Ben drew me carefully down the garden-path.  I inhaled the breath of the tulips and hyacinths, as we passed them.  I longed to stay there in that fairy land, for they brought back all the unspeakably rapturous feelings of my boyhood.  Strange that such delight, after we become men, never visits us except in moments brief as lightning-flashes,—­and then generally only as a memory,—­not, as when we were children, in the form of a hope!  When we are boys, and sudden joy stirs our hearts, we say, “Oh, how grand life will be!” When we are men, and are thus moved, it is, “Ah, how bright life was!”

Ben did not pause in the hyacinth-bed with me.  He was anxious to prove the excellence of his vehicle; so he dragged me on in it, until we had nearly reached the boundary of our grounds, where the two tall, ragged old cedar-trees marked the extreme point of the evergreen shrubbery, and the view of the neighborhood lies before us.  He stopped there and said,—­

“Ye’ll mappen like to look abroad a bit, and I’se go on to the post-office.  Miss Kathleen bid me put you here fornenst the landskip, and then leave ye.  She was greatly fashed at the coompany cooming just then.  I must go, Sir.”

“All right, Ben.  You need not hurry.”

The fresh morning wind whisked up to me and kissed my face bewitchingly, as Ben removed his tall, burly form from the narrow opening between the two trees, and left me alone there in the shade, with nothing between me and the view.

That moment revealed to me the joy of all liberated prisoners.  My eyes flew over the wide earth and the broad heavens.  After a sweeping view of both in their vast unity, I began to single out particulars.  There lay the village in the lap of the hills, in summer time “bosomed high in tufted trees,” but now only half veiled by the gauze-like green of the budding foliage.  The apple orchards, still white with blossoms, and green with wheat or early grass, extended up the hills, and encroached upon the dense brown forests.  There was the little red brick turret which crowned the village church, and my eye rested lovingly upon it.  Not that it was anything to me; but Kate and all the women I respect love it, or what it stands for, and through them I hope to experience that warm love of worship, and of the places dedicated to it, which seems native to them, and much to be desired for us.  I have cared little for such things hitherto.  Their beauty and happiness are just beginning to dawn upon me.

          ——­“Dear Jesus, can it be? 
  Wait we till all things go from us or e’er we go to thee? 
  Ay, sooth!  We feel such strength in weal, thy love may seem
       withstood: 
  But what are we in agony? Dumb, if we cry not ‘God!’”

Behind the village I can see the blue hazy line of a far-distant horizon, as the valley opens in that direction.  I know the sea lies there, and sometimes I fancy that mirage lifts its dark waters to my sight.