nd contentment that the
big shaggy creatures ceased to blow stormily through their nostrils,
and drew long tranquil breaths instead.

"Look again!" said the Angel. And from a hut of wattles and clay a
little peasant girl came with a bundle of hay in her arms, and gave
first one of the oxen and then the other a wisp. Then she stroked
their black muzzles, and laid her rosy face against their white cheeks.
Then the Prince Bishop saw the rude teamster rise from his rest on the
bank and cry to his cattle, and the oxen strained against the beam and
the thick ropes tightened, and the huge block of stone was once more
set in motion.

And when the Prince Bishop saw that it was these fellow-workers whose
service was more worthy in God's eyes than his own, he was abashed and
sorrowful for his sin, and the tears of his own weeping awoke him. So
he sent for the master of the sculptors and bade him fill the little
niche over the middle portal, not with his own effigy but with an image
of the child; and he bade him make two colossal figures of the white
oxen; and to the great wonderment of the people these were set up high
in the tower so that men could see them against the blue sky. "And as
for me," he said, "let my body be buried, with my face downward,
outside the great church, in front of the middle entrance, that men may
trample on my vainglory and that I may serve them as a stepping-stone
to the house of God; and the little child shall look on me when I lie
in the dust."

Now the little girl in the niche was carved with wisps of hay in her
hands, but the child who had fed the oxen knew nothing of this, and as
she grew up she forgot her childish service, so that when she had grown
to womanhood and chanced to see this statue over the portal she did not
know it was her own self in stone. But what she had done was not
forgotten in heaven.

And as for the oxen, one of them looked east and one looked west across
the wide fruitful country about the foot of the hill-city. And one
caught the first grey gleam, and the first rosy flush, and the first
golden splendour of the sunrise; and the other was lit with the colour
of the sunset long after the lowlands had faded away in the blue mist
of the twilight. Weary men and worn women looking up at them felt that
a gladness and a glory and a deep peace had fallen on the life of toil.
And then, when people began to understand, they said it was well that
these mighty labourers, who ha