"I watched it ooze out of an egg like a speck of dirty water. I watched it eat a thousand times its own weight and grow into the nastiest wretch that crawls. I saw it stop eating and spit its stomach out and shrivel up, and crawl out of its skin and pull its own head off, and bury itself alive in a coffin made out of itself, a coffin like a bit of rotting wood. Look at it! There it lies, stone-dead for all a man's eyes can see! "And yet this thing will answer a call no ears can hear and crawl out of its coffin something entirely different from what went into it! I've seen it with my own eyes, but how it's done I don't know; no, nor no man since the world was made knows, or could do it himself. What does it? What gives that call these dead-alive things hear in the dark? What makes a crawling ugliness get itself ready for what's coming--how does it _know_ there's ever going to be a call, or that it'll hear it without fail?" "Some of us call it Nature: but others call it God," said I. "Search me! I don't know what It is--but I do know there's got to be Something behind these things, anyhow," said he, and turned the chrysalis over and over in his palm, staring down at it thoughtfully. He had used Westmoreland's words, once applied to his own case! "Oh, yes, there's Something, because I've watched It working with grubs, getting 'em ready for five-inch moths and hand-colored butterflies, Something that's got the time and the patience and the know-how to build wings as well as worlds." He laid the little inanimate mystery aside. "It's come to the point, parson, where I've just _got_ to know more. I know enough now to know how much I don't know, because I've got a peep at how much there is to know. There's a God's plenty to find out, and it's up to me to go out and find it." "Some of the best and brightest among men have given all the years of their lives to just that finding out and knowing more--and they found their years too few and short for the work. But such help as you need and we can get, you shall have, please God!" said I. "I'm ready for the word to start, chief." And heaven knows he was.