Very curiously it had befallen him furthermore that just at the time when all these changes were taking place around him and within him, she had brought him the book that she had pressed with emphasis upon his attention. In the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania where his maternal Scotch-Irish ancestors had settled and his own life been spent, very few volumes had fallen into his hands. After coming to Kentucky not many more until of late: so that of the world's history he was still a stinted and hungry student. When,therefore, she had given him Malory's "LeMorte D'Arthur," it was the first time that the ideals of chivalry had ever flashed their glorious light upon him; for the first time the models of Christian manhood, on which western Europe nourished itself for centuries, displayed themselves to his imagination with the charm of story; he heard of Camelot, of the king, of that company of men who strove with each other in arms, but strove also with each other in grace of life and for the immortal mysteries of the spirit. She had said that he should have read this book long before but that henceforth he would always need it even more than in his past: that here were some things he had looked for in the world and had never found; characters such as he had always wished to grapple to himself as his abiding comrades: that if he would love the best that it loved, hate what it hated, scorn what it scorned, it would help him in the pursuit of his own ideals to the end. Of this and more he felt at once the truth, since of all earthly books known to him this contained the most heavenly revelation of what a man may be in manliness, in gentleness, and in goodness. And as he read the nobler portions of the book, the nobler parts of his nature gave out their immediate response. Hungrily he hurried to and fro across the harvest of those fertile pages, gathering of the white wheat of the spirit many a lustrous sheaf: the love of courage, the love of courtesy, the love of honour, the love of high aims and great actions, the love of the poor and the helpless, the love of a spotless name and a spotless life, the love of kindred, the love of friendship, the love of humility of spirit, the love of forgiveness, the love of beauty, the love of love, the love of God. Surely, he said to himself, within the band of these virtues lay not only a man's noblest life, but the noblest life of the world. While fondling these, he failed not to notice how the great book, as though it were a living mouth, spat its deathless scorn upon the things that he also--in the imperfect measure of his powers--had always hated: all cowardice of mind or body, all lying, all oppression, all unfaithfulness, all secret revenge and hypocrisy and double-dealing: the smut of the heart and mind. But ah! the other things besides these.