“Now look down into the valley when the next flash comes,” Gabriel said with a note of excitement sounding in his deep voice that matched the wind through the trees.
Then just as he finished speaking, a slow, steady sheet of light came and lit up the world below us. The fields in their spring garments, embroidered by the threads of silver creeks, lay lush and green, dotted by farm-houses in which dim lights twinkled, bouqueted by glowing pink orchards, and outlined by blooming hedges. Tall trees were massed along the edges of the meadows and the river-banks, and among them the white lines of the old sycamores gleamed in masses of high lights. And in the wild, soft wind that rushed up the mountain-sides and flung itself upon us there was mingled the tang of the honeysuckle and rhododendron with the sweetness of the orchards and pungence of newly plowed earth.
Then as suddenly as the picture had risen before our eyes it sank back into the purple blackness, and I caught my breath with the glory of it.
“And God made it!” I exclaimed softly, with the last sob that had been left in my heart caught from my mouth by the wind.
“‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein,’” he answered, and the wind took his words as if it had been waiting for them to carry across the mountains.
After that for several long minutes, I don’t know how many, I sat silent in the windy blackness, with the tree-branches sighing and crashing over our heads, and wild things rustling in the leaves and bushes beside us, and wondered what was happening to me.
Of course I have been deadly afraid of a minister all my life, and the times we have had the bishops and presiding elders and pastors to dinner with us in honor of the memory of Grandmother Wickliffe have been times of torture to me. I always thought, of course, they were not real men, though the way they looked and their hearty appetites for both viands and jokes kept them from seeming conventional angels; but this Gabriel materialization that sat close to me on that rock, which was the end of the universe, was a strong, heart-beating man, who alone stood between me and the real wilderness of the woods and the awful wilderness of my ignorant and convicted spirit. It was terrific, but heavenly sweet.