"You have seen only one side of him," remarked Mrs. Marion, when her husband had taken him away to introduce David. "While he was very entertaining, I think he has shown us one of the least attractive phases of his character."
David had felt very much out of place all morning. It was one thing to travel among ordinary Gentiles, as he had always done, and another to be surrounded by those who were constantly bubbling over with religious enthusiasm. He did not object to sitting beside a hot-water tank, he said to himself, but he did object to its boiling over on him.
His neighbors would have been very much surprised could they have known he was studying them with keen insight, and finding much to criticise. Even some of their songs were objectionable to him, their catchy refrains reminding him of some he had heard at colored minstrel shows.
With such an exalted idea of worship as the old rabbi had inculcated in him, it did not seem fitting to approach Deity in song unless through such sonorous utterances as the psalms. Some of these little tinkling, catch-penny tunes seemed profanation.
He ventured to say as much to George Cragmore. He had very unexpectedly found a congenial friend in the young minister. It was not often he met a man so keenly alert to nature, so versed in his favorite literature, or of his same sensitive temperament. He felt himself opening his inner doors as he did to no one else but the rabbi.
A drizzling rain was falling when they began to wind in and out among the mountains of Tennessee, and for miles in their journey a rainbow confronted them at every turn in the road. It crowned every hilltop ahead of them. It reached its shining ladder of light into every valley. It seemed such a prophecy of what awaited them on the mountain beyond, that some one began to sing, "Standing on the Promises."
As the full glory of the rainbow flashed on Cragmore's sight, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence. The expression of his face seemed to transfigure it. When he turned to David, there were tears in his eyes.
"O, the covenants of the Old Testament!" he said, in a low tone, that thrilled David with its intensity of feeling. "The Bethels! The Mizpahs! The Ebenezers! See, it is like a pillar of fire leading us to a veritable land of promise."
Then, with his hand resting on David's knee, he began to talk of the promises of the Bible, till David exclaimed, impulsively: "You make me forget that you are a Christian. You enter into Israel's past even more fully than many of her own sons."