We mounted the five-mile ridge,—­and, “Poor Robin,” he said, “what of him?” “Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses’ graveyard,” I laughed, “in the soft gray ashes of my blazing hearth.  One must live the life before he tells the tale.”  “I loved his ‘awakening,’” he replied, “and I have often thought of it by myself.  And will nothing come of him now?” “Who can tell?” I said, looking hard off over the prairie.  “The Muses must care for their own.  That ‘awakening,’” I went on, after a moment of wondering why the distant stream of the valley was called “the Looking-glass,” and learning only that such was its name, “was when after the bookish torpor of his mind—­you remember he called books his opiates—­he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of human service come back on him like a flood.  It was the growing consciousness of how little of life is our own.  Youth takes life for granted; the hand that smoothed his pillow the long happy years, the springs that brought new blossoms to his cheeks, the common words that martyr and patriot have died to form on childish lips, and make them native there with life’s first breath, are natural to him as Christmas gifts, and bring no obligation.  Our life from babyhood is only one long lesson in indebtedness; and we best learn what we have received by what we give.  This was dawning on my hero then.  I recall how he ran the new passion.  That outburst you used to like, amid the green bloom of the prairies, like the misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide warmth of April breathing with universal mildness through the softened air—­why, you can remember the very day,” I said.  “It was one—­” “Yes, I can remember more than that,” he interrupted; “I know the words, or some of them; what you just said was the old voice—­tang and colour—­Poor Robin’s voice;” and he began, and I listened to the words, which had once been mine, and now were his.

“By heaven, I never believed it.  ’Clotho spins, Lachesis weaves, and Atropos cuts,’ I said, ’and the poor illusion vanishes; the loud laughter, the fierce wailing, die on pale lips; the foolish and the wise, the merciful and the pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and the idlers in the market-place, are huddled into one grave, and the heart of Mary Mother and of Mary Magdalen are one dust.’  Duly in those years the sun rose to cheer me; the breath of the free winds was in my nostrils; the grass made my pathways soft to my feet.  Spring with its blossomed fruit trees, and the ungarnered summer, gladdened me; the flame of autumn was my torch of memory, and winter lighted my lamp of solitude.  Men tilled the fields to feed me, and worked the loom to clothe me, and so far as in them was power and in me was need, brought to my doors sustenance for the body and whatsoever of divine truth was theirs for my soul.  Women ministered to me in blessed charities; and some among my fellows gave me their souls in keeping.  How true is that which my friend said to the poor boy-murderer condemned to die,—­’I