h he had walked
unconscious of their meaning, came to him. There was a sound in his ears
of delicate flowers springing to light through dewy moss, of buds
bursting, and he saw the glancing of myriad tiny leaves upon the grey
old trees. With precisely the same sense of sweetness came the vision of
days when autumn rain was falling, and the red and sear leaf, the nut,
the pine-cone and the flower-seed were dropping into the cold wet earth.
Was life in the spring, and death in the autumn? Was the power and love
of God not resting in the damp fallen things that lay rotting in the
ground?

There came before him a troop of the little children of Fentown, all the
rosy-cheeked faces and laughing eyes and lithe little dancing forms that
he had ever taken the trouble to notice; and Ann and Christa came and
stood with them--Christa with her dancing finery, with her beautiful,
thoughtless, unemotional face, her yellow hair, and soft white hands;
and Ann, a thousand times more beautiful to him, with her sun-brown
tints and hazel eyes, so full of energy and forethought, her dark neat
hair and working-dress and hardened hands--this was beauty! Over against
it he saw Markham, blear-eyed, unkempt and dirty; and his own father, a
gaunt, idiotic wreck of respectable manhood; and his mother, faded,
worn, and peevish; with them stood the hunch-backed baker of Fentown
and all the coarse and ugly sons of toil that frequented its wharfs.
There was not a child or a maiden among those he saw first who did not
owe their life to one of these. With the children and the maidens there
were pleasure and hope; with the older men and women there were effort
and failure, sin and despair. The life that was in all of them, was it
partly of God and partly of themselves? He laughed again at the
question. The life that was in them all was all of God, every impulse,
every act. The energy that thrilled them through, by which they acted,
if only as brutes act, by which they spoke, if only to lie, by which
they thought and felt, even when thought and feeling were false and bad,
the energy which upheld them was all of God. That devil, too, that he
saw standing close by and whispering to them--his form was dim and
fading; he was not sure whether he was a reality or a thought, but--if
he had life, was it his own? Somewhere, he could not remember where or
when, he had heard the voice of truth saying, "Thou couldst have no
power against me except it were given thee fr