a heathen than he; for he knew not what Ulysses knew,
that a heavenly guide was with him in his wanderings; still less what
Ulysses knew not, that what he called the malicious sport of fortune
was, in truth, the earnest education of a father; but who will blame
him for getting strength and comfort from such merely natural founts,
or say that the impulse came from below, and not from above, which
made him say--

"Brave old world she is, after all, and right well made; and looks
right well to-day, in her go-to-meeting clothes; and plenty of room
and chance in her for a brave man to earn his bread, if he will but go
right on about his business, as the birds and the flowers do, instead
of peaking and pining over what people think of him, like that
miserable Briggs. Hark to that jolly old missel-thrush below! he's had
his nest to build, and his supper to earn, and his young ones to feed,
and all the crows and kites in the wood to drive away, the sturdy John
Bull that he is; and yet he can find time to sing as merrily as
an abbot, morning and evening, since he sang the new year in last
January. And why should not I?"

Let him be a while; there are sounds of deeper meaning in the air,
if his heart had ears to hear them; far off church-bells chiming to
even-song; hymn-tunes floating up the glen from the little chapel in
the vale. He may learn what they, too, mean some day. Honour to him,
at least, that he has learnt what the missel-thrush below can tell
him. If he accept cheerfully and manfully the things which he does
see, he will be all the more able to enter hereafter into the deeper
mystery of things unseen. The road toward true faith and reverence for
God's kingdom of heaven does not lie through Manichaean contempt and
slander of God's kingdom of earth.

So let him stride over the down, enjoying the mere fact of life, and
health, and strength, and whistling shrilly to the bird below, who
trumpets out a few grand ringing notes, and repeats them again and
again, in saucy self-satisfaction; and then stops to listen for the
answer to this challenge; and then rattles on again with a fresh
passage, more saucily than ever, in a tone which seems to ask,--"You
could sing that, eh? but can you sing this, my fine fellow on the down
above?" So he seems to Tom to say; and, tickled with the fancy, Tom
laughs, and whistles, and laughs, and has just time to compose his
features as he steps up to the farm-yard gate.

Let him be, I sa