, be he educator or physician,
be only called "in season." No doubt,--but in season would often be a
hundred or two years before the child was born; and people never send so
early as that.

The father of Elsie Veneer knew his duties and his difficulties too well
to trouble himself about anything others might think or say. So soon
as he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life up to
following her and protecting her as far as he could. It was a stern and
terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not without force
of intellect and will, and the manly ambition for himself and his
family-name which belonged to his endowments and his position. Passive
endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such a nature.

What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing
his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could
not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring. His
minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner sort
of devotees,--persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity,
and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere with
the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more odious forms of
avarice and self-indulgence. How could he speak with the old physician
and the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror which but to name
was to strike dumb the lips of Consolation?

In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for
which young men and young women go about looking into each other's
faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and
making them beautiful to each other, as to all of us. He had found his
other self early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted his
freshness in vain longings: the lot of many, perhaps we may say of most,
who infringe the patent of our social order by intruding themselves
into a life already upon half allowance of the necessary luxuries of
existence. The life he had led for a brief space was not only beautiful
in outward circumstance, as old Sophy had described it to the Reverend
Doctor. It was that delicious process of the tuning of two souls to each
other, string by string, not without little half-pleasing discords now
and then when some chord in one or the other proves to be overstrained
or over-lax, but always approaching nearer and nearer to harmony, until
they become at last as two instruments with a single voice