hole. Going back to the grate, he piled on the wood, watching the
blaze as it rushed up over the logs, devouring the dried lichens on
the bark; then sinking back to the bottom rounds, where it must
slowly rise again, reducing the wood to ashes. Beside him as he sat
in his rush-bottomed chair stood a small square table and on this a
low brass candlestick, the companion of the one in the dining room.
A half-burnt candle rose out of the socket. As David now lighted it
and laid the long fresh candle alongside the snuffers, he measured
with his eye the length of his luminaries and the amount of his
wood--two friends. The little grate had commenced to roar at him
bravely, affectionately; and the candle sputtered to him and threw
sparks into the air--the rockets of its welcoming flame.

It was not yet ten o'clock: two hours of the long winter evening
remained. He turned to his treasury.

This was a trunk in a corner, the trunk he had bought while at
college, small and cheap in itself, not in what it held. For here
were David's books--the great grave books which had been the making
of him, or the undoing of him, according as one may have enough of
God's wisdom and mercy to decide whether it were the one or the
other.

As the man now moved his chair over, lifted the lid, and sat gazing
down at the backs of them, arranged in a beautiful order of his
own, there was in the lofty, solemn look of him some further
evidence of their power over him. The coarse toil of the day was
forgotten; his loved dependent animals in the wind-swept barn
forgotten; the evening with his father and mother, the unalterable
emptiness of it, the unkindness, the threatening tragedy,