David sat long immovable before that letter.

One other Bible student remained. On the campus, not far from the
dormitory, stood a building of a single story, of several rooms. In
one of these rooms there lived, with his family, that tall, gaunt,
shaggy, middle-aged man, in his shiny black coat and paper collars,
without any cravats, who had been the lad's gentle monitor on the
morning of his entering college. He, too, was to spend the summer
there, having no means of getting away with his wife and children.
Though he sometimes went off himself, to hold meetings where he
could and for what might be paid him; now preaching and baptizing
in the mountains; now back again, laboring in his shirt-sleeves at
the Pentateuch and the elementary structure of the English
language. Such troubles as David's were not for him; nor science
nor doubt. His own age contained him as a green field might hold a
rock. Not that this kind, faithful, helpful soul was a lifeless
stone; but that he was as unresponsive to the movements of his time
as a boulder is to the energies of a field. Alive in his own
sublime way he was, and inextricably rooted in one ever-living book
alone--the Bible.

This middle-aged, childlike man, settled near David as his
neighbor, was forever a reminder to him of the faith he once had
had--the faith of his earliest youth, the faith of his father and
mother. Sometimes when the day's work was done and the sober, still
twilights came on, this reverent soul, sitting with his family
gathered about him near the threshold of his single homeless room,
--his oldest boy standing beside his chair, his wife holding in her
lap the sleeping babe she had just nursed,--would begin to sing.
The son's voice joined the father's; the wife's followed the son's,