The conversation became each day more interesting and instructive. The souls of the two captives seemed to unite in one body. The old man had acquired knowledge, and the young man was willing to receive instruction. At the end of the first month he eagerly applied himself to the study of geometry. Gordon made him read "Rohault's Physics," which book was still in fashion; and he had good sense enough to find in it nothing but doubts and uncertainties.

He afterward read the first volume of the "Enquiry After Truth." This instructive work gave him new light.

"What!" said he, "do our imagination and our senses deceive us to that degree? What! are not our ideas formed by objects, and can we not acquire them by ourselves?"

When he had gone through the second volume, he was not so well satisfied; and he concluded it was much easier to destroy than to build.

His colleague, astonished that a young ignoramus should make such a remark, conceived a very high opinion of his understanding, and was more strongly attached to him.

"Your Malebranche," said he to Gordon one day, "seems to have written half his book while he was in possession of his reason, and the other half with the assistance only of imagination and prejudice."

Some days after, Gordon asked him what he thought of the soul, and the manner in which we receive our ideas of volition, grace, and free agency.

"Nothing," replied the Huron. "If I think sometimes, it is that we are under the power of the Eternal Being, like the stars and the elements—that he operates everything in us—that we are small wheels of the immense machine, of which he is the soul—that he acts according to general laws, and not from particular views. This is all that appears to me intelligible; all the rest is to me a dark abyss."

"But this, my son, would be making God the author of sin!"

"But, father, your effectual grace would equally make him the author of sin; for certainly all those to whom this grace was refused would sin; and is not an all-powerful being who permits evil, virtually the author of evil?"

This sincerity greatly embarrassed the good man; he found that all his endeavors to extricate himself from this quagmire were ineffectual; and he heaped such quantities of words upon one another, which seemed to have meaning, but which in fact had none, that the Huron could not help pitying him. This question evidently determined the origin of good and evil; and poor Gordon was reduced to the necessity of recurring to Pandora's box—Oromasdes' egg pierced by Arimanes—the enmity between Typhon and Osiris—and, at last, original sin; and these he huddled together in profound darkness, without their throwing the least glimmering light upon one another. However, this romance of the soul diverted their thoughts from the contemplation of their own misery; and, by a strange magic, the multitude of calamities dispersed throughout the world diminished the sensation of their own miseries. They did not dare complain when all mankind was in a state of sufferance.

But in the repose of night, the image of the charming Miss St. Yves effaced from the mind of her lover every metaphysical and moral idea. He awoke with his eyes bathed in tears; and the old Jansenist forgot his effectual grace, and the abbé of St. Cyran, and even Jansenius himself, to afford consolation to a youth whom he had judged guilty of a mortal sin.

After these lectures and their reasonings were over, their adventures furnished them with subjects of conversation; after this store was exhausted they read together, or separately. The Huron's understanding daily increased; and he would certainly have made great progress in mathematics if the thought of Miss St. Yves had not frequently distracted him.

He read histories, which made him melancholy. The world appeared to him too wicked and too miserable. In fact, history is nothing more than a picture of crimes and misfortunes. The crowd of innocent and peaceable men is always invisible upon this vast theatre. The dramatis personæ is composed of ambitious, perverse men. The pleasure which history affords is derived from the same source as tragedy, which would languish and become insipid, were it not inspired with strong passions, great events, and piteous misfortunes. Clio must be armed with a poniard as well as Melpomene.