The pollards did not look half so dreary.  The river began to glimmer a little; and the old bridge had become an interesting old bridge.  The country altogether was rather nice than otherwise.  I had found a friend already!—­that is, a man to whom I might possibly be of some use; and that was the most precious friend I could think of in my present situation and mood.  I had learned something from him too; and I resolved to try all I could to be the same man in the pulpit that I was out of it.  Some may be inclined to say that I had better have formed the resolution to be the same man out of the pulpit that I was in it.  But the one will go quite right with the other.  Out of the pulpit I would be the same man I was in it—­seeing and feeling the realities of the unseen; and in the pulpit I would be the same man I was out of it—­taking facts as they are, and dealing with things as they show themselves in the world.

One other occurrence before I went home that evening, and I shall close the chapter.  I hope I shall not write another so dull as this.  I dare not promise, though; for this is a new kind of work to me.

Before I left the bridge,—­while, in fact, I was contemplating the pollards with an eye, if not of favour, yet of diminished dismay,—­the sun, which, for anything I knew of his whereabouts, either from knowledge of the country, aspect of the evening, or state of my own feelings, might have been down for an hour or two, burst his cloudy bands, and blazed out as if he had just risen from the dead, instead of being just about to sink into the grave.  Do not tell me that my figure is untrue, for that the sun never sinks into the grave, else I will retort that it is just as true of the sun as of a man; for that no man sinks into the grave.  He only disappears.  Life is a constant sunrise, which death cannot interrupt, any more than the night can swallow up the sun.  “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto him.”

Well, the sun shone out gloriously.  The whole sweep of the gloomy river answered him in gladness; the wet leaves of the pollards quivered and glanced; the meadows offered up their perfect green, fresh and clear out of the trouble of the rain; and away in the distance, upon a rising ground covered with trees, glittered a weathercock.  What if I found afterwards that it was only on the roof of a stable?  It shone, and that was enough.  And when the sun had gone below the horizon, and the fields and the river were dusky once more, there it glittered still over the darkening earth, a symbol of that faith which is “the evidence of things not seen,” and it made my heart swell as at a chant from the prophet Isaiah.  What matter then whether it hung over a stable-roof or a church-tower?

I stood up and wandered a little farther—­off the bridge, and along the road.  I had not gone far before I passed a house, out of which came a young woman leading a little boy.  They came after me, the boy gazing at the red and gold and green of the sunset sky.  As they passed me, the child said—­