and
mysteriously keeping tune with our own! Young hearts, young leaves,
flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all
wildly, gladly rejoicing together."

There is something missing in the life of one who cannot enter into the
feelings of a boy like Muir or Taylor or Drummond. And when such a boy
grows up, the gap in the life will be more conspicuous than ever.

Think of the poverty of the stranger to whom a traveler, feeling that he
must give expression to his keen delight in the autumn foliage, said,
"What wonderful coloring!" "Where?" came the reply. "Oh, the trees!
Well, I'm not interested in trees. Talk to me about coal. I know coal."

V

COMPANIONSHIP WITH GOD

Some people insist that it is impractical moonshine to speak of making a
companion of God, that folks who talk about such things are dreamers,
far removed from touch with the cold reality of daily life.

Then how about the nephew of whom Dr. Alexander MacColl told at
Northfield? He was surely a practical man. For four years he had been in
the thick of the fighting in France. Yet at the close of one of his
letters to his uncle he said: "I hope when the war is over that I may
be able to spend a month somewhere among the hills. I often think that
if more people in the world had lived among such hills as we have in
Scotland there would have been no world war."

"When I came yesterday afternoon, and saw again the glory of these
hills," was Dr. MacColl's comment, "I found myself sharing very deeply
in that feeling of my good nephew, and wishing that more people in the
world had known what it is to commune with God in the silences."

That fine young Scotchman would have known how to take a college student
who, while having a country walk with a friend, was explaining the
reason for his belief in God and his trust in Him. As he concluded his
message he pointed to a large tree which they were passing, saying as he
did so, "God is as real to me as that tree."

He had a right to say such a thing, for he not only believed, but he was
conscious that God was with him, his Companion wherever he went. This
being the case, prayer became for him the simplest and most natural
thing in the world. God was by his side; then why should not he talk to
God, by ejaculation as well as by more formal utterance? Yet his talks
with God never became formal. They were always intimate and
confidential--like the approaches of Principal John Cairns, the