I came to your window, where we parted. I have never forgot how you
looked then, nor what you said. Nothing in my life ever had such an
effect upon me. I thought that I loved you before; but I went away
feeling that love was something so deep and high and sacred, that I was
not worthy to name it to you. I cannot think of the man in the world
who is worthy of what you said you felt for me.

"From _that_ hour there was a new purpose in my soul,--a purpose which
has led me upward ever since. I thought to myself in this way: 'There
is some secret source from whence this inner life springs,'--and I knew
that it was connected with the Bible which you gave me; and so I
thought I would read it carefully and deliberately, to see what I could
make of it.

"I began with the beginning. It impressed me with a sense of something
quaint and strange,--something rather fragmentary; and yet there were
spots all along that went right to the heart of a man who had to deal
with life and things as I did. Now I must say that the Doctor's
preaching, as I told you, never impressed me much in any way. I could
not make out any connection between it and the men I had to manage and
the things I had to do in my daily life. But there were things in the
Bible that struck me otherwise. There was _one_ passage in particular,
and that was where Jacob started off from all his friends to go and
seek his fortune in a strange country, and laid down to sleep all alone
in the field, with only a stone for his pillow. It seemed to me exactly
the image of what every young man is like, when he leaves his home and
goes out to shift for himself in this hard world. I tell you, Mary,
that one man alone on the great ocean of life feels himself a very weak
thing. We are held up by each other more than we know till we go off by
ourselves into this great experiment. Well, there he was as lonesome as