ry knowledge will be easy to
assimilate. You will receive in the course of a few days a parting
present from myself in the shape of a box of carefully chosen books on
European literature and history. Devote yourself to the study of
these, and of the German language, which was your mother's native
tongue, for the next year, and then I shall consider that you are
fairly finished, and then, too, my dear Angela, I shall expect to reap
a full reward for my labours."

"What is it that you will expect of me?"

"I shall expect, Angela," and he rose from his chair and walked up and
down the room in his excitement--"I shall expect to see you take your
proper place in your generation. I shall say: 'Choose your own line,
become a critical scholar, a practical mathematician, or--and perhaps
that is what you are most suited for with your imaginative powers--a
writer of fiction. For remember that fiction, properly understood and
directed to worthy aims, is the noblest and most far-reaching, as it
is also the most difficult of the arts.' In watching the success that
will assuredly attend you in this or any other line, I shall be amply
rewarded for my trouble."

Angela shook her head with a gesture of doubt, but he did not wait for
her to answer.

"Well, my dear, I must not keep you any longer--it is quite dark and
blowing a gale of wind--except to say one more word. Remember that all
this is--indirectly perhaps, but still none the less truly--a means to
an end. There are two educations, the education of the mind and the
education of the soul; unless you minister to the latter, all the time
and toil spent upon the former will prove to little purpose. The
learning will, it is true, remain; but it will be as the quartz out of
which the gold has been already crushed, or the dry husks of corn. It
will be valueless and turn to no good use, will serve only to feed the
swine of intellectual voluptuousness and infidelity. It is, believe
me, the higher learning of the soul that gilds our earthly lore. The
loftier object of all education is so to train the intellect that it
may become competent to understand something, however little, of the
nature of our God, and to the true Christian the real end of learning
is the appreciation of His attributes as exemplified in His mysteries
and earthly wonders. But perhaps that is a subject on which you are as
well fitted to discourse as I am, so I will not enter into it.
'Finis,' my dear, 'finis.'"