“I am a brute, Molly! Did he feel it very much?” “He always spoke to God about it, not to me. He never finds it easy to talk to his fellow-man; but I always know when he is talking to God! May I tell your father what you have just told me Walter? But of course not! You will tell him yourself!” “No, Molly! I would rather you should tell him. I want him to know, and would tell him myself, if you were not handy. Then, if he chooses, we can have a talk about it! But now, Molly, what am I to do?” “You still feel as if you had a call to literature, Walter?” “I have no pleasure in any other kind of work.” “Might not that be because you have not tried anything else?” “I don’t know. I am drawn to nothing else.” “Well, it seems to me that a man who would like to make a saddle, must first have some pig-skin to make it of! Have you any pig-skin, Walter?” “I see well enough what you mean!” “A man must want long leisure for thought before he can have any material for his literary faculty to work with. “You could write a history, but could you write one _now_? Even for a biography, you would have to read and study for months--perhaps years. As to the social questions you have been treating, men generally change their opinions about such things when they know a little more; and who would utter his opinions, knowing he most by and by wish he had not uttered them!” “No one; but unhappily every one is cock-sure of his opinion till he changes it--and then he is as sure as before till he changes it again!” “Opinion is not sight, your father says,” answered Molly; and again a little pause followed. “Well, but, Molly,” resumed Walter, “how is that precious thing, leisure for thought, to be come by? Write reviews I will not! Write a history, I can not. Write a poem I might, but they wouldn’t buy copies enough of it to pay for the paper and printing. Write a novel I might, if I had time; but how to live, not to say how to think, while I was writing it? Perhaps I ought to be a tutor, or a school-master!” “Do you feel drawn to that, Walter?” “I do not.” “And you do feel drawn to write?” “I dare not say I have thoughts which demand expression; and yet somehow I want to write.” “And you say that some begin by writing what is of no value, but come to write things that are precious?” “It is true.” “Then perhaps you have served your apprenticeship in worthless things, and the inclination to write comes now of precious things on their way, which you do not yet see or suspect, not to say know!” “But many men and women have the impulse to write, who never write anything of much worth!” Molly thought awhile. “What if they yielded to the impulse before they ought? What if their eagerness to write when they ought to have been doing something else, destroyed the call in them? That is perhaps the reason why there are so many dull preachers--that they begin to speak before they have anything to say!” “Teaching would be favorable to learning!”