hopeful mood to distinguish from autumnal
ones--dull, depressing, persistent: there might be sunshine in Mercury
or Venus--but on the earth could be none, from his right hand round by
India and America to his left; and certainly there was none between--a
mood to which all sensitive people are liable who have not yet learned
by faith in the everlasting to rule their own spirits. Naturally enough
his thoughts turned to the place where he had suffered most--his old
room in the garret. Hitherto he had shrunk from visiting it; but now he
turned away from the window, went up the steep stairs, with their one
sharp corkscrew curve, pushed the door, which clung unwillingly to the
floor, and entered. It was a nothing of a place--with a window that
looked only to heaven. There was the empty bedstead against the wall,
where he had so often kneeled, sending forth vain prayers to a deaf
heaven! Had they indeed been vain prayers, and to a deaf heaven? or had
they been prayers which a hearing God must answer not according to the
haste of the praying child, but according to the calm course of his own
infinite law of love?

Here, somehow or other, the things about him did not seem so much
absorbed in the past, notwithstanding those untroubled rows of papers
bundled in red tape. True, they looked almost awful in their lack of
interest and their non-humanity, for there is scarcely anything that
absolutely loses interest save the records of money; but his mother's
workbox lay behind them. And, strange to say, the side of that bed drew
him to kneel down: he did not yet believe that prayer was in vain. If
God had not answered him before, that gave no certainty that he would
not answer him now. It was, he found, still as rational as it had ever
been to hope that God would answer the man that cried to him. This came,
I think, from the fact that God had been answering him all the time,
although he had not recognized his gifts as answers. Had he not given
him Ericson, his intercourse with whom and his familiarity with whose
doubts had done anything but quench his thirst after the higher life?
For Ericson's, like his own, were true and good and reverent doubts, not
merely consistent with but in a great measure springing from devoutness
and aspiration. Surely such doubts are far more precious in the sight of
God than many beliefs?

He kneeled and sent forth one cry after the Father, arose, and turned
towards the shelves, removed some of the bundl