ed this rather
than saw it. He knew it, but could not assert it. The body, with its
bodily wants and limitations, leaned on the couch, half slumberously;
while the mind, himself, full of vague aspirations, keen intellectual
hunger, and overlaid with error, obstinacy, and the thick crust of
self-contemplation, which stifles all true progress,--these assimilated
qualities made himself, what he felt he was, not an attractive object to
himself more than to anybody else. All his perceptions pointed inward,
and cramped and narrowed his existence. He felt very, very small.

"This is strange," he reasoned, "that I should have such a sense of
contraction! I crowd on myself, as it were. My thoughts hit me, press
me, instead of elevating me. I cannot see why; for the habit of looking
up to no goodness or intelligence but the Supreme must surely be a good
one, and self-education and development the noblest process for a human
being."

He said this in a mechanical sort of way, as if it were a lesson he
remembered at school. But it made no impression on him, and did not
relieve his difficulty. He knew it, somehow, to be false, and felt
it falling off as he spoke, as if it were the last remnant of gauzy
sophistry.

Fred had never been fond of church-going, nor was he much given to
reading the Holy Scriptures. Indeed, he rather affected the style of the
Latter-Day Saints, who look for a better and nobler Messiah than came in
the Son of Mary. But just now, fifty texts of Scripture, which he must
have learned long ago at his mother's knee, came crowding upon his
memory.

"Though I have all gifts, and have not charity, I am nothing."

"He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."

"He that loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how can he love God,
whom he hath not seen?"

"Little children, love one another."

"Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ."

And so on,--interminably. In a helpless, vague way, he looked at the
shadow by his side.

"You like pictures, and paint them," said she, speaking for the first
time;--and the voice was precisely the tone he had recognized in the
music of the wind; he had thought then it was like hers;--"look with me
at these two."

They were, indeed, magnificent pictures. They reached from floor to
ceiling. Fred was artist enough to enjoy fully the wide sweep of sky and
land,--the mountains in the distance, and the firmament studded with
stars. A