'There's a good many of us as'll wish that we was deaf before that time comes.'
'Because many men are deaf they take no heed of the harmonies.'
'There's something in that. I shouldn't wonder but what there's a lot of music as no one notices. The more you speak, the more I seem to know you. You're like a voice I've heard talking to me when the speaker was hid by the darkness.'
'I have spoken to you often.'
'Ay, I believe you have. I thought I knew you from the first. I felt so comfortable when you came. All the morning I've been troubled, what with worries at home and the pains what seems all over me, so that I can't move about as I did use to; and then when I saw you coming along the path all the trouble was at an end.'
'I heard you calling as I passed along the road.'
'You heard me calling? Why, I never opened my mouth!'
'Not the words of the lips are heard in heaven, but none ever called from his heart in vain.'
The charcoal-burner rose from his heap of billets.
'Why, who are you?' He came closer, peering with his dim eyes. 'It is the Lord! What an old fool I am not to have known You from the first! Yet I felt that it was You.'