ame for clearness, I understood some of the
deep and simple things of life, as that we are to be like the friendly
pines, and the elm trees, and the open fields, and reject no man and
judge no man. Once, a long time ago, I read a sober treatise by one who
tried to prove with elaborate knowledge that, upon the whole, good was
triumphant in this world, and that probably there was a God, and I
remember going out dully afterward upon the hill, for I was weighed down
with a strange depression, and the world seemed to me a hard, cold,
narrow place where good must be heavily demonstrated in books. And as I
sat there the evening fell, a star or two came out in the clear blue of
the sky, and suddenly it became all simple to me, so that I laughed
aloud at that laborious big-wig for spending so many futile years in
seeking doubtful proof of what he might have learned in one rare home
upon my hill. And far more than he could prove far more.

As I came away from that place I knew I should never again be quite the
same person I was before.

[Illustration: And as I sat there the evening fell, a star or two came
out in the clear blue of the sky]

Well, we cannot remain steadily upon the heights. At least I cannot,
and would not if I could. After I have been out about so long on such an
adventure as this, something lets go inside of me, and I come down out
of the mountain--and yet know deeply that I have been where the bush was
burning; and have heard the Voice in the Fire.

So it was yesterday morning. I realized suddenly that I was
hungry--commonly, coarsely hungry. My whole attention, I was going to
say my whole soul, shifted to the thought of ham and eggs! This may seem
a tremendous anti-climax, but it is, nevertheless, a sober report of
what happened. At the first onset of this new mood, the ham-and-eggs
mood, let us call it, I was a little ashamed or abashed at the
remembrance of my wild flights, and had a laugh at the thought of myself
floundering around in the marshes and fields a mile from home, when
Harriet, no doubt, had breakfast waiting for me! What absurd,
contradictory, inconsistent, cowardly creatures we are, anyway!

The house seemed an inconceivable distance away, and the only real thing
in the world the gnawing emptiness under my belt. And I was wet to my
knees, and the tangled huckleberry bashes and sheep laurel and hardback
I had passed through so joyously a short time before now clung heavily
about my legs