“Did I tell you,” interposed Morgan—­“it is almost in the line of your thought—­of a girl I met the other day on the train?  I happened to be her seat-mate in the car-thin face, slight little figure—­a commonplace girl, whom I took at first to be not more than twenty, but from the lines about her large eyes she was probably nearer forty.  She had in her lap a book, which she conned from time to time, and seemed to be committing verses to memory as she looked out the window.  At last I ventured to ask what literature it was that interested her so much, when she turned and frankly entered into conversation.  It was a little Advent song-book.  She liked to read it on the train, and hum over the tunes.  Yes, she was a good deal on the cars; early every morning she rode thirty miles to her work, and thirty miles back every evening.  Her work was that of clerk and copyist in a freight office, and she earned nine dollars a week, on which she supported herself and her mother.  It was hard work, but she did not mind it much.  Her mother was quite feeble.  She was an Adventist.  ’And you?’ I asked.  ’Oh, yes; I am.  I’ve been an Adventist twenty years, and I’ve been perfectly happy ever since I joined—­perfectly,’ she added, turning her plain face, now radiant, towards me.  ‘Are you one?’ she asked, presently.  ‘Not an immediate Adventist,’ I was obliged to confess.  ‘I thought you might be, there are so many now, more and more.’  I learned that in our little city there were two Advent societies; there had been a split on account of some difference in the meaning of original sin.  ’And you are not discouraged by the repeated failure of the predictions of the end of the world?’ I asked.  ’No.  Why should we be?  We don’t fix any certain day now, but all the signs show that it is very near.  We are all free to think as we like.  Most of our members now think it will be next year.’—­’I hope not!’ I exclaimed.  ‘Why?’ she asked, turning to me with a look of surprise.  ‘Are you afraid?’ I evaded by saying that I supposed the good had nothing to fear.  ’Then you must be an Adventist, you have so much sympathy.’—­’I shouldn’t like to have the world come to an end next year, because there are so many interesting problems, and I want to see how they will be worked out.’—­’How can you want to put it off’—­and there was for the first time a little note of fanaticism in her voice—­’when there is so much poverty and hard work?  It is such a hard world, and so much suffering and sin.  And it could all be ended in a moment.  How can you want it to go on?’ The train approached the station, and she rose to say good-by.  ‘You will see the truth some day,’ she said, and went away as cheerful as if the world was actually destroyed.  She was the happiest woman I have seen in a long time.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is an age of both faith and credulity.”

“And nothing marks it more,” Morgan added, “than the popular expectation among the scientific and the ignorant of something to come out of the dimly understood relation of body and mind.  It is like the expectation of the possibilities of electricity.”