n
heart.

The good old man could not understand how he was to live for weeks
without work, without books, doing nothing but nurse his body. Such a
cure as this, he said with a childlike smile, was only a sickness with
the ability to take walks, and it would be nothing worse than sickness
if he lay in bed.

But he soon turned the conversation from himself, and asked Eric about
his studies, and how he was getting on with his great work upon
slavery. Before Eric could answer, the Professor told him that he was
continually making notes upon the subject for him, and that one of the
most striking things he had met with was the decision with which
Luther, from a religious point of view, had expressed himself in favor
of holding slaves.

"I do not blame Luther," he continued; "he adopted the views of his
day, just as others in other generations have believed in the agency of
evil spirits. The language of the great Bossuet shows how much the
strongest minds were influenced by the general belief of the time; he
said that whoever denied the right of holding slaves sinned against the
Holy Ghost. Perhaps a future generation will be as little able to
understand our prejudices."

Eric found in this morning walk a satisfaction to which he had been
long a stranger. Professor Einsiedel had looked cautiously about him as
he walked, as if fearing some one might overhear the great secret he
was about to reveal. At last he said:--

"Dear Doctor," he always called Eric Doctor, "I have been thinking a
great deal about the task of educating a rich youth. The absolutely
right I have not found; that can exist only in the imagination. But so
to educate a human being, intellectually and morally, that we can be
approximately sure--mark you, I say approximately--that we can be
approximately sure, or have reason to believe, that, in any given case
he will be guided by pure moral laws, that is all that we can hope to
do; and I am very much mistaken, if that is not what you have already
succeeded in accomplishing with regard to your pupil. As far as I know
the world,--and I was tutor myself once, though only for a short
time--as far as I know the world, those of high birth, and no doubt it
is the same with those of great wealth, are full of wishes and
cravings; and the task is to convert these wishes, these cravings, this
expectancy, into active will and effort. Your handsome pupil has
excellent, dispositions, in this respect; he understands the