fellow-creatures, and they both only put us more widely apart! Every
one of us dwells in an impenetrable solitude! We understand each
other a little if our circumstances are similar, but if they are
different all our words leave us dumb and unintelligible."




IV.


Barker walked away from the minister's door without knowing where he
was going, and with a heart full of hot pain. He burned with a
confused sense of shame and disappointment and anger. It had turned
out just as his mother had said: Mr. Sewell would be mighty
different in Boston from what he was that day at Willoughby
Pastures. There he made Barker think everything of his poetry, and
now he pretended to tell him that it was not worth anything; and he
kept hinting round that Barker had better go back home and stay
there. Did he think he would have left home if there had been
anything for him to do there? Had not he as much as told him that he
was obliged to find something to make a living by, and help the
rest? What was he afraid of? Was he afraid that Barker wanted to
come and live off _him_? He could show him that there was no
great danger. If he had known how, he would have refused even to
stay to dinner.

What made him keep the pictures of these people who had got along,
if he thought no one else ought to try? Barker guessed to himself
that if that Mr. Agassiz had had to get a living off the farm at