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‘”The end is very near–a few hours perhaps!” Hetty tells him.

‘”And she is happy?”

‘”Ah, so happy!” Hetty’s eyes brimmed with tears and she turned away.

‘”Sister, that happiness is for you, too. Why have you, alone of us, so far rejected it?”

‘Hetty stepped to the door with a feeble gesture of the hands. She knew that, worn as he was with his journey, if she gave him the chance he would grasp it and pause, even while his mother panted her last, to wrestle for and win a soul–not because she, Hetty, was his sister, but simply because hers was a soul to be saved. Yes, and she foresaw that sooner or later he would win; that she would be swept into the flame of his conquest. She craved only to be let alone; she feared all new experience; she distrusted even the joy of salvation. Life had been too hard for Hetty.’ And on another page we have an extract from Charles’s journal. ‘I prayed by my sister, a gracious, tender, trembling soul; a bruised reed which the Lord will not break.’

The cows had all come home. The milkmaid’s faith had not failed.

The happiest people in the world, and the best, are the people who go through life as the milkmaid goes through the day, believing that before night the cows will all come home. It is a faith that does not lend itself to apologetics, but, like the coming of the cows, it seems to work out with amazing regularity. It is what Myrtle Reed would call ‘a woman’s reasoning.’ It is because it is. The cows will all come home because the cows will all come home.

‘Good wife, what are you singing for? you know we’ve lost the hay,
And what we’ll do with horse and kye is more than I can say;
While, like as not, with storm and rain, we’ll lose both corn and wheat.’
She looked up with a pleasant face, and answered low and sweet,
There is a Heart, there is a Hand, we feel but cannot see;
We’ve always been provided for, and we shall always be.’

‘That’s like a woman’s reasoning, we must because we must!’
She softly said, ‘I reason not, I only work and trust;
The harvest may redeem the hay, keep heart whate’er betide;
When one door’s shut I’ve always found another open wide.
There is a Heart, there is a Hand, we feel but cannot see
We’ve always been provided for, and we shall always be.’

The fact is that the milkmaid has a kind of understanding with Providence. She is in league with the Eternal. And Providence has a way of its own of keeping faith with trustful hearts like hers. I was reading the other day Commander J. W. Gambier’s Links in my Life, and was amused at the curious inconsistency which led the author first to sneer at Providence and then to bear striking witness to its fidelity. As a young fellow the Commander came to Australia and worked on a way-back station, but he had soon had enough. ‘I was to try what fortune could do for a poor man; but I believed in personal endeavour and the recognition of it by Providence. I did not know Providence.’

‘I did not know Providence!’ sneers our young bushman.

‘The cows will all come home,’ says the happy milkmaid.

But on the very same page that contains the sneer Commander Gambier tells this story. When he was leaving England the old cabman who drove him to the station said to him, ‘If you see my son Tom in Australia, ask him to write home and tell us how he’s getting on.’ ‘I explained,’ the Commander tells us, ‘that Australia was a big country, and asked him if he had any idea of the name of the place his son had gone to. He had not.’ As soon as Commander Gambier arrived at Newcastle, in New South Wales, he met an exceptionally ragged ostler. As the ostler handed him his horse, Mr. Gambier felt an irresistible though inexplicable conviction that this was the old cabman’s son. He felt absolutely sure of it; so he said: