eed. At certain hours
he would study his country's social, political needs; at others he would
help in his father's farm management; at others he would study some
exact science. But when the measured hours of his day were over, and
before he lit his student's lamp, for a while he turned his fancies
loose, and they ran all too surely to play about Susannah's charms,
about the circumstances of her life. This was not his happiest hour. The
eternal advantage of love was lost for the time in its present distress.
Hateful thoughts were the results of this self-indulgence, yet he hated
more anything that came as interruption. During these years the lover in
him had not grown what the world calls wise.

For some minutes Finney, controlling the briskness of his ordinary pace,
walked by Ephraim's side and contented himself with the gracious scene,
passing remarks upon weather and crops. Soon, for the value of time
always pressed upon him, his business-like voice took a softened tone,
and he began preaching a heart-felt sermon to his one listener.

The subject of the sermon was "the fire God gave for other ends," and he
ventured to point out to Ephraim, in his plain, logical way, that it was
wrong to waste on a woman that devotion which God intends only himself.

Ephraim smiled; it was a good-tempered, buoyant smile. "Did it ever
occur to you, Finney, to reflect that, with your opinions, had you been
the Creator, you would never have made the world as it is made? What
time would you ever have thought it worth while to spend in developing
the iridescence on a beetle's wing, in adjusting man's soul till it
responds with storm or calm, gloom or glory, to outer influence, as the
surface of the ocean to weather?"

Finney was puzzled, as he always was, by Ephraim's _bonhomie_ and his
strange ideas. "But what have you to advance against what I have already
said, Ephraim?"

"Advance? I advance nothing. I even withdraw my painted insects and the
storms of emotion by which I had perhaps thought that God did his best
teaching; I withdraw also my exaltation of that strait gate of use
without abuse for the making of which I had almost said Heaven hands us
the most dangerous things. I withdraw all that offends you, Finney, in
order to thank you for having spoken her name. No one else has spoken it
in my hearing since they knew of my last parting with her, and I--I am
fool enough half the days to wish the clouds in their thunder-claps
would