interesting
experiment, will it not?"

I fell in with his whim, and the next day we made the rounds agreed
upon.

What a curious thing it was! How men of various creeds felt confident
and repeated the old platitudes, and would be anything but logical!
How one or two were honest, and said they could not answer.

And how absurd, we said at night, the keeping of men to tell us what
can no more be learned in a theological school than in a blacksmith
shop, and in neither place as well as in the woods or on the sea! Yet
there was no scoffing in it. We were neither irreligious.

To this young man building the fence there came a resisting mood, and
he was puzzled still, but slept more pleasantly again upon his
clover-mow. He was groping, but less despondent, that was all. It
seemed all strange to him, for the old farm life had become largely a
memory, and it was but yesterday that he was in college, one of a
thousand, full of all energy and lightsomeness, and here he was alone
in the wood as in a monastery, and all else was somehow like a dream.
Only the oxen and the logs and the ax and the maul and the growing
fence were real by day. But, in the evening, there was Jenny Bierce,
and she was very real, as well as charming.

Ho wondered if she cared for him. She was apparently pleased when he
found her, and they had taken long walks alone in the twilight. Once
he had kissed her, and she had not been angry. What sort of drift was
this, and why was he so carried by it? How different it all was from
even the life of a few weeks ago! Then there came before his eyes a
picture of the great, splendid animal in town, and it remained with
him. It bothered him for many a day and night.

If the Hindoo king were right, if all were so undefined, why not do as
did the birds and squirrels, and seek all sunny places? He could not
work at his fence Sunday. He had not done that yet, but he would walk
the miles Saturday night and spend his Sunday in the town.

As he thought, so he did. He did not swing the maul late the next
Saturday that came, but took up his journey and reached home in early
evening.

He had been absent but three weeks, yet his family had much to ask, and
his father laughed at his hardened palms, and congratulated him. He
changed his garb and took the way toward Mrs. Rolfston's. She had not
looked for him sooner, though she knew men well, for she had seen his
growing trouble and she knew his will. Her