nt for the lad may have been one of those in the development of
the young when they suddenly behold familiar objects as with eyes more
clearly opened; when the neutral becomes the decisive; when the sermon
is found in the stone. As he now took curious cognizance of the budding
wood which he, seeing it only in winter, had supposed could not bud
again, he fell to marvelling how constant each separate thing in nature
is to its own life and how sole is its obligation to live that life
only. All that a locust had to do in the world was to be a locust; and
be a locust it would though it perished in the attempt. It drew back
with no hesitation, was racked with no doubt, puzzled with no necessity
of preference. It knew absolutely the law of its own being and knew
absolutely nothing else; found under that law its liberty, found under
that liberty its life.

"But I," he reflected, "am that which was never sown and never grown
before. All the ages of time, all the generations of men, have not
fixed any type of life for me. What I am to become I must myself each
instant choose; and having chosen, I can never know that I have chosen
best. Often I do know that what I have selected I must discard. And yet
no one choice can ever be replaced by its rejected fellow; the better
chance lost once, is lost eternally. Within the limits of a locust, how
little may the individual wander; within the limits of the wide and
erring human, what may not a man become! What now am I becoming? What
shall I now choose--as my second choice?"

A certain homely parallel between the tree and himself began to shape
itself before his thought: how he, too, had been dug up far away--had,
in a sense, voluntarily dug himself up--and been transplanted in the
college campus; how, ever since being placed there, the different
sectarian churches of the town had, without exception, begun to pin on
the branches of his mind the many-shaped garments of their dogmas,
until by this time he appeared to himself as completely draped as the
little locust after a heavy dormitory washing. There was this terrible
difference, however: that the garments hung on the tree were anon
removed; but these doctrines and dogmas were fastened to his mind to
stay--as the very foliage of his thought--as the living leaves of
Divine Truth. He was forbidden to strip off one of those sacred leaves.
He was told to live and to breathe his religious life through them, and
to grow only where they hung.