ridges, lay empty and cold. The little
house behind, where its awful furnace used to glow, and which the
pungent chlorine used to fill with its fumes, stood open to the wind
and the rain: he could see the slow river through its unglazed window
beyond. The water still went slipping and sliding through the deserted
places, a power whose use had departed. The canal, the delight of his
childhood, was nearly choked with weeds; it went flowing over long
grasses that drooped into it from its edges, giving a faint gurgle once
and again in its flow, as if it feared to speak in the presence of the
stars, and escaped silently into the river far below. The grass was no
longer mown like a lawn, but was long and deep and thick. He climbed to
the place where he had once lain and listened to the sounds of the belt
of fir-trees behind him, hearing the voice of Nature that whispered
God in his ears, and there he threw himself down once more. All the old
things, the old ways, the old glories of childhood--were they gone? No.
Over them all, in them all, was God still. There is no past with him.
An eternal present, He filled his soul and all that his soul had ever
filled. His history was taken up into God: it had not vanished: his life
was hid with Christ in God. To the God of the human heart nothing that
has ever been a joy, a grief, a passing interest, can ever cease to be
what it has been; there is no fading at the breath of time, no passing
away of fashion, no dimming of old memories in the heart of him whose
being creates time. Falconer's heart rose up to him as to his own deeper
life, his indwelling deepest spirit--above and beyond him as the heavens
are above and beyond the earth, and yet nearer and homelier than his own
most familiar thought. 'As the light fills the earth,' thought he, 'so
God fills what we call life. My sorrows, O God, my hopes, my joys, the
upliftings of my life are with thee, my root, my life. Thy comfortings,
my perfect God, are strength indeed!'

He rose and looked around him. While he lay, the waning, fading moon had
risen, weak and bleared and dull. She brightened and brightened until at
last she lighted up the night with a wan, forgetful gleam. 'So should I
feel,' he thought, 'about the past on which I am now gazing, were it not
that I believe in the God who forgets nothing. That which has been, is.'
His eye fell on something bright in the field beyond. He would see what
it was, and crossed the earthen dyke.