come the messenger--had come, but to ears deafened by centuries of
misrule, blindness, and oppression; so that, with all my longing, I
am shut out of the wondrous world where walked Melampus and the
Saint. To me there is no suggestion of evil in the little silent
creatures, harmless, or deadly only with the Death which is Life.
The beasts who turn upon us, as a rule maul and tear
unreflectingly; with the snake there is the swift, silent strike,
the tiny, tiny wound, then sleep and a forgetting.

My brown friend, with its message unspoken, slid away into the
grass at sundown to tell its tale in unstopped ears; and I, my task
done, went home across the fields to the solitary cottage where I
lodge. It is old and decrepit--two rooms, with a quasi-attic over
them reached by a ladder from the kitchen and reached only by me.
It is furnished with the luxuries of life, a truckle bed, table,
chair, and huge earthenware pan which I fill from the ice-cold well
at the back of the cottage. Morning and night I serve with the
Gibeonites, their curse my blessing, as no doubt it was theirs when
their hearts were purged by service. Morning and night I send down
the moss-grown bucket with its urgent message from a dry and dusty
world; the chain tightens through my hand as the liquid treasure
responds to the messenger, and then with creak and jangle--the
welcome of labouring earth--the bucket slowly nears the top and
disperses the treasure in the waiting vessels. The Gibeonites were
servants in the house of God, ministers of the sacrament of service
even as the High Priest himself; and I, sharing their high office
of servitude, thank God that the ground was accursed for my sake,
for surely that curse was the womb of all unborn blessing.

The old widow with whom I lodge has been deaf for the last twenty