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waves, the warmth of the sunshine, all seem to enter our very souls, and proclaim their blood relationship to every fibre. In such a moment the sentence, “Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return,” does not seem altogether spoken in condemnation, and we feel soothed and rested even by the unnoted roll of the earth through space, as she cradles our tiny lives, “rolled on in her diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.”
Alice seemed to absorb something of the beauty of the hills, the peace of the wide heath, the freedom of the wind, as she rested in the warm and fragrant bed of bracken, and when she roused herself at last the skeins of sunlight were all gathered together in a glowing mass of golden cloud. She saw a white arrow of smoke darting over the plain far away, and knew it was the mail train on its long journey across the island from sea to sea, and the sight of the flying smoke brought her back to the life and struggle of this work-a-day world again. A sad little tinkling church bell began to ring with a lonely echo in the waste moorland spaces; but it did not ring all in vain, for presently half-a-dozen children, and a man who was probably the schoolmaster, appeared one after another over the cliff-line, and went into the church. Alice