The idea made Neale feel very shy and queer as though through the pages of this chance-found book he were spying on the privacy of that unsuspecting person. But all the same, it was too strange that _Father_ should have ... what else had he marked? Intensely curious, Neale turned the pages over. What else had struck the fancy of that young man, so many years ago, before he dreamed that he was to be a business man and a father. It was like looking straight into some one's heart; the first time Neale had ever dreamed of such a thing. There they were, those glimpses of what had fed his father's spirit. Neale read them because they were marked. Some he understood, others he only felt. "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, one kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till." "Life only avails, not having lived." Good enough! "For every stoic was a stoic, but in Christendom, where is the Christian?" every word underlined in ink. "Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of pleasure which concealed it." On the margin the note was, "True, think of E. B." "Wonder who E. B. was," thought Neale, "but the old man's right." Ah, this is bully! "Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will ... but thou, God's darling, heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them...." Why, this was not marked! The old man must have been asleep at the switch. Neale stopped turning the pages and jumping from one marked passage to another. He began to read for himself, a deep vibration within answering the organ-note which throbbed up at him out of the page. "This," he said to himself, after a long, absorbed silence, "this is my meat." * * * * * There was a good place on top of the plate-beam of the mill, dry and safe. One morning before Grandfather and Si came down to work, Neale climbed up to this, dusted it clean of the litter of a century or more and put the three volumes there. Whenever the water got low, and the mill shut down, and Si went off to oil the harness and Grandfather to have a visit with Grandmother in the kitchen, Neale clambered up and clinging with one hand, reached in and took out a volume ... any one of the three. From there to the top of the highest lumber-pile outside, in the clean sunlight.