Christ.  It is the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, fundamental, that preserves their influence in other lives.  They help us by opening and directing the spiritual powers we have in common; and beyond our own experience we believe in their counsels as leading to what we in our turn may somewhat attain to in the life they followed.  It is not what they believed of God, but what God accomplished in them, that holds our attention; and we interpret it only by what ourselves have known of his dealing with us.  It is life, and the revelation of God there contained, that in others or ourselves is the root of the matter—­God in us.  This is the corner stone.”

* * * * *

The sun was high in the heavens when we ceased talking of these matters and saw in a lowland before us a farmhouse, where we stopped.  It was a humble dwelling—­almost the humblest—­partly built of sod, with a barn near by, and nothing to distinguish it except the sign, “Post Office,” which showed it was the centre of this neighborhood, if “the blank miles round about” could be so called.  We were made welcome, and, the ponies being fed and cared for, we sat down with the farmer and his wife and the small brood of young children, sharing their noonday meal.  It was a rude table and a lowly roof; but, when I arose, I was glad to have been at such a board, taking a stranger’s portion, but not like a stranger.  It was to be near the common lot, and the sense of it was as primitive as the smell of the upturned earth in spring; it had the wholesomeness of life in it.  Going out, I lay down on the ground and talked with the little boy, some ten years old, to whom our coming was evidently an event of importance; and I remember asking him if he ever saw a city.  He had been once, he said, to—­the hamlet, as I thought it, which we had just left—­with his father in the farm-wagon.  That was his idea of the magnificence of cities.  I could not but look at him curiously.  Here was the creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look of man’s world than any one I had ever encountered.  To him this overstretching silent sky, this vacant rolling reach of earth, and home, were all of life.  What a waif of existence!—­but the ponies being ready, we said our good-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still northward.  We talked for a while in that spacious atmosphere—­the cheerful talk, half personal, half literary, lightly humorous, too, which we always had together; but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my mind as a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated being whom my notes had described, and knowing that I had told but half my story and that my friend would like the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious things, saying—­and there was nothing surprising in such a change with us—­“After all, you know, we can’t live to ourselves alone or by ourselves.  How to enter life and be one with other men, how to be the child of society, and a peer