In the afternoon he had taken a dozen of the village children to find a
swamp whose borders were fringed with gentians, which seemed to have
caught the color of the wind-swept October skies. He would not let Helen
go. "The walk would tire you," he said; but he himself seemed to know no
weariness, though most of the time he carried one of the children, and
was continually lifting them over rough places, and picking their flowers
and ferns for them.

Helen had seen them start, and watched them as they tramped over the
short, crisp grass of an upland pasture, and she could just distinguish
the words of a hymn they sung, John's deep, sweet tenor leading their
quavering treble:--

"His loving kindness, loving kindness,
His loving kindness, oh, how free!"

After they had gathered gentians to their hearts' content, they crowded
about John and begged for a story, for that was always the crowning bliss
of an afternoon with the preacher. But, though prefaced with the remark
that they must remember it was only a story and not at all true, their
enjoyment of gnomes and fairies, of wondrous palaces built of shining
white clouds, with stars for lamps, was never lessened. True, there was
generally a moral, but in his great desire to make it attractive John
often concealed it, and was never quite sure that his stories did the
good he intended. But they did good in another way; the children loved
him, as most of them loved nothing else in their meagre, hungry little
lives. And he loved them; they stirred the depths of tenderness in him.
What did the future hold for them? Misery, perhaps, and surely sin, for
what hope was there of purity and holiness in such homes as theirs? And
the horror of that further future, the sure eternity which follows sin,