Vulgar American life?  He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before.  People called him a fanatic.  It may be that he was one:  yet the uncouth old man, sick in soul from some gnawing pain of his own life, looked into the depths of human loss with a mad desire to set it right.  On the very faces of those who sneered at him he found some traces of failure or pain, something that his heart carried up to God with a loud and exceeding bitter cry.  The voice of the world, he thought, went up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,—­the great blind world, astray since the first ages!  Was there no hope, no help?

The hot sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on open problems in the lives of these men and women who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye could read.  There were places where it did not shine:  down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder:  what riddles of human life lay there he dared not think of.  God knows how the man groped for the light,—­for any voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.

So the hot, long day wore on, for all of them.  There was another light by which the world was seen that day, rarer than the sunshine, purer.  It fell on the dense crowds,—­upon the just and the unjust.  It went into the fogs of the fetid dens from which the coarser light was barred, into the deepest mires where a human soul could wallow, and made them clear.  It lighted the depths of the hearts whose outer pain and passion men were keen to read in the unpitying sunshine, and bared in those depths the feeble gropings for the right, the loving hope, the unuttered prayer.  No kindly thought, no pure desire, no weakest faith in a God and heaven somewhere could be so smothered under guilt that this subtile light did not search it out, glow about it, shine through it, hold it up in full view of God and the angels,—­lighting the world other than the sun had done for six thousand years.  We have no name for the light:  it has a name,—­yonder.  Not many eyes were clear to see its shining that day; and if they did, it was as through a glass, darkly.  Yet it belonged to us also, in the old time, the time when men could “hear the voice of the Lord God in the garden in the cool of the day.”  It is God’s light now alone.

Yet poor Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, sometimes, of its heavenly clearness.  I think it was this light that made the burning of Christmas fires warmer for her than for others, that showed her all the love and outspoken honesty and hearty frolic which her eyes saw perpetually in the old warm-hearted world.  That evening, as she sat on the step of her brown frame shanty, knitting at a great blue stocking, her scarred face and misshapen body very pitiful to the passers-by, it was this light that gave to her face its homely, cheery smile.  It made her eyes quick to know the message in the depths of color in the evening