Fred had never been fond of church-going, nor was he much given to reading the Holy Scriptures.  Indeed, he rather affected the style of the Latter-Day Saints, who look for a better and nobler Messiah than came in the Son of Mary.  But just now, fifty texts of Scripture, which he must have learned long ago at his mother’s knee, came crowding upon his memory.

“Though I have all gifts, and have not charity, I am nothing.”

“He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

“He that loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?”

“Little children, love one another.”

“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”

And so on,—­interminably.  In a helpless, vague way, he looked at the shadow by his side.

“You like pictures, and paint them,” said she, speaking for the first time;—­and the voice was precisely the tone he had recognized in the music of the wind; he had thought then it was like hers;—­“look with me at these two.”

They were, indeed, magnificent pictures.  They reached from floor to ceiling.  Fred was artist enough to enjoy fully the wide sweep of sky and land,—­the mountains in the distance, and the firmament studded with stars.  A figure wandered up and down the space, sometimes to the tops of the mountains, sometimes to the clefts of the rocks.  When he saw the stars, he calculated their distances;—­when he saw the moon, he weighed her, and guessed about the atmosphere on the other side;—­when the gold and diamonds shone in the clefts of the rocks, he gathered and analyzed them.  The Leviathan he studied and classed.  He groped and reached constantly, and, having gathered, looked at his gatherings, dissatisfied.  He was ever searching out knowledge.  Meanwhile, a gnat put him in a passion, and unleavened bread destroyed his peace.  Though he might sleep on rose-leaves, as he could not command the wind, they came often to double under him, and annoy him with bad dreams.

“When shall I be a disembodied spirit, and no longer subject to the petty annoyances that belong to the flesh?” cried he, fretfully.  “My knowledge, too, is a moth,—­only vexing me by a sense of the limitations of my condition.  If I could grasp Nature,—­if I could handle the stars,—­if I could wake the thunder,—­if I could summon the cloud!  That would be worth something,—­to send the comets on their errands!  But what avails it, to know that they go?—­how far from me when they start, and how many millions of miles before they turn to come back?  If I could move only one of these subtile energies that mock me while I look them in the face!”

The philosopher dozed.  A storm came on, and swept over all creation.  When he awoke, it was clearing away, and one side of the heavens was heaped with gold-lined clouds, and the darkness of the other spanned with the seven-hued bow.  He looked admiringly at the clouds and critically at the rainbow, and added to his memorandum-book.