“If you could understand how God knows, Harry, then you would know yourself; but before you have made up your mind, you don’t know which you will choose; and even then you only know on which you intend to set your foot; for you have often changed your mind after making it up.”

Harry looked as puzzled as before.

“Why, Harry, to understand how God understands, you would need to be as wise as he is; so it is no use trying.  You see you can’t quite understand me, though I have a real meaning in what I say.”

“Ah!  I see it is no use; but I can’t bear to be puzzled.”

“But you need not be puzzled; you have no business to be puzzled.  You are trying to get into your little brain what is far too grand and beautiful to get into it.  Would you not think it very stupid to puzzle yourself how to put a hundred horses into a stable with twelve stalls?”

Harry laughed, and looked relieved.

“It is more unreasonable a thousand times to try to understand such things.  For my part, it would make me miserable to think that there was nothing but what I could understand.  I should feel as if I had no room anywhere.  Shall we go to our cave again?”

“Oh! yes, please,” cried Harry; and in a moment he was on Hugh’s back once more, cantering joyously to the barn.

After various improvements, including some enlargement of the interior, Hugh and Harry sat down together in the low yellow twilight of their cave, to enjoy the result of their labours.  They could just see, by the light from the tunnel, the glimmer of the golden hollow all about them.  The rain was falling heavily out-of-doors; and they could hear the sound of the multitudinous drops of the broken cataract of the heavens like the murmur of the insects in a summer wood.  They knew that everything outside was rained upon, and was again raining on everything beneath it, while they were dry and warm.

“This is nice!” exclaimed Harry, after a few moments of silent enjoyment.

“This is your first lesson in architecture,” said Hugh.

“Am I to learn architecture?” asked Harry, in a rueful tone.

“It is well to know how things came to be done, if you should know nothing more about them, Harry.  Men lived in the cellars first of all, and next on the ground floor; but they could get no further till they joined the two, and then they could build higher.”

“I don’t quite understand you, sir.”

“I did not mean you should, Harry.”

“Then I don’t mind, sir.  But I thought architecture was building.”

“So it is; and this is one way of building.  It is only making an outside by pulling out an inside, instead of making an inside by setting up an outside.”

Harry thought for a while, and then said joyfully: 

“I see it, sir!  I see it.  The inside is the chief thing—­not the outside.”

“Yes, Harry; and not in architecture only.  Never forget that.”