No other book had he ever read: only that sublime epic, with its deep tendernesses and its mighty portents; with its subtleties of prophecy in wide and splendid phrase, and their fulfilment in the barren record of the simplest life; with all the throbbing presentment of martyrdom and doom and death, dominated by the miracle of resurrection and the potency of divinity. Every detail was as clearly pictured to his mind as if, instead of the vast, unstoried stretches of the Great Smoky Mountains, he looked upon the sanctities of the hills of Judæa.
He read as he rode along—slowly, slowly. A bird's shadow would flit across the holy page, and then away to the mountain; the winds of heaven caressed it. Sometimes the pollen of flowering weeds fell upon it; for in the midst of the unfrequented road they often stood in tall rank rows, with a narrow path on either side, trodden by the oxen of the occasional team, while the growth bent elastically under the passing bed of the waggon.
He was almost happy. The clamours of his insistent heart were still. His conscience, his memory, his self-reproach, had loosed their hold. His keen and subtile native intellect stretched its unconscious powers, and discriminated the workings of character, and reviewed the deploying of events, and measured results. He was far away, walking with the disciples.
Suddenly, like an aërolite, he was whirled from high ethereal spaces by the attraction of the earth. A man was peering from between the rails of a fence by the wayside.
'Kin ye read yer book, pa'son, an' ride yer beastis all ter wunst?' he cried out with the fervour of admiration.
That tree of knowledge—ah, the wily serpent!
Galilee—it was thousands of miles away across the deep salt seas.
The parson closed his book with a smile of exultation.
'The beast don't hender me none. I kin read ennywhar,' he said, proud of the attainment.
'Waal, sir!' exclaimed the other, one of that class, too numerous in Tennessee, who can neither read nor write. 'Air it the Good Book?' he demanded, with a sudden thought.