AN OLD MAN FACES TWO WAYS


His candle up, he went softly along the white hallway over the heavy red
carpet, to where a door at the end, half-open, let him into his study.
Here a wood fire at the stage of glowing coals made a searching warmth.
Blowing out his candle, he seated himself at the table where a shaded lamp
cast its glare upon a litter of books and papers. A big, white-breasted
gray cat yawned and stretched itself from the hearthrug and leaped lightly
upon him with great rumbling purrs, nosing its head under one of his hands
suggestively, and, when he stroked it, looking up at him with lazily
falling eye-lids.

He crossed his knees to make a better lap for the cat, and fell to musing
backward into his own boyhood, when the Christmas Saint was a real
presence. Then he came forward to his youth, when he had obeyed the call
of the Lord against his father's express command that he follow the family
way and become a prosperous manufacturer. Truly there had been revolt in
him. Perhaps he had never enough considered this in excuse for his own
daughter's revolt.

Again he dwelt in the days when he had preached with a hot passion such
truth as was his. For a long time, while the old clock ticked on the
mantel before him and the big cat purred or slept under his absent
pettings, his mind moved through an incident of that early ministry.
Clear in his memory were certain passages of fire from the sermon. In the
little log church at Edom he had felt the spirit burn in him and he had
movingly voiced its warnings of that dread place where the flames forever
blaze, yet never consume; where cries ever go up for one drop of water to
cool the parched tongues of those who sought not God while they lived. He