nnot comprehend;" and the Sir Oracles
carry so much the greater weight of influence.

The men, and more particularly the Justice and the school-director,
shrugged their shoulders. Eric's enthusiasm and his unreserved
unfolding of his own interior life had in it something odd, even
wounding to some of the men. They felt that this strange manner, this
extraordinary revelation of character, this pouring out of one's best,
was attractive to the ladies, and that they, getting in a word
incidentally and without being able to complete a thought, or round off
a period, were wholly cast into the shade. The Justice, observing the
beaming eyes of his daughter and of the forester's wife, whispered to
the school-director, "This is a dangerous person."

The company broke up into groups. Eric stood with Clodwig in the
bow-window, and they looked out upon the night. The lightning flashed
over the distant mountains, sometimes lighting up a peak in the
horizon, sometimes making a rift in the sky, as if behind it were
another sky, while the thunder rolled, shaking the ceiling and tinkling
the pendent prisms of the chandelier.

"There are circumstances and events which occur and repeat themselves
as if they had already passed before us in a dream," Clodwig began.
"Just as I now stand here with you, I stood with your father in the
Roman Campagna. I know not how it chanced, but we spoke of that view in
which the things of the world are regarded under the aspect of the
infinite, and then your father said,--methinks I still hear his
voice,--'Only when we take in the life of humanity as a whole do we
have, as thinkers, that rest which the believers receive from faith,
for then the world lives to us as to them, in the oneness of God's
thought. He who follows up only the individual ant cannot comprehend
its zigzag track, or its fate as it suddenly falls into the hole of the
ant-lion, who must also get a living. But he who regards the anthill as
a whole--'"

Clodwig suddenly stopped. From the valley they heard the shrill whistle
of the locomotive, and the hollow rumbling of the train of cars.

"But at that time," he continued after a pause, and his face was
lighted up by a sudden flash of lightning, "at that time no
locomotive's whistle broke in upon our quiet meditation."

"And yet," said Eric, "I do not like to regard this shrill tone as a
discord."

"Go on, I am curious to hear why not."

"Is it not grand that human beings continue th