as was in the hands of every child. She
did not know what she wanted--only that she had come out to be
entertained and to revel in her love of heroes, and she had been pinned
down to the one thought that _real_ men were made of those who found
their power in their Bible and on their knees.

The solemn, earnest, tender closing to this address did not lessen her
sense of discomfort. Then just beside her was carried on a conversation
that added to her annoyance.

"They are big men," a man said. He was dressed in a common business
suit; his linen had not the exquisite freshness about it that her
fastidious eyes delighted in; his hands looked as though they might have
been used to work that was rough and hard; his straggling hair was
sprinkled with gray, and there was not a striking feature about him.

"They are big men," he said, "and I've no doubt it is a big thing to
know them, and talk with them, and have a friendly feeling for each, as
if they belonged to him, but he knows a bigger one than them, and the
best of it is, so do we. The Lord Jesus Christ, our Elder Brother, is
not to be compared to common men like these."

And now Ruth's lips curled utterly. She was an aristocrat without
knowing it. She believed in Christianity, and in its power to save the
poor and the commonest, but this insufferable assumption of dignity and
superiority over the rest of the world, as she called it, was hateful to
her in the extreme. It would have startled her exceedingly to have been
told that she was angry with the man for presuming to place _his_ Friend
higher in the list of great ones than any of those given that day; and
yet such was actually her feeling. She swept her skirts angrily away
from contact with the man, and spoke so crustily to the little lady who
had come in her wake that she moved timidly away.

Just at her left were two gentlemen shaking hands. Both had been on the
stand together, she knew the faces of both, and _one_ ranked just a
trifle higher in her estimation than any one at Chautauqua. She edged a
little nearer. She lived in the hope of making the acquaintance of some
of these lights, just enough acquaintance to receive a bow and a clasp
of the hand, though how one could accomplish it who was determined that
her interest in them should neither be seen nor suspected, it would be
hard to say; but they were talking in eager, hearty tones, not at all as
if their words were confidential--at least she might have th