These fencing bouts grew more frequent as Yan grew stronger and the doctor’s inhibition was removed.

After one of unusual warmth, Yan realized with a chill that all her interest in his pursuits had been an affected one.  He was silent a long time, then said:  “Mother! you like to talk about your Bible.  It tells you the things that you long to know, that you love to learn.  You would be unhappy if you went a day without reading a chapter or two.  That is your nature; God made you so.

“I have been obliged to read the Bible all my life.  Every day I read a chapter; but I do not love it.  I read it because I am forced to do it.  It tells me nothing I want to know.  It does not teach me to love God, which you say is the one thing needful.  But I go out into the woods, and every bird and flower I see stirs me to the heart with something, I do not know what it is; only I love them:  I love them with all my strength, and they make me feel like praying when your Bible does not.  They are my Bible.  This is my nature.  God made me so.”

The mother was silent after this, but Yan could see that she was praying for him as for a lost soul.

A few days later they were out walking in the early spring morning.  A Shore-lark on a clod whistled prettily as it felt the growing sunshine.

Yan strained his eyes and attention to take it in.  He crept up near it.  It took wing, and as it went he threw after it a short stick he was carrying.  The stick whirled over and struck the bird.  It fell fluttering.  Yan rushed wildly after it and caught it in spite of his mother’s calling him back.

He came with the bird in his hand, but it did not live many minutes.  His mother was grieved and disgusted.  She said.  “So this is the great love you have for the wild things; the very first spring bird to sing you must club to death.  I do not understand your affections.  Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, and yet not one of them falls to the ground without the knowledge of your heavenly Father.”

Yan was crushed.  He held the dead bird in his hand and said, contradictorily, as the tears stood in his eyes, “I wish I hadn’t; but oh, it was so beautiful.”

He could not explain, because he did not understand, and yet was no hypocrite.

Weeks later a cheap trip gave him the chance for the first time in his life to see Niagara.  As he stood with his mother watching the racing flood, in the gorge below the cataract, he noticed straws, bubbles and froth, that seemed to be actually moving upstream.  He said: 

“Mother, you see the froth how it seems to go up-stream.”

“Well!”

“Yet we know it is a trifle and means nothing.  We know that just below the froth is the deep, wide, terrible, irresistible, arrowy flood, surging all the other way.”

“Yes, my son.”