tell you, you cannot escape the mercy of God;’ and tears coursed down the imbruted face, and once more the human soul, that the ministers of God could not reach, shone in its tabernacle.  Now the butterfly has flown in at the tavern-window, and rebuked me.  I go out, and on the broad earth the warm sun shines; the spring moves throughout our northern globe as when first man looked upon it; the seasons keep their word; the birds know their pathways through the air; the animals feed and multiply; the succession of day and night has no shadow of turning; the stars keep their order in the blue depths of infinite space; Sirius has not swerved from his course, nor Aldebaran flamed beyond his sphere; nature puts forth her strength in all the vast compass of her domain, and is manifest in life that continues and is increased in fuller measures of joy, heightened to fairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of man.  Wiser were the ascetics whom I used to scorn; they made themselves ascetics of the body, but I have been an ascetic of the soul.”

* * * * *

“Eccola!” I said, “was it like that?  But a heady rhetoric is not inconsistent with sobriety of thought, as many a Victorian page we have read together testifies.  The style tames with the spirit; and wild blood is not the worst of faults in poets or boys.  But I will change old coin for the new mintage with you, if you like, and it is not so very different.  There is a good stretch ahead, and the ponies never seem to misbehave both at once.”  In fact, these ponies, who seemed to enjoy the broad, open world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson of civilization, and unite their private wills in rebellion; for, while one or the other of them would from time to time fling back his heels and prepare to resist, the other dragged him into the course with the steady pace, and, under hand and voice, they kept going in a much less adventurous way than I had anticipated.  And so I read a page or two from the small blank-book in which I used to write, saying only, by way of preface, that the April morning my friend so well remembered marked the time when I began that direct appeal to life of which these notes were the first-fruits.

The waters of the Looking-glass had been lost behind its bluffs to the west as we turned inland, though we still rose with the slope of the valley; and now on higher land we saw the open country in a broad sweep, but with bolder configuration than was familiar to me in prairie regions, the rolling of the country being in great swells; and this slight touch of strangeness, this accentuation of the motionless lines of height and hollow, and the general lift of the land, perhaps, was what first gave that life to the soil, that sense of a presence in the earth itself, which was felt at a later time.  Then I saw only the outspread region, with here and there a gleam of grain on side-hills and far-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or