of it, had been glad to get rid of each
period as it passed, and of many persons and scenes connected with
childhood, youth, and manhood. Now they looked to him, these despised
years, persons, and scenes, like jewels set in fine gold, priceless
jewels of human love fixed forever in the adamant of God's memory. They
were his no more. Happily God would not forget them, but would treasure
them, and reward time and place and human love according to their
deserving. He was full of scorn for himself, who could take and enjoy so
much of happiness with no thought of its value, and no other
acknowledgment than the formal and hasty word of thanks, as each soul
laid its offering of love and service at his feet.

"You're no worse than the rest of us," said Martha, "I didn't know, and
very few of my friends ever seemed to know, what good things they had
till they lost 'em. It may be that God would not have us put too high a
price on 'em at first, fearin' we'd get selfish about 'em. Then when
they're gone, it turns our thoughts more to heaven, which is the only
place where we have any chance to get 'em back."

When he had got over his self-scorn, the abyss of pain and horror out of
which God had lifted him--this was his belief--showed itself mighty and
terrible to his normal vision. Never would he have believed that a man
could fall so far and so awfully, had he not been in those dark depths
and mounted to the sun again. He had read of such pits as exaggerations.
He had seen sorrow and always thought its expression too fantastic for
reality. Looking down now into the noisome tunnel of his own tragedy, he
could only wonder that its wretched walls and exit did not carry the red
current of blood mingled with its own foul streaks. Nothing that he had
done in his grief expressed more than a syllable of the pain he had
endured. The only full voice to such grief would have been the wrecking
of the world. Strange that he could now look calmly into this abyss,
without the temptation to go mad. But its very ghastliness turned his
thought into another channel. The woman who had led him into the pit,
what of her? Free from the tyranny of her beauty, he saw her with all
her loveliness, merely the witch of the abyss, the flower and fruit of
that loathsome depth, in whose bosom filthy things took their natural
shape of horror, and put on beauty only to entrap the innocent of the
upper world. Yes, he was entirely freed from her. Her name sounded to