pinney, come pure and keen through the thin air, purged of all
uncertain murmurs. I can hear, it seems, a mile away, the rumble of the
long procession of red mud-stained field-carts, or the humming of the
threshing-gear; or the chatter of children on the farm-road beyond my
shrubberies breaks clear and jocund on the ear. I become conscious here
of how noisily and hurriedly I have lived my life; happily enough, I
will confess; but the thought of it all--the class-room, the street,
the playing-field--bright and vivacious as it all was, seems now like a
boisterous prelude of blaring brass and tingling string, which lapses
into some delicate economy of sweet melody and gliding chord. It has
its shadows, I do not doubt, this Silent Isle; but to-day at least it
is all still and translucent as its clear-moving quiet waters, free as
its vaulted sky, rich as its endless plain.

It is not that I mean to be idle here! I have my web to weave; I have
my lucid mirror. But instead of scrambling and peeping, I mean to see
it all clearly and tranquilly, without dust and noise. I have lived
laboriously and hastily for twenty years; and surely there is a time
for garnering the harvest and for reckoning up the store? I want to see
behind it all, into the meaning of it all, if I can. Surely when we are
bidden to consider the lilies of the field, and told that they neither
toil nor spin, it is not that we may turn aside from them in scorn, and
choose rather to grow rank and strong, bulging like swedes, shoulder by
shoulder, in the gross furrow. It is not as though we content ourselves
with the necessary work of the world; we multiply vain activities, we
turn the songs of poets and the words of the wise into dumb-bells to
toughen our intellectual muscles; we make our pastimes into envious
rivalries and furious emulations; and when we have poured out our
contempt upon a few quiet-minded dreamers for their lack of spirit,
scarified a few lovers of leisure for their absence of ability,
ploughed up a few pretty wastes where the field-flowers grew as they
would, bred up a few hundred gay golden birds, that we may gloat over
the thought of striking them blood-bedabbled out of the sky on a winter
afternoon, we think complacently of the Kingdom of God, and all we have
done so diligently to hasten its coming.

There is a pleasant story of a man who was asked by an ardent
missionary for a subscription to some enterprise or other in the ends
of the ear