(2641)
With Bunyan’s marriage to a good woman the real reformation in his life began. While still in his teens he married a girl as poor as himself. “We came together,” he says, “as poor as might be, having not so much household stuff as a dish or spoon between us both.” The only dowry which the girl brought to her new home was two old, threadbare books, “The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven,” and “The Practise of Piety.” Bunyan read these books, which instantly gave fire to his imagination. He saw new visions and dreamed terrible new dreams of lost souls; his attendance at church grew exemplary; he began slowly and painfully to read the Bible for himself, but because of his own ignorance and the contradictory interpretations of Scripture which he heard on every side, he was tossed about like a feather by all the winds of doctrine.—William J. Long, “English Literature.”
(2642)
REFORMERS, ERRATIC
On the farm there grows a weed called the tumble-weed. When October comes, the wind breaks the stalk. As round as a dandelion puff-ball, the tumble-weed is as large as a bushel basket. When the wind blows from the north the tumble-weeds start across the field, toward the fence-corners. That evening, when the wind changes, the tumble-weed starts rolling across the meadow toward the same fence from which it started in the morning. With the new day, the tumble-weed takes up fresh journeys. At night the wind rises, and tho the farmer and his flocks sleep, not the tumble-weeds. They are still traveling. We all are familiar, alas, with the career of Mr. Tumble Weed, the false radical, tumbling into every public meeting, Sunday-afternoon-gathering reform club. The moment the meeting opens he unrolls his fad and reform, and away he goes—now toward this extreme, now toward that, driven every whither by the new wind, issuing from the puffed-out cheek of any new faddist in reform. (Text.)—N. D. Hillis.
(2643)
Reforms not Sudden—See [Impatience of Reformers].
REFRESHING SPRINGS
Prof. C. D. Hitchcock writes interestingly about fresh-water springs that rise under the sea, and near the sea-shore in Hawaii: