ctification. Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw
them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal
lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to
secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them--all rude
tramps and robbers of the uncivilized plain.

The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar
force. How was it, he wondered, that this had never occurred to him
before? Examining himself, he found that he had supposed vaguely that
there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the
flood. But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean
town of Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him
and his neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's
father, died in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family
belonged there, and were Chaldeans like the rest.

I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it did have a
curious effect upon Theron Ware. Up to that very afternoon, his notion
of the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular
book called "Ruth the Moabitess," written by a clergyman he knew very
well, the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself
not at all with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through
scented summer seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing, it is true,
but pleasing a good deal and selling like hot cakes. Now, all at once
Theron felt that he hated that sort of book. HIS work should be of a
vastly different order. He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the
fact that Abram was a Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the
world in general as a novelty. Very well, then, there was his chance.
He would write a learned book, showing who the Chaldeans were, and how
their manners and beliefs differed from, and influenced--

It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation
suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again,
leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from
the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous
side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned
feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write
learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't
remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new re