Then he turned aside from the rough track into the
heather and bracken. When he came to a little dry hollow, with a
yet thicker growth of heather, its tops almost close as those of his
bed at his father's cottage, he sought no further. Taking his
knife, he cut a quantity of heather and ferns, and heaped it on the
top of the thickest bush; then creeping in between the cut and the
growing, he cleared the former from his face that he might see the
worlds over him, and putting his knapsack under his head, fell fast
asleep.
When he woke not even the shadow of a dream lingered to let him know
what he had been dreaming. He woke with such a clear mind, such an
immediate uplifting of the soul, that it seemed to him no less than
to Jacob that he must have slept at the foot of the heavenly stair.
The wind came round him like the stuff of thought unshaped, and
every breath he drew seemed like God breathing afresh into his
nostrils the breath of life. Who knows what the thing we call air
is? We know about it, but it we do not know. The sun shone as if
smiling at the self-importance of the sulky darkness he had driven
away, and the world seemed content with a heavenly content. So
fresh was Donal's sense that he felt as if his sleep within and the
wind without had been washing him all the night. So peaceful, so
blissful was his heart that it longed to share its bliss; but there
was no one within sight, and he set out again on his journey.
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