"William," she said, addressing my father, "I do believe Davy is thinking of being a minister and is kind of ashamed to own it." I caught the softening note in my mother's voice and in her eyes a light of pride as she regarded me inquiringly. Whatever obligation lay on me to till the ancestral acres, there was a higher duty which would absolve it. This she had pointed out. My plans at once took a concrete form, and though my first faltering assent might have savored of hypocrisy, I was soon sincere in my determination. And now the opposition crumbled and my parents found pride in a son whose heart at the age of ten was stirred by the need of lost humanity. My father discovered that it had been his own early ambition to be a minister; it was as though I was to erect the edifice to which he had feared to put his strength, and it comforted him. He delighted to lay his hand upon my head in the presence of company and to announce that his David was going to do the work to which he had always believed he had himself been called. With my mother the son's gifts became a subject on which she never tired dilating, and naturally such flattery reconciled me to a calling far removed from all my old ambitions; but had it been intimated to me that I might become a plumber I should have accepted that vocation just as readily, provided that by following it I should go out of the valley, over the mountains, to Pittsburgh and the presence of Rufus Blight. Now arose Mr. Pound to help me. Here was the crowning incongruity in a chain of incongruous events. I had never liked Mr. Pound. He had overwhelmed me too often. His sermon was the rack on which I was stretched for an hour every Sunday to endure untold agonies of restlessness; his house the temple to which too often I had to carry propitiatory offerings of vegetables and chickens. And then his persecution of my friend the Professor still rankled in me. Yet I found myself, of necessity, using him as the one known quantity in the equation over which I worked. He became my model. I fancied myself attaining a mien like his, a deep, resonant voice and a vocabulary of marvellous words. I dressed myself in material garments like his, in spreading folds of awe-inspiring black; I wrapped myself in his immaterial cloak, his dignity and goodness. I faced Rufus Blight and he quailed before a presence so imposing, and when I spoke in a voice vibrating truth my eloquence smothered his feeble, shifty protests. Always I asserted my right to Penelope and led her from her prison. And always, it seemed, with that victory I cast off my Pound-like sanctity and became as other men. With it the great task of my ministry was accomplished, though there was a certain charm in the idea of continuing it in the hunting fields of Africa, an appeal of romance in a kraal, a cork hat, and the picture of Penelope and me setting forth with a band of faithful converts to the slaughter of elephants and lions.