d attuned by their thin harmony, not on the wind that floated without
breaking their lovely message, but on the ripples of the wind that
bloweth where it listeth, came the words, unlooked for, their coming
unheralded by any mental premonition, 'My peace I give unto you.' The
sounds died slowly away in the distance, fainting out of the air, even
as they had grown upon it, but the words remained.

In a few moments he was fast asleep, comforted by pleasure into repose;
his dreams were of gentle self-consoling griefs; and when he awoke in
the morning--'My peace I give unto you,' was the first thought of which
he was conscious. It may be that the sound of the sheep-bells made him
think of the shepherds that watched their flocks by night, and they
of the multitude of the heavenly host, and they of the song--'On earth
peace': I do not know. The important point is not how the words came,
but that the words remained--remained until he understood them, and they
became to him spirit and life.

He soon recovered strength sufficiently to set out again upon his
travels, great part of which he performed on foot. In this way he
reached Avignon. Passing from one of its narrow streets into an open
place in the midst, all at once he beheld, towering above him, on a
height that overlooked the whole city and surrounding country, a great
crucifix. The form of the Lord of Life still hung in the face of heaven
and earth. He bowed his head involuntarily. No matter that when he drew
nearer the power of it vanished. The memory of it remained with its
first impression, and it had a share in what followed.

He made his way eastward towards the Alps. As he walked one day about
noon over a desolate heath-covered height, reminding him not a little of
the country of his childhood, the silence seized upon him. In the midst
of the silence arose the crucifix, and once more the words which had
often returned upon him sounded in the ears of the inner hearing, 'My
peace I give unto you.' They were words he had known from the earliest
memorial time. He had heard them in infancy, in childhood, in boyhood,
in youth: now first in manhood it flashed upon him that the Lord did
really mean that the peace of his soul should be the peace of their
souls; that the peace wherewith his own soul was quiet, the peace at the
very heart of the universe, was henceforth theirs--open to them, to all
the world, to enter and be still. He fell upon his knees, bowed down in
the b