more compilers and
reducers and fewer thinkers; more modifiers and completers, and fewer
inventors.

He lay gazing up into the depth of the sky, rendered deeper and bluer by
the masses of white cloud that hung almost motionless below it, until he
felt a kind of bodily fear lest he should fall off the face of the round
earth into the abyss. A gentle wind, laden with pine odours from the
sun-heated trees behind him, flapped its light wing in his face: the
humanity of the world smote his heart; the great sky towered up
over him, and its divinity entered his soul; a strange longing after
something 'he knew not nor could name' awoke within him, followed by
the pang of a sudden fear that there was no such thing as that which he
sought, that it was all a fancy of his own spirit; and then the voice
of Shargar broke the spell, calling to him from afar to come and see
a great salmon that lay by a stone in the water. But once aroused, the
feeling was never stilled; the desire never left him; sometimes growing
even to a passion that was relieved only by a flood of tears.

Strange as it may sound to those who have never thought of such things
save in connection with Sundays and Bibles and churches and sermons,
that which was now working in Falconer's mind was the first dull and
faint movement of the greatest need that the human heart possesses--the
need of the God-Man. There must be truth in the scent of that pine-wood:
some one must mean it. There must be a glory in those heavens that
depends not upon our imagination: some power greater than they must
dwell in them. Some spirit must move in that wind that haunts us with a
kind of human sorrow; some soul must look up to us from the eye of that
starry flower. It must be something human, else not to us divine.

Little did Robert think that such was his need--that his soul was
searching after One whose form was constantly presented to him, but as
constantly obscured and made unlovely by the words without knowledge
spoken in the religious assemblies of the land; that he was longing
without knowing it on the Saturday for that from which on the Sunday he
would be repelled without knowing it. Years passed before he drew nigh
to the knowledge of what he sought.

For weeks the mood broken by the voice of his companion did not return,
though the forms of Nature were henceforth full of a pleasure he had
never known before. He loved the grass; the water was more gracious to
him; he would l