Faith looked at the crimson leaves on the floor—for the window was open though the fire was burning; then at the fair sky outside, seen beyond and through some other crimson leaves yet hanging on the large maple there,—then coming back to the face before her, she smiled and said,
"I don't know—except to make people happy, Mr. Linden."
"That is one part of its use, certainly. But take the thousands of wilderness flowers, and the thousands of deep sea shells; look at the carvings on the scale of a fish, which no human eye can see without a glass, or those other exquisite patterns traced upon the roots and stems of some of the fossil pines, which were hid in the solid rock before there was a human eye to see. What is their use?"
To the wilderness and to the deep sea, Faith's thought and almost her eye went, and she took some time to consider the subject.
"I suppose—" she said thoughtfully—"I don't know, Mr. Linden."
"Did you ever consider those words which close the account of the Creation—'God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good'."
"That is what I was going to say!" she said modestly but with brightening colour,—"that perhaps he made all those things, those you spoke of, for himself?"
"For himself—to satisfy the perfectness of his own character. And think how different the divine and the human standards of perfection! Not the outward fair colour and proportion merely, not the perfect fitness and adaptation, not the most utilitarian employment of every grain of dust, so that nothing is lost,—not even the grandest scale of working, is enough; but the dust on the moth's wing must be plumage, and the white chalk cliffs must be made of minute shells, each one of which shines like spun silver or is figured like cut glass. Not more steadily do astronomers discover new worlds, than the microscope reveals some new perfection of detail and finish in our own."
Faith listened, during this speech, like one literally seeing 'into space,' as far as an embodied spirit can, for the first time. Then with a smile, a little sorrowful, she brought up with,
"I don't know anything of all that, Mr. Linden! Do you mean that chalk is really made of little shells?"