rch. They had come to call their fellow-student Hermas
from his lodging.

Their voices rang out cheerily through the cool air. They were full of
that glad sense of life which the young feel when they have risen
early and come to rouse one who is still sleeping. There was a note of
friendly triumph in their call, as if they were exulting unconsciously
in having begun the adventure of the new day before their comrade.

But Hermas was not asleep. He had been waking for hours, and the walls
of his narrow lodging had been a prison to his heart. A nameless sorrow
and discontent had fallen upon him, and he could find no escape from the
heaviness of his own thoughts.

There is a sadness of youth into which the old cannot enter. It seems
unreal and causeless. But it is even more bitter and burdensome than the
sadness of age. There is a sting of resentment in it, a fever of angry
surprise that the world should so soon be a disappointment, and life
so early take on the look of a failure. It has little reason in it,
perhaps, but it has all the more weariness and gloom, because the man
who is oppressed by it feels dimly that it is an unnatural thing that he
should be tired of living before he has fairly begun to live.

Hermas had fallen into the very depths of this strange self-pity. He was
out of tune with everything around him. He had been thinking, through
the dead night, of all that he had given up when he left the house of
his father, the wealthy pagan Demetrius, to join the company of the
Christians. Only two years ago he had been one of the richest young men
in Antioch. Now he was one of the poorest. The worst of it was that,
though he had made the choice willingly and with a kind of enthusiasm,
he was already dissatisfied with it.

The new life was no happier than the old. He was weary of vigils and
fasts, weary of studies and penances, weary of prayers and sermons.
He felt like a slave in a treadmill. He knew that he must go on. His
honour, his conscience, his sense of duty, bound him. He could not go
back to the old careless pagan life again; for something had happened
within him which made a return impossible. Doubtless he had found the
true religion, but he had found it only as a task and a burden; its joy
and peace had slipped away from him.

He felt disillusioned and robbed. He sat beside his hard couch, waiting
without expectancy for the gray dawn of another empty day, and hardly
lifting his head at the shouts o