Daisy In The Field

"Yes," said Mr. Dinwiddie, when I said my thought aloud, -

" 'Skin for skin; all that a man hath will he give for his

life.' But when the conscience knows that heaven is not to be

bought that way, then there is no other motive left that will

use up all a man's energies but the love of Christ

constraining him."

"The trouble is, Mr. Dinwiddie, that there is so little of

that."

"So little!" he said, - "even in those of us who love most. I

do not mean to say that this love had no share in determining

the actions of those who used to live here; perhaps they

thought to get nearer to Christ by getting nearer to the

places of His some time presence and working in human flesh."

"And don't you think it does help, Mr. Dinwiddie?" I said.

He turned on me a very deep and sweet look, that was half a

smile.

"No!" he answered. "The Lord may use it, - He often does, - to

quicken our sense of realities and so strengthen our

apprehension of spiritualities; but just so He can use other

things, even remote distance from such and all material helps.

Out of that very distance He can make a tie to draw the soul

to Himself."

"There must have been a great many of those old Christians

living here once?" I said.

"Yes," said Mr. Dinwiddie. "On this face of the mountain there

are thirty or forty caves - I think there are many more in the

gorge of the Kelt, round on the south face. Do you see that

round hole over your head?"

We were standing in one of the caverns. I looked up.

"I cannot get you up there," he went on, - "but I have climbed

up by means of a rope. There are other rooms there, and one is

a chapel - I mean, it was one, - with arches cut to the

windows and doorways, and frescoed walls, full of figures of

saints. Through another hole in another ceiling, like this, I

got up into still a third set of rooms, like the ones below.

Into those nobody had come for many a year; the dust witnessed

it. Back of one room, the chapel, was a little low doorway;

very low. I crept through - and there in the inner place, lay

piled the skeletons of the old hermits; skulls and bones, just

as they had been laid while the flesh was still upon them; the

dust was inches deep. A hundred feet higher up there are more

caverns. No, I should not like to take you - though the

Abyssinian devotees come to them every spring. Yet higher than

those, far up, near the top of the mountain, I have explored

others, where I found still more burial caves like the one

just here above us. Chapels and frescoes were up there too."