Mather's Invisible Providence--sounded religious. Neale did not even
take it out. A big, old book with the back off proved, when he opened
it, to be Rollin's Ancient History. With a true Hadley horror for
learning anything out of hours, he slammed it shut, and took down the
next one, Butler's Analogy. Seemed as though he had heard of that one.
He sat down on the edge of the little four-poster, and opened it at
random, skimming the pages. Oh, awful! Fierce! _Worse_ than religious!
He put it back, discouraged, and ran over the titles on that shelf. A
name struck his eye. Emerson. Wasn't there a poem by Emerson at the
beginning of "The Children of the Zodiac?" Neale like every one else at
that time had read a good deal of Kipling, although he was vague as to
Emerson.
He took down Volume I, and opened to the first page.
"But thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history
pre-exist in the mind as laws."
"Pretty rough sledding!" thought Neale, "bad as Butler."
He turned over a page. His eye was struck by a thick black pencil-mark
along the margin; a passage that had interested somebody. Neale read, "I
have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks
that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded
far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day."
An idea knocked at Neale's head. He looked up from the book to take it
in. It echoed and re-echoed in his brain, the first idea about history
which had ever penetrated to fertilize the facts piled up by Hadley.
Gee! there was something _to_ that! Neale began to walk around it
speculatively. Wonder if that's true? Sounds good.
Were there perhaps more passages marked? He turned over the pages again
and came on another of the black pencil lines in the margin.
"When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me--when a truth that
fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more."
"Time is no more...." The grandeur of those four words unrolled a great
scroll from before Neale's eyes.
Say, who was it who had marked these places, anyhow? Who was it, who,
before Neale, had sat in this low-ceilinged room and had caught that
glimpse of timeless infinity? Neale turned back to the fly-leaf and
found written in a familiar handwriting, "Daniel W. Crittenden, Williams
1876."
Why, that was _Father_!
Neale stared at the name. Could it be Father? Yes, he had gone to
Williams and although 1876 was incredibly long ago, that might have been
Father's class. And this was Father's room! He looked about him,
astonished.
For the first time in his life it occurred to Neale that his father had
not always been a father and a successful, conservative business man of
forty-something, but that long, long ago he had also been a person.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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