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There his life was held of value. It is not at all strange that he went back. As one flees from a desolate, burning, desert waste, to a land of shady groves and fruitful gardens, of cool waters and companionable friends, so this man fled from his days that were into his days that were gone so he went back into his Yesterdays.
And the kiss that had sealed the vows the kiss that was so different from other kisses it was but a childish kiss ... In the long years that had come between that boy and girl the vows and the kiss had become but memories even as the games they played even as her keeping house and her family of dolls. That child wedding belonged only to the Yesterdays.
The lady's cheeks paled a bit, but she did not exclaim, nor as Jed would have said "make a fuss." She said, simply, "Thank you, I will remember," and that was the only reference she made to the subject of the "clam field." Miss Barbara, to whom the events of dead yesterdays were of no particular concern compared to those of the vital and living to- day, was rummaging among the stock.
Perhaps it was the sight of some boys coasting down a little hill, on a side street, near where the man lived at this time: perhaps it was a group of children who, on their way home from school, were waging a merry snow fight: or, perhaps, it was the man's own effort to acquire Knowledge: or, it may be, that his brain was weary, that the way of Knowledge seemed over long, that the links in the golden chain were many and passed all too slowly through his hand I do not know but, whatever it was that did it, the man, as he sat before his fire that winter evening with a too solid and substantial book, slipped away from his grown up world of facts back into the no less real world of childhood, back into his Yesterdays to a school day in his Yesterdays.
Each human life is like unto a vine its trunk manifest in the present; its roots deeply buried in the past; its branches throwing themselves forward, ripening fruit for days to come. Life is a solid column of days all compacted together. To-day's usefulness is in the number of wise, happy and helpful yesterdays, whose accumulated treasures crowd forward the soul's present activities.
In an abandon of grief and sympathy, he began to speak to them in words of comfort and hope. At first these exiles, dumb with pain and grief, listened, but listened with no light quivering in the eye, and no hope flitting like sunshine across the face. Their yesterdays held bondage, blows and degradation; their tomorrow held only the desert and the return to a ruined land.
We may travel many days up the mountain trails, and look in the silent places for them. They are not there. We may paddle many moons on the sea, but our canoes will never enter the channel that leads to the yesterdays of the Indian people. These things are lost, just like 'The Island of the North Arm. They may be somewhere nearby, but no one can ever find them."
Or trace his footsteps by the rising flow'rs? Your golden wings now hov'ring o'er him shed Protection: now are wav'ring in applause To that blest son of foresight! Lord of fate! That awful independent on to-morrow! Whose work is done; who triumphs in the past; Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile."
When at sunrise we fancy some foreign friend beholding dawn upon the silver summits of the Alps, we are forced directly to remember that with him day is at the noon, and his sunrise has vanished with those of all the yesterdays, so that even our friend becomes a being of the past; or when, bathed in the mellow air of an autumn afternoon, the sunshine falling on us like the light of a happy smile, and all the vaporous vistas melting in clouded sapphire, it occurs to us that possibly it is snowing on the Mackenzie River, and night has already darkened down over the wide and awful ice-fields, then distance seems a paradox, and time and occasion mere phantasmagoria; there are no beings but ourselves, there is no moment but the present; all circumstance of the world becomes apparent to us only like pictures thrown into the perspective of the past.
The desert knows no time, its past and present are one, a thousand years is as a single day, and when it chooses to find its voice all yesterdays and all to-morrows blend.
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