inmost depth. Nor was he without
those moments of communion when the creature is lifted into the secret
place of the Creator.

Looking back to the time when it seemed that he cried and was not heard,
he saw that God had been hearing, had been answering, all the time; had
been making him capable of receiving the gift for which he prayed. He
saw that intellectual difficulty encompassing the highest operations of
harmonizing truth, can no more affect their reality than the dulness
of chaos disprove the motions of the wind of God over the face of its
waters. He saw that any true revelation must come out of the unknown in
God through the unknown in man. He saw that its truths must rise in the
man as powers of life, and that only as that life grows and unfolds can
the ever-lagging intellect gain glimpses of partial outlines fading away
into the infinite--that, indeed, only in material things and the laws
that belong to them, are outlines possible--even there, only in the
picture of them which the mind that analyzes them makes for itself, not
in the things themselves.

At the close of these four years, with his spirit calm and hopeful,
truth his passion, and music, which again he had resumed and diligently
cultivated, his pleasure, Falconer returned to Aberdeen. He was received
by Dr. Anderson as if he had in truth been his own son. In the
room stood a tall figure, with its back towards them, pocketing its
handkerchief. The next moment the figure turned, and--could it be?--yes,
it was Shargar. Doubt lingered only until he opened his mouth, and said
'Eh, Robert!' with which exclamation he threw himself upon him, and
after a very undignified fashion began crying heartily. Tall as he was,
Robert's great black head towered above him, and his shoulders were like
a rock against which Shargar's slight figure leaned. He looked down like
a compassionate mastiff upon a distressed Italian grayhound. His eyes
shimmered with feeling, but Robert's tears, if he ever shed any, were
kept for very solemn occasions. He was more likely to weep for awful
joy than for any sufferings either in himself or others. 'Shargar!'
pronounced in a tone full of a thousand memories, was all the greeting
he returned; but his great manly hand pressed Shargar's delicate
long-fingered one with a grasp which must have satisfied his friend that
everything was as it had been between them, and that their friendship
from henceforth would take a new start. For with al