'
Rogers flushed like a boy. But he felt the thrill of his dream course
through him like great fires. Wherein was any single thing in the
world worth doing, any object of life worth following, unless as means
to an end, and that end helping some one else. One's own little
personal dreams became exhausted in a few years, endeavours for self
smothered beneath the rain of disappointments; but others, and work
for others, this was endless and inexhaustible.
'I've sometimes thought,' he heard the older man going on, 'that in
the dusk I saw'--his voice lowered and he glanced towards the windows
where the rose trees stood like little figures, cloaked and bonneted
with beauty beneath the stars--'that I saw your Dustman scattering his
golden powder as he came softly up the path, and that some of it
reached my own eyes, too; or that your swift Lamplighter lent me a
moment his gold-tipped rod of office so that I might light fires of
hope in suffering hearts here in this tiny world of my own parish.
Your dreadful Head Gardener, too! And your Song of the Blue-Eyes
Fairy,' he added slyly, almost mischievously, 'you remember that, I
wonder?'
'H'm--a little, yes--something,' replied Rogers confusedly. 'It was a
dreadful doggerel. But I've got a secretary now,' he continued
hurriedly and in rather a louder voice,' a fellow named Minks, a jewel
really of a secretary he is--and he, I believe, can write real--'
'It was charming enough for us all to have remembered it, anyhow,' the
Vicar stopped him, smiling at his blushes,' and for May--or was it
Joan? dear me, how I do forget names!--to have set it to music.
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