their deep-drawn sighs of contentment, and to
the musical grinding of the oats in their teeth. His imaginative mind
read his own thoughts into everything, and he believed that he could
distinguish in these inarticulate sounds the words, "Good-night.
Good-night."

"Good-night," he said, and stroking their great flanks with his kind
hand, left them to their well-earned repose. On his way to the house he
stopped to bathe his face in the waters of a spring brook that ran
across the yard, and then entered the kitchen where supper was spread.

"Thee is late," said the woman who had watched and waited, her fine face
radiant with a smile of love and welcome.

"Forgive me, mother," he replied. "I have had another vision."

"I thought as much. Thee must remember what thee has seen, my son," she
said, "for all that thee beholds with the outer eye shall pass away,
while what thee sees with the inner eye abides forever. And had thee a
message, too?"

"It was delivered to me that on the holy Sabbath day I should go to the
camp in Baxter's clearing and preach to the lumbermen."

"Then thee must go, my son."

"I will," he answered, taking her hand affectionately, but with Quaker
restraint, and leading her to the table.

The family, consisting of the mother, an adopted daughter Dorothea, the
daughter's husband Jacob and son Stephen, sat down to a simple but
bountiful supper, during which and late into the evening the young
mystic pondered the vision which he believed himself to have seen, and
the message which he believed himself to have heard. In his musings
there was not a tremor or a doubt; he would have as soon questioned the
reality of the old farm-house and the faces of the family gathered about
the table. Of the susceptibility of the nerves to morbid activity, or
the powers of the overdriven brain to objectify its concepts, he had
never even dreamed. He was a credulous and unsophisticated youth,
dwelling in a realm of imagination rather than in a world of reality and
law. He had much to learn. His education was about to begin, and to
begin as does all true and effective education, in a spiritual
temptation. The Ghebers say that when their great prophet Ahriman was
thrown into the fire by the order of Nimrod, the flames into which he
fell turned into a bed of roses, upon which he peacefully reclined. This
innocent Quaker youth had been reclining upon a bed of roses which now
began to turn into a couch of flames.