Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/134

 turned back to the fly-leaf and found written in a familiar, handwriting, "Daniel W. Crittenden, Williams 1876."

Why, that was Father!

Neale stared at the name. Could it be Father? Yes, he had gone to Williams and although 1876 was incredibly long ago, that might have been Father's class. And this was Father's room! He looked about him, astonished.

For the first time in his life it occurred to Neale that his father had not always been a father and a successful, conservative business man of forty-something, but that long, long ago he had also been a person.

The idea made Neale feel very shy and queer as though through the pages of this chance-found book he were spying on the privacy of that unsuspecting person. But all the same, it was too strange that Father should have … what else had he marked? Intensely curious, Neale turned the pages over. What else had struck the fancy of that young man, so many years ago, before he dreamed that he was to be a business man and a father. It was like looking straight into some one's heart; the first time Neale had ever dreamed of such a thing.

There they were, those glimpses of what had fed his father's spirit. Neale read them because they were marked. Some he understood, others he only felt.

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, on kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."

"Life only avails, not having lived." Good enough!

"For every stoic was a stoic, but in Christendom, where is the Christian?" every word underlined in ink.

"Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of