it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to
know what they would say to us? Was it the weakness and ignorance that
made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you
or me? She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and
sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed. Why, sometimes, out in the
hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the
shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of
water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a passioned
trance, from which she roused herself, weak and tired.

She had no self-poised artist sense, this Lois,--knew nothing of
Nature's laws. Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of the prairie rise
and fall in the crimson light of early morning, or, in the farms,
breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven exultant with the life of
bird and forest, she forgot the poor coarse thing she was, some coarse
weight fell off, and something within, not the sickly Lois of the town,
went out, free, like an exile dreaming of home.

You tell me, that, doubtless, in the wreck of the creature's brain,
there were fragments of some artistic insight that made her thus rise
above the level of her daily life, drunk with the mere beauty of form
and color. I do not know,--not knowing how sham or real a thing you mean
by artistic insight. But I do know that the clear light I told you of
shone for this girl dimly through this beauty of form and color; and
ignorant, with no words for her thoughts, she believed in it as the
Highest that she knew. I think it came to her thus an imperfect
language, (not an outward show of tints and lines, as to some
artists,)--a language, the same that Moses heard when he stood alone,
with nothing between his naked soul and God, but the desert and the
mountain and the bush that burned with fire. I think the weak soul
of the girl staggered from its dungeon, and groped through these
heavy-browed hills, these color-dreams, through even the homely kind
faces on the street, to find the God that lay behind. So the light
showed her the world, and, making its beauty and warmth divine and near
to her, the warmth and beauty became real in her, found their homely
shadows in her daily life. So it showed her, too, through her vague
childish knowledge, the Master in whom she believed,--showed Him to her
in everything that lived, more real than all beside. The waiting earth,
the prophetic