doctrines and dogmas of
religion in his own town finally caused him to suspect a universal
misreading of the Bible. This doubt, together with his own desire for
justification according to the Word, finally put the idea in his mind to
make a study of the Bible himself. He would read it, he said. He would
study Hebrew and Greek, and refer all questionable readings of words and
passages back to the original tongue in which it had been written.

With this end in view he began a study of these languages, the
importance of the subject so growing upon him that he neglected his
business. Day after day he labored, putting a Bible and a Concordance
upon a pile of soap-boxes near the door of his store and poring over
them between customers, the store meantime taking care of itself. He
finally mastered Greek and Hebrew after a fashion, and finding the word
"repent" frequently used, and that God had made man in the image of
Himself, with a full knowledge of right and wrong, he gravitated toward
the belief that therefore his traducers in Noank knew what they were
doing, and that before he needed to forgive them--though his love might
cover all--they must repent.

He read the Bible from beginning to end with this one feeling
subconsciously dominant, and all its loving commands about loving one
another, forgiving your brother seventy times seven, loving those that
hate you, returning good for evil, selling all that you have and giving
it to the poor, were made to wait upon the duty of others to repent. He
began to give this interpretation at Eustis, where he was allowed to
have a Sunday-school, until the minister came and told him once, "to his
face," as the local report ran: "We don't want you here."

Meekly he went forth and, joining a church across the Sound on Long
Island, sailed over every Sunday and there advanced the same views until
he was personally snubbed by the minister and attacked by the local
papers. Leaving there he went to Amherst, always announcing now that he
held distinctive views about some things in the Bible and asking the
privilege of explaining. In this congregation he was still comfortably
at rest when I knew him.

"All sensitiveness," the sail-maker had concluded after his long
account. "There ain't anything the matter with Elihu, except that he's
piqued and grieved. He wanted to be the big man, and he wasn't."

I was thinking of this and of his tender relationship with children as I
had noticed it, and