Patience, and his father, and his mother, and how they would hear, at
least, that he had played the man in Israel that day, and resisted
unto blood, striving against sin and the Man of Sin?

And was there no poetry in him, too, as he came wearied along
Thoresby dyke, in the quiet autumn eve, home to the house of his
forefathers, and saw afar off the knot of tall poplars rising over
the broad misty flat, and the one great abele tossing its sheets of
silver in the dying gusts; and knew that they stood before his
father's door? Who can tell all the pretty child-memories which
flitted across his brain at that sight, and made him forget that he
was a wounded cripple? There is the dyke where he and his brothers
snared the great pike which stole the ducklings--how many years ago?-
-while pretty little Patience stood by trembling, and shrieked at
each snap of the brute's wide jaws; and there, down that long dark
lode, ruffling with crimson in the sunset breeze, he and his brothers
skated home in triumph with Patience when his uncle died. What a day
that was! when, in the clear bright winter noon, they laid the gate
upon the ice, and tied the beef-bones under the four corners, and
packed little Patience on it. How pretty she looked, though her eyes
were red with weeping, as she peeped out from among the heap of
blankets and horse--hides; and how merrily their long fen-runners
whistled along the ice-lane, between the high banks of sighing reed,
as they towed home their new treasure in triumph, at a pace like the
race-horse's, to the dear old home among the poplar-trees. And now
he was going home to meet her, after a mighty victory, a deliverance
from heaven, second only in his eyes to that Red Sea one. Was there
no poetry in his heart at that thought? Did not the glowing sunset,
and the reed-beds which it transfigured before him into sheets of
golden flame, seem tokens that the glory of God was going before him