“If you left your saddle-bags at home, I think I am; if they are here, I am very well.  Doctor,” he went on, “can a man have half of his faculties shut off and retain the others clear and strong?”

“I don’t know,—­perhaps so; why?”

“Well, I feel as if one of your astringents had placed its claws on a full half of me and drawn it all into a pucker; and the other half is in some way set free, and I feel clairvoyant.”

“What do you think you can see?” asked the Doctor.

“A young man—­quite a young man—­blindfolded, groping backward in the chambers of his darkened soul, and trying to escape out of it,” said Bart.

“What a queer fancy!” said the Doctor.

“He must have an unusually large soul,” said Uncle Jonah.

“Every soul is big enough for the man to move in, small as it is,” said Bart.

“What is your youth doing in his, now?” asked the Doctor.

“He is sitting down, resigned,” answered Bart.

“If his soul was dark, why was he blindfolded?” asked the Doctor.

“Well, I don’t know.  For the same reason that men with eyes think that a blind man cannot see so well in the dark, perhaps,” was the answer.  “And see here,” looking into the water, “away down here is a beautiful star.  There, I can blot it out with my hand! and see, now, how I can shatter it into wavelets of stars, and now break it into a hundred, by merely disturbing the water where I see it, ’like sunshine broken in a rill.’  Who knows but it may be the just-arrived light of an old, old star which has just come to us?  How easy to climb back on one of these filmy rays, myriads of millions of leagues, home to its source!  I will take off the bandage and let the poor boy see it, and climb if he may.”

“You are fanciful and metaphysical,” said the Doctor.  “Euclid has not operated, I fear.  Why would you go up to the source of that ray?  Would you expect to find God and heaven there?”

“I should but traverse the smallest portion of God,” said Bart, “and yet how far away He seems just now.  Somebody’s unshapen hand cuts His light off; and I cannot see Him by looking down, and I haven’t the strength to look up.”

“How incoherently you talk; after all, suppose that there is no God, for do your best, it is but a sentiment, a belief without demonstrative proof.”

“Oh, Doctor, don’t!  You are material, and go by lines and angles; cannot you understand that a God whose existence you would have to prove is no God at all? that if His works and givings out don’t declare and proclaim him, He is a sham?  You cannot see and hear, Doctor, when you are in one of your material moods.  Look up, if you can see no reflection in the waters below.”

“Well, when I look into the revealed heaven, for instance, Bart, I see it peopled with things of the earth, reflected into it from the earth; showing that the whole idea is of the earth—­earthy.”