“How are your friends and dear companions, the worms? I missed them very much after you had gone, and often found myself stepping carefully and looking down to the right and the left in crossing the upper hall, expecting to see some green or brown thing crawling about. The great drawer I gave you, we call ‘the worm drawer’ yet, and I don’t know as I shall ever open it comfortably again. The peaceable and innocent rolls of linen and sewing lie in it now, just as they used before you had it, but sometimes I forget and open the one under it cautiously, expecting to see some of your treasures dropped through again, on my things. Henry and Julie are making collections now also, and Cottie brought home, the other day, the finest, largest specimen I ever saw, of the sort you called ‘Polyphemus’? It was of immense size, and a very bright healthy color, both in its body and in those little tufts that stud it all over. He laid it away very carefully, and left it in peace a few days, and yesterday, behold it had spun a cocoon in its box as large as a butternut, and as strong as linen, of a beautiful reddish brown. We shall expect the moth with great interest. The children are too impatient to hurry up business with their worms. They are forever opening the boxes, and lifting and handling the creatures, so that I should think the poor things would despair of ever getting a chance to set their houses in order, at all.” His relations with his mother were always close and sympathetic. She was a rare nature, refined and cultivated, with a strong literary bent and deep religious feeling. She wrote not a little, contributing to the pages of “The Christian Union” and other publications. She scrupulously kept all the boy’s letters from his schooldays forward through the years. One of the cherished mementos of her life was a little manuscript volume, which bears the inscription: “I leave this book to my son William.” It is a record of her study of the Bible, her grapple with the great problems of ethical and theological thought, prayers in which she has uttered the aspirations of a reverent spirit insistently seeking light through all the confusion and shadow of modern speculation, comment upon the great books which were stirring Christendom and sounding the note of the new thought about Christ and Christianity. To read them is to discover the sources of the son’s deep reverence and broad, unconventional religious life. It is to feel anew the unconscious power of motherhood in shaping the ductile spirit of childhood, and to be certain that the light of such a spirit was a very pillar of fire to the soul of her son. CHAPTER II CALLING AND ELECTION It was between the years 1866 and 1868 that the great crisis of young Gibson’s life occurred; and a series of influences and incidents befell, which were decisive in settling the great questions of his life-work and of the spirit in which he would undertake it.