to the angelic face. The farmer stood in dismay, still as the bull,
afraid to move. Clare looked up and smiled, but his delicate little
hand went on caressing the huge head. It was one of God's small high
creatures visiting with good news of hope one of his big low
creatures--a little brother of Jesus Christ bringing a taste of his
father's kingdom to his great dull bull of a brother. The farmer
called him. The boy came at once. Mr. Goodenough told him he must not
go near the bull; he was fierce and dangerous. Clare informed him that
he and the bull had been friends for a long time; and to prove it ran
back, and before the farmer could lay hold of him, was perched on the
animal's shoulders. The bull went on eating the grass in the manger
before him, and took as little heed of the boy as if it were but a fly
that had lighted on him, and neither tickled nor stung him.

By degrees he grew familiar with all the goings on at the farm, and
drew nearer to a true relation with the earth that nourishes
all. Where the soil was not too heavy, the ploughman would set him on
the back of the near horse, and there he would ride in triumph to the
music of the ploughman's whistle behind. His was not the pomp of the
destroyer who rides trampling, but the pomp of the saviour drawing
forth life from the earth. In the summer the hayfield knew him, and in
the autumn the harvest-field, where busily he gathered what the earth
gave, and for himself strength, a sense of wide life and large
relations. The very mould, not to say the grass-blades and the
daisies, was dear to him. He was more sympathetic with the daisies
ploughed down than was even Burns, for he had a strong feeling that
they went somewhere, and were the better for going; that this was the
way their sky fell upon them.

All the people on the farm, all the people of the village, every one