easiness, condescension. David followed his host
into a magnificent room with enormous windows, now raised and opening
upon a veranda. Below was a garden full of old vines black with grapes
and pear trees bent down with pears and beds bright with cool autumn
flowers. (The lad made a note of how much money he would save on apples
if he could only live in reach of those pear trees.) There was a big
rumpled bed in the room; and stretched across this bed on his stomach
lay a student studying and waving his heels slowly in the air. A table
stood in the middle of the room: the books and papers had been scraped
off to the floor; four students were seated at it playing cards and
smoking. Among them his other friend, who rose and gave him a hearty
grip and resuming his seat asked what was trumps. A voice he had heard
before called out to him from the table:--

"Hello, preachy! Did you find your way to the Bible College?"

Whereupon the student on the bed rolled heavily over, sat up
dejectedly, and ogled him with red eyes and a sagging jaw.

"Have you matriculated?" he asked.

David did not think of the cards, and he liked the greeting of the two
strangers who guyed him better than the welcome of his old friends.
That hurt: he had never supposed there was anything just like it in the
nature of man. But during the years since he had seen them, old times
were gone, old manners changed. And was it not in the hemp fields of
the father of one of them that he had meantime worked with the negroes?
And is there any other country in the world where the clean laborer is
so theoretically honored and so practically despised as by the American
snob of each sex?

One afternoon he went over to the courthouse and got the county clerk
to show him the entry where his great-grandfather had had the deed to
his church recorded. There it all was!--all written down to hold good
while the world lasted: that perpetual grant of part and parcel of his
land, for the use of a free school and a free church. The lad went
reverently over the plain, rough speech of the mighty old pioneer, as
he spoke out his purpose.

During those early days also he sought out the different churches,
scrutinizing respectfully their exteriors. How many they were, and how
grand nearly all! Beyond anything he had imagined. He reasoned that if
the buildings were so fine, how fine must be the singing and the
sermons! The unconscious assumption, the false logic here, was
credit