t I have, sir, saving your presence; I know in Whom I have
believed; and what a man has once known for certain, he can never not
know again as long as he lives."

"But Christianity is a myth, a fable. You may imagine and pretend that
it is true, but you can not know that it is."

"But I do know, sir, begging your pardon, as well as I know you are
standing here and the sun is shining over yonder."

Alan smiled rather scornfully: how credulous were the lower classes, he
thought in his pride of intellectual superiority. "I do not understand
how you can know a thing that has never been proved," he said.

The giant turned and looked on his fragile frame with eyes full of a
great pity. "You do not understand, you say, sir that's just it; and I
am too foolish and ignorant to be able to explain things rightly to a
gentleman like you; but the Lord will explain it to you when He thinks
fit. You are young yet, sir, and the way stretches long before you, and
the mysteries of God are hidden from your eyes. But when you have loved
and cherished a woman as your own flesh, and when you have had little
children clinging round your knees, you'll understand rightly enough
then without needing any man to teach you."

"My good man, do you suppose a wife and children would teach me more
than the collected wisdom of the ages?"

"A sight more, Mr. Tremaine--a sight more. Folks don't learn the best
things from books, sir. Why, when the Lord Himself wrote the law on
tables of stone, they got broken; but when He writes it on the fleshly
tables of our hearts, it lives forever. And His Handwriting is the love
we bear for our fellow-creatures, and--through them--for Him; at least,
so it seems to me."

"That is pure imagination and sentiment, Bateson. Very pretty and
poetic, no doubt; but it won't hold water."

Caleb smiled indulgently. "Wait till you've got a little lass of your
own, like my Lucy Ellen, sir. Not that you'll ever have one quite as
good as her, bless her! for her equal never has been seen in this world,
and never will. But when you've got a little lass of your own, and know
as you'd be tortured to death quite cheerful-like just to save her a
minute's pain, you'll laugh at all the nonsense that's written in books,
and feel you know a sight better than all of 'em put together."

"I don't quite see why."

"Well, you see, sir, it's like this. When the dove came back to the ark
with the olive leaf in her mouth, Noah didn't begin