r 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, as you do. 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 vile thing she was, some
coarse weight fell off, and something within, not the sickly Lois of
the mill, 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 colour. 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
colour; alive. The Life, rather; 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 in imperfect language, (not an outward show of tints
and lines, as to 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 colour-dreams, through the
faces of dog or man upon the street, to find the God that lay behind.
So she saw the world, and its beauty and warmth being divine as near to
her, the warmth and beauty became real in her, found their homely
reflection in her daily life. So she knew, too, the Master in whom she
believed, saw Him in everything that lived, more real than all beside.
The waiting earth, the prophetic sky, the very worm in the gutter was
but a part of this man, something come to tell her of Him,--she dimly
felt; though, as I said, she had no words for such a thought. Yet even
more real than this. There was no pain nor temptation down in those
dar