nd had washed his hands of me that day when I was bold
enough to renounce my purpose of entering the ministry, and now, when
in the exultation of the moment my mind reverted to that abandoned
plan, I found my own ideas too nebulous to permit me to set myself up
as a teacher of divine truth. The law had taken its place with the
making of nails, and I did not believe that when my race was run, when
I had counted up the wills I had drawn, the bad causes I had defended,
the briefs I had written in useless litigations, I could content myself
with the thought that I had fought a good fight. For there is a good
fight, and to the weakest of us must come a sense of futility in those
moments when we awaken from our sloth and hear the distant din of the
battle. I thought of medicine, of all professions in itself the most
altruistic, and then I found myself face to face with that distressing
commonplace, the need of money, for though my father was accounted a
rich man in the valley, his wealth was proportioned to the valley
standards. A commercial life alone seemed left to me, and then I
remembered the million kegs of nails, and I recalled Rufus Blight's
achievement of giving away a prize with every pound of tea. Here
indeed was a march through waste-lands.

You will think that I was a dreamy, egotistical youth for whom not only
the ways of home but the ways of the mass of his fellows were not quite
good enough. Perhaps I was. But you must remember a boyhood passed in
loneliness; long days when my feet followed the windings of the creek,
but my eyes were turned to the distant mountains; the evenings when
from the barn-bridge I watched the shadows fall and saw the valley
peopled with mysterious shapes. I was ambitious, and I coddled myself
with the belief that my ambition did not spring from selfishness, from
what the Professor had called the yearning for something more, but from
the desire for something better. I did not drag up the roots of my
motives to light. Had I, the cynical philosopher must have found that
they were nurtured in the same soil that nurtured the ambitions of
Judge Bundy.

I had faith in the Professor and I wanted to find him. I could see the
inconsistency of his practice and his preaching, but truth is truth no
matter by whom uttered. I believed that he could help me, and I wrote
to him in the care of Valerian Harassan. The writing of this letter
was an evening's labor, for in it I had to tell him