"I'm in the Slough of Despond, and I don't know how to get out. I can see the sunny uplands that I long to reach, but everything is quaking and giving way under my feet. After listening to Dr. Barstow's grand sermon this morning, my spirit flamed up hopefully. Now he has placed a duty directly in my path that I cannot perform by myself. Mrs. Arnot has made it clear to me that the manhood I need is Christian manhood. Dr. Barstow proves out of the Bible that the first step toward this is conversion--which seems to be a mysterious change which I but vaguely understand. I must do my part myself, he says, yet I am wholly dependent on the will and co-operation of another. Just what am I to do? Just when and how will the help come in? How can I know that it will come? or how can I ever be sure that I have been converted?" "O, stop splittin' hairs!" said Mr. Growther, testily. "Hanged if I can tell you how it's all goin' to be brought about--go ask the parson to clear up these p'ints for you--but I can tell you this much: when you git convarted you'll know it. If you had a ragin' toothache, and it suddenly stopped and you felt comfortable all over, wouldn't you know it? But that don't express it. You'd feel more'n comfortable; you'd feel so good you couldn't hold in. You'd be fur shoutin'; you wouldn't know yourself. Why, doesn't the Bible say you'd be a new critter? There'll be just such a change in your heart as there is in this old kitchen when we come in on a cold, dark night and light the candles, and kindle a fire. I tell you what 'tis, young man, if you once got convarted your troubles would be wellnigh over." Though the picture of this possible future was drawn in such homely lines, Haldane looked at it with wistful eyes. He had become accustomed to his benefactor's odd ways and words, and caught his sense beneath the grotesque imagery. As he was then situated, the future drawn by the old man and interpreted by himself was peculiarly attractive. He was very miserable, and it is most natural, especially for the young, to wish to be happy. He had been led to believe that conversion would lead to a happiness as great as it was mysterious--a sort of miraculous ecstasy, that would render him oblivious of the hard and prosaic conditions of his lot. Through misfortune and his own fault he possessed a very defective character. This character had been formed, it is true, by years of self-indulgence and wrong, and Mrs. Arnot had asserted that reform would require long, patient, and heroic effort. Indeed, she had suggested that in fighting and subduing the evils of one's own nature a man attained the noblest degree of knighthood. He had already learned how severe was the conflict in which he had been led to engage.