"This is strange," he reasoned, "that I should have such a sense of contraction! I crowd on myself, as it were. My thoughts hit me, press me, instead of elevating me. I cannot see why; for the habit of looking up to no goodness or intelligence but the Supreme must surely be a good one, and self-education and development the noblest process for a human being." He said this in a mechanical sort of way, as if it were a lesson he remembered at school. But it made no impression on him, and did not relieve his difficulty. He knew it, somehow, to be false, and felt it falling off as he spoke, as if it were the last remnant of gauzy sophistry. Fred had never been fond of church-going, nor was he much given to reading the Holy Scriptures. Indeed, he rather affected the style of the Latter-Day Saints, who look for a better and nobler Messiah than came in the Son of Mary. But just now, fifty texts of Scripture, which he must have learned long ago at his mother's knee, came crowding upon his memory. "Though I have all gifts, and have not charity, I am nothing." "He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." "He that loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?" "Little children, love one another." "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." And so on,--interminably. In a helpless, vague way, he looked at the shadow by his side. "You like pictures, and paint them," said she, speaking for the first time;--and the voice was precisely the tone he had recognized in the music of the wind; he had thought then it was like hers;--"look with me at these two." They were, indeed, magnificent pictures. They reached from floor to ceiling. Fred was artist enough to enjoy fully the wide sweep of sky and land,--the mountains in the distance, and the firmament studded with stars. A figure wandered up and down the space, sometimes to the tops of the mountains, sometimes to the clefts of the rocks. When he saw the stars, he calculated their distances;--when he saw the moon, he weighed her, and guessed about the atmosphere on the other side;--when the gold and diamonds shone in the clefts of the rocks, he gathered and analyzed them. The Leviathan he studied and classed. He groped and reached constantly, and, having gathered, looked at his gatherings, dissatisfied. He was ever searching out knowledge. Meanwhile, a gnat put him in a passion, and unleavened bread destroyed his peace. Though he might sleep on rose-leaves, as he could not command the wind, they came often to double under him, and annoy him with bad dreams.