Wise, foolish. So am I.
Let me turn not away from their smiles nor their tears,—
Both parts of an infinite plan,—
Let me live in my house by the side of the road,
And be a friend to man!
And there, in his house by the side of the road, the minister will welcome his wondrous visions, and will take good care to be shod with sandals. Gurnall concludes the first volume of his great work in The Christian Armour with 'Six Directions for the Helping On of this Spiritual Shoe'; but the man who is wise enough to wear sandals stands in no need of any such elaborate instructions.
PART III
I—WE ARE SEVEN!
Tall, bronzed and bearded, Bruce Sinclair was a typical New Zealand farmer. He was born in Fifeshire, it is true, but his parents had emigrated when he was so young that he seemed to belong to the land of his adoption. They had come out on the John Macintyre—one of the first ships to bring settlers to these shores. I never saw the old people. By the time I reached New Zealand, Bruce had laid them to rest in the little God's-acre on the crest, and was himself farming the lands on which they had originally settled. The homestead was up among the foothills near Otokia—about nine miles south of Mosgiel—and Bruce usually rode over on Sundays. One felt that something was missing, if, on going round to the vestry door, 'Oscar,' Bruce's chestnut pony, was not to be seen in the yard. Bruce was quiet and reserved: he seldom spoke unless he was spoken to: but he gave an impression of depth and stability. In his light blue eyes—eyes that seemed paler than they really were by contrast with his sunburned and weatherbeaten countenance—there was a subtle suggestion of secret struggle and secret suffering. You somehow felt that the calm of his sturdy personality was the peace that comes when mighty forces have been vanquished, and fierce storms stilled. I had heard it whispered that in the early colonial days—the days of his youth—Bruce had chafed under the restraints of home and had for some years gone his own way; but except that I fancied that I saw a look of pain in his face when he first directed my attention to the framed portraits of his parents as they hung on either side of the fireplace at Otokia, he had given me no hint of anything of the kind.