me. Yet I
found myself, of necessity, using him as the one known quantity in the
equation over which I worked. He became my model. I fancied myself
attaining a mien like his, a deep, resonant voice and a vocabulary of
marvellous words. I dressed myself in material garments like his, in
spreading folds of awe-inspiring black; I wrapped myself in his
immaterial cloak, his dignity and goodness. I faced Rufus Blight and
he quailed before a presence so imposing, and when I spoke in a voice
vibrating truth my eloquence smothered his feeble, shifty protests.
Always I asserted my right to Penelope and led her from her prison.
And always, it seemed, with that victory I cast off my Pound-like
sanctity and became as other men. With it the great task of my
ministry was accomplished, though there was a certain charm in the idea
of continuing it in the hunting fields of Africa, an appeal of romance
in a kraal, a cork hat, and the picture of Penelope and me setting
forth with a band of faithful converts to the slaughter of elephants
and lions.

Idle dreams of boyhood! Absurd, incongruous fancies! And but for them
I might at this very moment be dozing in the valley; I might be another
distinguished Judge Malcolm, with my little court of ministers and
squires, with old Mr. Smiley as master-of-the-horse and Miss Agnes
Spinner as lady-in-waiting. Instead? I did not stay in the valley.
Aroused by the sense of antagonism to Rufus Blight, and spurred on by
the ambition to confront and defeat him, I began my struggle to cross
the mountains, and Mr. Pound became my support and guide. He never
knew the real truth behind my commendable resolution. The inspiring
thought in my mind, as he insisted on judging it, was born of his own
teaching. As my father had planned to live his life over again in me,
so Mr. Pound saw a hope of his own intellectual immortality. Were not
the evidences of grace so suddenly revealed in me the reward of his own
labors?

When he came to the house, summoned in consultation over my future, he
placed a hand upon my head and solemnly repeated the lines of the grand
old hymn: "God works in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform."
There was here a gentle hint that my past had not been altogether good
or full of promise, and as Mr. Pound undoubtedly believed this, it made
more generous his conduct toward me. He was a narrow man, an egotist,
unlearned, too, save in the cruder forms of his calling, but he was