t this expression changed in conversation,
when not only his words but his gestures and his glances challenged a
friendly but energetic conflict of opinion.

If it be asked, how did Father Hecker recreate himself during those
mournful years, the answer is that recreation in the sense of a
pleasurable relaxation seemed contrary to his nature whether in
sickness or in health. It was once said to him, "Easter week is
always a lazy time." "No, it is not," he answered. "I never have
known a time, not a moment, in my whole life, when I felt lazy or was
in an idle mood." He found himself obliged, however, to get out of
the house and take exercise, walking in the park leaning on the arm
of one of the community, or, if he was more than usually weak, being
driven in his brother's carriage. There were occasions when to kill
time was for him to kill care--to call his mind away from thoughts of
death and of the judgment, the dread of which fell upon him like
eternal doom. Then he would try to get some one to talk to, or to go
with him and look at pictures and statues; or he would work at
mending old clocks, a pretty well mended collection of which he kept
in his room against such occasions. In the park he would often go and
look at the beasts in the menagerie, and he spoke of them
affectionately. "They bring to my mind the power and beauty of God,"
he said. He came to meals with the community, at least to dinner,
until five or six years before his death, when his appetite became so
unreliable that he took what food he could, and when he could, in his
room. He also attended the community recreations after meals until a
few years before the end; but it was often noticed that the process
of humiliation he was undergoing caused him to creep away into a
corner, sit awhile with a very dejected look, and then wearily go
upstairs to his room. When he was urged not to do this, "I cannot
help it to save my life," was all the answer he could give. He
finally gave up the recreations almost entirely.

But he hated laziness. "I am so weak," he once said, "and my brain is
so easily tired out that I am forced to read a great deal to recreate
myself. That's why you see me reading so much." The book in which he
was at the moment seeking recreation was a ponderous work on
metaphysics by a prolix Scotchman, treating in many dreary chapters
of such amusing topics as the unity of the act of perception with the
object perceived! As may be supposed of su