arnest. Poor papa's
last words to me were: 'Laugh and you're safe!'--but if I laugh now, I'm
lost."

"This is the first time I ever met any one honest enough to acknowledge
that marriage was so sad a thing. Catherine, if I ask you to marry me,
will you turn serious?"

"She will turn serious enough if she does it," said Esther. "You would
stay with her a week, and then tell her that you were obliged to see a
friend in Japan. She would never see you again, but the newspapers would
tell her that you had set out to look for bones in the Milky Way."

"What you say sounds to me as though it had a grain of truth," replied
Strong. "That reminds me that I got a letter telling me of a lot of new
bones only yesterday, but I must leave them underground till the summer;
if by that time I can do any thing for you in Oregon, let me know."

"I want you very much to do something for me now," said Esther. "Will
you try to be serious a moment for my sake?"

"I don't know," said Strong. "You ask too much all at once. Where are
you coming out?"

"Will you answer me a question? Say yes or no!"

"That depends on the question, Mistress Esther! Old birds are not to be
caught in old traps. State your question, as we say in the
lecture-room."

"Is religion true?"

"I thought so! Cousin Esther, I love you as much as I love any one in
this cold world, but I can't answer your question. I can tell you all
about the mound-builders or cave-men, so far as known, but I could not
tell you the difference between the bones of a saint and those of a
heathen. Ask me something easier! Ask me whether science is true!"

"Is science true?"

"No!"

"Then why do you believe in it?"

"I don't believe in it."

"Then why do you belong to it?"

"Because I want to help in making it truer. Now, Esther, just take this
matter coolly! You are bothered, I suppose, by the idea that you can't
possibly believe in miracles and mysteries, and therefore can't make a
good wife for Hazard. You might just as well make yourself unhappy by
doubting whether you would make a good wife to me because you can't
believe the first axiom in Euclid. There is no science which does not
begin by requiring you to believe the incredible."

"Are you telling me the truth?"

"I tell you the solemn truth that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so
difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms
of physics. The wife of my mathematical colleague, to my knowledg