Holy Writ might have a chastening effect, she was permitted to minister
to me in my shame. The amazing adventure of Shadrach, Meshach and
Abednego particularly appealed to an imagination needing little
stimulation. It never occurred to me to doubt that these gentlemen had
triumphed over caloric laws. But out of my window, at the back of the
second storey, I often saw a sudden, crimson glow in the sky to the
southward, as though that part of the city had caught fire. There were
the big steel-works, my mother told me, belonging to Mr. Durrett and Mr.
Hambleton, the father of Ralph Hambleton and the grandfather of Hambleton
Durrett, my schoolmates at Miss Caroline's. I invariably connected the
glow, not with Hambleton and Ralph, but with Shadrach, Meshach and
Abednego! Later on, when my father took me to the steel-works, and I
beheld with awe a huge pot filled with molten metal that ran out of it
like water, I asked him--if I leaped into that stream, could God save me?
He was shocked. Miracles, he told me, didn't happen any more.

"When did they stop?" I demanded.

"About two thousand years ago, my son," he replied gravely.

"Then," said I, "no matter how much I believed in God, he wouldn't save
me if I jumped into the big kettle for his sake?"

For this I was properly rebuked and silenced.

My boyhood was filled with obsessing desires. If God, for example, had
cast down, out of his abundant store, manna and quail in the desert, why
couldn't he fling me a little pocket money? A paltry quarter of a dollar,
let us say, which to me represented wealth. To avoid the reproach of the
Pharisees, I went into the closet of my bed-chamber to pray, requesting