. He began
to grasp the hitherto unnoted fact that meals and a bed and fires and
clothes and all the other stark necessities involved labor of the hands,
skilful exercise of the thought-function.

If this was so, he, Wesley Thompson, twenty-five years of age and a
minister of the gospel, was deeply in debt--unless he denied the justice
of giving value for value received. He had received much; he had
returned nothing except perfunctory thanks. And what had he to give?
Even to him, transcendent as was his faith that the glory of man was but
the reflected glory of God, that faith was not a commodity to be
bartered.

He did not think these things in these terms. He found himself becoming
involved in a maze of speculation, in which he could only grope feebly
for words to define the unrest that was in him.

While he sat at his small table of rough-hewn boards with his scorched,
unappetizing biscuits, ill-cooked potatoes and bacon, and a pot of tea
that he could never brew to his liking (and Mr. Thompson, from a
considerable amount of juggling afternoon teacups, had acquired a nice
taste in that beverage) he saw Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr pass along one
edge of his clearing, a cluster of bright-winged ducks slung over
Tommy's shoulder, their voices floating across to him as if they came
down a long corridor. They disappeared toward Lone Moose through the
timber, and Mr. Thompson sat brooding over his lonely meal until he
realized with a start that his mind was concentrating upon Sophie Carr
with a disturbing insistence.

The plague of mosquitoes had somewhat abated. In the early morning and
for a time in the evening, and also when rain dampened the atmosphere,
these pests still kept a man's hands busy warding them off. But through
the dry heat of the day he could go abroad in reasonable comfort.

So now Mr. Thompson washed up his dishes in a fashion to make the lips
of a careful housekeeper pucker in disdain, clapped on his broken-rimmed
straw hat and sallied forth.

He was full of an earnest desire to do good, as he defined doing good.
He had come here for that purpose, backed by an organization for just
such good work. This evangelical fire burned strong in him despite the
crude shifts he was put to, the loneliness, the perplexities and trials
of the spirit. Just as an educated humanitarian coming upon an
illiterate people would gladly banish their illiteracy, so Thompson was
resolved to banish what he deemed the spir