other.
The problem really disturbed the young minister's mind throughout
the meal, and his abstraction became so marked at last that his wife
commented upon it.

"A penny for your thoughts!" she said, with cheerful briskness. This
ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather jarred on Theron. It
presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality.

"I am going to begin my book this afternoon," he remarked impressively.
"There is a great deal to think about."

It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had
imagined. After hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up
and down before his open book-shelves, Theron found the first shadows of
a May-day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white
paper, still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before
him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea
of beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by
week, had faded away like a dream.

This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own
brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really
a most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut
most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy,
found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that
he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose
pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be
laughed at with deserved contempt.

Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to
be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating
his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron
mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues
in the Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the
difference was that they were doomed by native in