Though we accomplish no more in our philosophy than the poor
insect, which momentarily illumines its wandering through the
illimitable night by a flash from its own body.

Lost in obscurity, then, as was David's relation to his mother,
there seemed some gleams of light discernible in that between
father and son. For there are men whom nature seems to make use of
to connect their own offspring not with themselves but with earlier
sires. They are like sluggish canals running between far-separated
oceans--from the deeps of life to the deeps of life, allowing the
freighted ships to pass. And no more does the stream understand
what moves across its surface than do such commonplace agents
comprehend the sons who have sprung from their own loins. Here,
too, is one of Nature's greatest cruelties to the parent.

As David's father would not have recognized his remote ancestors if
brought face to face, so he did not discover in David the image of
them--the reappearance in the world, under different conditions, of
certain elements of character found of old in the stock and line.
He could not have understood how it was possible for him to
transmit to the boy a nature which he himself did not actively
possess. And, therefore, instead of beholding here one of Nature's
mysterious returns, after a long period of quiescence, to her
suspended activities and the perpetuation of an interrupted type,
so that his son was but another strong link of descent joined to
himself, a weak one; instead of this, he saw only with constant
secret resentment that David was at once unlike him and his
superior.

These two had worked side by side year after year on the farm; such