ather with a sense of his
unfitness to hear such a lofty utterance, I saw at once that it was for
his sake that he had thus spoken. The old man had thrown himself back
too, and was gazing into the sky, puzzling himself, I could see, to
comprehend what his son could mean. I fear he concluded, for the time,
that Robert was not gifted with the amount of common-sense belonging
of right to the Falconer family, and that much religion had made him
a dreamer. Still, I thought I could see a kind of awe pass like a
spiritual shadow across his face as he gazed into the blue gulfs over
him. No one can detect the first beginnings of any life, and those
of spiritual emotion must more than any lie beyond our ken: there is
infinite room for hope. Falconer said no more. We betook ourselves early
within doors, and he read King Lear to us, expounding the
spiritual history of the poor old king after a fashion I had never
conceived--showing us how the said history was all compressed, as far as
human eye could see of it, into the few months that elapsed between
his abdication and his death; how in that short time he had to learn
everything that he ought to have been learning all his life; and how,
because he had put it off so long, the lessons that had then to be given
him were awfully severe.

I thought what a change it was for the old man to lift his head into the
air of thought and life, out of the sloughs of misery in which he had
been wallowing for years.

CHAPTER XVII. IN THE COUNTRY.

The next morning Falconer, who knew the country, took us out for a
drive. We passed through lanes and gates out upon all open moor, where
he stopped the carriage, and led us a few yards on one side. Suddenly,
hundreds of feet below us, down what seemed an almost precipitous
descent, we saw the wood-embosomed, stream-trodden valley we had left
the day before. Enough had been cleft and scooped seawards out of
the lofty table-land to give room for a few little conical hills with
curious peaks of bare rock. At the bases of these hills flowed noisily
two or three streams, which joined in one, and trotted out to sea over
rocks and stones. The hills and the sides of the great cleft were half
of them green with grass, and half of them robed in the autumnal foliage
of thick woods. By the streams and in the woods nestled pretty houses;
and away at the mouth of the valley and the stream lay the village. All
around, on our level, stretched farm and moorland