restlessness; and the unanswerable query which, in spite of his high
and spiritual faith had often troubled him, came back again
hauntingly to his mind,--"Why should Life be made so beautiful only
to end in Death?"

This was the Shadow that hung over all things; this was the one
darkness he and others of his calling were commissioned to transfuse
into light,--this was the one dismal end for all poor human
creatures which he, as a minister of the Gospel was bound to try and
represent as not an End but a Beginning,--and his soul was moved to
profound love and pity as he raised his eyes to the serene heavens
and asked himself: "What compensation can all the most eloquent
teaching and preaching make to men for the loss of the mere
sunshine? Can the vision of a world beyond the grave satisfy the
heart so much as this one perfect morning of May!"

An involuntary sigh escaped him. The beating wings of a swallow
flying from its nest under the old gabled eaves above him flashed a
reflex of quivering light against his eyes; and away in the wide
meadow beyond, where the happy cattle wandered up to their fetlocks
in cowslips and lush grass, the cuckoo called with cheerful
persistence. One of old Chaucer's quaintly worded legends came to
his mind,--telling how the courtly knight Arcite,

"Is risen, and looketh on the merrie daye
All for to do his observance to Maye,--
And to the grove of which that I you told,
By aventure his way he gan to hold
To maken him a garland of the greves,
Were it of woodbind or of hawthorn leaves,