One asks, Why does Higgins do these things? The answer is simple: Because he loves his neighbor as himself–because he actually does, without self-seeking or any pious pretence. One asks, What does he get out of it? I do not know what Higgins gets. If you were to ask him, he would say, innocently, that once, when he preached at Camp Seven of the Green River Works, the boys fell in love with the singing. Jesus, Lover of My Soul, was the hymn that engaged them. They sang it again and again; and when they got up in the morning, they said: “Say, Pilot, let’s sing her once more!” They sang it once more–in the bunk-house at dawn–and the boss opened the door and was much too amazed to interrupt. They sang it again. “All out!” cried the boss; and the boys went slowly off to labor in the woods, singing, Let me to Thy bosom fly! and, Oh, receive my soul at last!–diverging here and there, axes and saws over shoulder, some to the deeper forest, some making out upon the frozen lake, some pursuing the white roads–all passing into the snow and green and great trees and silence of the undefiled forest which the Pilot loves–all singing as they went, Other refuge have I none; hangs my helpless soul on Thee–until the voices were like sweet and soft-coming echoes from the wilderness.
Poor Higgins put his face to the bunk-house door and wept.
“I tell you, boys,” he told us, on the road from Six to Four, “it was pay for what I’ve tried to do for the boys.”
Later–when the Sky Pilot sat with his stockinged feet extended to a red fire in the superintendent’s log-cabin of that bitterly cold night–he betrayed himself to the uttermost. “Do you know, boys,” said he, addressing us, the talk having been of the wide world and travel therein, “I believe you fellows would spend a dollar for a dinner and never think twice about it!”
We laughed.
“If I spent more than twenty-five cents,” said he, accusingly, “I’d have indigestion.”
Again we laughed.
“And if I spent fifty cents for a hotel bed,” said he, with a grin, “I’d have the nightmare.”
That is exactly what Higgins gets out of it.