erhaps 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 wrangl