But looking more to the
north, I saw where the vale opened, and then I had a vision worthy of
the name by which Studd had baptized it. An immense green pasture land
ran out to the dim horizon. There were forests scattered athwart it,
and single great trees, and little ridges, too, but at the height where
we stood it seemed to the eye to be one verdant meadow as trim and
shapely as the lawn of a garden. A noble river, the child of many hill
streams, twined through it in shining links. I could see dots, which I
took to be herds of wild cattle grazing, but no sign of any human
dweller.
"What is it?" I asked unthinkingly.
"The Shenandoah," Shalah said, and I never stopped to ask how he knew
the name. He was gazing at the sight with hungry eyes, he whose gaze
was, for usual, so passionless.
That prospect gave me a happy feeling of comfort; why, I cannot tell,
except that the place looked so bright and habitable. Here was no sour
wilderness, but a land made by God for cheerful human dwellings. Some
day there would be orchards and gardens among those meadows, and miles
of golden corn, and the smoke of hearth fires. Some day I would enter
into that land of Canaan which now I saw from Pisgah. Some day--and I
scarcely dared the thought--my children would call it home.
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