The directness of the question startled the gambler.  “I have, no peace of any kind; my heart is full of storms and my life is a ruin,” he answered sadly.

“Did thee never notice,” said the lumberman gently, “how nature loves to reclaim a ruin?”

“In what way?”

“By covering it with vines and moss.”

The unexpected nature of this answer and the implied encouragement produced a deep impression on the mind of the gambler, but he answered: 

“I shall never be reclaimed.  I have gone too far.  I have often tried to find the true way of life, and prayed for a single glimpse of light!  Have you ever heard how Zeyd used to spend hours leaning against the wall of the Kaaba and praying, ’Lord, if I knew in what manner thou wouldst have me adore thee, I would obey thee; but I do not!  Oh! give me light!’ I have prayed that prayer with all that agony, but, to me, the universe is dark as hell!”

“There is light enough!  It is eyes we need!” said the evangelist.

“Light!  Who has it?  Many think they have, but it is mere fancy.  They mistake the shining of rotten wood for fire!”

“And sometimes men have walked in the light without seeing it, as fish swimming in the sea and birds flying in the air, might say, ’Where is the sea?’ ‘Where is the air?’”

“But what comfort is it, if there is light, and I cannot see it?  There might as well be no light at all!”

“The bird never knows it has wings until it tries them!  We see, not by looking for our eyes, but by looking out of them.  We say of a little child that it has to ‘find its legs.’  Some men have to find their eyes.”

“It is an art, then, to see?”

“I would even call it a trick, if I dared.”

“Can you impart that capacity and teach that art?”

“No, it must be acquired by each man for himself.  We can only tell others ‘we see.’”

“I only know that I wish I could see!”

“We see by faith.”

“And what is faith?”

“It is a power of the soul as much higher than reason as reason is higher than sense.”

“Some men may possess such power, but I do not.”

“You at least have an imagination.”

“Yes.”

“Well, faith is but the imagination spiritualized.”

Mantel regarded the man who spoke in these terse and pregnant sentences with astonishment.  “This,” said he, “is not the same language in which you addressed the people in the Battery.  This is the language of a philosopher!  Do all lumbermen in the west speak thus?”