hat this subtile light did not search it out,
glow about it, shine under it, hold it up in full view of God and the
angels,--lighting the world other than the sun had done for six
thousand years. I have no name for the light: it has a name,--yonder.
Not many eyes were clear to see its--shining that day; and if they did,
it was as through a glass, darkly. Yet it belonged to us also, in the
old time, the time when men could "hear the voice of the Lord God in
the garden in the cool of the day." It is God's light now alone.

Yet Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, sometimes, of its heavenly
clearness. I think it was this light that made the burning of
Christmas fires warmer for her than for others, that showed her all the
love and outspoken honesty and hearty frolic which her eyes saw
perpetually in the old warm-hearted world. That evening, as she sat on
the step of her frame-shanty, knitting at a great blue stocking, her
scarred face and misshapen body very pitiful to the passers-by, it was
this that gave to her face its homely, cheery smile. It made her eyes
quick to know the message in the depths of colour in the evening sky,
or even the flickering tints of the green creeper on the wall with its
crimson cornucopias filled with hot shining. She liked clear, vital
colours, this girl,--the crimsons and blues. They answered her,
somehow. They could speak. There were things in the world that like
herself were marred,--did not understand,--were hungry to know: the
gray sky, the mud streets, the tawny lichens. She cried sometimes,
looking at them, hardly knowing why: she could not help it, with a
vague sense of loss. It seemed at those times so dreary for them to be
alive,--or for her. Other things her eyes were quicker to see than
ours: delicate or grand lines, which she perpetually sought for
unconsciously,--in the homeliest things, the very soft curling of the
woollen yarn in her fingers, as in the eternal sculpture of the
mountains. Was it the disease of her injured brain that made all
things alive to her,--that made her watch, in her ignorant way, the
grave hills, the flashing, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the
face of some starved hound, or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before
it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know
what they would say to us? Was it weakness and ignorance that made
everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or
me? She neve