He told us that now he began for the first time since coming to the
island, to find his books his best source of interest and diversion. He
learned, he said, a way of reading by which sea, sky, book, island, and
absent humanity, all seemed parts of one whole, and all to speak together
in one harmony, while they toiled together for one harmony some day to be
perfected. Not all books, nor even all good books, were equally good for
that effect, he thought, and the best----

"You might not think it," he said, "but the best was a Bible I'd chanced
to carry along;" he didn't know precisely what kind, but "just one of
these ordinary Bibles you see lying around in people's houses." He
extolled the psalms and asked Mrs. Smith if she'd ever noticed the beauty
of the twenty-third. She smiled and said she believed she had.

"Then there was one," he went on, "beginning, 'Lord, my heart is not
haughty, nor mine eyes lofty; neither do I exercise myself in great
matters, or in things too wonderful for me;' and by and by it says,
'Surely, I have quieted myself as a child that is weaned: my soul is even
as a weaned child.'"

One day, after a most marvellous sunset, he had been reading, he said,
"that long psalm with twenty-two parts in it--a hundred and seventy-six
verses." He had intended to read "Lord, my heart is not haughty" after it,
though the light was fast failing, but at the hundred and seventy-sixth
verse he closed the book. Thus he sat in the nearly motionless air, gazing
on the ripples of the lagoon as, now singly, and now by twos or threes,
they glided up the beach tinged with the colors of parting day as with a
grace of resignation, and sank into the grateful sands like the lines of
this last verse sinking into his heart; now singly--"I have gone astray
like a lost sheep;" and now by twos--"I have gone astray like a lost