e 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-morro