The raspberry patches were in sunny hollows. There was a span-wide stream, running pure over a gravel bed, and a grazed-over hillside, green and short-piled as velvet, and deep woods closing in, shutting out. Summer sunshine bathed every grass blade and berry leaf, summer winds cooled the air, bees and grasshoppers and birds, squirrels in the woods, rippling water, wind in the leaves made summer sounds. It was a happy day. Sometimes Hagar, Thomasine, Maggie, Corker, and Jinnie picked purply-red berries from the same bush; sometimes they scattered and combined in twos and threes. Sometimes each established a corner and picked in an elfin solitude. Sometimes they conversed or bubbled over with laughter, sometimes they kept a serious silence. It was a matter of rivalry as to whose bucket should first be filled. Hagar strayed off at last to an angle of an old rail fence. The berries, as she found, were very fine here. She called the news to the others, but they said they had fine bushes, too, and so she picked on with a world of her own about her. The June-bugs droned and droned, her fingers moved slower and slower. At last she stopped picking, and, lying down on a sunken rock by the fence, fell to dreaming. Her dreams were already shot with thought, and she was apt, when she seemed most idle, to be silently, inwardly growing. Now she was thinking about Heaven and about God. She was a great committer of poetry to memory, and now, while she lay filtering sand through her hands as through an hourglass, she said over a stanza hard to learn, which yet she had learned some days ago.
"Trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home--"
When she had repeated it dreamily, in an inward whisper, the problem of why, in that case, she was so far from home engaged her attention. The "here" and the "there--" God away, away off on a throne with angels, and Hagar Ashendyne, in a blue sunbonnet here by a Virginia rail fence, with raspberry stain on her hands. _Home_ was where you lived. God was everywhere; then, was God right here, too? But Hagar Ashendyne couldn't see the throne and the gold steps and floor and the angels. She could make a picture of them, just as she could of Solomon's throne, or Pharaoh's throne, or Queen Victoria's throne, but the picture didn't stir anything at her heart. She wasn't homesick for the court. She was homesick to be a good woman when she grew up, and to learn all the time and to know beautiful things, but she wasn't homesick for Heaven where God lived. Then was she wicked? Hagar wondered and wondered. The yellow sand dropped from between her palms.... God in the sand, God in me, God here and now.... Then God also is trying to grow more God.... Hagar drew a great sigh, and for the moment gave it up.