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The Mettle of the Pasture

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"I object to your offering your mind as the banks to such a stream. Still I'm glad that I live near the banks," and he kissed his hand to her. "When one woman tells another anything and the other woman does not tell, remember it is not scandal--it is confidence." "Then there is no such thing as confidence," he replied, laughing. He turned toward his shelves. "Now do rest," she pleaded, "you look worn out." She had a secret notion that books instead of putting life into people took it out of them. At best they performed the function of grindstones: they made you sharper, but they made you thinner--gave you more edge and left you less substance. "I wish every one of those books had a lock and I had the bunch of keys." "Each has a lock and key; but the key cannot be put into your pocket, Anna, my dear; it is the unlocking mind. And you are not to speak of books as a collection of locks and keys; they make up the living tree of knowledge, though of course there is very little of the tree in this particular bookcase." "I don't see any of it," she remarked with wholesome literalness. "Well, here at the bottom are lexicons--think of them as roots and soil. Above them lie maps and atlases: consider them the surface. Then all books are history of course. But here is a great central trunk rising out of the surface which is called History in especial. On each side of that, running to the right and to the left, are main branches. Here for instance is the large limb of Philosophy--a very weighty limb indeed. Here is the branch of Criticism. Here is a bough consisting principally of leaves on which live unnamed venomous little insects that poison them and die on them: their appointed place in creation." "And so there is no positive fruit anywhere," she insisted with her practical taste for the substantial. "It is all food, Anna, edible and nourishing to different mouths and stomachs. Some very great men have lived on the roots of knowledge, the simplest roots. And here is poetry for dates and wild honey; and novels for cocoanuts and mushrooms. And here is Religion: that is for manna." "What is at the very top?" His eyes rested upon the highest row of books. "These are some of the loftiest growths, new buds of the mind opening toward the unknown. Each in its way shows the best that man, the earth-animal, has been able to accomplish. Here is a little volume for instance which tells what he ought to be--and never is. This small volume deals with the noblest ideals of the greatest civilizations. Here is what one of the finest of the world's teachers had to say about justice. Aspiration is at that end. This little book is on the sad loveliness of Greek girls; and the volume beside it is about the brief human chaplets that Horace and some other Romans wore--and then trod on. Thus the long story of light and shadow girdles the globe. If you were nothing but a spirit, Anna, and could float in here some night, perhaps you would see a mysterious radiance streaming upward from this shelf of books like the northern lights from behind the world--starting no one knows where, sweeping away we know not whither--search-light of the mortal, turned on dark eternity." She stood a little behind him and watched him in silence, hiding her tenderness. "If I were a book," she said thoughtlessly, "where should I be?" He drew the fingers of one hand lingeringly across the New Testament. "Ah, now don't do that," she cried, "or you shall have no dinner. Here, turn round! look at the dust! look at this cravat on one end! look at these hands! March upstairs." He laid his head over against hers. "Stand up!" she exclaimed, and ran out of the room. Some minutes later she came back and took a seat near the door. There was flour on her elbow; and she held a spoon in her hand. "Now you look like yourself," she said, regarding him with approval as he sat reading before the bookcase. "I started to tell you what Harriet told me." He looked over the top of his book at her. "I thought you said you stopped the stream at its source. Now you propose to let it run down to me--or up to me: how do you know it will not run past me?" "Now don't talk in that way," she said, "this is something you will want to know," and she related what Harriet had chronicled. VIII When she had left the room, he put back into its place the volume he was reading: its power over him was gone. All the voices of all his books, speaking to him from lands and ages, grew simultaneously hushed. He crossed the library to a front window opening upon the narrow rocky street and sat with his elbow on the window-sill, the large fingers of one large hand unconsciously searching his brow--that habit of men of thoughtful years, the smoothing out of the inner problems. The home of Professor Hardage was not in one of the best parts of the town. There was no wealth here, no society as it impressively calls itself; there were merely well-to-do human beings of ordinary intelligence and of kindly and unkindly natures. The houses, constructed of frame or of brick, were crowded wall against wall along the sidewalk; in the rear were little gardens of flowers and of vegetables. The street itself was well shaded; and one forest tree, the roots of which bulged up through the mossy bricks of the pavement, hung its boughs before his windows. Throughout life he had found so many companions in the world outside of mere people, and this tree was one. From the month of leaves to the month of no leaves--the period of long hot vacations--when his eyes were tired and his brain and heart a little tired also, many a time it refreshed him by all that it was and all that it stood for--this green tent of the woods arching itself before his treasured shelves. In it for him were thoughts of cool solitudes and of far-away greenness; with tormenting visions also of old lands, the crystal-aired, purpling mountains of which, and valleys full of fable, he was used to trace out upon the map, but knew that he should never see or press with responsive feet. For travel was impossible to him. Part of his small salary went to the family of a brother; part disappeared each year in the buying of books--at once his need and his passion; there were the expenses

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