To one man alone among those hundreds could David look back as
having begun to take interest in him toward the close of his
college days. During that vacation which he had spent in reading
and study, he had often refreshed himself by taking his book out to
the woodland park near the city, which in those days was the
grounds of one of the colleges of the University. There he found
the green wild country again, a forest like his pioneer ancestor's.
Regularly here he observed at out-of-door work the professor of
Physical Science, who also was pressing his investigations forward
during the leisure of those summer months. An authority from the
north, from a New England university, who had resigned his chair to
come to Kentucky, attracted by the fair prospects of the new
institution. A great gray-bearded, eagle-faced, square-shouldered,
big-footed man: reserved, absorbed, asking to be let alone, one of
the silent masters. But David, desperate with intellectual
loneliness himself, and knowing this man to be a student of the new
science, one day had introduced himself and made inquiry about
entering certain classes in his course the following session.

The professor shook his head. He was going back to New England
himself the next year; and he moved away under the big trees,
resuming his work.

As troubles had thickened about David, his case became discussed in
University circles; and he was stopped on the street one day by
this frigid professor and greeted with a man's grasp and a look of
fresh beautiful affection. His apostasy from dogmatism had made him
a friend of that lone thinker whose worship of God was the worship
of Him through the laws of His universe and not through the dogmas
of men.