"Can't see what he said that fur," said the oarsman.
"No more don't I!" said the other. "He had got a good haul o' fish, anyway—if he was ever so!—and we aint none of us white lilies."
"But then Peter knew that he ought to be a white lily—and such a new view of God's power and greatness made him feel it more than ever. So that he was both afraid and ashamed,—he thought himself unworthy to have the Lord in his ship, and was afraid to have him stay there."
"I wouldn't have asked him to go out, if he had been in mine,—I don't think!"—said the elder fisher slowly. "I don't see as that chap need to ha' been afeard—he hadn't done nothin' but good to him."
"But it's what we do ourselves that makes us afraid," said Mr. Linden. "So it was with Adam and Eve in the garden, you know—God had talked to them a great many times, and they were never afraid till they disobeyed him—then the moment he spoke they ran and hid themselves."
The oarsman was silent, the other man gave a sort of grunt that betokened interest.
"What shines had this feller been cuttin' up?"
"Why!" said Mr. Linden, starting up and taking his stand by the mast, as the little boat curtseyed softly over the waves, "if you tell one of your boys always to walk in one particular road, and you find him always walking in another—I don't think it matters much what he's doing there, to him or to you."
"Wall?"—said the man, with a face of curiosity for what was to come next, mingled with a certain degree of intelligence that would not confess itself.
"Well—Peter knew he was not in the way wherein the Lord commands us all to walk."