worked, was a wonderland of beautiful creations that inspired a thousand
glowing fancies. Sometimes, at his heavy task, he would pause for a
moment's rest, and so would look out and away over the vast expanse of
country that from his feet stretched in all its charm of winding river
and wooded slopes, and tree-fringed ridges to the far, blue sky-line;
and the very soul of him would answer to the call as he had thought he
never could answer again. The very clouds that drifted past on their
courses to unseen ports beyond the hills were freighted with meaning for
him now. The winds that came laden with the subtly blended perfume
of ten thousand varieties of trees and grasses and shrubs and flowers
whispered words of life which he now could hear. The loveliness of the
glowing morning skies, as he saw them when he rose for the day's work,
and the glories of the sunsets, as he watched them with Auntie Sue
from the porch when the day's task was accomplished, filled him with an
exquisite gladness which he had never hoped to know again.

Most of all, did the river speak to him; not, indeed, as it had spoken
that dreadful night, when, from the window of his darkened room, he had
listened to its call: the river spoke, now, in the full day as his eye
followed its winding length through the hills in all its varied beauty
of sunshine and shadow;--of gleaming silver and living green and
russet-brown. It talked to him in the evening when the waters gave back
the glories of the sky and the deepening twilight wrapped the world in
its dusky veil of mystery. It spoke to him in the soft darkness of the
night, as it swept on its way under the stars, or in the light of the
golden moon. And, in time, some of these things which the river said to
him, he, in turn, told to Auntie Sue.

And Auntie Sue, delighted with the man's awakening self, and charmed
with his power of thought and his gift of expression, led him on.