pouring of a full heart? Did they really mean anything to him,
or to those who heard them? He grasped despairingly at the fast-fading
glories of the vision, dropping on his knees at the bedside. "O God, let
me see Thee and touch Thee, and be sure, _sure_!" he prayed, over and
over again; and so finally sleep found him still on his knees with his
face buried in the bed-clothes.

XI

THE TRUMPET-CALL

For the first few vacation days Tom rose with the sun and lived with the
industries, marking all the later expansive strides and sorrowing keenly
that he had not been present to see them taken in detail.

But this was a passing phase. When the mechanical hunger was sated; when
he had started and stopped every engine in the big plant, had handled
the levers of the great steam-hoist that shot the coal-cars from the
mine to the coke-yard bins, and had prevailed on the engineer of the
dinkey engine to let him haul out and dump a pot of slag, he had a sharp
relapse into the primitive, and went roaming afield in search of his
lost boyhood.

It was not to be found in any of the valley haunts, these having been
transformed by the country-house colony. The old water-wheel below the
dam hung motionless, being supplanted by the huge, modern,
blowing-engines; and the black wash from the coal-mines had driven the
perch from the pools and spoiled the swimming-holes in the creek. In the
farther forests of the rampart hills the chopper's ax had been busy; and
the blackberry patches in all the open spaces were sacked daily by
chattering swarms of the work-people's children, white and black.

On the third morning Tom turned his steps despairingly toward the
slopes of the mountain. He was at a pass when he would have given worlds
to find one of the sacred places undesecrated. And there remained now
only the high altar under the cedars of Lebanon to be visited.

It comforted him not a little to find that he had the old-time, burning
thirst when he came within earshot of the dripping spring under the
great rock. But when he would have knelt to drink from his palms like
Gideon's men, there was no pool in the rocky basin. A barrel had been
sunk in the sand-filled crevice, and a greedy pipe-line sucked up the
water as fast as it trickled from the rock, to pass it on to one of the
thirsty mechanisms in the iron plant a thousand feet below.

In its way this was the final straw, and Tom sat down beside the
utilized spring with a lump