During the season of his intense and enamoured pursuit of these absorbing studies, an incident occurred which produced some uneasiness both to teacher and disciple. Joe was seated, one evening, on a stool at the tailor's door, fervently engaged in his usual recreation,--the tailor meanwhile plying his needle,--when the clergyman of the village passing by, and observing the boy's studious deportment as something unusual, stepped towards him, and desired to know what he was so intent upon. Joe naturally felt some diffidence in returning an answer, and turned towards his friend on the shop-board with a glance that was meant to entreat his kind offices in the formation of a reply. But the tailor, to Joe's utter confusion, hung down his head doggedly, and struck his needle into a nether garment that lay upon his knees, with singular vehemence. In default of this expected help, Joe gave his two precious volumes, silently and resignedly, into the hands of the vicar,--a reverend gentleman held in deserved respect by his humble flock for the rigid purity of his morals, but of small skill in the waywardness of the human mind. After a very few minutes' examination of the books, the spiritual overseer crimsoned with apparent displeasure, shook his head very expressively at the boy, and returning the volumes into his hands, assured him he was very sorry to see him so ill employed,--"for one of the books," he said, "contained only a foolish tale,--and the other was as whimsical a dream as ever ran through the brains of a fanatic." So saying, the well-intentioned, but ill-informed, teacher turned away,--leaving the boy to his own reflections, and the hot criticism of the tailor on what they had just heard from the village parson. These by no means led Joe into a coincidence with the vicar's way of thinking; and, whenever opportunity served, he was sure, as before, to be wandering, ideally, with the romantic and intrepid adventurer on the desert island, or to be found absorbed in the effort to penetrate the spiritual mysteries he had been directed to discover in the remaining volume whose enchanting imagery had captivated his young understanding. "A foolish tale,"--he could not conceive the narrative of the shipwrecked and eremite mariner to be: it was too full of sober earnestness, he thought, to be fantastic: it created before him a verisimilitude in which he himself lived all the wild yet truthful adventures of the cast-a-way seaman over again. And if he had not been told that the story of the Pilgrim was a parable, his simple and eager phantasy would have, primarily, set it down for a literal truth,--however after-reflection might have qualified his first conclusion.