be a deserted room, the sound of a human
voice in whose tones there was a peculiar quality which aroused his
interest and perhaps excited his superstition. He crept toward the rude
cabin on his tiptoes, paused and listened. What he heard was the voice
of the young mystic, pouring out his heart in prayer.

For the first time in his life McFarlane gave serious attention to a
petition addressed to the Supreme Being. Other prayers had disgusted him
because of their vulgar familiarity with the Deity, or repelled him by
their hypocrisy; but there was something so sincere and simple in the
childlike words which issued from the cabin as to quicken his soul and
turn his thoughts upon the mysteries of existence. He had received the
gift of life as do the eagles and the lions--without surprise. Had any
one asked him: "Andy McFarlane, what is life?" he would have answered:
"Life? Why it is just life."

But suddenly a voice, heard in the quiet of a wilderness, a voice full
of tenderness and pathos, issuing from unknown and invisible lips and
ascending into the vast and illimitable spaces of air, threw wide open
the gates of mystery. His heart was instantly emptied of its passions;
his soul grew calm and his whole nature became as impressionable as wax.

When at length the prayer had ended and the sermon began, every power of
his mind was strained to its utmost capacity, and he listened as if for
life. The buried germs of desires and aspirations of which he had never
dreamed were quickened into life with the rapidity of the outburst of
vegetation in a polar summer. Words and phrases which had hitherto
seemed to him the utterances of fools or madmen, became instinct with a
marvelous beauty and a wondrous meaning. They flashed like balls of
fire. They pierced like swords. They aroused like trumpets. Such was
the susceptibility of this great soul, and such was the power of that
simple eloquence.

Andy McFarlane, the child of poverty, the rude lumberman, the hardy
frontiersman, was by nature a poet and a seer, and this was his new
birth into his true inheritance. Those eyes which had never wept, swam
in tears. Those knees which had never trembled before the visible, shook
in the presence of the unseen.

The emotions have their limitations as well as the thoughts, and
McFarlane had endured all that he was capable of sustaining. With a
profound sob, in which he uttered the feelings he could not speak, he
turned and fled. It was this