Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/133

 he slammed it shut, and took down the next one, Butler's Analogy. Seemed as though he had heard of that one. He sat down on the edge of the little four-poster, and opened it at random, skimming the pages. Oh, awful! Fierce! Worse than religious! He put it back, discouraged, and ran over the titles on that shelf. A name struck his eye. Emerson. Wasn't there a poem by Emerson at the beginning of "The Children of the Zodiac?" Neale like every one else at that time had read a good deal of Kipling, although he was vague as to Emerson.

He took down Volume I, and opened to the first page.

"But thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws."

"Pretty rough sledding!" thought Neale, "bad as Butler."

He turned over a page. His eye was struck by a thick black pencil-mark along the margin; a passage that had interested somebody. Neale read, "I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day."

An idea knocked at Neale's head. He looked up from the book to take it in. It echoed and re-echoed in his brain, the first idea about history which had ever penetrated to fertilize the facts piled up by Hadley. Gee! there was something to that! Neale began to walk around it speculatively. Wonder if that's true? Sounds good.

Were there perhaps more passages marked? He turned over the pages again and came on another of the black pencil lines in the margin.

"When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more."

"Time is no more …" The grandeur of those four words unrolled a great scroll from before Neale's eyes.

Say, who was it who had marked these places, anyhow? Who was it, who, before Neale, had sat in this low-ceilinged room and had caught that glimpse of timeless infinity? Neale