"If you can keep them from the negroes: negroes love chips."
"I'll save them while I chop. You shall have them, if I have to catch them as they fly."
His hunger had been satisfied: his spirits began to rise.
"Mother, are you going to eat that piece of biscuit? If not, just hand it over to me, please."
She looked dryly down at the bread in her fingers: humor was denied her—that playfulness of purest reason.
David had commenced to collect a plateful of scraps—the most appetizing of the morsels that he himself had not devoured. He rose and went out into the porch to the dog.
"Now, mother," he said, reentering; and with quiet dignity he preceded her into the room adjoining.
His father sat on one side of the fireplace, watching the open door for the entrance of his son. He appeared slightly bent over in his chair. Plainly the days of rough farm-work and exposure were over for him, prematurely aged and housed. There was about him—about the shape and carriage of the head—in the expression of the eye most of all, perhaps,—the not wholly obliterated markings of a thoughtful and powerful breed of men. His appearance suggested that some explanation of David might be traceable in this quarter. For while we know nothing of these deep things, nor ever shall, in the sense that we can supply the proofs of what we conjecture; while Nature goes ever about her ancient work, and we cannot declare that we have ever watched the operations of her fingers, think on we will, and reason we must, amid her otherwise intolerable mysteries. Though we accomplish no more in our philosophy than the poor insect, which momentarily illumines its wandering through the illimitable night by a flash from its own body.
Lost in obscurity, then, as was David's relation to his mother, there seemed some gleams of light discernible in that between father and son. For there are men whom nature seems to make use of to connect their own offspring not with themselves but with earlier sires. They are like sluggish canals running between far-separated oceans—from the deeps of life to the deeps of life, allowing the freighted ships to pass. And no more does the stream understand what moves across its surface than do such commonplace agents comprehend the sons who have sprung from their own loins. Here, too, is one of Nature's greatest cruelties to the parent.
As David's father would not have recognized his remote ancestors if brought face to face, so he did not discover in David the image of them—the reappearance in the world, under different conditions, of certain elements of character found of old in the stock and line. He could not have understood how it was possible for him to transmit to the boy a nature which he himself did not actively possess. And, therefore, instead of beholding here one of Nature's mysterious returns, after a long period of quiescence, to her suspended activities and the perpetuation of an interrupted type, so that his son was but another strong link of descent joined to himself, a weak one; instead of this, he saw only with constant secret resentment that David was at once unlike him and his superior.