“You are a happy man, Mr. Polwarth—­if you can say that and abide by it.”

“I am a happy man, sir.  I don’t know what would come of me sometimes, for very gladness, if I hadn’t my good friend, the asthma-devil, to keep me down a bit.  Good night, sir,” he added, for Mr. Drake was already moving away.

He felt superior to this man, set him down as forward, did not quite approve of him.  Always ready to judge involuntarily from externals, he would have been shocked to discover how much the deformity of the man, which caused him discomfort, prejudiced him also against him.  Then Polwarth seldom went to a place of worship, and when he did, went to church!  A cranky, visionary, talkative man, he was in Mr. Drake’s eyes.  He set him down as one of those mystical interpreters of the Word, who are always searching it for strange things, whose very insight leads them to vagary, blinding them to the relative value of things.  It is amazing from what a mere fraction of fact concerning him, a man will dare judge the whole of another man.  In reality, little Polwarth could have carried big Drake to the top of any hill Difficulty, up which, in his spiritual pilgrimage, he had yet had to go panting and groaning—­and to the top of many another besides, within sight even of which the minister would never come in this world.

“He is too ready with his spiritual experience, that little man!—­too fond of airing it,” said the minister to his daughter.  “I don’t quite know what to make of him.  He is a favorite with Mr. Wingfold; but my experience makes me doubtful.  I suspect prodigies.”

Now Polwarth was not in the habit of airing his religious experiences; but all Glaston could see that the minister was in trouble, and he caught at the first opportunity he had of showing his sympathy with him, offering him a share of the comfort he had just been receiving himself.  He smiled at its apparent rejection, and closed the gate softly, saying to himself that the good man would think of it yet, he was sure.

Dorothy took little interest in Polwarth, little therefore in her father’s judgment of him.  But, better even than Wingfold himself, that poor physical failure of a man could have helped her from under every gravestone that was now crushing the life out of her—­not so much from superiority of intellect, certainly not from superiority of learning, but mainly because he was alive all through, because the life eternal pervaded every atom of his life, every thought, every action.  Door nor window of his being had a lock to it!  All of them were always on the swing to the wind that bloweth where it listeth.  Upon occasions when most would seek refuge from the dark sky and gusty weather of trouble, by hiding from the messengers of Satan in the deepest cellar of their hearts, there to sit grumbling, Polwarth always went out into the open air.  If the wind was rough, there was none the less life in it:  the breath of God, it was