It pleased me in the winter months to think that the worn-out
limbs, the old scarred face of Lois rested, slept: crumbled into
fresh atoms, woke at last with a strange sentience, and, when God
smiled permission through the summer sun, flashed forth in a wild
ecstasy of the true beauty that she loved so well. In no
questioning, sad pallor of sombre leaves or gray lichens:
throbbed out rather in answering crimsons, in lilies, white,
exultant in a chordant life!
Yet, more than this: I strive to grope, with dull, earthy sense,
at her freed life in that earnest land where souls forget to
hunger or to hope, and learn to be. And so thinking, the
certainty of her aim and work and love yonder comes with a new,
vital reality, beside which the story of the yet living men and
women of whom I have told you grows vague and incomplete, like
unguessed riddles. I have no key to solve them with,--no right
to solve them.
My story is but a mere groping hint? It lacks determined truth,
a certain yea and nay? It has no conduit of God's justice running
through it, awarding apparent good and ill? I know: it is a
story of To-Day. The Old Year is on us yet. Poor old Knowles
will tell you it is a dark day; bewildered at the inexplicable
failure of the cause for which his old blood ran like water that
dull morning at Ball's Bluff. He doubts everything in the
bitterness of wasted effort; doubts sometimes, even, if the very
flag he fights for, be not the symbol of a gigantic selfishness:
if the Wrong he calls his enemy, have not caught a certain truth
to give it strength.
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