Little by little, so quietly as to be unnoticeable in the working, but with, cumulative effect; built under the surface like those coral reefs that finally rear themselves into palm-crowned peaks upon the Pacific, during the years’ slow upward march had John Flint grown.

Nature had never meant him for a criminal.  The evil conditions that society saddles upon the slums had set him wrong because they gave him no opportunity to be right.  Now even among butterflies there are occasional aberrants, but they are the rare exceptions.  Give the grub his natural food, his chance to grow, protect him from parasites in the meanwhile, and he will presently become the normal butterfly.  That is the Law.

At a crucial phase in this man’s career his true talisman—­a gray moth—­had been put into his hand; and thereby he came into his rightful heritage.

I count as one of my red-letter days that on which I found him brooding over the little gray-brown chrysalis of the Papilio Cresphontes, that splendid swallowtail whose hideous caterpillar we in the South call the orange puppy, from the fancied resemblance the hump upon it bears to the head of a young dog.  Its chrysalis looks so much like a bit of snapped-off twig that the casual eye misses it, fastened to a stem by a girdle of silk or lying among fallen leaves.

“I watched it ooze out of an egg like a speck of dirty water.  I watched it eat a thousand times its own weight and grow into the nastiest wretch that crawls.  I saw it stop eating and spit its stomach out and shrivel up, and crawl out of its skin and pull its own head off, and bury itself alive in a coffin made out of itself, a coffin like a bit of rotting wood.  Look at it!  There it lies, stone-dead for all a man’s eyes can see!

“And yet this thing will answer a call no ears can hear and crawl out of its coffin something entirely different from what went into it!  I’ve seen it with my own eyes, but how it’s done I don’t know; no, nor no man since the world was made knows, or could do it himself.  What does it?  What gives that call these dead-alive things hear in the dark?  What makes a crawling ugliness get itself ready for what’s coming—­how does it know there’s ever going to be a call, or that it’ll hear it without fail?”

“Some of us call it Nature:  but others call it God,” said I.

“Search me!  I don’t know what It is—­but I do know there’s got to be Something behind these things, anyhow,” said he, and turned the chrysalis over and over in his palm, staring down at it thoughtfully.  He had used Westmoreland’s words, once applied to his own case!  “Oh, yes, there’s Something, because I’ve watched It working with grubs, getting ’em ready for five-inch moths and hand-colored butterflies, Something that’s got the time and the patience and the know-how to build wings as well as worlds.”  He laid the little inanimate mystery aside.

“It’s come to the point, parson, where I’ve just got to know more.  I know enough now to know how much I don’t know, because I’ve got a peep at how much there is to know.  There’s a God’s plenty to find out, and it’s up to me to go out and find it.”