood the dim soul of the lad, itself in a temple
of perpetual worship: these are some of the conditions which yielded
him during these two years the intense, exalted realities of his inner
life.

When of morning he stepped out of the plain farm-house with its rotting
doors and leaking roof and started off joyously to his day's work, at
the sight of the great sun just rising above the low dew-wet hills, his
soul would go soaring away to heaven's gate. Sometimes he would be
abroad late at night, summoning the doctor for his father or returning
from a visit to another neighborhood. In every farmhouse that he passed
on the country road the people were asleep--over all the shadowy land
they were asleep. And everywhere, guardian in the darkness, watched the
moon, pouring its searching beams upon every roof, around every
entrance, on kennel and fold, sty and barn--with light not enough to
awaken but enough to protect: how he worshipped toward that lamp tended
by the Sleepless! There were summer noons when he would be lying under
a solitary tree in a field--in the edge of its shade, resting; his face
turned toward the sky. This would be one over-bending vault of serenest
blue, save for a distant flight of snow-white clouds, making him think
of some earthward-wandering company of angels. He would lie motionless,
scarce breathing, in that peace of the earth, that smile of the Father.
Or if this same vault remained serene too long; if the soil of the
fields became dusty to his boots and his young grain began to wither,
when at last, in response to his prayer, the clouds were brought
directly over them and emptied down, as he stepped forth into the
cooled, dripping, soaking green, how his heart blessed the Power that
reigned above and did all things well!

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

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

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




V


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank you," he said pleasantly but proudly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The middle-aged man laughed painfully.

"I am one of the students."

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

"About a thousand."

The two walked side by side toward the college.

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

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

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

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

After a brief silence his companion spoke again.

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

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

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

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

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

A revelation they were! Nearly all poor like himself; nearly all having
worked their way to the university: some from farms, some by teaching
distant country or mountain schools; some by the peddling of books--out
of unknown byways, from the hedges and ditches of life, they had
assembled: Calvary's regulars.

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

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




VI


The lad could not study eternally. The change from a toiling body and
idle mind to an idle body and toiling mind requires time to make the
latter condition unirksome. Happily there was small need to delve at
learning. His brain was like that of a healthy wild animal freshly
captured from nature. And as such an animal learns to snap at flung
bits of food, springing to meet them and sinking back on his haunches
keen-eyed for more; so mentally he caught at the lessons prepared for
him by his professors: every faculty asked only to be fed--and remained
hungry after the feeding.

Of afternoons, therefore, when recitations were over and his muscles
ached for exercise, he donned his old farm hat and went, stepping in
his high, awkward, investigating way around the town--unaware of
himself, unaware of the light-minded who often turned to smile at that
great gawk in grotesque garments, with his face full of beatitudes and
his pockets full of apples. For apples were beginning to come in from
the frosty orchards; and the fruit dealers along the streets piled them
into pyramids of temptation. It seemed a hardship to him to have to
spend priceless money for a thing like apples, which had always been as
cheap and plentiful as spring water. But those evening suppers in the
dormitory with the disciples! Even when he was filled (which was not
often) he was never comforted; and one day happening upon one of those
pomological pyramids, he paused, yearned, and bought the apex. It was
harder not to buy than to buy. After that he fell into this fruitful
vice almost diurnally; and with mortifying worldly-mindedness he would
sometimes find his thoughts straying apple-wards while his professors
were personally conducting him through Canaan or leading him dry-shod
across the Red Sea. The little dealer soon learned to anticipate his
approach; and as he drew up would have the requisite number ready and
slide them into his pockets without a word--and without the chance of
inspection. A man's candy famine attacked him also. He usually bought
some intractable, resisting medium: it left him rather tired of
pleasure.

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

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

Having been invited to come up to his friends' room, he mounted and
found one of them waiting at the head of the stairs in his shirt
sleeves, smoking. His greeting was hearty in its way yet betokened some
surprise, a little uneasiness, condescension. David followed his host
into a magnificent room with enormous windows, now raised and opening
upon a veranda. Below was a garden full of old vines black with grapes
and pear trees bent down with pears and beds bright with cool autumn
flowers. (The lad made a note of how much money he would save on apples
if he could only live in reach of those pear trees.) There was a big
rumpled bed in the room; and stretched across this bed on his stomach
lay a student studying and waving his heels slowly in the air. A table
stood in the middle of the room: the books and papers had been scraped
off to the floor; four students were seated at it playing cards and
smoking. Among them his other friend, who rose and gave him a hearty
grip and resuming his seat asked what was trumps. A voice he had heard
before called out to him from the table:--

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

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

"Have you matriculated?" he asked.

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

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

During those early days also he sought out the different churches,
scrutinizing respectfully their exteriors. How many they were, and how
grand nearly all! Beyond anything he had imagined. He reasoned that if
the buildings were so fine, how fine must be the singing and the
sermons! The unconscious assumption, the false logic here, was
creditable to his heart at least--to that green trust of the young in
things as they should be which becomes in time the best seasoned staff
of age. He hunted out especially the Catholic Church. His
great-grandfather had founded his as free for Catholics as Protestants,
but he recalled the fact that no priest had ever preached there. He
felt very curious to see a priest. A synagogue in the town he could not
find. He was sorry. He had a great desire to lay eyes on a
synagogue--temple of that ancient faith which had flowed on its deep
way across the centuries without a ripple of disturbance from the
Christ. He had made up his mind that when he began to preach he would
often preach especially to the Jews: the time perhaps had come when the
Father, their Father, would reveal his Son to them also. Thus he
promptly fixed in mind the sites of all the churches, because he
intended in time to go to them all.

Meantime he attended his own, the size and elegance of which were a
marvel; and in it especially the red velvet pulpit and the vast
chandelier (he had never seen a chandelier before), blazing with stars
(he had never seen illuminating gas). It was under this chandelier that
he himself soon found a seat. All the Bible students sat there who
could get there, that being the choir of male voices; and before a
month passed he had been taken into this choir: for a storm-like bass
rolled out of him as easily as thunder out of a June cloud. Thus
uneventful flowed the tenor of his student life during those several
initiatory weeks: then something occurred that began to make grave
history for him.

The pastor announced at service one morning that he would that day
begin a series of sermons on errors in the faith and practice of the
different Protestant sects; though he would also consider in time the
cases of the Catholics and Jews: it would scarcely be necessary to
speak of the Mohammedans and such others. He was driven to do this, he
declared, and was anxious to do it, as part of the work of his brethren
all over the country; which was the restoration of Apostolic
Christianity to the world. He asked the especial attention of the Bible
students of the University to these sermons: the first of which he then
proceeded to preach.

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

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

In the history of any human soul it is impossible to grasp the first
event that starts up a revolution. But perhaps the troubles of the lad
began here. His absences from Sunday night service of course attracted
notice under the chandelier. His bass was missed. Another student was
glad to take his place. His roommate and the several other dormitory
students who had become his acquaintances, discussed with him the
impropriety of these absences: they agreed that he would better stick
to his own church. He gave reasons why he should follow up the pastor's
demonstrations with actual visits to the others: he contended that the
pastor established the fact of the errors; but that the best way to
understand any error was to study the erring. This was all new to him,
however. He had not supposed that in educating himself to preach the
simple Gospel, to the end that the world might believe in Christ, he
must also preach against those who believed in Christ already. Besides,
no one seemed to be convinced by the pastor but those who agreed with
him in advance: the other churches flourished quite the same.

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

A little cloud came that instant between David and the students to whom
he expressed these views. Some rejoined hotly at once; some maintained
the cold silence which intends to speak in its own time. The next thing
the lad knew was that a professor requested him to remain after class
one day; and speaking with grave kindness, advised him to go regularly
to his own church thereafter. The lad entered ardently into the reasons
why he had gone to the others. The professor heard him through and
without comment repeated his grave, kind advice.

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

One morning there was a sermon on the Catholics. David went dutifully
to his professor. He said he had never been to a Catholic Church and
would like to go. His professor assented cordially, evincing his
pleasure in the lad's frankness. But the next Sunday morning he was in
the Catholic Church again, thus for the first time missing the
communion in his own. Of all the congregations of Christian believers
that the lad had now visited, the Catholic impressed him as being the
most solemn, reverent, and best mannered. In his own church the place
did not seem to become the house of God till services began; and one
morning in particular, two old farmers in the pew behind him talked in
smothered tones of stock and crops, till it fairly made him homesick.
The sermon of the priest, too, filled him with amazement. It weighed
the claims of various Protestant sects to be reckoned as parts of the
one true historic church of God. In passing, he barely referred to the
most modern of these self-constituted Protestant bodies--David's own
church--and dismissed it with one blast of scorn, which seemed to
strike the lad's face like a hot wind: it left it burning. But to the
Episcopal Church the priest dispensed the most vitriolic criticism. And
that night, carried away by the old impulse, which had grown now almost
into a habit, David went to the Episcopal Church: went to number the
slain. The Bishop of the diocese, as it happened, was preaching that
night--preaching on the union of Christian believers. He showed how
ready the Episcopal Church was for such a union if the rest would only
consent: but no other church, he averred, must expect the Episcopal
Church ever to surrender one article of its creed, namely: that it
alone was descended not by historical continuity simply, but by Divine
succession from the Apostles themselves. The lad walked slowly back to
the dormitory that night with knit brows and a heavy heart.

A great change was coming over him. His old religious peace had been
unexpectedly disturbed. He found himself in the thick of the wars of
dogmatic theology. At that time and in that part of the United States
these were impassioned and rancorous to a degree which even now, less
than half a century later, can scarce be understood; so rapidly has
developed meantime that modern spirit which is for us the tolerant
transition to a yet broader future. Had Kentucky been peopled by her
same people several generations earlier, the land would have run red
with the blood of religious persecutions, as never were England and
Scotland at their worst. So that this lad, brought in from his solemn,
cloistered fields and introduced to wrangling, sarcastic, envious
creeds, had already begun to feel doubtful and distressed, not knowing
what to believe nor whom to follow. He had commenced by being so
plastic a medium for faith, that he had tried to believe them all. Now
he was in the intermediate state of trying to ascertain which. From
that state there are two and two only final ones to emerge: "I shall
among them believe this one only;" or, "I shall among them
believe--none." The constant discussion of some dogma and disproof of
some dogma inevitably begets in a certain order of mind the temper to
discuss and distrust ALL dogma.

Not over their theologies alone were the churches wrangling before the
lad's distracted thoughts. If the theologies were rending religion,
politics was rending the theologies. The war just ended had not
brought, as the summer sermon of the Bible College professor had
stated, breadth of mind for narrowness, calm for passion. Not while men
are fighting their wars of conscience do they hate most, but after they
have fought; and Southern and Union now hated to the bottom and nowhere
else as at their prayers. David found a Presbyterian Church on one
street called "Southern" and one a few blocks away called "Northern":
how those brethren dwelt together. The Methodists were similarly
divided. Of Baptists, the lad ascertained there had been so many kinds
and parts of kinds since the settlement of Kentucky, that apparently
any large-sized family anywhere could reasonably have constituted
itself a church, if the parents and children had only been fortunate
enough to agree.

Where politics did not cleave, other issues did. The Episcopal Church
was cleft into a reform movement (and one unreformable). In his own
denomination internal discord raged over such questions as diabolic
pleasures and Apostolic music. He saw young people haled before the
pulpit as before a tribunal of exact statutes and expelled for moving
their feet in certain ways. If in dancing they whirled like a top
instead of being shot straight back and forth like a bobbin in a
weaver's shuttle, their moral conduct was aggravated. A church organ
was ridiculed as a sort of musical Behemoth--as a dark chamber of
howling, roaring Belial.

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

"What do you think?" they asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He broke off abruptly.

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

The lad had never heard of Voltaire. The information was rather
prepossessing.

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

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

"You may meet Voltaire some day."

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

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

The silence in the study grew intense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

His visage was not pleasant.

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

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

"I am."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you a copy of the New Testament?"

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

"I have,"

"You can read it?"

"I can."

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

"I do."

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

"I have tried to do that."

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

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

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

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

"Well?"

"May I ask you some questions?"

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

So bidden, the lad began;--

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

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

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

"They do!"

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

"It is!"

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

"They do!"

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

"It is!"

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

"They do!"

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

"It is!"

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

"It is!"

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

"It is!"

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

"It is!"

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

"They do!"

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

"It is!"

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

"They do!"

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

"It is!"

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

"It is!"

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

"It is."

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

"They did!"

The pastor was grasping the arms of his chair, his body bent toward the
lad, his head thrown back, his face livid with sacred rage. He was a
good man, tried and true: God-fearing, God-serving. No fault lay in him
unless it may be imputed for unrighteousness that he was a stanch,
trenchant sectary in his place and generation. As he sat there in the
basement study of his church, his pulpit of authority and his baptismal
pool of regeneration directly over his head, all round him in the city
the solid hundreds of his followers, he forgot himself as a man and a
minister and remembered only that as a servant of the Most High he was
being interrogated and dishonored. His soul shook and thundered within
him to repel these attacks upon his Lord and Master. As those
unexpected random questions had poured in upon him thick and fast, all
emerging, as it seemed to him, like disembodied evil spirits from the
black pit of Satan and the damned, it was joy to him to deal to each
that same straight, God-directed spear-thrust of a reply--killing them
as they rose. His soul exulted in that blessed carnage.

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

"Ask some more!"

On his side, the lad had lost divine passion as the pastor had gained
it. His interest waned while the pastor's waxed. His last questions
were put so falteringly, almost so inaudibly, that the pastor might
well believe his questioner beaten, brought back to modesty and
silence. To a deeper-seeing eye, however, the truth would have been
plain that the lad was not seeing his pastor at all, but seeing THROUGH
him into his own future: into his life, his great chosen life-work. His
young feet had come in their travels nigh to the limits of his Promised
Land: he was looking over into it.

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

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

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

But reaching it, he wheeled and came back.

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

The interview of that day was one of the signs of two storms which were
approaching: one appointed to reach the University, one to reach the
lad.

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

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

Away back in 1780, while every man, woman, and child in the western
wilderness ness was in dire struggle for life itself, those far-seeing
people had induced the General Assembly of Virginia to confiscate and
sell in Kentucky the lands of British Tories, to found a public
seminary for Kentucky boys--not a sectarian school. These same
broad-minded pioneers had later persuaded her to give twenty thousand
acres of her land to the same cause and to exempt officers and students
of the institution from military service. Still later, intent upon this
great work, they had induced Virginia to take from her own beloved
William and Mary one-sixth of all surveyors' fees in the district and
contribute them. The early Kentuckians, for their part, planned and
sold out a lottery--to help along the incorruptible work. For such an
institution Washington and Adams and Aaron Burr and Thomas Marshall and
many another opened their purses. For it thousands and thousands of
dollars were raised among friends scattered throughout the Atlantic
states, these responding to a petition addressed to all religious
sects, to all political parties. A library and philosophical apparatus
were wagoned over the Alleghanies. A committee was sent to England to
choose further equipments. When Kentucky came to have a legislature of
its own, it decreed that each of the counties in the state should
receive six thousand acres of land wherewith to start a seminary; and
that all these county seminaries were to train students for this
long-dreamed-of central institution. That they might not be sent
away--to the North or to Europe. When, at the end of the Civil War, a
fresh attempt (and the last) was made to found in reality and in
perpetuity a home institution to be as good as the best in the
republic, the people rallied as though they had never known defeat. The
idea resounded like a great trumpet throughout the land. Individual,
legislative, congressional aid--all were poured out lavishly for that
one devoted cause.

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

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




VII


The storm approaching David was vaster and came faster.

Several days had passed since his anxious and abruptly terminated
interview with his pastor. During the interval he had addressed no
further inquiries to any man touching his religious doubts. A serious
sign: for when we cease to carry such burdens to those who wait near by
as our recognized counsellors and appointed guides, the inference is
that succor for our peculiar need has there been sought in vain. This
succor, if existent at all, will be found elsewhere in one of two
places: either farther away from home in greater minds whose teaching
has not yet reached us; or still nearer home in what remains as the
last court of inquiry and decision: in the mind itself. With greater
intellects more remote the lad had not yet been put in touch; he had
therefore grown reflective, and for nearly a week had been spending the
best powers of his unaided thought in self-examination.

He was sitting one morning at his student's table with his Bible and
note-book opened before him, wrestling with his problems still. The
dormitory was very quiet. A few students remained indoors at work, but
most were absent: some gone into the country to preach trial sermons to
trying congregations; some down in the town; some at the college,
practising hymns, or rehearsing for society exhibitions; some scattered
over the campus, preparing Monday lessons on a spring morning when
animal sap stirs intelligently at its sources and sends up its mingled
currents of new energy and new lassitude.

David had thrown his window wide open, to let in the fine air; his eyes
strayed outward. A few yards away stood a stunted transplanted
locust--one of those uncomplaining asses of the vegetable kingdom whose
mission in life is to carry whatever man imposes. Year after year this
particular tree had remained patiently backed up behind the dormitory,
for the bearing of garments to be dusted or dried. More than once
during the winter, the lad had gazed out of his snow-crusted panes at
this dwarfed donkey of the woods, its feet buried deep in ashes, its
body covered with kitchen wash-rags and Bible students' frozen
underwear. He had reasoned that such soil and such servitude had killed
it.

But as he looked out of his window now, his eyes caught sight of the
early faltering green in which this exile of the forest was still
struggling to clothe itself--its own life vestments. Its enforced and
artificial function as a human clothes-horse had indeed nearly
destroyed it; but wherever a bud survived, there its true office in
nature was asserted, its ancient kind declared, its growth stubbornly
resumed.

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

"But I," he reflected, "am that which was never sown and never grown
before. All the ages of time, all the generations of men, have not
fixed any type of life for me. What I am to become I must myself each
instant choose; and having chosen, I can never know that I have chosen
best. Often I do know that what I have selected I must discard. And yet
no one choice can ever be replaced by its rejected fellow; the better
chance lost once, is lost eternally. Within the limits of a locust, how
little may the individual wander; within the limits of the wide and
erring human, what may not a man become! What now am I becoming? What
shall I now choose--as my second choice?"

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

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

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

"But as I was true to myself then, let me be true now. If I cannot
believe what I formerly believed, let me determine quickly what I CAN
believe. The Truth, the Law--I must find these and quickly!"

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

The parting of the ways where he had thus faltered, summing up his
bewilderment, and crying aloud for fresh directions, was one
immemorially old in the history of man: the splitting of Life's single
road into the by-paths of Doubt and Faith. Until within less than a
year, his entire youth had been passed in the possession of what he
esteemed true religion. Brought from the country into the town, where
each of the many churches was proclaiming itself the sole incarnation
of this and all others the embodiment of something false, he had, after
months of distracted wandering among their contradictory clamors,
passed as so many have passed before him into that state of mind which
rejects them all and asks whether such a thing as true religion
anywhere exists.

The parting of Life's road at Doubt and Faith! How many pilgrim feet
throughout the ages, toiling devoutly thus far, have shrunk back before
that unexpected and appalling sign! Disciples of the living Lord,
saints, philosophers, scholars, priests, knights, statesmen--what a
throng! What thoughts there born, prayers there ended, vows there
broken, light there breaking, hearts there torn in twain! Mighty
mountain rock! rising full in the road of journeying humanity. Around
its base the tides of the generations dividing as part the long racing
billows of the sea about some awful cliff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As David made his way to the rear of the long bookshelves, which
extended back toward the stove, the pastor rose and held out his hand
with hearty warmth--and a glance of secret solicitude. The lad looked
sheepish with embarrassment; not until accosted had he himself realized
what a stray he had become from his pastor's flock and fold. And he
felt that he ought instantly to tell the pastor this was the case. But
the pastor had reseated himself and regripped his masterful monologue.
The lad was more than embarrassed; he felt conscious of a new
remorseful tenderness for this grim, righteous man, now that he had
emancipated mind and conscience from his teaching: so true it often is
that affection is possible only where obedience is not demanded. He
turned off sorrowfully to the counter, and a few moments later, getting
the attention of the clerk, asked in a low conscience-stricken tone for
"The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man"; conscience-stricken
at the sight of the money in his palm to pay for them.

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

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

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

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

That day the lad changed his teachers.

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

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

There is a sort of land which receives in autumn, year by year, the
deposit of its own dead leaves and weeds and grasses without either the
winds and waters to clear these away or the soil to reabsorb and
reconvert them into the materials of reproduction. Thus year by year
the land tends farther toward sterility by the very accumulation of
what was once its life. But send a forest fire across those smothering
strata of vegetable decay; give once more a chance for every root below
to meet the sun above; for every seed above to reach the ground below;
soon again the barren will be the fertile, the desert blossom as the
rose. It is so with the human mind. It is ever putting forth a thousand
things which are the expression of its life for a brief season. These
myriads of things mature, ripen, bear their fruit, fall back dead upon
the soil of the mind itself. That mind may be the mind of an
individual; it may be the mind of a century, a race, a civilization. To
the individual, then, to a race, a civilization, a century, arrives the
hour when it must either consume its own dead or surrender its own
life. These hours are the moral, the intellectual revolutions of
history.

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

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

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

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

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




VIII


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

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

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

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

It was hard to stay away from them. Not until separated, had he
realized how dear they were to him. He could not bear even to write
about all that. And he was homesick for the sight of the farm,--the
horses and cows and sheep,--for the sight of Captain. But he must
remain where he was; what he had to do must be done quickly--a great
duty was involved. And they must write to him oftener because he would
need their letters, their love, more than ever now. And so God keep
them in health and bless them. And he was their grateful son, who too
often had been a care to them, who could never forget the sacrifices
they had made to send him to college, and whose only wish was that he
might not cause them any disappointment in the future.

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

David sat long immovable before that letter.

One other Bible student remained. On the campus, not far from the
dormitory, stood a building of a single story, of several rooms. In one
of these rooms there lived, with his family, that tall, gaunt, shaggy,
middle-aged man, in his shiny black coat and paper collars, without any
cravats, who had been the lad's gentle monitor on the morning of his
entering college. He, too, was to spend the summer there, having no
means of getting away with his wife and children. Though he sometimes
went off himself, to hold meetings where he could and for what might be
paid him; now preaching and baptizing in the mountains; now back again,
laboring in his shirt-sleeves at the Pentateuch and the elementary
structure of the English language. Such troubles as David's were not
for him; nor science nor doubt. His own age contained him as a green
field might hold a rock. Not that this kind, faithful, helpful soul was
a lifeless stone; but that he was as unresponsive to the movements of
his time as a boulder is to the energies of a field. Alive in his own
sublime way he was, and inextricably rooted in one ever-living book
alone--the Bible.

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

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

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

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

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

And now summer was gone, the students flocking in, the session
beginning. David reentered his classes. Inwardly he drew back from this
step; yet take any other, throw up the whole matter,--that he could not
do. With all his lifelong religious sense he held on to the former
realities, even while his grasp was loosening.

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

So the crisis came, as come it must.

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

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

Before them, then, sat the lad, facing the wintry light; and there was
a long silence. Every one knew beforehand what the result would be. It
was the best part of a year since that first interview in the pastor's
study; there had been other interviews--with the pastor, with the
professors. They had done what they could to check him, to bring him
back. They had long been counsellors; now in duty they were
authorities, sitting to hear him finally to the end, that they might
pronounce sentence: that would be the severance of his connection with
the university and his expulsion from the church.

Old, old scene in the history of Man--the trial of his Doubt by his
Faith: strange day of judgment, when one half of the human spirit
arraigns and condemns the other half. Only five persons sat in that
room--four men and a boy. The room was of four bare walls and a
blackboard, with perhaps a map or two of Palestine, Egypt, and the
Roman Empire in the time of Paul. The era was the winter of the year
1868, the place was an old town of the Anglo-Saxon backwoodsmen, on the
blue-grass highlands of Kentucky. But in how many other places has that
scene been enacted, before what other audiences of the accusing and the
accused, under what laws of trial, with what degrees and rigors of
judgment! Behind David, sitting solitary there in the flesh, the
imagination beheld a throng so countless as to have been summoned and
controlled by the deep arraigning eye of Dante alone. Unawares, he
stood at the head of an invisible host, which stretched backward
through time till it could be traced no farther. Witnesses all to that
sublime, indispensable part of man which is his Doubt--Doubt respecting
his origin, his meaning, his Maker, and his destiny. That perpetual
half-night of his planet-mind--that shadowed side of his
orbit-life--forever attracted and held in place by the force of Deity,
but destined never to receive its light. Yet from that chill, bleak
side what things have not reached round and caught the sun! And as of
the earth's plants, some grow best and are sweetest in darkness, what
strange blossoms of faith open and are fragrant in that eternal umbra!
Sacred, sacred Doubt of Man. His agony, his searching! which has led
him always onward from more ignorance to less ignorance, from less
truth to more truth; which is the inspiration of his mind, the sorrow
of his heart; which has spoken everywhere in his science, philosophy,
literature, art--in his religion itself; which keeps him humble not
vain, changing not immutable, charitable not bigoted; which attempts to
solve the universe and knows that it does not solve it, but ever seeks
to trace law, to clarify reason, and so to find whatever truth it can.

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

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

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

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

The lad soon grew composed. These judges were still his friends, not
his masters. His masters were the writers of the books in which he
believed, and he spoke for them, for what he believed to be the truth,
so far as man had learned it. The conference lasted through that short
winter afternoon. In all that he said the lad showed that he was full
of many confusing voices: the voices of the new science, the voices of
the new doubt. One voice only had fallen silent in him: the voice of
the old faith.

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

"Do you not even believe in God?"

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

"Do you not even believe in God?"

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

"Do I believe in God?"

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

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

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

And so he read:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




IX


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

At early candle-light that morning, the huge red stage-coach, leaving
town for his distant part of the country, had rolled, creaking and
rattling, to the dormitory entrance, the same stage that had conveyed
him thither. Throwing up his window he had looked out at the curling
white breath of the horses and at the driver, who, buried in coats and
rugs, and holding the lash of his whip in his mittened fist, peered up
and called out with no uncertain temper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crows about the corn shocks, flying leisurely to the stake-and-ridered
fence: there alighting with their tails pointing toward him and their
heads turned sideways over one shoulder; but soon presenting their
breasts seeing he did not hunt. The solitary caw of one of them--that
thin, indifferent comment of their sentinel, perched on the silver-gray
twig of a sycamore. In another field the startled flutter of field
larks from pale-yellow bushes of ground-apple. Some boys out
rabbit-hunting in the holidays, with red cheeks and gay woollen
comforters around their hot necks and jeans jackets full of Spanish
needles: one shouldering a gun, one carrying a game-bag, one eating an
apple: a pack of dogs and no rabbit. The winter brooks, trickling
through banks of frozen grass and broken reeds; their clear brown water
sometimes open, sometimes covered with figured ice.

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

By and by he reached the edge of his father's land, climbed to the
topmost rail of the boundary fence and sat there, his eyes glued to the
whole scene. It lay outspread before him, the entirety of that farm. He
had never realized before how little there was of it, how little! He
could see all around it, except where the woods hid the division fence
on one side. And the house, standing in the still air of the winter
afternoon, with its rotting roof and low red chimneys partly obscured
by scraggy cedars--how small it had become! How poor, how wretched
everything--the woodpile, the cabin, the hen-house, the ice-house, the
barn! Was this any part of the great world? It was one picture of
desolation, the creeping paralysis of a house and farm. Did anything
even move?

Something did move. A column of blue smoke moved straight and thin from
the chimney of his father's and mother's room. In a far corner of the
stable lot, pawing and nozzling some remnants of fodder, were the old
horses. By the hay-rick he discovered one of the sheep, the rest being
on the farther side. The cows by and by filed slowly around from behind
the barn and entered the doorless milking stalls. Suddenly his dog
emerged from one of those stalls, trotting cautiously, then with a
playful burst of speed went in a streak across the lot toward the
kitchen. A negro man issued from the cabin, picked out a log, knocked
the ashes out of his pipe in the palm of his hand, and began to cut the
firewood for the night.

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

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

He fancied he could see them as they sat in the house this moment, not
dreaming he was anywhere near. One on each side of the fireplace; his
mother wearing her black dress and purple shawl: a ball of yarn and
perhaps a tea-cake in her lap; some knitting on her needles; she knit,
she never mended. But his father would be mending--leather perhaps, and
sewing, as he liked to sew, with hog bristles--the beeswax and the awls
lying in the bottom of a chair drawn to his side. There would be no
noises in the room otherwise: he could hear the stewing of the sap in
the end of a fagot, the ticking of one clock, the fainter ticking of
another in the adjoining room, like a disordered echo. They would not
be talking; they would be thinking of him. He shut his eyes, compressed
his lips, shook his head resolutely, and leaped down.

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

"Captain," he called with a quivering voice.

With ears laid back and one cry of joy the dog was on him. The lad
stooped and drew him close. Neither at that moment had any articulate
speech nor needed it. As soon as he was released, the dog, after
several leaps toward his face, was off in despair either of expressing
or of containing his joy, to tell the news at the house. David
laggingly followed.

As he stepped upon the porch, piled against the wall beside the door
were fagots as he used to see them. When he reached the door itself, he
stopped, gazing foolishly at those fagots, at the little gray lichens
on them: he could not knock, he could not turn the knob without
knocking. But his step had been heard. His mother opened the door and
peered curiously out.

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

She dropped her knitting and threw her arms around him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is the matter? What happened?"

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

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

"How can you ever tell me?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The words choked him.

"Oh! oh!--"

"Mother, don't!--"

"What is it?"

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

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

"FOR WHAT?"

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

"FOR WHAT?"

"I do not believe the Bible any longer. I do not believe in
Christianity."

"Oh, don't do THAT!"

The cry proceeded from David's mother, who crossed quickly and sat
beside her husband, holding his hand, perhaps not knowing her own
motive.

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

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

"WHY HAVE YOU COME BACK HERE?"

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

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

It was a kick of the foot.




X


More than two months had passed. Twilight of closing February was
falling over the frozen fields. The last crow had flapped low and
straight toward the black wood beyond the southern horizon. No sunset
radiance streamed across the wide land, for all day a solitude of cloud
had stretched around the earth, bringing on the darkness now before its
time.

In a small hemp field on an edge of the vast Kentucky table-land, a
solitary breaker kept on at his work. The splintered shards were piled
high against his brake: he had not paused to clear them out of his way
except around his bootlegs. Near by, the remnant of the shock had
fallen over, clods of mingled frost and soil still sticking to the
level butt-ends. Several yards to windward, where the dust and refuse
might not settle on it, lay the pile of gray-tailed hemp,--the coarsest
of man's work, but finished as conscientiously as an art. From the
warming depths of this, rose the head and neck of a common shepherd
dog, his face turned uneasily but patiently toward the worker. Whatever
that master should do, whether understood or not, was right to him; he
did not ask to understand, but to love and to serve. Farther away in
another direction leaned the charred rind of a rotting stump. At
intervals the rising wind blew the ashes away, exposing live
coals--that fireside of the laborer, wandering with him from spot to
spot over the bitter lonely spaces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




XI


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

David put his hemp in the saddle-house; a separate hemp-house they were
not rich enough to own. He had chosen this particular part of the barn
because it was dryest in roof and floor. Several bales of hemp were
already piled against the logs on one side; and besides these, the room
contained the harness, the cart and the wagon gear, the box of tar, his
maul and wedges, his saddle and bridle, and sundry implements used in
the garden or on the farm. It was almost dark in there now, and he
groped his way.

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

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

The man laughed heartily as he paused a moment and listened to that
rejoicing uproar. But he was touched, also. To them he was the answerer
of prayer. Not one believed that he ever refused to succor in time of
need, or turned a deaf ear to supplication. If he made poor provision
for them sometimes, though they might not feel satisfied, they never
turned against him. The barn was very old. The chemical action of the
elements had first rotted away the shingles at the points where the
nails pinned them to the roof; and, thus loosened, the winds of many
years had dislodged and scattered them. Through these holes, rain could
penetrate to the stalls of the horses, so that often they would get up
mired and stiff and shivering; but they never reproached him. On the
northern side of the barn the weather-boarding was quite gone in
places, and the wind blew freely in. Of winter mornings the backs of
the cows would sometimes be flecked with snow, or this being stubbornly
melted by their own heat, their hides would be hung with dew-drops:
they never attributed that fact to him as a cruelty. In the whole
stable there was not one critic of his providence: all were of the
household of faith: the members being in good standing and full
fellowship.

Remembrance of this lay much in his mind whenever, as often, he
contrasted his association with his poor animals, and the troublous
problem of faith in his own soul. It weighed with especial heaviness
upon his heart, this nightfall in the barn, over which hung that
threatening sky. Do what he could for their comfort, it must be
insufficient in a rotting, windswept shelter like that. And here came
the pinch of conscience, the wrench of remorse: the small sums of money
which his father and mother had saved up at such a sacrifice on the
farm,--the money which he had spent lavishly on himself in preparation,
as he had supposed, for his high calling in life,--if but a small part
of that had been applied to the roof and weather-boarding of the
stable, the stock this night might have been housed in warmth and
safety.

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

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

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

"What makes you so late?"

Her tone betrayed minute curiosity rather than any large concern.

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

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

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

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

There was a moment of silence.

"Supper's over," she said simply.

She held in one hand a partly eaten biscuit.

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

After another short interval she asked:

"Is it going, to snow?"

"It's going to do something."

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

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

As it started and spread, little by little it brought out of the
cheerless darkness all the features of the rough, homely, kind face,
bent over and watching it so impatiently and yet half absently. It gave
definition to the shapeless black hat, around the brim of which still
hung filaments of tow, in the folds of which lay white splinters of
hemp stalk. There was the dust of field and barn on the edges of the
thick hair about the ears; dust around the eyes and the nostrils. He
was resting on one knee; over the other his hands were
crossed--enormous, powerful, coarsened hands, the skin so frayed and
chapped that around the finger-nails and along the cracks here and
there a little blood had oozed out and dried.




XII


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

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

His mother sat in her place at the head of the table, quietly waiting
for him, and still holding in one hand the partially eaten biscuit As
he took his seat, she rose, and, walking listlessly to the kitchen
door, made a listless request of one of the two negro women. When the
coffee had been brought in, standing, she poured out a cup, sweetened,
stirred, and tasted it, and putting the spoon into it, placed it before
him. Then she resumed her seat (and the biscuit) and looked on,
occasionally scrutinizing his face, with an expression perhaps the most
tragic that can ever be worn by maternal eyes: the expression of a
lowly mother who has given birth to a lofty son, and who has neither
the power to understand him, nor the grace to realize her own
inferiority.

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

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

That from so dark a receptacle as this mother there should have emerged
such a child of light, was one of those mysteries that are the
perpetual delight of Nature and the despair of Science. This did not
seem one of those instances--also a secret of the great Creatress--in
which she produces upon the stem of a common rose a bud of alien
splendor. It was as if potter's clay had conceived marble. The
explanation of David did not lie in the fact that such a mother had
produced him.

One of the truest marks of her small, cold mind was the rigid tyranny
exercised over it by its own worthless ideas. Had she not sat beside
her son while he ate, had she not denied herself the comfort of the
fireside in the adjoining room, in order that she might pour out for
him the coffee that was unfit to be drunk, she would have charged
herself with being an unfaithful, undutiful mother. But this done, she
saw no further, beheld nothing of the neglect, the carelessness, the
cruelty, of all the rest, part of which this very moment was outspread
beneath her eyes.

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

Work in the hemp fields leaves a man's body calling in every tissue for
restoration of its waste. David had hardly taken his seat before his
eye swept the prospect before him with savage hope. In him was the
hunger, not of toil alone, but of youth still growing to manhood, of
absolute health. Whether he felt any mortification at his mother's
indifference is doubtful. Assuredly life-long experience had taught him
that nothing better was to be expected from her. How far he had
unconsciously grown callous to things as they were at home, there is no
telling. Ordinarily we become in such matters what we must; but it is
likewise true that the first and last proof of high personal
superiority is the native, irrepressible power of the mind to create
standards which rise above all experience and surroundings; to carry
everywhere with itself, whether it will or not, a blazing, scorching
censorship of the facts that offend it. Regarding the household
management of his mother, David at least never murmured; what he
secretly felt he alone knew, perhaps not even he, since he was no
self-examiner. As to those shortcomings of hers which he could not fail
to see, for them he unconsciously showed tenderest compassion.

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

"What makes you so late?"

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

"Is it going to snow?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What an evil-minded cook!"

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

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

She spoke with uneasiness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His father sat on one side of the fireplace, watching the open door for
the entrance of his son. He appeared slightly bent over in his chair.
Plainly the days of rough farm-work and exposure were over for him,
prematurely aged and housed. There was about him--about the shape and
carriage of the head--in the expression of the eye most of all,
perhaps,--the not wholly obliterated markings of a thoughtful and
powerful breed of men. His appearance suggested that some explanation
of David might be traceable in this quarter. For while we know nothing
of these deep things, nor ever shall, in the sense that we can supply
the proofs of what we conjecture; while Nature goes ever about her
ancient work, and we cannot declare that we have ever watched the
operations of her fingers, think on we will, and reason we must, amid
her otherwise intolerable mysteries. Though we accomplish no more in
our philosophy than the poor insect, which momentarily illumines its
wandering through the illimitable night by a flash from its own body.

Lost in obscurity, then, as was David's relation to his mother, there
seemed some gleams of light discernible in that between father and son.
For there are men whom nature seems to make use of to connect their own
offspring not with themselves but with earlier sires. They are like
sluggish canals running between far-separated oceans--from the deeps of
life to the deeps of life, allowing the freighted ships to pass. And no
more does the stream understand what moves across its surface than do
such commonplace agents comprehend the sons who have sprung from their
own loins. Here, too, is one of Nature's greatest cruelties to the
parent.

As David's father would not have recognized his remote ancestors if
brought face to face, so he did not discover in David the image of
them--the reappearance in the world, under different conditions, of
certain elements of character found of old in the stock and line. He
could not have understood how it was possible for him to transmit to
the boy a nature which he himself did not actively possess. And,
therefore, instead of beholding here one of Nature's mysterious
returns, after a long period of quiescence, to her suspended activities
and the perpetuation of an interrupted type, so that his son was but
another strong link of descent joined to himself, a weak one; instead
of this, he saw only with constant secret resentment that David was at
once unlike him and his superior.

These two had worked side by side year after year on the farm; such
comradeship in labor usually brings into consciousness again the
primeval bond of Man against Nature--the brotherhood, at least, of the
merely human. But while they had mingled their toil, sweat, hopes, and
disappointments, their minds had never met. The father had never felt
at home with his son; David, without knowing why--and many a sorrowful
hour it had cost him--had never accepted as father the man who had
brought him into the world. Each soon perceived that a distance
separated them which neither could cross, though vainly both should
try, and often both did try, to cross it.

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

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

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

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

"I'm sorry."

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

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

"What made you so late?"

David explained again.

"How much hemp did you break?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll take the woods."

"FATHER!" cried David, wheeling on him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No."

"Nor promised?"

"No!"

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

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

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

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

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




XIII


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

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

A comfortless room. Rag carpeting on the floor. No rug softening the
hearth-stones. The sashes of the windows loose in the frames and shaken
to-night by twisty gusts. A pane of glass in one had been broken and
the opening pasted over with a sheet of letter paper. This had been
burst by an indolent hand, thrust through to close the shutters
outside; and a current of cold air now swept across the small room. The
man felt it, shook himself free of depressing thoughts, rose
resolutely. He took from a closet one of his most worthless coats, and
rolling it into a wad, stopped the hole. Going back to the grate, he
piled on the wood, watching the blaze as it rushed up over the logs,
devouring the dried lichens on the bark; then sinking back to the
bottom rounds, where it must slowly rise again, reducing the wood to
ashes. Beside him as he sat in his rush-bottomed chair stood a small
square table and on this a low brass candlestick, the companion of the
one in the dining room. A half-burnt candle rose out of the socket. As
David now lighted it and laid the long fresh candle alongside the
snuffers, he measured with his eye the length of his luminaries and the
amount of his wood--two friends. The little grate had commenced to roar
at him bravely, affectionately; and the candle sputtered to him and
threw sparks into the air--the rockets of its welcoming flame.

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

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

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

An hour passed, during which, one elbow on the table, the shaded side
of his face supported in the palm of his hand, he read, scarce moving
except to snuff the wick or to lay on a fresh fagot. At the end of this
time other laws than those which the writer was tracing began to assert
their supremacy over David--the laws of strength and health, warmth and
weariness. Sleep was descending on him, relaxing his limbs, spreading a
quiet mist through his brain, caressing his eyelids. He closed the
pages and turned to his dying fire. The book caused him to wrestle; he
wanted rest.

And now, floating to him through that mist in his brain, as softly as a
nearing melody, as radiantly as dawning light, came the image of
Gabriella: after David had pursued Knowledge awhile he was ready for
Love. But knowledge, truth, wisdom before every other earthly
passion--that was the very soul of him. His heart yearned for her now
in this closing hour, when everything else out of his way, field-work,
stable-work, wood-cutting, filial duties, study, he was alone with the
thought of her, the newest influence in his life, taking heed of her
solely, hearkening only to his heart's need of her. In all his rude
existence she was the only being he had ever known who seemed to him
worthy of a place in the company of his great books. Had the summons
come to pack his effects to-morrow and, saying good-by to everything
else, start on a journey to the congenial places where his mighty
masters lived and wrought, he would have wished her alone to go with
him, sharer of life's loftiness. Her companionship wherever he might
be--to have just that; to feel that she was always with him, and always
one with him; to be able to turn his eyes to hers before some vanishing
firelight at an hour like this, with deep rest near them side by side!

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was the sound of a scratching on David's window shutters, as
though a stiff brush were being moved up and down across the slats. He
became aware that this sound had reached him at intervals several times
already, but as often happens, had been disregarded by him owing to his
preoccupation. Now it was so loud as to force itself positively upon
his attention.

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

Sleet! This, then, was the nature of the threatening storm, which all
day had made man and beast foreboding and distressed. David held out
his hand: rain was falling steadily, each drop freezing on whatsoever
it fell, adding ice to ice. The moon rode high by this time; and its
radiance pouring from above on the roof of riftless cloud, diffused
enough light below to render large objects near at hand visible in bulk
and outline. A row of old cedars stretched across the yard. Their
shapes, so familiar to him, were already disordered. The sleet must
have been falling for hours to have weighed them down this way and
that. A peculiarity of the night was the wind, which increased
constantly, but with fitful violence, giving no warning of its high
swoop, seizure, and wrench.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




XIV


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

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

A marvel of nature, terrible, beautiful, met his eyes: ice-rain and a
great frost Cloud, heavy still, but thinner than on the day before,
enwrapped the earth. The sun, descending through this translucent roof
of gray, filled the air beneath with a radiance as of molten pearl; and
in this under-atmosphere of pearl all earthly things were tipped and
hung in silver. Tree, bush, and shrub in the yard below, the rose
clambering the pillars of the porch under his window, the scant ivy
lower down on the house wall, the stiff little junipers, every blade of
grass--all encased in silver. The ruined cedars trailed from sparlike
tops their sweeping sails of incrusted emerald and silver. Along the
eaves, like a row of inverted spears of unequal lengths, hung the
argent icicles. No; not spun silver all this, but glass; all things
buried, not under a tide of liquid silver, but of flowing and then
cooling glass: Nature for once turned into a glass house, fixed in a
brittle mass, nowhere bending or swaying; but if handled roughly, sure
to be shivered.

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

He went at once to the stable for the feeding and found everything
strangely quiet--the stilling influence of a great frost on animal
life. There had been excitement and uneasiness enough during the night;
now ensued the reaction, for man is but one of the many animals with
nerves and moods. A catastrophe like this which covers with ice the
earth--grass, winter edible twig and leaf, roots and nuts for the brute
kind that turns the soil with the nose, such putting of all food
whatsoever out of reach of mouth or hoof or snout--brings these
creatures face to face with the possibility of starving: they know it
and are silent with apprehension of their peril; know it perhaps by the
survival of prehistoric memories reverberating as instinct still. And
there is another possible prong of truth to this repression of their
characteristic cries at such times of frost: then it was in ages past
that the species which preyed on them grew most ravenous and far
ranging. The silence of the modern stable in a way takes the place of
that primeval silence which was a law of safety in the bleak
fastnesses, hunted over by flesh eating prowlers. It is the prudent
noiselessness of many a species to-day, as the deer and the moose.

The sheep, having enjoyed little shelter beside the hayrick, had
encountered the worst of the storm. When David appeared in the stable
lot, they beheld him at once; for their faces were bunched expectantly
toward the yard gate through which he must emerge. But they spoke not a
word to one another or to him as they hurried slipping forward. The man
looked them over pityingly, yet with hu

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