signal, one could have fancied him a shepherd boy come down from the
plains of heaven to look after a lost lamb. Often, when the two old
people were in bed and asleep, Gibbie would be out watching the moon
rise--seated, still as ruined god of Egypt, on a stone of the
mountain-side, islanded in space, nothing alive and visible near
him, perhaps not even a solitary night-wind blowing and ceasing like
the breath of a man's life, and the awfully silent moon sliding up
from the hollow of a valley below. If there be indeed a one spirit,
ever awake and aware, should it be hard to believe that that spirit
should then hold common thought with a little spirit of its own? If
the nightly mountain was the prayer-closet of him who said he would
be with his disciples to the end of the world, can it be folly to
think he would hold talk with such a child, alone under the heaven,
in the presence of the father of both? Gibbie never thought about
himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance of the
spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to any reader: How could
a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I
answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment
the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing
fire-flies throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour
steams up from the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure
sea; and the next moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had
never been more than a phosphorescent gleam--the summer lightning of
the brain. For then the man sees himself but in his own dim mirror,
whereas ere he turned to look in that, he knew himself in the
absolute clarity of God's present thought out-bodying him. The
shoots of glad consciousness that come to the obedient man, surpass
in bliss whole days and years of such ravined rapture as he gains
whose weariness is ever spurring the sides of his intent towards the
ever retreating goal of his desires. I am a traitor even to myself
if I would live without my life.

But I withhold my pen; for vain were the fancy, by treatise or
sermon or poem or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He
cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging
tooth. There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of
our deeper, our true self--God's idea of us when he devised us--the
Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy,
whining self, of which, mo