Could we learn what waking-dreams haunted the boyhood of a man, we should have a rare help toward understanding the character he has developed.  Those of the young Faber were, almost exclusively, of playing the prince of help and deliverance among women and men.  Like most boys that dream, he dreamed himself rich and powerful, but the wealth and power were for the good of his fellow-creatures.  If it must be confessed that he lingered most over the thanks and admiration he set to haunt his dream-steps, and hover about his dream-person, it must be remembered that he was the only real person in the dreams, and that he regarded lovingly the mere shadows of his fellow-men.  His dreams were not of strength and destruction, but of influence and life.  Even his revenges never-reached further than the making of his enemies ashamed.

It was the spirit of help, then, that had urged him into the profession he followed.  He had found much dirt about the door of it, and had not been able to cross the threshold without some cleaving to his garments.  He is a high-souled youth indeed, in whom the low regards and corrupt knowledge of his superiors will fail utterly of degrading influence; he must be one stronger than Faber who can listen to scoffing materialism from the lips of authority and experience, and not come to look upon humanity and life with a less reverent regard.  What man can learn to look upon the dying as so much matter about to be rekneaded and remodeled into a fresh mass of feverous joys, futile aspirations, and stinging chagrins, without a self-contempt from which there is no shelter but the poor hope that we may be a little better than we appear to ourselves.  But Faber escaped the worst.  He did not learn to look on humanity without respect, or to meet the stare of appealing eyes from man or animal, without genuine response—­without sympathy.  He never joined in any jest over suffering, not to say betted on the chance of the man who lay panting under the terrors of an impending operation.  Can one be capable of such things, and not have sunk deep indeed in the putrid pit of decomposing humanity?  It is true that before he began to practice, Faber had come to regard man as a body and not an embodiment, the highest in him as dependent on his physical organization—­as indeed but the aroma, as it were, of its blossom the brain, therefore subject to all the vicissitudes of the human plant from which it rises; but he had been touched to issues too fine to be absolutely interpenetrated and inslaved by the reaction of accepted theories.  His poetic nature, like the indwelling fire of the world, was ever ready to play havoc with induration and constriction, and the same moment when degrading influences ceased to operate, the delicacy of his feeling began to revive.  Even at its lowest, this delicacy preserved him from much into which vulgar natures plunge; it kept alive the memory of a lovely mother; and fed the flame of that wondering, worshiping reverence