great mistake to suppose that sorrow is a part of repentance.  It is far too good a grace to come so easily.  A man may repent, that is, think better of it, and change his way, and be very much of a Pharisee —­ I do not say a hypocrite —­ for a long time after:  it needs a saint to be sorrowful.  Yet repentance is generally the road to this sorrow. —­ And now that in the gracious time of grief, his eyesight purified by tears, he entered one after another all the chambers of the past, he humbly renewed once more his friendship with the noble dead, and with the homely, heartful living.  The grey-headed man who walked with God like a child, and with his fellow-men like an elder brother who was always forgetting his birthright and serving the younger; the woman who believed where she could not see, and loved where she could not understand; and the maiden who was still and lustreless, because she ever absorbed and seldom reflected the light —­ all came to him, as if to comfort him once more in his loneliness, when his heart had room for them, and need of them yet again.  David now became, after his departure, yet more of a father to him than before, for that spirit, which is the true soul of all this body of things, had begun to recall to his mind the words of David, and so teach him the things that David knew, the everlasting realities of God.  And it seemed to him the while, that he heard David himself uttering, in his homely, kingly voice, whatever truth returned to him from the echo-cave of the past.  Even when a quite new thought arose within him, it came to him in the voice of David, or at least with the solemn music of his tones clinging about it as the murmur about the river’s course.  Experience had now brought him up to the point where he could begin to profit by David’s communion; he needed the things which David could teach him; and David began forthwith to give them to him.

That birth of nature in his soul, which enabled him to understand and love Margaret, helped him likewise to contemplate with admiration and awe, the towering peaks of David’s hopes, trusts, and aspirations.  He had taught the ploughman mathematics, but that ploughman had possessed in himself all the essential elements of the grandeur of the old prophets, glorified by the faith which the Son of Man did not find in the earth, but left behind him to grow in it, and which had grown to a noble growth of beauty and strength in this peasant, simple and patriarchal in the midst of a self-conceited age.  And, oh! how good he had been to him!  He had built a house that he might take him in from the cold, and make life pleasant to him, as in the presence of God.  He had given him his heart every time he gave him his great manly hand.  And this man, this friend, this presence of Christ, Hugh had forsaken, neglected, all but forgotten.  He could not go, and, like the prodigal, fall down before him, and say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and thee,” for that heaven had taken