have been
doing whose word I can believe. It is interesting. What was the first
thing you ever wanted very much?"

The boy waited to remember, then began hesitatingly, but soon the words
flowed. In the smallest past we find an inexhaustible mine when once we
begin to dig at it.

A confused, disordered story--the little made large and the large small,
and nothing showing its inward meaning. It is not till the past
has receded many steps that before the clearest eyes it falls into
co-ordinate pictures. It is not till the I we tell of has ceased to
exist that it takes its place among other objective realities, and
finds its true niche in the picture. The present and the near past is
a confusion, whose meaning flashes on us as it slinks away into the
distance.

The stranger lit one cigar from the end of another, and puffed and
listened with half-closed eyes.

"I will remember more to tell you if you like," said the boy.

He spoke with that extreme gravity common to all very young things who
feel deeply. It is not till twenty that we learn to be in deadly earnest
and to laugh. The stranger nodded, while the fellow sought for something
more to relate. He would tell all to this man of his--all that he knew,
all that he had felt, his inmost sorest thought. Suddenly the stranger
turned upon him.

"Boy," he said, "you are happy to be here."

Waldo looked at him. Was his delightful one ridiculing him? Here, with
this brown earth and these low hills, while the rare wonderful world lay
all beyond. Fortunate to be here?

The stranger read his glance.

"Yes," he said; "here with the karoo-bushes and red sand. Do you wonder
what I mean? To all who have been born in the old faith there comes a
time of danger, when the old slips from us, and we have not yet planted
our feet on the new. We hear the voice from Sinai thundering no more,
and the still small voice of reason is not yet heard. We have proved the
religion our mothers fed us on to be a delusion; in our bewilderment we
see no rule by which to guide our steps day by day; and yet every day we
must step somewhere."

The stranger leaned forward and spoke more quickly. "We have never once
been taught by word or act to distinguish between religion and the moral
laws on which it has artfully fastened itself, and from which it has
sucked its vitality. When we have dragged down the weeds and creepers
that covered the solid wall and have found them to be rotten wood, we
imagin