A certain homely parallel between the tree and himself began to
shape itself before his thought: how he, too, had been dug up far
away--had, in a sense, voluntarily dug himself up--and been
transplanted in the college campus; how, ever since being placed
there, the different sectarian churches of the town had, without
exception, begun to pin on the branches of his mind the many-shaped
garments of their dogmas, until by this time he appeared to himself
as completely draped as the little locust after a heavy dormitory
washing. There was this terrible difference, however: that the
garments hung on the tree were anon removed; but these doctrines
and dogmas were fastened to his mind to stay--as the very foliage
of his thought--as the living leaves of Divine Truth. He was
forbidden to strip off one of those sacred leaves. He was told to
live and to breathe his religious life through them, and to grow
only where they hung.

The lad declared finally to himself this morning, that realize his
religious life through those dogmas he never could; that it was
useless any longer to try. Little by little they would as certainly
kill him in growth and spirit as the rags had killed the locust in
sap and bud. Whatever they might be to others--and he judged no
man--for him with his peculiar nature they could never be life-
vestments; they would become his spiritual grave-clothes.

The parallel went a little way further: that scant faltering green!
that unconquerable effort of the tree to assert despite all
deadening experiences its old wildwood state! Could he do the like,
could he go back to his? Yearning, sad, immeasurable filled him as
he now recalled the simple faith of what had already seemed to him