With precisely the same sense of sweetness came the vision of days when autumn rain was falling, and the red and sear leaf, the nut, the pine-cone and the flower-seed were dropping into the cold wet earth.
Was life in the spring, and death in the autumn?
Was the power and love of God not resting in the damp fallen things that lay rotting in the ground?
There came before him a troop of the little children of Fentown, all the rosy-cheeked faces and laughing eyes and lithe little dancing forms that he had ever taken the trouble to notice; and Ann and Christa came and stood with them--Christa with her dancing finery, with her beautiful, thoughtless, unemotional face, her yellow hair, and soft white hands; and Ann, a thousand times more beautiful to him, with her sun-brown tints and hazel eyes, so full of energy and forethought, her dark neat hair and working-dress and hardened hands--this was beauty! Over against it he saw Markham, blear-eyed, unkempt and dirty; and his own father, a gaunt, idiotic wreck of respectable manhood; and his mother, faded, worn, and peevish; with them stood the hunch-backed baker of Fentown and all the coarse and ugly sons of toil that frequented its wharfs.
There was not a child or a maiden among those he saw first who did not owe their life to one of these.

With the children and the maidens there were pleasure and hope; with the older men and women there were effort and failure, sin and despair.

The life that was in all of them, was it partly of God and partly of themselves?
He laughed again at the question.

The life that was in them all was all of God, every impulse, every act.

The energy that thrilled them through, by which they acted, if only as brutes act, by which they spoke, if only to lie, by which they thought and felt, even when thought and feeling were false and bad, the energy which upheld them was all of God.