zed at a country that was like
a map unrolled at their feet. Still as a vision it stretched to where
sky and earth fused in a golden haze. No sound or motion broke its
dreaming quiet, vast, brooding, self-absorbed, a land of abundance and
accomplishment, its serenity flowing to the faint horizon blur. Lines
of trees, showing like veins, followed the wandering of streams, or
gathered in clusters to suck the moisture of springs. Nearby a pool
gleamed, a skin of gold linked by the thread of a rivulet to other
pools. They shone, a line of glistening disks, imbedded in the green.
Space that seemed to stretch to the edges of the world, the verdure of
Eden, the silence of the unpolluted, unconquered earth were here.

So must it have looked when the beaked Viking ships nosed along the
fretted shores of Rhode Island, when Columbus took the sea in his
high-pooped caravals, when the Pilgrims saw the rocks and naked boughs
of the New England coast. So it had been for centuries, roamed by wild
men who had perished from its face and left no trace, their habitation
as a shadow in the sun, their work as dew upon the grass, their lives
as the lives of the mayfly against its immemorial antiquity.

The young man felt his spirit mount in a rush of exaltation like a
prayer. Some fine and exquisite thing in himself leaped out in wild
response. The vision and the dream were for a moment his. And in that
moment life, all possible, all perfect, stretched before him, to end in
a triumphant glory like the sunset.

The doctor took off his hat.

"The heavens declare the glory of God. All the earth doth magnify his
name," he said in a low voice.

CHAPTER V

A broken line of moving dots, the little company trailed a slow way
across this ocean of green. Nothing on its face was more insignificant
than they. The birds in the trees and the bees in the flowers had a
more important place in its economy. One afternoon David riding in the
rear crested a ridge and saw them a mile in advance, the road
stretching before and behind them in a curving thread. The tops of the
wagons were like the backs of creeping insects, the mounted figures,
specks of life that raised a slight tarnish of dust on the golden
clearness. He wondered at their lack of consequence, unregarded
particles of matter toiling across the face of the world.

This was what they suggested viewed largely from the distance. Close
at hand--one of them--and it was a very