more or less than he believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements speculative and uncertain elements, traditional error, and all that body of rejected doctrine which, though he himself be free from it, must yet be slowly uprooted from the general belief; if emotion is so sacred to him that his native and habitual reticence becomes so sensitive in this most private part of life as to make it here something between God and him only; if his heart of charity and hand of friendship find out his fellow-men with no intervention; if for these reasons, or any of them, or if from that modesty of nature, which is so much more common in American youth than is believed, he hesitates, out of pure awe of the responsibility before God and man which he incurs, to think himself worthy of such vows, such hopes, such duties,—­if in any way, being of noble nature, he keeps by himself,—­let him not think he thereby withdraws from the life of Christendom, nor that in the Church itself he may not still take some portion of its great good.  So far as its authority is of the heart only, so far as it has organized the religious life itself without regard to other ends and free from intellectual, historical, and governmental entanglements that are supplementary at most, he needs no formal act to be one with its spirit; and, however much he may deny himself by his self-limitation, he remains a Christian.”

* * * * *

There was no doubt about it; we were lost.  The faint tracks in the soil had long ago disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, the draws between the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass had deepened till it was above the wheels and to the shoulders of the ponies.  They did not mind; they were born to it.  What solitude there was in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand!  What wildness was there!  Only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of lonely splendour, and green horizons, broken and nigh, of the waving prairie, whispering with the high wind,—­and no life but ours shut in among the group of low, close hills all about, in that grassy gulf!  The earth seemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like this, men lost had died and none knew it; half-unconsciously I found myself thinking of Childe Roland’s Tower,—­

        “those two hills on the right
    Couched,”—­

and the reality of crossing the prairie in old days came back on me.  That halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment of life, an arrival, an end.

The sun was too low for further adventuring.  We struck due west on as straight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach the Looking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back to mankind.  An hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance to which we drove,—­a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made our nooning in.  We drove to the door, and called; it was long before any answer came; but at last a