“Bless me,” he said, “I ain’t got a wife.  I never was a daring man, and I guess I’ll confine my melancholy pleasures to them funereal orators for some time yet.”

“Well, now, hold on a minute!” I exclaimed.  “I’ve got just the thing for you.”  I had been looking over the shelves with some care, and remembered seeing a copy of “Reveries of a Bachelor.”  I clambered down, raised the flap of the van (it gave me quite a thrill to do it myself for the first time), and hunted out the book.  I looked inside the cover and saw the letters n m in Mifflin’s neat hand.

“Here you are,” I said.  “I’ll sell you that for thirty cents.”

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said courteously.  “But honestly I wouldn’t know what to do with it.  I am working through a government report on scabworm and fungus, and I sandwich in a little of them funereal speeches with it, and honestly that’s about all the readin’ I figure on.  That an’ the Port Vigor Clarion.”

I saw that he really meant it, so I climbed back on the seat.  I would have liked to talk to the woman in the kitchen who was peering out of the window in amazement, but I decided it would be better to jog on and not waste time.  The farmer and I exchanged friendly salutes, and Parnassus rumbled on.

The morning was so lovely that I did not feel talkative, and as the Professor seemed pensive I said nothing.  But as Peg plodded slowly up a gentle slope he suddenly pulled a book out of his pocket and began to read aloud.  I was watching the river, and did not turn round, but listened carefully: 

“Rolling cloud, volleying wind, and wheeling sun—­the blue tabernacle of sky, the circle of the seasons, the sparkling multitude of the stars—­all these are surely part of one rhythmic, mystic whole.  Everywhere, as we go about our small business, we must discern the fingerprints of the gigantic plan, the orderly and inexorable routine with neither beginning nor end, in which death is but a preface to another birth, and birth the certain forerunner of another death.  We human beings are as powerless to conceive the motive or the moral of it all as the dog is powerless to understand the reasoning in his master’s mind.  He sees the master’s acts, benevolent or malevolent, and wags his tail.  But the master’s acts are always inscrutable to him.  And so with us.

“And therefore, brethren, let us take the road with a light heart.  Let us praise the bronze of the leaves and the crash of the surf while we have eyes to see and ears to hear.  An honest amazement at the unspeakable beauties of the world is a comely posture for the scholar.  Let us all be scholars under Mother Nature’s eye.

“How do you like that?” he asked.

“A little heavy, but very good,” I said.  “There’s nothing in it about the transcendent mystery of baking bread!”

He looked rather blank.

“Do you know who wrote it?” he asked.