all for earth and heaven,
     By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well
     His fitness for the task,—­this, even this,
     Was the true doctrine only yesterday
     As thoughts are reckoned,—­and to-day you hear
     In words that sound as if from human tongues
     Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past
     That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth
     As would the saurians of the age of slime,
     Awaking from their stony sepulchres
     And wallowing hateful in the eye of day!

Four of us listened to these lines as the young man read them,—­the Master and myself and our two ladies.  This was the little party we got up to hear him read.  I do not think much of it was very new to the Master or myself.  At any rate, he said to me when we were alone, That is the kind of talk the “natural man,” as the theologians call him, is apt to fall into.

—­I thought it was the Apostle Paul, and not the theologians, that used the term “natural man”, I ventured to suggest.

—­I should like to know where the Apostle Paul learned English?—­said the Master, with the look of one who does not mean to be tripped up if he can help himself.—–­But at any rate,—­he continued,—­the “natural man,” so called, is worth listening to now and then, for he didn’t make his nature, and the Devil did n’t make it; and if the Almighty made it, I never saw or heard of anything he made that wasn’t worth attending to.

The young man begged the Lady to pardon anything that might sound harshly in these crude thoughts of his.  He had been taught strange things, he said, from old theologies, when he was a child, and had thought his way out of many of his early superstitions.  As for the Young Girl, our Scheherezade, he said to her that she must have got dreadfully tired (at which she colored up and said it was no such thing), and he promised that, to pay for her goodness in listening, he would give her a lesson in astronomy the next fair evening, if she would be his scholar, at which she blushed deeper than before, and said something which certainly was not No.

IX

There was no sooner a vacancy on our side of the table, than the Master proposed a change of seats which would bring the Young Astronomer into our immediate neighborhood.  The Scarabee was to move into the place of our late unlamented associate, the Man of Letters, so called.  I was to take his place, the Master to take mine, and the young man that which had been occupied by the Master.  The advantages of this change were obvious.  The old Master likes an audience, plainly enough; and with myself on one side of him, and the young student of science, whose speculative turn is sufficiently shown in the passages from his poem, on the other side, he may feel quite sure of being listened to.  There is only one trouble in the arrangement, and that is that it brings this young man not only close to us, but also next to our Scheherezade.