After that day I loitered about the mill, watching this man, whose life had been spent in one godless theatre after another, very much as the Florentine peasants looked after Dante when they knew he had come back from hell.  I was on the lookout for the taint, the abnormal signs, of vice.  It was about that time that I was fevered with the missionary enthusiasm, and in Polynesia, where I meant to go (but where I never did go), I declared to Phil daily that I should find in every cannibal the half-effaced image of God, only waiting to be quickened into grace and virtue.  That was quite conceivable.  But that a flashy, God-defying actor could be the same man at heart as this fat, good-tempered, gossiping miller, who jogged to the butcher’s every morning for his wife, a basket on one arm and a baby on the other, was not conceivable.  He was a close dealer at the butcher’s, too, though dribbling gossip there as everywhere; a regular attendant at St. Mark’s, with his sandy-headed flock about him, among whom he slept comfortably enough, it is true, but with as pious dispositions as the rest of us.

I remember how I watched this man, week in and week out.  It was a trivial matter, but it irritated me unendurably to find that this circus-rider had human blood precisely like my own it outraged my early religion.

We talk a great deal of the rose-colored illusions in which youth wraps the world, and the agony it suffers as they are stripped from its bare, hard face.  But the fact is, that youth (aside from its narrow-passionate friendships) is usually apt to be acrid and watery and sour in its judgment and creeds—­it has the quality of any other unripe fruit:  it is middle age that is just and tolerant, that has found room enough in the world for itself and all human flies to buzz out their lives good-humoredly together.  It is youth who can see a tangible devil at work in every party or sect opposed to its own, whose enemy is always a villain, and who finds treachery and falsehood in the friend who is occasionally bored or indifferent:  it is middle age that has discovered the reasonable sweet juste milieu of human nature—­who knows few saints perhaps, but is apt to find its friend and grocer and shoemaker agreeable and honest fellows.  It is these vehement illusions, these inherited bigotries and prejudices, that tear and cripple a young man as they are taken from him one by one.  He creeps out of them as a crab from the shell that has grown too small for him, but he thinks he has left his identity behind him.

It was such a reason as this that made me follow the miller assiduously, and cultivate a quasi intimacy with him, in the course of which I picked the following story from him.  It was told at divers times, and with many interruptions and questions from me.  But for obvious reasons I have made it continuous.  It had its meaning to me, coarse and common though it was—­the same which Christ taught in the divine beauty of His parables.  Whether that meaning might not be found in the history of every human life, if we had eyes to read it, is matter for question.