diff options
| author | nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> | 2025-02-09 13:36:09 -0800 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> | 2025-02-09 13:36:09 -0800 |
| commit | 41fdd4206be3f08a8f529c10c427771611346371 (patch) | |
| tree | 42b327b550e15ef67aa177afccdf46a6d39b0bec | |
| parent | b632ba35305a91245cbf5913b507488fa13914e7 (diff) | |
Update from April 1, 2019
| -rw-r--r-- | 59180-0.txt | 5906 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 59180-0.zip | bin | 0 -> 132082 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | 59180-h.zip | bin | 223941 -> 223505 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | 59180-h/59180-h.htm | 6 |
4 files changed, 5909 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/59180-0.txt b/59180-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b518c6f --- /dev/null +++ b/59180-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5906 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rubble and Roseleaves, by F. W. Boreham
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Rubble and Roseleaves
+ And Things of That Kind
+
+Author: F. W. Boreham
+
+Release Date: April 1, 2019 [EBook #59180]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUBBLE AND ROSELEAVES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David T. Jones, Roger Frank, Al Haines, Sue
+Clark & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team
+at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ RUBBLE AND ROSELEAVES
+
+ And Things of That Kind
+
+ BY
+
+ F. W. BOREHAM
+
+
+ [Illustration]
+
+
+ THE ABINGDON PRESS
+ NEW YORK CINCINNATI
+
+
+
+
+ Copyright, 1923, by
+ F. W. BOREHAM
+
+ Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+ CONTENTS
+
+ Part I
+
+ I. OLD ENVELOPES 11
+ II. 'WHISTLING JIGS TO MILESTONES' 22
+ III. THE FRONT-DOOR BELL 35
+ IV. THE GREEN CHAIR 46
+ V. LIVING DOGS AND DEAD LIONS 57
+ VI. NEW BROOMS 67
+ VII. A GOOD WIFE AND A GALLANT SHIP 78
+
+ Part II
+
+ I. ODD VOLUMES 91
+ II. O'ER CRAG AND TORRENT 101
+ III. THE PRETENDER 113
+ IV. ACHMED'S INVESTMENT 124
+ V. SATURDAY 134
+ VI. THE CHIMES 145
+ VII. 'BE SHOD WITH SANDALS' 156
+
+ Part III
+
+ I. WE ARE SEVEN 169
+ II. THE FISH-PENS 181
+ III. EDGED TOOLS 192
+ IV. OLD PHOTOGRAPHS 202
+ V. A BOX OF BLOCKS 214
+ VI. PIECRUST 226
+ VII. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 235
+
+
+
+
+ BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
+
+Every man has a genius for something or other. I have a genius for a
+comfortable armchair and a blazing fire. Add to these two ingredients
+what Bob Cratchit would call a _circle_ of congenial companions
+(meaning, as his considerate creator points out, a _semi-circle_) and I
+am as destitute of envy as the Miller of the Dee. I stipulate, however,
+that my companions shall be so very much to my taste that, when in the
+mood, I can talk to my heart's content without seeming garrulous, and,
+when in the mood, can remain as silent as the Sphinx without appearing
+sullen.
+
+This outrageous spasm of autobiography is necessitated as an explanation
+of _Rubble and Roseleaves_. The contents are neither essays nor sermons
+nor anything of the kind. The inexhaustible patience of my readers has
+lured me into the habit of talking on any mortal—or immortal—subject
+that takes my fancy. I have merely set down here a few wayward notions
+that have, in the course of my wanderings, occurred to me. But, in
+self-defense, let me add that these outbursts have been punctuated by
+whole infinitudes of silence. The silences are eloquently represented by
+the gaps between the chapters.
+
+ Frank W. Boreham.
+ Armadale, Melbourne, Australia.
+ Easter, 1923.
+
+
+
+
+ PART I
+
+
+
+
+ I—OLD ENVELOPES
+
+
+Three envelopes, cruelly torn and sadly crumpled, look reproachfully up
+at me from the yawning abyss of my waste-paper basket. There is a heavy,
+pompous envelope, of foolscap size, who evidently feels that I have
+affronted his dignity by casting him to the void in this unceremonious
+way. There is a thin, blue envelope who seems to be barking out
+something about an account that ought to be paid. And there is a dainty
+little square envelope, delicately perfumed, and addressed in a lady's
+flowing hand. This pretty piece of stationery keeps asking, in a
+plaintive voice, if the age of chivalry is dead.
+
+'_Why_,' these envelopes want to know, '_why are the letters that we
+brought laid so respectfully on your desk whilst we, to whom you are so
+much indebted, are crushed and mangled and tossed disdainfully aside?
+Isn't an envelope as good as a letter any day?_'
+
+There is justice in their contention, and I take up my pen that I may
+tender them an apology. A letter will tell you much; but the envelope
+will often tell you more. I remember sitting with John Broadbanks one
+autumn afternoon on the broad verandah of the Mosgiel Manse. Some
+important meetings were to be held next day, and he had driven over to
+help me in my preparations for them. He had, moreover, arranged to stay
+the night. As we made our way through the various papers that would have
+to be dealt with next day, the gate swung open and the postman placed a
+budget of letters in my hand.
+
+'Hullo!' I exclaimed, 'an English mail!' And, excusing myself from the
+business on hand, I lost myself in the letters from Home.
+
+I noticed that, when we returned to the agenda paper and reports, John
+did not seem as keen as usual. He went through the documents
+mechanically, languidly, perfunctorily, allowing several matters to pass
+that, ordinarily, he would have questioned. He gave me the impression of
+having something on his mind, and it was not until we all sat round the
+tea-table that I grasped the situation. Then he opened his heart to us.
+
+'I am very sorry,' he said, 'but if you'll let me, I think I had better
+return to Silverstream this evening after all. The arrival of the
+English mail makes all the difference. You have your letters; mine are
+waiting for me at the Manse. When I last heard from Home, my mother was
+very ill; I have spent an anxious month waiting for the letter that has
+evidently arrived to-day; and I do not feel that I can settle down to
+to-morrow's business until I have seen it.'
+
+The announcement was greeted with demonstrations of general
+disappointment. John was a universal favorite; he was the nearest
+approach to a relative that the children had ever known; and the
+prospect of having him in the house until bedtime, and of finding him
+still on the premises when they awoke in the morning, had occasioned the
+wildest excitement. And now the beautiful dream was about to be
+shattered!
+
+'I tell you what, John,' I said, going to the window and looking out,
+'it's going to be a perfect moonlight night. Spend an hour with the
+children after tea, and then I'll drive over to Silverstream with you.
+If all's well, we can return together. If not, we shall understand.'
+
+When, after a sharp cold drive in the moonlight, we reached the
+Silverstream Manse, things took an unexpected turn.
+
+'Mrs. Broadbanks has gone out,' the maid explained. 'The English mail
+arrived this afternoon and she said you would be anxious to get your
+Home letter. She took it with her and said that she would try to get it
+posted this evening so that you would get it first thing in the morning.
+And I think she intended to look in at Mrs. Blackie's before she
+returned and inquire about Alec's broken leg. I know she took some
+jellies with her.'
+
+It was now John's turn to be disappointed. He had had his journey for
+nothing; indeed, as things now stood he would be nearer to the letter at
+Mosgiel than at Silverstream. Then an idea occurred to him.
+
+'Did Mrs. Broadbanks get letters from _her_ home?' The maid thought that
+she did. She knew, at least, that, after the arrival of the mail, her
+mistress had spent some time in the bedroom by herself. John hurried to
+the bedroom.
+
+'Hurrah!' he cried, a moment later. 'Here's the envelope! It is
+addressed in my mother's handwriting, and the postmark shows that it
+left England on March 16. The last letter left on February 17 and the
+envelope was addressed by my sister. So all's serene! Let's get back to
+Mosgiel!' John wrote a hurried note for Lilian; left it on the bed; and,
+in a few minutes, we were once more startling the rabbits on the road.
+
+It is wonderful how often the envelope tells us all that we wish to
+know. I always feel sorry for the Postmaster-General. No man on the
+planet is under so great an illusion as is he. I can never read his
+annual report without amusement. It is a stirring romance; but the
+romance is, to some extent, the romance of _fiction_ rather than the
+romance of _fact_. I know that it is a thankless task to rob a man of an
+illusion that makes him happy; but the interests of truth sometimes
+demand it. They do in this case. For it is not the Postmaster-General
+alone who has been tricked by the witchery of appearances; the fallacy
+is shared by all the members of his enormous staff. Every individual in
+the department, from the Minister down to the messenger-boy, is equally
+deceived. The annual report proves it. For, in this annual report, the
+Postmaster-General tells you how many millions of letters he and his
+subordinates have handled during the year. But have they? As a matter of
+fact, they have handled no letters at all—except dead letters, and dead
+things don't count. The Postmaster-General handles envelopes; that is
+all. Let him correct the statement in his next report.
+
+It will involve him in no loss of prestige, for, as these three
+envelopes in the basket plead so plaintively, and as John Broadbanks
+discovered that moonlight night at Silverstream, envelopes have a
+significance of their own. The postman knows that. He never sees the
+_letters_; but the _envelopes_ whisper to him a thousand secrets. He
+knows the envelopes that contain circulars, and he hands them to you
+with a look that is a kind of apology for having troubled you to answer
+the door. He knows the official envelopes that contain demands for
+rates, income taxes, and the like. If you are in his good books, he
+hands them to you sympathetically; if not, he secretly enjoys the fun.
+Here is an envelope marked 'Urgent'; here is one with a deep black
+border; here is one with silver edges! He cannot be quite deaf to all
+that these envelopes say. And here is one, addressed very neatly, to a
+young lady at the house at the corner. He brings an exactly similar
+envelope to the same fair recipient every other morning. On the morning
+on which he brings the envelope, she invariably scampers along the hall
+in order personally to receive the letters; on the alternate mornings
+her father or her sister usually respond to his ring. He never sees her
+letters; but he knows, he knows! The envelopes chatter to him all the
+way down the street. Envelopes are great gossips. They talk to the
+sorter; they talk to the collector; they talk to the postman; they talk
+to the receiver; and they even go on talking—like the trio that set me
+scribbling—after they have been tossed disdainfully into the
+waste-paper basket.
+
+The letter may be interesting in its way; but the envelope reveals the
+essential things. When a man writes to me, he does not tell me what kind
+of a man he is; but, recognizing that it is of the utmost importance to
+me that this information should be placed at my disposal, he is good
+enough to impart it on the envelope. He smothers the envelope with
+hieroglyphs and signs which are more revealing than a photograph. It
+frequently happens that my reply is determined more by these signs than
+by anything that he says in the letter. The letter is probably stiff,
+formal, lifeless—like a tailor's model. But the envelope reveals
+individuality, character, life! The envelope's the thing! You find all
+sorts of things in envelopes; you never find any mock modesty there.
+Envelopes are never shy; they never stand on ceremony; they wait for no
+introduction; they begin to talk as soon as they arrive. The envelope
+tells me, by means of its postmark, of the locality from which it has
+come and of the length of time that it has spent upon the road. Then,
+swiftly establishing itself on friendly terms, it becomes personal,
+communicative, confidential. It tells me that the writer of the letter
+that I am about to read is a tidy man or a slovenly man, as the case may
+be. Sometimes an envelope will tell me that it was addressed by a
+feverish, impulsive, excitable man; another will assure me, proudly,
+that it was sent to me by a leisurely, composed, methodical man. 'I
+come,' boasts one envelope, 'from a painstaking and accurate man who is
+scrupulously careful to cross every "_t_" and dot every "_i_."' 'And I,'
+murmurs the envelope lying against it, 'come from a man who doesn't care
+a rap whether the "_i's_" have dots, or, for that matter, whether the
+dots have "_i's_"!' Here is an envelope that tells me that it has been
+sent to me by a very dilatory man! The letter is dated March 2; the
+postmark is dated March 6; he was four days in posting it! This envelope
+contains a letter earnestly requesting me to oblige the writer by
+speaking at a meeting which he is organizing, and he is kind enough to
+speak of the great value which he attaches to my services. But the good
+man has not the heart to deceive me. So, lest I should take the contents
+of the letter seriously, he tells me that he has not even troubled to
+find out how I spell my name or what initials I am pleased to bear. I
+recognize, of course, that the information imparted by the envelope is
+not to be implicitly trusted. A notorious gossip must always be heard
+with the greatest caution. But most people with much experience of
+correspondence, before answering a letter, like to hear what the
+envelope has to say about it.
+
+Nature, I notice, is very careful about the envelopes in which she sends
+us her letters. The architecture of an orange is a marvel of symmetry
+and compactness; but who has not admired the color and formation of the
+peel? Is there anything on earth more delicate and ingenious than the
+wrappings of a maize-cob? The husks and rinds and pods and shells that
+we toss upon the rubbish-heap are masterpieces of design and execution.
+As a small boy, I found among my treasures three things that filled me
+with ceaseless wonder and admiration—the skin of horse-chestnuts, the
+cocoons of my silkworms and the shells of the birds' eggs that I brought
+home from the lane. I knew little about Nature in those days; but I
+instinctively based my first impressions on the envelopes that she sent;
+and, judging her by that sure standard, I felt that she must be
+wonderfully wise and good and beautiful.
+
+It is considered correct, I understand, to say that one should not judge
+by outward appearances; but how can you help it? Envelopes will talk! I
+can never forget a tremendous impression made upon my mind a few weeks
+after I went to live in London. I was barely seventeen. I was feeling
+horribly lonely, and, on all sorts of subjects, I was desperately
+groping my way. One wet night, in passing down the Strand, I saw
+hundreds of people crowding into Exeter Hall. Moved by a sudden impulse,
+I followed. The adventure promised a new experience, and I was
+specializing in novelties. Then came the impression! It was not created
+by the arguments of the speakers, for, as yet, not one of them had
+spoken. It was created by their personal appearance. The chair was
+occupied by Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood—'Beauty Blackwood,' as he
+was called—and addresses were delivered by the Revs. Newman Hall,
+Donald Fraser, Marcus Rainsford and Archibald G. Brown. I could imagine
+nothing more picturesque than those five knightly figures—tall,
+dignified and stately. The spectacle completely captivated me. I gazed
+spellbound. While the great audience sang the opening hymn, my eyes
+roved from one handsome form to another, bestowing upon each the silent
+homage of boyish hero-worship. This happened more than thirty years ago;
+yet I am confident that I could easily write out a full and accurate
+report of each of the speeches delivered that night. So favorably had
+the envelopes impressed my mind! And so effectively had they prepared me
+for the letters they contained!
+
+In every department of life it is the envelope that becomes emphatic. In
+describing at night the people with whom we have met during the day, we
+refer to 'the lady in the fur coat,' 'the girl in the red hat,' and 'the
+man in the grey suit.' The lady, the girl and the man—these are
+letters. The fur coat, the red hat and the grey suit are merely
+envelopes. Yet we feel that to speak of 'a lady,' 'a girl' or 'a man'
+is, in effect, to say nothing. It conveys no concrete idea. It lacks
+vividness, force, reality. But 'a lady _in a fur coat_,' 'a girl _in a
+red hat_,' 'a man _in a grey suit_'—these are pictures! The envelope
+makes all the difference.
+
+We often say by way of the envelope what we cannot say so well in the
+body of the letter. Charles Dickens knew that; so did John Bunyan; so
+did the Greatest Master of all.
+
+Dickens knew it. Indeed, somebody has as good as said that Dickens is
+all envelopes; he gives us the barrister's wig in mistake for the
+barrister, the beadle's cocked hat in mistake for the beadle, and so on.
+But if it is true, on the one hand, that Dickens is too fond of
+envelopes, it must be confessed, on the other, that he knows how to use
+them. Who can forget the night when David Copperfield and Mr. Peggotty
+set out together on one of those dreadful journeys that stood connected
+with the loss of little Emily? Before starting, Mr. Peggotty entered
+Emily's room. 'Without appearing to notice what he was doing,' said
+David Copperfield, 'I saw how carefully he adjusted the little room and
+finally took out of a drawer one of her dresses, neatly folded, and
+placed it on a chair. He made no allusion to these clothes, neither did
+I. There they had been waiting for her, many and many a night, no
+doubt.' Mr. Peggotty could not express in so many words all that he
+felt; but Emily, if she came, would see the dress lying ready for her,
+and would understand that everything was to be just as it always was.
+She would see the envelope; and the envelope would say more than any
+letter could possibly do.
+
+Bunyan knew it. The first thing that impressed the people of Vanity
+Fair, as they gazed upon Christian and Faithful, was that 'the pilgrims
+were clothed with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the raiment
+of any that traded in that fair.'
+
+And Jesus knew it. The most searching and terrible of all His parables
+was the parable of the man who, seated at the king's feast, had not a
+wedding garment. And, even more notably, when the prodigal came home,
+the father knew of _no words_ in which he could adequately welcome his
+son. But, if he could not write a satisfactory letter, he could at least
+express himself by means of the envelope! Away with the rags! On with
+the robes! Bring forth _the best robe_ and put it on him, and put _a
+ring_ on his hand and _shoes_ on his feet!
+
+And even when the Bible attempts to depict the felicities of the world
+to come, it does it, not in the phraseology that we employ in letters,
+but in the symbolism that we employ in the use of envelopes. It speaks
+of robes and palms and crowns, for it knows that the wise will
+understand.
+
+
+
+
+ II—'WHISTLING JIGS TO MILESTONES'
+
+
+ I
+
+Blueberry Creek! Blueberry Creek! Where in the world was Blueberry
+Creek? It was all very well for Conference to resolve—in the easy and
+airy fashion that is so charmingly characteristic of Conferences—that
+John Broadbanks and I should be appointed '_to visit and report upon the
+affairs of the congregation at Blueberry Creek_'; but how on earth were
+we to get there? On that point, the Conference, in its wisdom, had given
+no directions: it had not even condescended to take so mundane a detail
+into its consideration. A fearful and wonderful thing is a Conference. A
+Conference is capable of ordering an inquiry into the state of the
+inhabitants of Mars; and it would appoint its commissioners without
+giving a thought to the ways and means by which they were to proceed to
+the scene of their investigations. It was altogether beneath the dignity
+of that august body to reflect that Blueberry Creek is as near to the
+Other End of Nowhere as any man need wish to go; that it is many miles
+from a railway station or a decent road; and that the only approach to
+it is by means of a grassy track that, winding in and out among the
+great brown hills, is, during a large part of the year, impassable. The
+only indication of the track's existence consisted of a suspicion of
+wheelmarks among the tussock.
+
+When, at the close of the session, we met on the steps outside the hall,
+John and I stared at each other in a lugubrious bewilderment. Then,
+seeing, as he never failed to do, the humor of the situation, he burst
+into peals of laughter.
+
+'Blueberry Creek!' he roared, as though the very name were a joke, 'and
+how are we to get to Blueberry Creek?'
+
+Still, while we admired the complacent audacity with which the
+Conference had saddled us with the responsibility of finding—or
+making—a road to Blueberry Creek, _we_ felt, as _it_ felt, that
+somebody ought to go. Allan Gillespie, a young minister, who, for seven
+years, had done excellent work there, had resigned without any apparent
+reason. The people, whose confidence, esteem and affection he had
+completely won, were depressed and disheartened; and the work stood in
+imminent peril. John used to say that, if you leave a problem long
+enough, it will solve itself. The way in which the problem of getting to
+Blueberry Creek solved itself certainly seemed to vindicate his
+philosophy.
+
+'I've been making inquiries,' said Mr. Alexander Mitchell, a man of few
+words but of great practical sagacity, as he met me in the porch on the
+last day of the Conference. 'I've been making inquiries about that
+appointment of yours. I find that a motor has been through to Blueberry.
+If _one_ can do it, _another_ can. I have a sturdy little car that will
+get there if it is possible for four wheels to do it. My business will
+take me as far as Crannington next week, so that I shall then be
+two-thirds of the way to Blueberry. If you and Mr. Broadbanks care to
+accompany me, we will do our best to get through. I expect we shall have
+a rough passage, but I am willing to take all the risks if you are.'
+
+Truth to tell, the project was very much to our taste. In order that we
+might make an early start on the Tuesday, we arranged that John should
+spend Monday night as our guest at Mosgiel. He came, and we both awoke
+next morning on the best of terms with ourselves. Civilization was
+quickly left behind. We followed the road as far as Crannington; had
+lunch there; and then plunged into the hills. For the next few hours Mr.
+Mitchell's motor—whose sturdiness he had by no means exaggerated—was
+crashing its way through scrub and fern; clambering over rocky boulders;
+gliding down precipitous gradients; edging its course along shelves cut
+in the hillside; and splashing through the stream whose tortuous folds
+awaited us in every hollow. At about five o'clock we emerged upon a
+great plain covered with tussock; we made out a cluster of cottages in
+the distance; and we knew that, at last, we had come to Blueberry Creek.
+
+'Why, here is Allan!' exclaimed John, as he pointed to a solitary
+horseman who, dashing along a track that intersected ours, was evidently
+hurrying to join us.
+
+We were soon at the manse. Allan was not married; his mother kept house
+for him. 'My father died of consumption,' he used to say, 'and so did my
+grandfather: I must make sure that I am a _citizen_ of this planet, and
+not merely a _visitor_, before I let any pretty girl make eyes at me!'
+
+Our mission was quite unavailing. John and I had a long talk with Allan
+after tea.
+
+'No,' he said at last, rising from his chair and pacing the room under
+the stress of strong emotion. His shock of fair wavy hair fell about his
+forehead when he was excited, and he brushed it back impatiently with
+his hand. His pale blue eyes burned at such times as though a fire were
+blazing behind them. 'No; I feel that I am _whistling jigs to
+milestones_! I am preaching to people, who, while they are very good to
+me, make no response of any kind to my message. They see to it that
+Mother and I want for nothing; they bring us all kinds of little
+dainties from the farms and stations; they share with us whatever's
+going as the seasons come around; and they welcome me into their homes
+as though I really belonged to them. They are great church people, too;
+they attend the services magnificently, although they have to come long
+distances along bad roads in all sorts of weather. They even compliment
+me on my sermons, just as a sleeper, roused at midnight by the alarm of
+fire, might, without rising, praise the dramatic ability of the friend
+who had awakened him. I've stood it as long as I can,' he cried, his lip
+quivering and his face pale with passion, 'and now I must give it up.
+You needn't try to find me another church; I have no wish to repeat the
+experience. I shall preach my last sermon on Sunday week, and I have
+chosen my theme. I shall preach,' he said, coming right up to us and
+transfixing us with eyes whose glowing fervor seemed to scorch us, 'I
+shall preach on the _Unpardonable Sin_! I shall preach as gently and as
+persuasively, but as powerfully, as I know how. But _that_ will be my
+subject. For the Unpardonable Sin is to tamper with your oracle, to be
+disloyal to your vision, to play fast and loose with the truth!'
+
+Allan had an appointment that evening. Mr. Mitchell, exhausted by his
+long drive, retired early. John and I excused ourselves and set off for
+a walk across the plain. For a while we journeyed in silence, enjoying
+the sunset, the song of the birds and the evening air. Allan's words,
+too, had taken a strong hold upon us.
+
+'There's a lot in what he says,' John remarked at length, 'especially in
+his exposition of the Unpardonable Sin. Strangely enough, I was looking
+into the subject only a few days ago. The popular interpretation is, of
+course, absurd upon the face of it. You remember George Borrow's story
+of Peter Williams. Peter, as a boy of seven, came upon the passage
+'about the Unpardonable Sin and took it into his head that he could
+dispose of religion for the rest of his life by the simple process of
+committing that deadly transgression. Arising from his bed one night, he
+went out into the open air, had a good look at the stars, and then,
+stretching himself upon the ground and supporting his face with his
+hands, the little idiot poured out such a hideous torrent of blasphemy
+as, he believed, would destroy his soul for ever. For years the memory
+of that solemn act of spiritual self-destruction darkened all his days
+and haunted all his nights. He tormented himself, as Bunyan did, with
+the conviction that he had committed the sin for which there is no
+forgiveness. It ended as it did with Bunyan, and as it always does.
+Chrysostom says that it is notorious that men who imagine that they have
+committed the sin against the Holy Ghost invariably become Christians
+and lead exemplary lives.'
+
+We came at that moment to the banks of the creek; the waters were
+sparkling in the moonlight; we instinctively seated ourselves among the
+ferns.
+
+'Allan's interpretation,' John went on, 'is much nearer the mark. The
+words were addressed in the first instance to men who declared that
+Christ cast out devils by the prince of the devils. The thing is
+ridiculous; it is a contradiction in terms. Why should the prince of the
+devils occupy himself with casting out devils? The men who said such a
+thing were simply talking for the sake of talking. They were putting no
+brain into it. They were stultifying reason; and the man who stultifies
+his reason is darkening his own windows. He is, as Allan put it,
+tampering with his oracle; he is playing fast and loose with the truth.
+A fellow may behave in the same way towards his conscience or towards
+any other means of moral or spiritual illumination. As soon as he does
+that kind of thing, he shuts the door in his own face; he puts himself
+beyond the possibility of salvation. And, when I was dipping into the
+matter at Silverstream a few nights since, I came to the conclusion that
+the passage about the Unpardonable Sin simply means this: the men who,
+in the old Galilean days, distorted the evidence of the miracles and
+rejected the testimony of the Son of Man, were guilty of a serious
+offence; but it was a venial offence: for, after all, it was not easy to
+realize that a Nazarene peasant was the Son of God. But those to whom
+the fullness of the Gospel has come, and upon whom the light of the ages
+has shone, how shall they be made the recipients of the divine grace if
+they deliberately block every channel by which that grace may approach
+them? If they stultify their reasons and harden their hearts; if, as
+Allan says, they tamper with their oracles and play fast and loose with
+the truth, what hope is there for them? I am sorry to see poor old Allan
+taking the apathy of his congregation so much to heart: but most of us
+would make better ministers if we took it to heart a little more.'
+
+We discussed the matter for an hour or so, our conversation punctuated
+by the splashing of the trout in the creek; and then, feeling that it
+was getting chilly, we rose and walked back to the manse. Allan, to our
+surprise, was already there.
+
+'Now, look,' he said, as he seated himself in his armchair, and began to
+poke the fire, 'you two men have come up here to talk me out of my
+decision; and I'm delighted to see you. But tell me this. A few years
+ago nobody could talk about the things of which I speak every Sunday
+without moving people to deep emotion. I have been reading the records
+of Wesley and Whitefield and Spurgeon. Why, bless me, it was nothing for
+those men to see a whole audience bathed in tears. Whitefield would have
+the Kingswood miners crying like babies. Why do I never see any evidence
+of deep feeling? that's what I want to know. You may say that it's
+because I don't preach as Wesley and Whitefield and Spurgeon preached. I
+thought until lately that _that_ was the explanation. But I've given up
+that theory: it won't work. Livingstone has a story about old Baba, a
+native chief, who bore the most excruciating torture without the flicker
+of an eyelid or the contraction of a muscle. Yet, when Livingstone read
+to him the story of the crucifixion, he was melted to tears. No flights
+of rhetoric, mark you! Just the reading of the New Testament, without
+note or comment! Now I've read that same story to my people; and who was
+much affected by it? Then look at Spurgeon! Why, Spurgeon, anxious to
+test the acoustic properties of his new Tabernacle, entered the pulpit,
+believing the building to be empty, and exclaimed, '_Behold the Lamb of
+God that taketh away the sin of the world!_' A workman, concealed among
+the empty pews, heard the words, listened, heard them repeated, and was
+profoundly stirred by them. He laid down his tools, sought an interview
+with Spurgeon, and was led into a life of useful and happy service. No
+sermon, mark you; just a text! Why, _I've_ quoted that same text scores
+of times, and who came to _me_ enquiring the way of salvation? I shall
+say all this in my farewell sermon. I shall say it as kindly as I can,
+for the people have been wonderfully good to me; but it is my duty to
+say it. And I'm going to recite a few verses of poetry. Would you like
+to hear them? I haven't memorized them yet. I only came upon them
+yesterday.'
+
+He slipped off to another room and returned with a volume of poems by
+Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Opening it, he read to us some verses entitled _The
+Two Sunsets_. They tell how a young fellow, of pure heart and simple
+ways, saw a sunset and heard a song. As the sinking sun filled the
+western sky with crimson and gold—
+
+ He looked, and as he looked, the sight,
+ Sent from his soul through breast and brain
+ Such intense joy, it hurt like pain.
+ His heart seemed bursting with delight.
+
+ So near the unknown seemed, so close
+ He might have grasped it with his hand.
+ He felt his inmost soul expand,
+ As sunlight will expand a rose.
+
+And after the story of the sunset we have the story of the song:
+
+ One day he heard a singing strain—
+ A human voice, in bird-like trills,
+ He paused, and little rapture-rills
+ Went trickling downward through each vein.
+
+And then the years went by. Queen Folly held her sway. She fed his flesh
+and drugged his mind; he trailed his glory in the mire. And, after a
+long interval, he revisited his boyhood's home, beheld another sunset
+and heard another song:
+
+ The clouds made day a gorgeous bed;
+ He saw the splendor of the sky
+ With _unmoved heart_ and _stolid eye_;
+ _He only knew the West was red_.
+
+ Then, suddenly, a fresh young voice
+ Rose, bird-like, from some hidden place;
+ He did not even turn his face,
+ _It struck him simply as a noise_!
+
+He saw the sunset that once filled him with ecstasy; but he saw it
+'_with unmoved heart and stolid eye_'! He heard the song that once
+sounded to him like the voice of angels, and '_it struck him simply as a
+noise_!'
+
+'_That's_ the Unpardonable Sin!' exclaimed Allan, gathering fervor as he
+proceeded. He sprang from his chair and stood facing us, his back to the
+fire. '_That's_ the Unpardonable Sin! Miss Wilcox as good as says so.
+Listen!
+
+ O! worst of punishments, that brings
+ A blunting of all finer sense,
+ A loss of feelings keen, intense,
+ And dulls us to the higher things.
+
+ O! shape more hideous and more dread,
+ Than Vengeance takes in Creed-taught minds,
+ This certain doom that blunts and blinds,
+ And strikes the holiest feelings dead!
+
+This vehement recital brought on a violent fit of coughing and he left
+the room. When he returned we made no attempt to reply to him. We felt
+that the case did not lend itself to argument. We fondly wished that we
+could have retained him for the ministry. His burning passion would have
+glorified any pulpit. But what could we say?
+
+We were astir early next morning. Mr. Mitchell was up soon after dawn
+getting the car ready for the road. After breakfast, John led us all in
+family worship. Very graciously and very feelingly he committed the
+young minister to the divine guidance and care. He specially pleaded
+that the closing days of his ministry might be a season in which rich
+fruit should be gathered and lasting impressions made. 'And,' he
+continued, 'may the tears that he sheds as he takes farewell of his
+people soften his heart towards them and wash from his eyes the vision
+of their indifference. And may he be astonished in the Great Day at the
+abundant response which their hearts have made to the Word that he has
+preached among them.' Half an hour later we were again speeding towards
+the hills, Allan and his mother waving to us from the gate.
+
+
+ III
+
+Allan was as good as his word; after leaving Blueberry he never preached
+again. 'I must have a rest for a month or two,' he said. 'I saved a
+little money at Blueberry, and I can afford to take life easily for a
+while and think things over.' The next that I heard of him was in a
+letter, which some years later I received from John Broadbanks. 'Poor
+old Allan Gillespie has gone,' he told me. 'His lungs went all to pieces
+after he left Blueberry; the tonic air of the hills kept him alive up
+there. He went to the Mount Stewart Sanatorium; but it was too late. He
+died there three weeks later. I always felt that his fervent spirit made
+too heavy a demand upon so frail a frame. His mother was much touched by
+the letters she received from Blueberry. Crowds of young people wrote to
+say that they could never forget the things that, in public and in
+private, Allan had said to them; they owed everything, some of them
+added, to his intense devoted ministry. It looks as if they were not so
+irresponsive as they seemed.'
+
+I suspect that this is usually so. People are not so adamantine as they
+like to look. Still, John and I will always feel that Allan taught us to
+take our work a little more seriously. Whenever we are tempted to lower
+our ideals, or to settle down complacently to things as they are, his
+great eyes—so full of solicitude and passion—seem to pierce our very
+souls and sting us to concern.
+
+
+
+
+ III—THE FRONT-DOOR BELL
+
+
+A fearful and wonderful contrivance is a front-door bell. The wire
+attached to my front-door bell is the line of communication between me
+and the universe. The universe knows it—and so do I. The front-door
+bell is the one thing about a private dwelling that is public property.
+If a stranger walked in at the front gate and began to push or pull at
+anything else, I should instantly send for the police; but if, with all
+the confidence of proprietorship, he walks straight to the front-door
+bell, and begins to push or pull at _it_, I regard the position as
+perfectly normal. No man living may enter my gate in order to inspect
+the roses, to admire the view or to stroke the cat. But any one has a
+perfect right to walk boldly up the path and ring the front-door bell. A
+man may do what he will with his own; and the bell is _his_. It is more
+his than mine. It is perfectly true that I ordered the bell to be put
+there, and that I paid for it; but it is also true that I am the only
+person on the planet to whom it is of no use at all. A visitor from
+Mars, seeing the bellhangers working to my order, might be pardoned for
+supposing that I was gratifying in this way my insatiable passion for
+music. Not at all. In giving the order for the bell, I was actuated by
+no selfish motive. The bell at my front door is not my bell. It is
+everybody's bell—everybody's, that is to say, but mine.
+
+That is why such a thrill runs through the house when the bell rings. It
+is one of the sensations of the commonplace. A ring at the front-door
+bell is a bolt from the blue, a call from the vast, a message from out
+of the infinite. It presents to the imagination such a boundless range
+of possibilities. There are fifteen hundred million people on the
+planet, and this may be any one of them. It may be a hawker with the
+inevitable cake of soap—a cake of soap that he, poor man, appears to
+need so much more than I do. It may be the telegraph-boy with some
+startlingly pleasant or poignantly painful message. It may be the very
+man I want to see or the very man I don't. Or, then again, it may be
+'only Sam.' Everybody knows the accents of ineffable disdain in which it
+is announced that the ringer of the bell is simply a member of the
+family circle. It may be anybody; that is the point. When the front-door
+bell rings, you are prepared for anything. You feel, as you await the
+announcement, that you have suddenly dipped your hand into the lucky-bag
+of the universe, and you are in a flutter of curiosity as to what you
+are about to draw. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor; rich man, poor man,
+beggar man, thief; why is the girl so long in returning from the door?
+Smiles, frowns, laughter tears; they may any of them come with the
+ringing of the front-door bell. When the bell rings, you are eating your
+dinner, or reading the paper, or romping with the children, or chatting
+easily beside the fire. The atmosphere is perfectly tranquil; all the
+wheels are running smoothly; life is without a thrill. The bell rings;
+all eyes are lifted; each member of the household glances inquiringly at
+all the others; is anybody expecting anybody? We vaguely feel, when the
+bell rings, that life is about to enter upon a fresh phase. Whether the
+change will be for weal or for woe, for better or for worse, we cannot
+tell. We only know that things are not likely to be quite the same
+again. Somebody will come in, or somebody will be called out, or
+something fresh will have to be done. The cards of life are all shuffled
+and dealt afresh at the ringing of the front-door bell.
+
+But it was not of my own bell that I set out to write. My own bell is
+not my own bell; why, then, should I write of it? I prefer to write of
+the bells that _do_ belong to me. The next-door bell is my bell; and the
+bell of the house beyond that; and so on to the end of space. For, if it
+is humiliating to reflect that the bell at my own door is not mine, it
+is extremely gratifying to be reminded that, beyond my door, there are
+millions and millions of bells that I can proudly call my own. I am not
+generally considered musical; but I spend a good deal of my time in
+bell-ringing. And I propose to describe one or two instruments on which,
+at some time or other, I have performed.
+
+
+ I
+
+To begin with, there is _the bell that is not working_. To all outward
+appearance, the mechanism may be complete. You press the neat little
+button and then airily turn your back upon it, happy in the conviction
+that you have sent a delicious flutter through every soul on the
+premises. In point of fact you have done nothing of the kind. Things
+within are going on just as they were when you opened the gate; nobody
+has the slightest suspicion that you are cooling your heels on the
+doormat. The electric battery is exhausted. Beyond a scarcely
+perceptible click when your fingers pressed the button, you made no
+noise at all. That is the worst of life's most tragic collapses. There
+is nothing to indicate the break-down. The failure does not advertise
+itself. 'Samson said, I will go out as at other times and shake myself;
+and _he wist not that the Lord was departed from him_.' The button and
+the bell were there; how was he to know that the current had vanished?
+The preacher enters his pulpit as of old; who could have suspected that
+the invisible force, without which everything is so pitifully
+ineffective, had forsaken him. The worker is still in his place; who
+would have dreamed that, having lost his old power, his influence now
+counts for so little? Lots of people fancy that a button and a bell
+complete the requisites of life. Because the external appliances are in
+good order, they take it for granted that everything is working
+satisfactorily. It is a woeful blunder. The button may be there; and the
+bell may be there; yet the entire outfit may be destitute of all
+practical utility. I called at a house last week. Outside there was a
+button and inside there was a bell. I pressed the button several times
+and only discovered afterwards that the mechanism to which it was
+attached gave the lady of the house no intimation of my presence at her
+door. The bell was not working.
+
+A bell that is out of action represents a broken line of communication
+between the individual and the universe. Some time ago my bell broke
+down. I heard every day of people who had called and gone away, fancying
+that nobody was at home. I wondered every night what I had missed during
+the day through being out of touch with the world. The broken bell had
+turned me into a hermit, an exile, a recluse. People might want me never
+so badly; they could not get at me. I might want them never so badly;
+they left the door without my seeing them.
+
+The saddest case of this kind that ever came under my notice occurred at
+Hobart. A gentleman called one day and made it clear that his business
+was marked by gravity and urgency.
+
+'My name,' he said, 'is McArthur. My mother is lying very ill at the
+Homeopathic Hospital. It would be a great comfort to us all, and to her,
+if you could run up and see her. She has often asked us to send for you;
+but we have always put it off. It seemed like encouraging her in the
+notion that her days were few. But now we shall be very glad if you will
+go. I ought to tell you, though, that my mother is very deaf. You will
+not be able to make her hear. But you will find a slate and pencil at
+the bedside. If you write on it whatever you wish to say, she will be
+able to read it and reply to you.'
+
+I went at once. When I told the matron that I had come to see Mrs.
+McArthur, a strange look overspread her face and she drew me into her
+private room.
+
+'Is she dead?' I asked, 'or unconscious?'
+
+'Oh, no,' the matron replied, 'she is alive and quite conscious. But
+during the last few hours her sight has failed her. She can only see us
+like shadows between herself and the window. I don't know how you will
+be able to communicate with her.'
+
+I never felt so helpless in my life. As I stood by her bedside she
+seemed so near, yet so very far away. I stroked her forehead and she
+smiled; but that was all. I was standing on the doormat pressing the
+button; but the bell was not working. I could not establish
+communication with the soul within. It is a way that bells have. The
+current becomes exhausted sooner or later. It is clearly intended that,
+while we are in touch with the universe, we should learn all that the
+universe can teach us, so that, when the line of communication
+collapses, we shall be independent of the universe and need its messages
+no more.
+
+Then there is _the bell that, when I press the button, rings without my
+hearing it_. One day last week I called at a house in Winchester Avenue.
+I pressed the button several times, listening intently. I could hear no
+sound within. I tapped; but still everything was silent. I was just
+stooping to slip my card under the door when, suddenly, I heard a rush
+and a commotion within, and in a moment, Mrs. Finch, full of charming
+apologies, stood before me. She had heard the bell each time; but her
+maid was out; she was herself completing her toilet; she was dreadfully
+ashamed to have kept me waiting.
+
+We are too apt to suppose that our pressure of the button is awakening
+no response. We fancy that our words fall upon deaf ears. People appear
+to take no notice. Perhaps, if we knew all, we should discover that
+while we press, and listen, and hear nothing, we are all unconsciously
+throwing some gentle spirit into a perfect fever of agitation.
+
+ I pressed the button at my neighbor's door;
+ But, when I heard no sound, I turned and stood
+ Irresolute. If I had moved a bell
+ I must have heard it. Should I rap, or go?
+ But in a moment more my neighbor came.
+
+ 'The bell is far, and very small,' he said.
+ 'You may not catch it for the walls between
+ But rest assured, each time you push the knob
+ We cannot choose but hear the bell inside.'
+
+ And what they told me of my neighbor's bell
+ Has cheered me when I knocked at some hard heart
+ And caught no answer. Now and then
+ I poured my soul out in a hot appeal
+ And had no sign from lip, or hand, or eye,
+ That he I would have saved had even heard.
+ And I have sighed and turned away; and then
+ My neighbor's words came back: 'We cannot choose
+ But hear inside.'
+ And after many days
+ I have had an answer to a word I spoke
+ In ears that seemed as deaf as dead men's ears.
+
+I was twelve years at Mosgiel in New Zealand. I always felt that the men
+and women, and especially the old people, were attached to me; but,
+somehow, I was never as successful with the children as I should like to
+have been. I was very fond of them; I loved to meet them, play with
+them, talk with them; but I saw them grow up to be young men and women
+without being impressed in any way by any word of mine. That was the
+bitterest ingredient in my sorrow when, fifteen years ago, I left that
+little country town.
+
+During the past three years I have traveled Australia from end to end.
+In a railway journey of seven thousand miles I have crossed and
+recrossed the entire continent. And one of the most delightful
+experiences of this great trip was to meet my old Mosgiel boys and girls
+at every turn. One girl came, with her husband, a hundred miles to spend
+five minutes with me at the railway station; others traveled with me for
+twenty or thirty miles just for the sake of the talk in the train.
+Without an exception, they were all well and happy and living useful
+lives. In every case they reminded me of things that I had said and done
+in the old days—things that, as I fancied, had made no impression at
+all. And when I returned to the quiet of my own home, and reviewed all
+these happy reunions, I felt ashamed of having suspected these young
+people of being irresponsive. The bell often rings without _our_ hearing
+it.
+
+
+ III
+
+On the other hand, it does occasionally happen that, when I press the
+button, the bell rings; I myself, standing on the doormat, distinctly
+hear it; _yet it is not heard by those upon whom I have called_.
+
+'I am so sorry,' exclaimed Mrs. Wilson, as she left the church last
+evening. 'I took my book on Thursday afternoon and strolled down to the
+summer-house at the foot of the garden; I must have become absorbed in
+the story; I did not hear the bell; and, when I came in, I found your
+card under the door.'
+
+'I say,' cried Harry Blair, 'I am awfully sorry. I must have been at
+home when you called. But the bell is at the front of the house, and we
+happened to be at the back. The children were making such a din that we
+never heard you.'
+
+Precisely! There are those whose bells we ring in vain. In the days in
+which I made up my mind to be a minister, I fell under the influence of
+the Rev. James Douglas, M.A., of Brixton, a most devout and scholarly
+man. He often took me for a walk on Clapham Common, and said things to
+me that I have never forgotten.
+
+'When you are a minister,' he said one day, as we sat under the shelter
+of a giant oak, 'when you are a minister, you will find, wherever you
+go, that there are a certain number of people whom you are not fitted to
+influence. It is largely a matter of personality and temperament. Don't
+break your heart over it. Satisfy your conscience that you have done
+your duty by them, and then leave it at that!'
+
+It was wise counsel. There are a certain number of bells that, rung by
+us, are not heard within.
+
+
+ IV
+
+And, last and saddest of all, there is _the bell that we did not ring_.
+We half thought of it; we heard afterwards how welcome a call would have
+been; but the contemplated visit was not paid.
+
+ Around the corner I have a friend,
+ In the great city that has no end.
+
+ Yet days go by and weeks rush on,
+ And before I know it a year is gone;
+ And I never see my old friend's face,
+ For life is a swift and terrible race.
+ He knows I love him just as well
+ As in the days when I rang his bell
+ And he rang mine. We were younger then,
+ And now we are busy, tired men—
+ Tired with playing a foolish game,
+ Tired with trying to make a name.
+
+ 'To-morrow,' I say, 'I will call on Jim,
+ Just to show that I'm thinking of him.'
+ But to-morrow comes and to-morrow goes,
+ And the distance between us grows and grows,
+ Around the corner—yet miles away. . . .
+ 'Here's a telegram, sir.' 'Jim died to-day!'
+ And that's what we get and deserve in the end—
+ Around the corner a vanished friend.
+
+I really intended to have pressed the button at Jim's door; but the good
+intentions did not ring the bell; and I am left to nurse my lifelong
+remorse.
+
+I really intended to have answered the door when a Visitor Divine stood
+gently knocking there; but the good intention did not let Him in; He
+turned sadly and wearily away; and I am left to my shame and my
+everlasting regret.
+
+
+
+
+ IV—THE GREEN CHAIR
+
+
+ I
+
+The green chair was never occupied. It stood—according to Irving
+Bacheller—in the home of Michael Hacket; and Michael Hacket is the most
+lovable schoolmaster in American literature. Michael Hacket possessed a
+violin and a microscope. The romps that he led with the one, and the
+researches that he conducted with the other, represented the two sides
+of his character; for he was the jolliest soul in all that countryside,
+and the wisest. But, in addition to the violin and the microscope,
+Michael Hacket possessed a green chair; and the green chair was even
+more valuable, as a revelation of the schoolmaster's character, than
+either the microscope or the violin. Barton Baynes, the hero of the
+story, went as a boarder to Mr. Hacket's school; and the green chair
+deeply impressed him. When the family assembled at table, the green
+chair, always empty, was always there. Before he took his own seat, Mr.
+Hacket put his hand on the back of the green chair and exclaimed:
+
+'A merry heart to you, Michael Henry!'
+
+It was a rollicking meal, that first meal at which Barton was present;
+the schoolmaster was full of quips and jests; and his clever sallies
+kept everybody bubbling with laughter. Then, when all had finished, he
+rose and took the green chair from the table, exclaiming:
+
+'Michael Henry, God bless you!'
+
+'I wondered at the meaning of this,' says Barton, 'but I dared not ask.'
+Shortly afterwards, however, he summed up courage to do so. Mr. Hacket
+had gone out.
+
+'I've been all day in the study,' the schoolmaster had said; 'I must
+take a walk or I shall get an exalted abdomen. One is badly beaten in
+the race of life when his abdomen gets ahead of his toes. Children, keep
+Barton happy till I come back, and mind you, don't forget the good
+fellow in the green chair!'
+
+He had not been long gone when the children differed as to the game that
+they should play. A dispute was threatening.
+
+'Don't forget Michael Henry!' said Mrs. Hacket, reprovingly.
+
+'Who _is_ Michael Henry?' asked Barton.
+
+'Sure,' replied Mrs. Hacket, 'he's the child that has never been born.
+He was to be the biggest and noblest of them all—kind and helpful and
+cheery-hearted and beloved of God above all the others. We try to live
+up to him.'
+
+'He seemed to me,' said Barton, 'a very strange and wonderful
+creature—this invisible occupant of the green chair. Michael Henry was
+the spirit of their home, an ideal of which the empty chair was a
+constant reminder.'
+
+When a conversation threatened to become too heated, it was always
+Michael Henry whose ears must not be offended by harsh and angry tones;
+it was Michael Henry who had begged that a culprit might be forgiven
+just this once: it was Michael Henry who was always suggesting little
+acts of courtesy and kindness.
+
+'I like to think of Michael Henry,' the schoolmaster would say. 'His
+food is good thoughts and his wine is laughter. I had a long talk with
+Michael Henry last night when you were all abed. His face was a chunk of
+merriment. Oh, what a limb he is! I wish I could tell you all the good
+things he said!'
+
+But he couldn't; and we all know why.
+
+There was no Michael Henry! And yet Michael Henry—the occupant of the
+green chair—pervaded like a perfume and ruled like a prince the gentle
+schoolmaster's delightful home!
+
+
+ II
+
+We are very largely ruled by empty chairs. In support of this contention
+let me call two or three witnesses. The first is Clarence Shadbrook.
+
+Clarence was well on in life when I first met him. He struck me as being
+reserved, taciturn, unsociable. It took me several years, I grieve to
+say, to understand him. It was on the occasion of his wife's death that
+I first caught glimpses of unsuspected depths of tenderness and
+sentiment within him. Hannah Shadbrook was one of our most excellent
+women. She had a kind thought for everybody. She was the heart and soul
+of our ladies' organizations. In every good cause her hand was promptly
+outstretched to help. She was especially tactful in her dealings with
+the young people: to many of the girls she was a second mother. She was
+tall and spare, with a slight stoop at the shoulders; her eyes were soft
+and gray; and her face was illumined by a look of wonderful intelligence
+and sweetness. She was the sort of woman to whom one could tell
+anything.
+
+Somehow, I had always imagined that, at home, she was unappreciated. I
+cannot recall anything that I ever heard or saw that can have given me
+so false and unfortunate an impression. But there it was! And it was,
+therefore, with a shock of surprise that, at the time of her death, I
+found the strong and silent man so utterly broken and disconsolate.
+
+'Ah,' he sobbed, when, in a few halting words, I referred to the
+affection in which his wife was held at the church, 'I dare say. But it
+was at home that she was at her best. Nobody will ever know what she was
+to me and to the children who have married and gone.'
+
+But it was not until two years later that he opened his heart more
+thoroughly. I heard on a certain Sunday evening that he was ill; and
+next day I made my way to the cottage. He was in bed. I stepped across
+to the window and laid my hand upon a chair, intending to transfer it to
+the bedside.
+
+'Excuse me,' he said, 'but don't take that one. Would you mind having
+the chair over by the wardrobe instead?'
+
+If the request struck me as strange, the thought only lingered for a
+moment. I replaced the chair that I was holding; took the one indicated;
+and dismissed the matter from my mind.
+
+'I dare say you are wondering why I asked you not to take the chair by
+the window,' he said presently, after we had discussed the weather, the
+news, and his prospects of a speedy recovery. 'There's a story about
+that chair that I've never told to anybody, except to her'—glancing at
+a portrait—'but if you'd like to hear it, I don't mind telling you.'
+
+'Well,' he went on, assured of my interest, 'I took a fancy to that
+chair nearly fifty years ago. I was learning wood-carving; I thought
+that it would suit my purpose: and I bought it. It was the first piece
+of furniture that I ever possessed. I remember laughing to myself as I
+carried it to my little room. It stood beside the bed there for a year
+or two. Then I met Hannah. At first I felt a little bit afraid of her.
+She seemed far too good for me. But then, I thought to myself, she is
+far too good for anybody. And so our courtship began, and one night I
+came home tremendously excited. We were engaged! I lay awake for hours
+that night, sometimes painting wonderful pictures of the happy days to
+be, and sometimes lecturing myself as to the kind of man I must become
+in order to be worthy of the treasure about to be confided to my care.
+And I comforted myself with the reminder that I should have her always
+beside me to restrain the worst and encourage the best that was in me.
+And, thinking such thoughts, I at length fell asleep. But, sleeping, I
+went on dreaming. I thought that, coming home tired from the shop, I
+entered my little room at the top of the stairs (the room in which I was
+actually sleeping) and was surprised to find it occupied. A man was
+sitting in the chair beside the bed—the chair over there by the window.
+But I could not be angry, for he looked up and welcomed me with a smile
+that disarmed my suspicions and made me feel that all was well. I felt
+instantly and powerfully drawn to him. He seemed to magnetize me. His
+face realized my ideal of manly strength, tempered by an indefinable
+charm and courtesy. Then, as I gazed, it occurred to me that there was,
+about his countenance and bearing, something strangely familiar. What
+could it mean? Whom could it be? And then the truth flashed upon me. It
+was _myself_! Yes, it was myself as I should be in the years to come
+under Hannah's gentle and gracious influence! It was myself
+transfigured! I awoke and found myself staring fixedly at the empty
+chair beside the bed—the chair that you were about to remove from the
+window there. I made up my mind that day that the chair should never be
+used. It is dedicated to the ideal self of whom I caught a glimpse in my
+boyish dream. And, even now, the shadowy visitor of that memorable night
+seems to be still sitting there; and I never approach the chair without
+mentally comparing myself with its silent occupant.'
+
+Who would have supposed that, beneath the rugged exterior of Clarence
+Shadbrook, there dwelt so rich a vein of poetry and romance? I almost
+apologized to him for my earlier judgment. It only shows that, like the
+first Australian explorers, we may tread the gold beneath our feet
+without suspecting its existence.
+
+
+ III
+
+My second witness is Harold Glendinning. Harold was the minister at Port
+Eyre, a little seaside town close to the harbor's mouth. He had
+frequently asked me to exchange pulpits with him, and at last he had
+coaxed me to consent.
+
+'Come early on Saturday,' he wrote, 'so that we may have an hour or two
+together here before I have to leave.'
+
+Like Clarence Shadbrook, Harold was a widower. But, unlike Clarence, he
+was still young. His wife had faded and died after three short years of
+married life. His mother kept house for him at the manse.
+
+I reached Port Eyre early on the Saturday. We went for a walk round the
+rocky coast before dinner; and in the afternoon Harold made preparations
+for departure.
+
+'But, dear me,' he exclaimed, 'I haven't shown you your room. Come with
+me!' And he led me out into the hall and up the stairs.
+
+The room was obviously his own. Photographs of his young wife were
+everywhere. Her presence pervaded it. The window commanded a noble view
+of the bay, and we stood for a minute or two admiring the prospect. We
+then turned towards the door.
+
+'Treat the place as though it belonged to you,' he said. 'Make yourself
+perfectly at home. You're welcome to everything except—' He half-closed
+the door again.
+
+'You'll understand, I know,' he went on, 'but don't use the armchair
+over there in the corner.' I glanced in the direction indicated by his
+gaze. A comfortable chair stood beside a small occasional table on which
+a lovely bowl of roses had been placed.
+
+'It's _her_ chair,' he explained. 'It used to stand by the fireplace in
+the dining-room. She sat there every evening, reading or sewing, with
+her feet resting on her campstool.' I noticed now that a folded
+campstool stood near the chair. 'Somehow,' he continued, 'the chair
+seemed to become a part of her. And after—afterwards—I couldn't bear
+to leave it there for anybody to occupy who happened to call; so I
+brought it up here. And, somehow, with the chair there, she doesn't seem
+so very far away. I'll show you something else,' he said; and, diving
+into a drawer near his hand, he produced an old magazine.
+
+'I only found this afterwards,' he explained. 'At least I only noticed
+the marked passage. I saw it in her lap several times during the last
+week or two, and, in an off-hand way, I picked it up and glanced through
+it. But it was only after—afterwards—that I noticed that faint
+pencil-mark beside this poem.' He handed me the magazine, and, surely
+enough, I detected a mark, so faint as to be scarcely visible, beside
+some lines by L. C. Jack.
+
+ When day is done and in the golden west
+ My soul from yours sinks slowly out of sight,
+ And you alone enjoy the warmth and light
+ That once had seemed of all God's gifts the best;
+ When roses bloom and I not there to name,
+ When thrushes sing and I not there to hear,
+ When rippling laughter breaks upon your ear
+ And friends come flocking as of old they came;
+ I pray, dear heart, for sweet Remembrance sake
+ You pluck the rose and hear the songful thrush.
+ With laughter meet once more the merry jest
+ And great familiar faces still awake,
+ For I, asleep in the eternal Hush,
+ Would have you ever at your golden best.
+
+'You may think it strange,' he concluded, as we turned to leave the
+room, 'but I often fancy that the chair in the corner makes it a little
+more easy for me to live in the spirit of those lines.'
+
+
+ IV
+
+I had intended calling several other witnesses; but I must be content
+with one. Alec Fraser was a little old Scotsman, who lived about seven
+miles out from Mosgiel. I heard one day that he was very ill, and I
+drove over to see him. His daughter answered the door, showed me in, and
+placed a chair for me beside the bed. I noticed, on the other side of
+the bed, another chair. It stood directly facing the pillow, as if its
+occupant had been in earnest conversation with the patient.
+
+'Ah, Alec,' I exclaimed, on greeting him, 'so I'm not your first
+visitor!'
+
+He looked up surprised, and, in explanation, I glanced at the tell-tale
+position of the chair.
+
+'Oh,' he said, with a smile, 'I'll tell ye aboot the chair by-and-by;
+but how are the wife and the weans and the kirk?'
+
+I found that he was far too ill, however, to be wearied by general
+conversation. I read to him the Shepherd's Psalm; I led him to the
+Throne of Grace; and then I rose to go.
+
+'Aboot the chair,' he said, as I took his hand, 'it's like this. Years
+ago I found I couldna pray. I fell asleep on my knees, and, even if I
+kept awake, my thochts were aye flittin'. One day, when I was sair
+worried aboot it, I spoke to Mr. Clair Mackenzie, the meenister at Broad
+Point. We hadna a meenister o' oor ain at Mosgiel then. He was a guid
+auld man, was Mr. Mackenzie. And he telt me not to fash ma heed aboot
+kneeling down. "Jest sit ye down," he said, "and pit a chair agen ye for
+the Lord, and talk to Him just as though He sat beside ye!" An' I've
+been doin' it ever since. So now ye know what the chair's doin',
+standing the way it is!'
+
+I pressed his hand and left him. A week later his daughter drove up to
+the manse. I knew everything, or almost everything, as soon as I saw her
+face.
+
+'Father died in the night,' she sobbed. 'I had no idea that death was so
+near, and I had just gone to lie down for an hour or two. He seemed to
+be sleeping so comfortably. And, when I went back, he was gone! He
+didn't seem to have moved since I saw him last, except that _his hand
+was out on the chair_. Do you understand?'
+
+I understood.
+
+
+
+
+ V—LIVING DOGS AND DEAD LIONS
+
+
+ I
+
+Mosgiel was in the throes of an anniversary. As part of the programme,
+John Broadbanks and I were exchanging pulpits. In order to be on the
+spot when Sunday arrived, I was driven over to Silverstream on the
+Saturday evening. When I awoke on Sunday morning, and looking out of the
+Manse window, found the whole plain buried deep in snow, I was glad that
+I had taken this precaution. At breakfast we speculated on the chances
+of my having a congregation. Later on, however, the buggies began to
+arrive, and by eleven o'clock most of the homesteads were represented.
+But what about Sunday school in the afternoon? I told the teachers to
+feel under no obligation to come. 'I shall be here,' I said, 'and if any
+of the children put in an appearance, I shall be pleased to look after
+them.' When the afternoon came, there were three scholars present—Jack
+Linacre, who had ridden over on his pony from a farm about two miles
+away; Alec Crosby, a High School boy, who lived in a large house just
+across the fields; and little Myrtle Broadbanks—Goldilocks, as we
+called her—who had accompanied me from the Manse. I decided to return
+with my three companions to the Manse and to hold our Sunday school by
+the fireside.
+
+'Well,' I said, as soon as we were all cosily seated, 'I was reading
+this morning in the Bible about a living dog and a dead lion. Which
+would you rather be?' There was a pause. Jack was the first to speak.
+
+'Oh, I'd rather be the living dog,' he blurted out; 'it's better to be
+alive than dead any day!'
+
+'Oh, I don't know!' exclaimed Alec. Alec was a thoughtful boy who had
+already carried off two or three scholarships. He had been weighing the
+matter carefully while Jack was giving us the benefit of his first
+impressions. 'I don't know. A dead lion has been a living lion, while
+the living dog will be a dead dog some day. I think I'd rather be the
+dead lion.'
+
+'Well, Goldilocks,' I said, turning to the little maiden at my side,
+'and what do _you_ think about it?'
+
+'Oh,' she said, 'I think I'd like a little of both. I'd like to be _a
+lion_ like the one and _alive_ like the other!'
+
+This all happened many years ago. Jack Linacre now owns the farm from
+which he then rode over; Alec Crosby is a doctor with a large practice
+in Sydney; and I heard of Goldilocks' wedding only a few weeks ago. I
+expect they have forgotten all about the snowy afternoon that we spent
+by the fireside at Silverstream; but I smile still as I recall the
+answers that they gave to the question that I set them.
+
+
+ II
+
+There is something to be said for Jack's way of looking at things. Our
+love of life is our master-passion. It animates us at every point. It is
+because we are in love with life that we see so much beauty in the
+dawning of a new day and find so wealthy a romance in the unfolding of
+the Spring. We feel that, among the myriad mysteries of the universe,
+there is no mystery so elusive and so sublime as this one. A living moth
+is a more wonderful affair than a dead moon. Indeed, we only recognize
+the strength of the hold that life has upon us when there is some
+question of its extinction. Let a man stand on the seashore, and, unable
+to help, watch an exhausted swimmer struggle for his life in the
+seething waters; let him look up and follow the movements of a
+steeplejack as he climbs a dizzy spire; let him visit a circus and see
+an artist hazard his life in the course of some sensational performance;
+and, for the moment, he will find his heart in his mouth. The blood will
+forsake his face; he will be filled with trepidation and palpitation; he
+can scarcely breathe! And why? The people in peril are nothing to him.
+For him, life would go on in just the same way whether they live or die.
+Yet their danger fills him with uncontrollable excitement! Or look, if
+you will, in quite another direction.
+
+I was in a tramcar yesterday afternoon. In the corner opposite was a
+lad—probably an errand-boy—curled up with a book. His sparkling eyes
+were glued to the pages; his face was flushed with excitement; he was
+completely lost to his immediate surroundings. I rose to leave the car.
+The movement evidently aroused him. He glanced out of the window, and
+then, with a start, shut the book and sprang up to follow me.
+
+'Have you passed your proper corner?' I asked when, side by side, we
+reached the pavement.
+
+'Yes, sir,' he said, 'I was reading the book and never noticed.'
+
+'Exciting, was it?' I inquired, reaching out my hand for the volume. On
+the cover was a picture of a Red Indian galloping across the prairie,
+with a white girl thrown across the front of his saddle.
+
+'My word, it was!' he replied. 'It's about a fellow who was flying for
+his life from the Indians and took refuge in a cave. And, when he got
+back into the dark part of the cave, he felt something warm and then
+heard the growl of a bear. My! I thought he was dead that time!'
+
+And what did it matter? It was nothing to this errand-boy whether this
+hero of his—a mere frolic of an author's fancy—lived or died. And yet
+the life or death of that hero was of such moment to him that, for the
+time being, his mind lost its hold upon realities in order that it might
+concentrate itself upon a fight among shadows! It is our intense, our
+persistent, our unquenchable love of life that explains the fascination
+of all tales of romance and adventure. 'With man as with the animals,'
+says Dr. James Martineau, 'death is the evil from which he himself most
+shrinks, and which he most deplores for those he loves; it is the utmost
+that he can inflict upon his enemy and the maximum which the penal
+justice of society can award to its criminals. It is the fear of death
+which gives their vivid interest to all hairbreadth escapes, in the
+shipwreck or amid the glaciers or in the fight; and it is man's fear of
+death that supplies the chief tragic element in all his art.' When we
+find ourselves following with breathless interest the movements of the
+traveller, the hunter or the explorer, we fancy that our emotion arises
+from a solicitude for the man himself. As a matter of fact, it arises
+from nothing of the kind. It arises from our love of
+_life-for-its-own-sake_.
+
+In his _Lavengro_, George Borrow describes an open-air service which he
+attended on a large open moor. The preacher—a tall, thin man in a plain
+coat and with a calm, serious face—was urging his hearers not to love
+life overmuch and to prepare themselves for death. 'The service over,'
+Borrow says, 'I wandered along the heath till I came to a place where,
+beside a thick furze, sat a man, his eyes fixed intently on the red ball
+of the setting sun.' It looked like his old comrade, Jasper Petulengro,
+the gipsy.
+
+'Is that you, Jasper?'
+
+'Indeed, brother!'
+
+'And what,' enquired the newcomer, sitting by the gipsy's side, 'what is
+your opinion of death, Jasper?'
+
+'Life is sweet, brother!'
+
+'Do you think so?'
+
+'Think so! There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon
+and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the
+heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?'
+
+I need say no more in order to show that there is a good deal to be said
+for Jack Linacre's way of looking at things.
+
+ How beautiful it is to be alive!
+ To wake each morn as if the Maker's grace
+ Did us afresh from nothingness derive
+ That we might sing 'How happy is our case!
+ How beautiful it is to be alive!'
+
+From Jack's point of view there can be no doubt that one living dog is
+worth all the dead lions that ever were or will be!
+
+
+ III
+
+Alec Crosby, however, is not so sure. 'A dead lion,' he points out, 'has
+been a living lion, while the living dog will be a dead dog some day.'
+There is something in that. He means, if I rightly catch the drift of
+his philosophy, that you can pay too much for the privilege of being
+alive. Everything else has its price, and most of us buy our goods on
+too high a market. One man pays too much for popularity; he sells his
+conscience for it. Another pays too much for fame; it costs him his
+health. A third buys his money too dearly; in gaining the whole world he
+loses his own soul. And in the same way, a man may pay too much even for
+life itself. The dog, as Alec Crosby probably knew, is usually employed
+in Oriental literature as an emblem of the contemptible; the dog in our
+modern sense—Rover, Carlo and the rest—is unknown. The lion, on the
+other hand, is invariably the symbol of the courageous. Alec thinks
+that, all things considered, it is better to be a dead hero than a
+living coward. Alec reminds me of Artemus Ward. On the day of a general
+election, Artemus entered a polling-booth and began to look about him in
+evident perplexity. The returning officer approached and offered to help
+him.
+
+'For whom do you desire to vote?' he asked.
+
+'I want to vote for Henry Clay!' replied Artemus Ward.
+
+'For Henry Clay!' exclaimed the astounded officer, 'why, Henry Clay has
+been dead for years!'
+
+'Yes, I know,' replied Artemus Ward, 'but I'd rather vote for Henry Clay
+dead than for either of these men living!'
+
+Alec Crosby could easily call a great host of witnesses to support his
+view of the matter. Let me summon two—one from martyrology and one from
+fiction.
+
+My first witness shall be Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. For
+his fidelity to the truth, Cranmer was sentenced to die at the stake.
+But every day during his imprisonment he was offered life and liberty if
+only he would sign the deed of recantation. Every morning the document
+was spread out before him and the pen placed in his hand. Day after day,
+he resisted the terrible temptation. But, as Jasper says, life is very
+sweet; the craving to live was too strong; Cranmer yielded. But, as soon
+as the horror of a cruel death had been removed, he felt that he had
+bought the boon of life at too high a price. The death with which he had
+been threatened was the death of a lion; the life that he was living was
+the life of a dog! He held himself in contempt and abhorrence. He
+cowered before the faces of his fellow men! Life on such terms was
+intolerable. He made a recantation of the recantation. As a token of his
+remorse, he burned to a cinder the hand with which he signed the
+cowardly document. And then, at peace with his conscience, he embraced a
+fiery death with a joyful heart. He felt that it was a thousand times
+better to be a dead lion than a living dog.
+
+My witness from fiction is introduced to me by Maxwell Gray. In _The
+Silence of Dean Maitland_, he shows that life may be bought at too high
+a price. Cyril Maitland had committed a murder; yet all the
+circumstances pointed to the guilt of his innocent friend, Henry
+Everard. Maitland felt every day that it was his duty to confess; but
+the lure of life was too strong for him; and, besides, he was a
+minister, and his confession would bring shame upon his sacred office!
+And so the years went by. While Everard languished in jail, having been
+sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, Maitland advanced in popularity
+and won swift preferment. He became a dean. But his life was a torture
+to him. He felt that death—even the death that he had dreaded—would
+have been infinitely preferable. And, after suffering agonies such as
+Everard in prison never knew, he at last made a clean breast of his
+guilt and laid down the life for which he had paid too much. Thomas
+Cranmer and Dean Maitland would both take sides with Alec Crosby.
+
+
+ IV
+
+But it was Goldilocks that, on that snowy afternoon at Silverstream, hit
+the nail on the head.
+
+'I think I'd like a little of both,' she said. 'I'd like to be _a lion_
+like the one and _alive_ like the other!'
+
+Precisely! With her feminine facility for putting her finger on the very
+heart of things, Goldilocks has brushed away all irrelevancies and got
+to bedrock. For, after all, the question of life and death does not
+really concern us. A dog, living or dead, can be nothing other than a
+dog; a lion, living or dead, can be nothing other than a lion. The dead
+lion, as Alec Crosby says, was a living lion once; the living dog will
+be a dead dog some day. Goldilocks helps us to clear the issue. The real
+alternative is not between life and death; for life and death come in
+turn to dog and lion alike. The real question is between the canine and
+the leonine. Shall I live contemptibly or shall I live courageously?
+
+'And I looked,' says the last of the Biblical writers, 'and behold, a
+lion—_the Lion of the tribe of Juda_!'
+
+Like a lion He lived! With the courage of a lion He died! And in leonine
+splendor He moves through all the world above. Goldilocks had evidently
+made up her mind, in life and in death, to model her character and
+experience upon His!
+
+
+
+
+ VI—NEW BROOMS
+
+
+New brooms, they say, sweep clean. The statement is scarcely worth
+challenging. It is ridiculous upon the face of it. How can new brooms
+sweep clean? New brooms do not sweep at all. If they sweep, they are not
+new brooms: they have been used; the dealer will not receive them back
+into stock; they are obviously second-hand. But I need not stress that
+point. My antagonism to the ancient saw rests on other grounds.
+
+New brooms, they say, sweep clean. It is invariably a cynic who says it.
+He seizes the proverb as he would seize a bludgeon; and, with it, he
+makes a murderous attack on the first young enthusiast he happens to
+meet. It is a barbarous weapon, and can be wielded by an expert with
+deadly effects. It is a thousand times worse than a shillalah, a
+tomahawk, a baton, or a club; with either of these a man can break your
+head; but with the saying about the new broom he can break your heart. I
+well remember the public meeting at which I was formally welcomed to
+Mosgiel. Among the speakers was an old minister of the severely
+conservative type, with whom I subsequently grew very intimate. But at
+that stage, as he himself told me afterwards, he deeply resented my
+coming. He regarded it as an intrusion. He said, in the course of his
+speech, that he confidently expected to hear, during the next few
+months, the most glowing accounts of the work at the Mosgiel Church.
+That, he cruelly observed, was the usual thing. A young minister's first
+year among his people is, he remarked, a year of _admiration_; the
+second is a year of _toleration_; and the third, a year of
+_abomination_. New brooms, he said, sweep clean. The jest, I dare say,
+rolled from the memories of the people like water from a duck's back. I
+doubt if they gave it a second thought. They probably remarked to one
+another as they drove back to their farms that the old gentleman was in
+a droll humor. But, to me, his words were like the thrust of a sword; he
+stabbed me to the quick. There was never a day during those first three
+years at Mosgiel, but the wound ached and smarted. Long afterwards, I
+reminded the old gentleman of his jest; and he most solemnly assured me
+that he had not the slightest recollection of ever having uttered it.
+Which only proves that our thoughtless thrusts are often just as painful
+as our malicious ones. I have long since forgiven my old friend. Indeed,
+I do not know that I have much to forgive. For, after all, his stinging
+jibe only made me resolve to prove its falsity. For more than a thousand
+mornings I rose from my bed vowing that at the end of three years, and
+at the end of thirty, the broom should be sweeping as cleanly as ever.
+The old minister has been in his grave for many years now; and I have
+nothing but benedictions to heap upon his honored name.
+
+The cult of the new broom is a most pernicious one. No heresy has done
+more harm. The woman who really believes that new brooms sweep clean
+will endeavor to keep the broom new as long as she possibly can. And
+that is not what brooms are for. Brooms are to use; and, as soon as you
+begin to use them, they cease to be _new_ brooms. The point is a vital
+one. About three hundred years ago, one of the choicest spirits in
+English history was passing away. George Macdonald says of him that one
+of the keenest delights of the life to come will be the joy of seeing
+the face of George Herbert 'with whom to talk humbly will be in bliss a
+higher bliss.' As George Herbert lay dying, he drew from beneath his
+pillow the roll of manuscripts that contained the poems that are now so
+famous. 'Deliver this,' he said, 'to my dear brother, Nicholas Ferrar,
+and tell him that he will find in it a picture of the many spiritual
+conflicts that passed between God and my soul before I could subject my
+will to the will of Jesus my Master.' The verses were published, and
+have come to be esteemed as one of the priceless possessions of the
+Church universal. And among them, strangely enough, I find a striking
+reference to this matter of new brooms. 'What wretchedness,' George
+Herbert asks,
+
+ 'What wretchedness can give him any room
+ Whose house is foul while he adores the broom?'
+
+And here is George Herbert telling us on his death-bed that this
+reflects some deep spiritual conflict between God and his own soul! What
+can he mean? He means, of course, that it is possible to be so much in
+love with your new dress that you are afraid to wear it. You may be so
+enamored of your new spade that you shrink from soiling it. You may—to
+return to the poet's imagery—so adore your new broom that you allow all
+your floors to become dusty and foul.
+
+And herein lies one of life's cardinal sins. In his lecture on _The
+Valley of Diamonds_, John Ruskin discusses the nature of covetousness.
+What is covetousness? Wherein does it differ from the legitimate desire
+for wealth? Up to a certain point the desire for riches is admirable. It
+develops intellectual alertness in the individual, and, in the
+aggregate, builds up our national prosperity. If nobody wished to be
+rich, the resources of the country would never be exploited. Why should
+men trouble to clear the bush or sink mines or erect factories or
+cultivate farms? Apart from the lure of wealth we should be a people of
+sluggish wit and savage habits. Viewed in this light, the desire for
+wealth is not only pardonable; it is admirable. At what point does it
+curdle into covetousness and threaten our undoing? Ruskin draws the line
+sharply. The desire for wealth is good, he argues, as long as we have
+_some use_ for the riches that we acquire; it deteriorates into mere
+covetousness as soon as we crave to possess it for the sheer sake of
+possessing it and apart from any _use_ to which we propose to put it.
+'Fix your desire on anything useless,' he says, 'and all the pride and
+folly of your heart will mix with that desire; and you will become at
+last wholly inhuman, a mere, ugly lump of stomach and suckers, like a
+cuttlefish.' John Ruskin's vigorous prose throws a flood of light on
+George Herbert's cryptic poetry. So far as I have it in my heart to use
+my new broom for the cleansing of my home and the comfort of my fellows,
+my new broom may be a means of grace to me and them; but, so far as I
+view the new broom merely as a possession, and irrespective of the
+service in which it should be worn out, my pride in it is bad as bad can
+be.
+
+John Ruskin reminds me of Le Sage. 'Before reading the story of my
+life,' he makes Gil Blas to say, 'listen to a tale I am about to tell
+thee!' And then he tells of the two tired and thirsty students who,
+travelling together from Pennafiel to Salamanca, sat down by a roadside
+spring. Near the spring they noticed a flat stone, and on the stone they
+soon detected some letters. The inscription was almost effaced, partly
+by the teeth of time and partly by the feet of the flocks that came to
+water at the fountain. But, after washing it well, they were able to
+make out the words '_Here is interred the soul of the Licentiate Peter
+Garcias_.' The first of the students roared with laughter and treated
+the affair as purely a joke. 'Here lies a _soul_!'—what an idea! A soul
+under a stone! The second, however, took it more seriously and began to
+dig. He at length came upon a leather purse containing a hundred ducats,
+and a card, on which was written in Latin the following sentence: '_Thou
+who hast had wit enough to discover the meaning of the inscription,
+inherit my money, and make a better use of it than I have!_'
+
+'The _soul_ of the Licentiate Peter Garcias!'
+
+'Make _a better use_ of it than I have!'
+
+Poor Peter Garcias felt that his shining ducats had been a curse and not
+a blessing, because he had loved them for their own sake instead of for
+the sake of the use to which they could be put. 'Make _a better use_ of
+them than I have!' he implored. Peter Garcias would have understood
+exactly what George Herbert meant by the worship of the new broom.
+
+But I need not have gone abroad for my illustration. It is a far cry
+from George Herbert to George Eliot; yet George Eliot has furnished us
+with the most telling exposition of George Herbert's recondite remark.
+For George Eliot has given us _Silas Marner_. Indeed, she has given us
+two Silas Marners. We have Silas Marner the miser, gloating greedily
+over the guineas that he afterwards lost; and, later on, we have Silas
+Marner, strong, unselfish, tender-hearted, rejoicing in the wealth that
+he has now regained. Let us glance, first at the one and then at the
+other.
+
+We peep at him as he appears in the second chapter. 'So, year after
+year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his guineas rising in the
+iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening itself more and more into
+a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any
+other being. His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and
+hoarding, _without any contemplation of an end towards which the
+functions tended_. Marner's face shrank; his eyes that used to look
+trusting and dreamy now looked as if they had been made to see only one
+kind of thing for which they hunted everywhere; and he was so withered
+and yellow that, although he was not yet forty, the children always
+called him "Old Master Marner."'
+
+This was Silas Marner the miser! Then followed the loss of the money;
+the hoarded guineas were all stolen, and Silas was like a man demented!
+Then little Eppie stole into his home and heart. When he saw her for the
+first time, curled up on the hearth, the flickering firelight playing on
+her riot of golden hair, he thought his long-lost guineas had come back
+in this new form, and he loved _her_ as he had once loved _them_. He
+would take her on his knee and tell her wonderful stories, and, in the
+long summer evenings, would stroll out into the meadows, thick with
+buttercups, and would make garlands for her hair and teach her to
+distinguish the songs of the birds. And so the years go by till Eppie is
+a bonny girl of eighteen—always in trouble about her golden hair, for
+no other girl of her acquaintance has hair like it, and, smooth it as
+she may, it will not be hidden under her pretty brown bonnet. And then
+comes the great discovery. The pond in the Stone Pit runs dry, and in
+its slimy bed are found the skeleton of the thief and—the long-lost
+guineas! That evening Silas and Eppie sat together in the cottage.
+George Eliot describes the transfiguration which his love for Eppie had
+effected in the countenance of Silas. 'She drew her chair towards his
+knees, and leaned forward, holding both his hands, while she looked up
+at him.' On the table near them, lit by a candle, lay the recovered
+gold—the old long-loved gold, ranged in orderly heaps, as Silas used to
+range it in the days when it was his only joy. He had been telling her
+how he used to count it every night, and how his soul was utterly
+desolate till she was sent to him.
+
+'Eh, my precious child,' he cried, 'if you hadn't been sent to save me,
+I should ha' gone to the grave in my misery. The money was taken away
+from me in time; and you see it's been kept—kept till it was wanted for
+you. It's wonderful—our life is wonderful!'
+
+It is indeed! But the wonderful thing for us at this moment is the
+contrast between these two Silas Marners. They are both rich. But the
+first is rich and wretched; the second is rich and happy. And the
+secret! The secret is that, in his first possession of the guineas, he
+loved them for their own sake, irrespective of any use to which they
+could be put; in his subsequent possession of the self-same guineas he
+loved them for the sake of the happiness that they could purchase for
+Eppie.
+
+The _first_ Silas Marner knew the wretchedness that George Herbert
+describes—the wretchedness of the man 'whose house is foul while he
+adores his broom'; the _second_ Silas Marner was willing that the broom
+should be worn out in sweeping all the obstacles and difficulties out of
+Eppie's path.
+
+In telling her story, George Eliot remarks incidentally that wiser men
+than Silas Marner often repeat his mistake. The only difference is that,
+while Silas Marner amassed _money_ without considering the uses to which
+it could be put, these wiser misers accumulate _knowledge_ in the same
+aimless way. They abandon themselves to some erudite research, some
+ingenious project or some well-knit theory; and it brings them little
+joy because it stands related to no actual need. It is a new broom and
+will remain a new broom; it will never brush away any of the world's
+sorrows or sweep together any of its long-lost treasures. Knowledge,
+like money, is a noble thing. But, as with money, so with knowledge, it
+derives its nobleness from the ends which it is designed to compass.
+Every nation has a right to rejoice in its universities. The university
+is the glory of civilization. But, unless we keep both eyes wide open,
+the university may come to resemble the hole in the cottage floor in
+which Silas Marner hoarded his gold. Let the student of engineering
+remember that he is accumulating knowledge, not that he may possess more
+of it than his rivals and competitors, but that he may do more than they
+towards surmounting the obstacles that block the path of human progress.
+Let the medical student remember that he is amassing knowledge, not that
+he may flourish the academic distinctions he has won, but that he may
+lessen the sum of human anguish and save human life. And let the
+theological student reflect that he is winning for himself a scholarly
+renown, not that he may rejoice in his attainments and distinctions for
+their own sake, but that, by means of them, he may the more effectively
+and skillfully lead all kinds and conditions of men into the kingdom and
+service of his Lord.
+
+And so I come back to my starting-point. The broom that sweeps clean is
+not a new broom. After commencing this chapter I happened to pick up a
+report of the British and Foreign Bible Society. On one of its pages I
+find a story told by the society's colporteur at Port Said. He boarded
+an incoming steamer, and, on the lower deck, found a German sailor
+sweeping out a cabin. The man was greatly depressed. In the course of
+conversation, each claimed to be a greater sinner than the other.
+
+'What!' exclaimed the sailor, 'why, you are the first man to tell me
+that he is a greater sinner than I am!'
+
+He took a Gospel from the colporteur's hands and began to read.
+
+'Ah,' he sighed, 'that I were a little child again and could read it
+with a clean heart!'
+
+The remark was overheard by some of his shipmates.
+
+'Is that _you_, Jansen?' they asked; 'what wonder has happened to you?'
+
+'No wonder at all,' the man replied. '_I want to sweep out my heart, and
+I am buying a broom!_'
+
+The broom that he bought is by no means a new one, but it sweeps
+wonderfully clean for all that!
+
+
+
+
+ VII—A GOOD WIFE AND A GALLANT SHIP
+
+
+ I
+
+Why is a good wife like a gallant ship? This is not a riddle; it is a
+sincere and earnest inquiry. An ancient philosopher in the East and a
+modern poet in the West have both remarked upon the resemblance between
+the two. Solomon spent nearly half his life thinking about ships. He was
+the only Jewish king who felt much enthusiasm for maritime affairs.
+Solomon reminds me of Peter the Great. Those who have perused
+Waliszewski's biography of that monarch are scarcely likely to forget
+the passage in which the historian describes the finding, by the boy
+Peter, of the broken boat. It was only an old, half-rotten wooden skiff,
+thrown to the scrap-heap with some useless lumber in the little village
+of Ismailof; but, captivating the boy's fancy, and stirring his
+imagination, he could not take his eyes from it. It changed the whole
+current of his life. He is destined to rule over a great continental
+people who have no access to the sea. Yet, from that day, he dreams of
+nothing but brave ships and romantic voyages. He comes to England to
+learn shipbuilding. He returns to Russia and builds useless navies. He
+claps his hands in delirious ecstasy as he launches his huge toys on his
+inland lakes. He is like a caged eagle; the passion of the infinite
+throbs in his veins, yet he is cribbed, cabined, and confined in this
+cruel way!
+
+Solomon was in a very similar case. He ruled over a people who regarded
+the sea with distrust and disdain. Yet he himself heard in his soul the
+challenging call of the mighty waters. The ships! The ships that bring
+the food! The merchant ships! The ships that lie becalmed in the oily
+seas of the tropics; the ships that get caught in the ice-pack at the
+poles; the ships that fight their way doggedly through howling gales and
+icy blizzards round the cape! Those stately ships, with their dizzy
+masts and shapely bows, captivated his imagination; and when he desired
+to speak of the virtuous and faithful housewife in terms of superlative
+appreciation, the only image that seemed worthy of her was the gallant
+ship riding at anchor in the bay. '_Who can find a virtuous woman?_' he
+asks, '_for her price is far above rubies. She is like the merchant
+ships; she bringeth her food from afar._'
+
+
+ II
+
+So much for the Eastern philosopher; now for the Western bard!
+Longfellow likens a good wife to a gallant ship; and, in order that we
+may see how much alike the two are, he places them side by side. He
+describes the old shipbuilder who has resolved to build one more ship,
+his last and his best. He comes down to the yards, his eyes sparkling
+with enthusiasm, carrying the model in his hand. He approaches his
+assistant, shows him the model, and confides to him his dream. The
+younger man, a stalwart and fiery youth, has a dream of his own. He
+aspires to marry his master's daughter. The two are engrossed in
+conversation, the elder man depicting to the younger the stately ship
+that is to be. He will build a vessel that shall laugh at all disaster,
+and with wave and whirlwind wrestle. And he concludes his eager
+communication by promising that 'the day that giveth her to the sea
+shall give my daughter unto thee.' The younger man starts at the radiant
+prospect.
+
+ And as he turned his face aside
+ With a look of joy and a thrill of pride.
+ Standing before her father's door
+ He saw the form of his promised bride.
+ The sun shone on her golden hair
+ And her cheek was glowing fresh and fair
+ With the breath of morn and the soft sea air.
+ Like a beauteous barge was she——
+
+And so on. All through the poem, right up to the wedding on the ship's
+deck on the day of her launching, Longfellow draws the analogy between
+the shapely vessel, the bride of the ocean, and the fair maiden, the
+bride of the proud young builder.
+
+'_She is like the merchant ships!_' says the ancient Eastern sage.
+
+'_Like a beauteous barge was she!_' exclaims the Western poet.
+
+It is difficult to resist the testimony of two such witnesses.
+
+
+ III
+
+Neither the good wife nor the gallant ship need resent the analogy. If
+the good wife does not like being compared to a ship, let her sit down
+for five minutes and think, and it will occur to her that, of all our
+ingenious inventions and bewildering contrivances, a ship is the only
+one that has a divine origin and a divine authority. The ark was the
+first ship; and its plans and specifications were divinely dictated.
+Moreover, it is obvious that, since the Lord God divided His world into
+islands and continents, with vast expanses of ocean rolling between, and
+commanded that all those scattered territories should be peopled and
+developed, He contemplated the existence of the ships. The ships were
+part of the original programme. The ships were to be the instruments of
+those distributive and mediative ministries on which the history of the
+world was to be based.
+
+Or, if instead of thinking abstract thoughts, the good wife prefers to
+read, let her reach down Rudyard Kipling's ballad of the _Big Steamers_.
+
+ 'Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers,
+ With England's own coal, up and down the salt seas?'
+ 'We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter.
+ Your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples, and cheese,
+
+ For the bread that you eat, and the biscuits you nibble,
+ The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,
+ They are brought to you daily by all us Big Steamers,
+ And if anyone hinders our coming you'll starve!'
+
+The ships, then, represent the indispensabilities of life, the things
+without which we cannot live. I am writing here in Australia. And even
+here in Australia, with our immense open spaces, spaces in which we can
+grow almost anything, how dependent we are upon the coming of the ships!
+We need the ships; ships to bring us our supplies from the great looms
+and factories of the old world; ships to take the produce of our
+boundless plains to the congested populations of the other hemisphere;
+ships to bring the letters for which our hearts are hungry, and to take
+the letters for which distant friends are waiting. Even here in
+Australia the ships are the light of our eyes and the breath of our
+nostrils. Even here in Australia, the good wife, when she spreads her
+table in the morning, brings her food from afar. For none of these
+dainties that tempt my appetite and nourish my frame are _native_ foods.
+They were not here until the ships began to come. The wheat is not
+indigenous; the meat is not native meat. The corn and the cattle and the
+coffee came to Australia on the ships. And, but for the ships, we
+ourselves could never have been here. Let a man register a vow that he
+will not eat, drink, wear or use anything that has—in a remote or in an
+immediate sense—been upon a ship; and he will be reduced to abject
+wretchedness in no time. God has built His world in such a way that the
+ship is the foundation of everything.
+
+ Each climate needs what other climes produce,
+ And offers something to the general use;
+ No land but listens to the common call,
+ And, in return, receives supplies from all.
+
+The Great Weaver stands continually at His loom working out an intricate
+and beautiful pattern. The nations are the threads that run up and down,
+up and down, not far apart, yet never meeting. The gallant ship is the
+shuttle, the busy shuttle, that flies to and fro, to and fro, weaving
+them all into one compact and wonderful whole. The web depends entirely
+on the shuttle; the world depends entirely on the ships.
+
+
+ IV
+
+I never see a great ship come into port at the end of a long voyage
+without feeling a sense of admiration, amounting almost to awe, at the
+masterly achievement. To say nothing of the perils to which she has been
+exposed at sea, it seems an amazing thing that, after having been for
+months on the trackless waters, she can pick up the heads as easily as
+though she had been following a well-blazed trail. There is a famous
+story on record in the _Memoirs of Captain Basil Hall_. It tells how the
+erudite commander once brought his vessel round Cape Horn on a voyage
+from San Blas to Rio de Janeiro. Without any other observations than
+those of the sun and moon, he laid his vessel, in a thick fog, outside
+what he believed to be the entrance to the harbor. The fog cleared, and
+the land slowly loomed up through it—the first that had been seen for
+more than three months. It was Rio! The sailors were electrified at the
+accuracy of their commander's calculations, and, rushing to the bridge,
+greeted him, by way of congratulation, with three ringing cheers! I
+suppose no man ever watched a brave ship drop anchor in the bay at the
+end of her voyage without some such feeling as this. And certainly no
+man ever looked into the face of his bride on his wedding day without
+being conscious of some such emotion. '_She is like the merchant ship;
+she bringeth her food from afar._' It seems so wonderful to the
+bridegroom that she should have reached his side in safety. The chances
+against her safe arrival were a million to one. She is the daughter of a
+thousand generations. For countless centuries her ancestors were
+fighting men. If, in that long chain of warring progenitors, only one
+had fallen before he mated, she could never have been born. Time after
+time, in those rude days, the earth was desolated by war, pestilence,
+and famine; yet the line of genealogy that led to _her_ remained
+unbroken! More than once whole nations were depopulated by the plague.
+But still her ancestry was unaffected. The providence that guards the
+good ship on the seething waters, bringing it safely through storm and
+tempest to its desired haven, watched over her as she floated down the
+restless ages to her husband's side. She was like the ark, upborne by
+the very waters that destroyed everything beside; or, to return to
+Solomon's simile, '_she is like the merchant ships; she bringeth her
+food from afar_.' Her safe arrival seems a miracle, and a golden miracle
+at that. It seems to her husband that, threatened by such perils as she
+has braved, only an escort of angels could have brought her safely to
+his side. And he bows his head in wondering gratitude.
+
+
+ V
+
+We owe everything to the ships. All our food comes from afar. Yes, all
+of it, including food for thought. The school, the college, the
+university; they all resemble the virtuous housewife spreading her
+table. They bring food from afar. Only this afternoon I was shown over
+Dennington College. The Principal, Miss Gertrude Milman, B.A., took me
+into a class-room in which a geography lesson was in progress. The
+teacher was giving her pupils food from afar. Hardy adventurers and
+patient explorers sailed across unknown seas, charted unknown lands, and
+returned with the priceless results of their hazardous investigations.
+And those results, brought home by the ships, were being dispensed in
+the class-room at Dennington College. Miss Milman herself teaches
+philosophy. But she owes it all to the ships. Far away over the sea,
+Plato and Aristotle and Socrates wrestled with the problems of the
+universe in the old days; and far away over the sea Kant and Hegel and
+Bergson pondered those same problems in a later time; and the ships have
+brought us the wealthy fruitage of their profound cogitations. 'And
+here,' Miss Milman told me, 'the girls assemble in the morning for the
+scripture lesson.' I do not know exactly how that half-hour is spent;
+but I am certain that, even then, Miss Milman sets before her pupils
+food from afar. The Bible itself has come to us across the ocean. The
+world is only rolling into light because the ships, with their white
+sails, have dotted every sea. 'The prayers you offer,' says J. M. Neale,
+'the prayers you offer, the hymns you sing, the books of devotion you
+use, how far, far hence in _time_, how far, far hence in _distance_, do
+their sources lie? Perhaps from some quaint mediæval German house, with
+its surrounding fields and lanes and gardens buried deep in snow, you
+get a prayer which we use at Christmastide. Perhaps from the dog days of
+an Andalusian Convent, with its orange trees and its pomegranates and
+its fountains, you get such music as that lovely introit, "Like as the
+hart desireth after the waterbrooks." Perhaps from the tomb of a martyr
+you get such a hymn as "O God, Thy soldiers' crown and guard." Prayers,
+music, hymns; they are all the same. They come from afar, from afar. I
+left Dennington College feeling that, after all, Miss Milman is very
+much like Solomon's housewife; she is entirely dependent on the ships;
+she bringeth her food from afar.
+
+
+ VI
+
+Now that I come to look a little more closely at the comely features of
+this virtuous woman—the woman who is like the merchant ships—I fancy
+that I recognize her. For she is none other than the Bride, the Lamb's
+wife. When the Church spreads her white cloth, and sets her wondrous
+table, she invariably decks it with food from afar. Listen as she
+invites you to partake of her heavenly fare!
+
+'_The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve
+thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in
+remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on Him in thy heart by
+faith with thanksgiving._'
+
+And listen again:
+
+'_The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve
+thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that
+Christ's blood was shed for thee and be thankful._'
+
+Food from afar! Food from afar! She is like the merchant ships; she
+bringeth her food from afar! Such viands can have been procured from no
+earthy source. This Bread was made from wheat that grew in no earthly
+field; this Wine was pressed from clusters that hung on no earthly vine.
+The happy guests who sit at the Church's table find that, as they
+partake of her sacred hospitalities, there is ministered to them a
+comfort that wipes all tears from all faces, a hope that transfigures
+with strange radiance every unborn day, and a peace that passeth all
+understanding. They know, as they taste this delectable fare, that such
+fruits grew in no earthly garden. And then, with faces that shine like
+the faces of the angels, they remember at whose table they are seated,
+and they say one to another, '_She is like the merchant ships; she
+bringeth her food from afar._' And that golden testimony is true.
+
+
+
+
+ PART II
+
+
+
+
+ I—ODD VOLUMES
+
+
+We have had a kind of wedding in my study this morning. The bride
+arrived by post. It happened in this wise. Twenty years ago I attended
+an auction sale at Mosgiel. A valuable library was under the hammer and
+the chance was too good to be missed. The books were all tied up in
+bundles and laid out on tables. I took a note of the numbers of those
+lots that contained works that I wanted. When, on the arrival of the
+carrier's cart, I proudly inspected my purchases, I found among them an
+odd volume. It was the first part of _Foster's Life and Correspondence_.
+The book was bound up with a number of others, and I could not buy
+_them_ without becoming responsible for _it_. My first inclination was
+to throw it away; and the temptation recurred when I left Mosgiel for
+Hobart, and again when I left Hobart for Armadale. Of what use was an
+odd volume? In packing up at Hobart I actually tossed it to the heap of
+rubbish that was to be left behind; but an aching void in the last case
+led to its ultimate rescue. This is the first part of our little
+romance.
+
+Last week I was visiting a country minister. In the ordinary course of
+things, I glanced over his book-shelves. I was just turning away, when,
+among some dusty volumes away on the topmost shelf, my eye caught the
+words _Foster's Life and Correspondence_. It, too, was an odd volume. On
+hearing of my own experience, the good man urged me to transfer the
+volume to my portmanteau and say no more about it. It was, he said, of
+no use to him.
+
+'But, my dear fellow,' I replied, 'I might just as well say that _mine_
+is of no use to _me_. We must leave the matter in the meantime. It is so
+long since I looked at the volume on my shelves that I cannot be sure
+that they are companions. They may be duplicates. Yours, I see, is
+_Volume Two_. If, on my return, I find that mine is _Volume One_, we
+will come to some arrangement. If not, neither of us can help the
+other.'
+
+My Mosgiel purchase turned out to be the _first_ volume. I posted my
+friend a copy of _Bleak House_, which, as I happened to know, he had
+never read, and he forwarded the _Foster_ by return of post. And this
+morning I took the odd volume from the lumber on the top shelf,
+introduced it to its mate, and now the two stand proudly side by side
+among my biographies. They make a handsome pair: no bride and bridegroom
+could look more perfectly matched. I do not suppose that they had ever
+met before; but that circumstance in itself presents no lawful
+impediment to their being united in a lifelong partnership.
+
+The mating of books is a very mechanical affair. At a big publishing
+house you may see two huge cases side by side, just as they have come
+from the printer's. The one is packed with copies of _Volume One_; the
+other contains copies of _Volume Two_. An assistant, asked by a customer
+for a copy of the complete work, takes a book from the one box and a
+book from the other; claps them together with a bang; and they are mated
+for all time to come. There is no question of selection, and no question
+of consent. There is no '_Wilt thou have..._' and no _'I will_.' The
+volume in the top right-hand corner of the one box is unable to steal a
+shy and furtive glance at the book lying in a corresponding position in
+the other box. His destined partner may be a little plumper or a little
+thinner than himself; she may be neatly attired in a pretty cover that
+sets off her charms to perfection, or she may be dressed in an
+ill-fitting wrapper that is smudged or torn; he cannot tell. He can only
+wait, and she can only wait, until they are unceremoniously snatched
+from their respective corners, banged together, and thus, for richer for
+poorer, for better for worse, made partners in a bond that is
+indissoluble. There is no question of sexual selection such as Darwin,
+Wallace, and the great biologists like to portray. The books in the one
+box do not strut and parade and show off their beauties in order to win
+the admiration of the books in the other box. That may be because they
+are conscious that they are all so much alike; they feel that there is
+little to pick and choose between them; or, on the other hand, it may be
+because they suspect that the books in the other box are all much of a
+muchness, and that it matters very little which bride each bridegroom
+has. But, whatever the reason, there it is! There is no element of
+selection such as we find in the fields and the forests; there is no
+lovemaking and courtship such as we mortals know; the volumes are
+arbitrarily paired off, and the thing is done.
+
+And, strangely enough, they appear to belong to each other from that
+very moment. One would feel that he was conniving at a kind of literary
+adultery if he were to take the second volume of _this_ set and the
+second volume of _that_ set and deliberately transpose them. I call the
+earth and the heavens to witness that, in my procedure this morning, I
+have been guilty of no such enormity. We are living in a rough world.
+With some books, as with some people, things go hardly. In the course of
+years a volume may be cruelly deserted by its companion; or its partner
+may come to an untimely end. The law of the land provides that in such
+sad cases, a second marriage is no shame. One does not like to think of
+my first volume of _Foster_ spending all its days among the lumber on
+_my_ top shelf, and of my friend's second volume spending all its days
+in the dust and neglect of _his_ top shelf. I do not often take my stand
+on my ministerial dignity; but I maintain that, being a minister, I have
+at least as good a right as any publisher's assistant to take those two
+sad and lonely volumes—the one from my top shelf in the city, and the
+other from my friend's top shelf in the country—and to unite them in
+the holy bond of matrimony. And as they stand before me side by
+side—never to perch upon a top shelf any more—I feel that I have done
+myself, my friend and them good service by having taken pity on their
+loneliness and launched them on a united career of happiness and
+usefulness. As things stood, neither was of any use to anybody; their
+union has made it possible for each to fulfill its destiny.
+
+Let it be distinctly understood that I am not writing of _single_
+volumes. A single volume is not an _odd_ volume. As I sit here at my
+desk and survey my shelves, I see at a glance that many of the books are
+complete in one volume. It would be the height of absurdity for me to
+take one such book, say _Pilgrim's Progress_, and another such book, say
+_Pickwick Papers_, and declare them _Volumes One_ and _Two_ for the mere
+sake of pairing them off. Neither the publisher's assistant nor the
+minister is vested with authority to mate the books after so arbitrary a
+fashion. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ is a single volume, and the _Pickwick
+Papers_ is a single volume; and it is better for them to do the work
+that they were sent into the world to do as single volumes, rather than
+to enter into an alliance that will make them each ridiculous and
+stultify them both. I am not arguing for the celibacy of the clergy or
+for the celibacy of the laity; how could I consistently adopt such a
+line of reasoning immediately after having celebrated the marriage of
+the _Fosters_? I am simply telling all the single volumes in my
+study—who are looking a little downcast and unhappy now that the
+excitement of the wedding is past—that _single_ volumes are not _odd_
+volumes. It is very nice, of course, to be happily mated; but it is
+quite possible for a solitary life to be a very useful one. Robert Louis
+Stevenson would have gone further. In his _Virginibus Puerisque_ he as
+good as says that no man can be a hero after he is married. The fact
+that he has a home of his own, and is surrounded by love and tenderness
+and thoughtful care, militates against the culture of the sterner
+virtues. 'If comfortable,' Stevenson says, 'marriage is not heroic. It
+inevitably narrows and damps the spirit of generous men. In marriage a
+man becomes stark and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his
+moral being. The air of the fireside withers up all the fine wildings of
+the husband's heart. He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to
+prefer comfort and happiness to anything else on earth, his wife
+included. Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; to-day his
+first duty is to his family,' and is fulfilled in large measure by
+laying down vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable parent.
+Twenty years ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism; now
+he is fit for neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without
+restraint; for you will not waken him.
+
+In his references to women, Stevenson does not speak quite so
+confidently. 'It is true,' he says, 'that some of the merriest and most
+genuine of women are old maids, and that those old maids, and wives who
+are unhappily married, have often most of the motherly touch. And this
+would seem to show, even for women, the same narrowing influence in
+comfortable married life.' Yet, on the other hand, he feels that
+marriage affects a woman differently. It makes greater demands upon her.
+The very comfort which is the husband's peril is largely the fruit of
+her thoughtfulness, her industry and her unselfishness. With wifehood,
+too, comes motherhood; and motherhood, side by side with felicities that
+only mothers know, inflicts a ceaseless discipline of suffering and
+self-denial. 'For women,' Stevenson admits, 'there is less danger.
+Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out so much more in life,
+and puts her in the way of so much freedom and usefulness that, whether
+she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss the benefit.' And he sums up
+by advising you, 'If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good
+bachelor and a good wife.' Since, however, if all women became good
+wives, all men could not remain good bachelors, it is obvious that
+Stevenson is crying for the moon. But he has said enough to dispel the
+gloomy and downcast looks that disfigured the countenances of all my
+single volumes immediately after the wedding. Single volumes are
+certainly not odd volumes; they are complete in themselves; and we are
+all very glad of them.
+
+But there are odd volumes. Charles Wagner says that 'in certain shelters
+for old people, where husbands and wives may pass a tranquil old age
+together, a very expressive term is used to designate one who is left
+alone. The bereft solitary is called _an odd volume_. How
+appropriate—like a book astray from its companion tome! Odd volumes
+indeed, those who have hitherto been one of two inseparables! They
+celebrated their silver and golden weddings, and suddenly find
+themselves desolate. They seem like guests left behind at the end of the
+feast or the play; the lights are out, the curtain is down; they wander
+about in the emptiness like souls in torment, possessed with the idea of
+continually searching for something they have lost. They hardly refrain
+from asking "Have you seen my husband?" "Where shall I find my wife?"
+Odd volumes, these!' And you may find them in palaces as well as in
+almshouses. Did we not all hear the cry that rang through the halls of
+Windsor on the day on which the Prince Consort passed away? 'I have no
+one now to call me "Victoria"!' And there are others. They knew no
+golden wedding, no silver wedding, no wedding at all; and yet felt
+themselves mated. Some, like Evangeline and Gabriel—and like my two
+_Fosters_—are separated by distance and ignorance of each other's
+whereabouts. Some, like Drumsheugh and Marget Howe, are separated by the
+iron hand of circumstance; some are kept apart by cruel
+misunderstandings and mistaken judgments; and some—
+
+ Women there are on earth, most sweet and high,
+ Who lose their own, and walk bereft and lonely,
+ Loving that one lost heart until they die
+ Loving it only.
+
+ And so they never see beside them grow
+ Children, whose coming is like breath of flowers;
+ Consoled by subtler loves than angels know
+ Through childless hours.
+
+ Faithful in life, and faithful unto death,
+ Such souls, in sooth, illume with lustre splendid
+ That glimpsed, glad land wherein, the Vision saith,
+ Earth's wrongs are ended.
+
+The purest spirit that ever walked this earth of ours was—I say it
+reverently—an odd volume. I do not mean that He was a single volume: I
+mean far more than that. He felt that He was not single: He was not
+complete in Himself. In some wonderful and mystical way, Deity and
+Humanity were odd volumes; volumes that were intended to supplement and
+complete each other; volumes that had become alienated and torn asunder.
+The amazing thing about the Scriptures is that, in both Testaments, they
+employ the very phraseology of mating and marriage. The quest that led
+to the Cross is the quest of the lover for His betrothed; and the
+consummation of all things is to be a marriage supper—the Marriage
+Supper of the Lamb. And it may be that, in the larger, the lesser is
+included. It may be that when Deity and Humanity, so long estranged, are
+at length perfectly united, other odd volumes will find their mates and
+the isolations of this life be swallowed up in the glad reunions of the
+life everlasting.
+
+
+
+
+ II—O'ER CRAG AND TORRENT
+
+
+ I
+
+Lexie Drummond had a place of her own in the hearts of the Mosgiel
+people. To begin with, she was lonely; and lonely folk have a remarkable
+way of exacting secret homage. Lexie worked at a loom in the woollen
+factory, and lived by herself in one of the factory cottages near by. I
+wish you could have seen it. The door invariably stood open, even when
+Lexie was away at her work. Everything was faultlessly natty and clean.
+An enormous tabby cat, 'Matey,' purred on the mat, while a golden canary
+sang bravely from his cage in the creeper just outside the door. Lexie
+had a trim little garden, in which she grew lavender and mignonette,
+roses and carnations. Lexie's white carnations always took the prize at
+our local Flower Show. Lexie mothered Mosgiel. If anybody was in
+trouble, she would be sure to drop in; and, in cases of serious
+sickness, she would often stay the night. Some people would deny that
+Lexie was beautiful; yet she had a loveliness peculiar to herself. She
+was tall, finely-built, and wonderfully strong. When Roger Gunton, the
+heaviest man on the plain, was seized with sudden illness, and his body
+was racked with excruciating pain, Lexie alone could turn him from side
+to side, and he would allow nobody else to touch him. If her face lacked
+the vivacity and sparkle of more voluptuous beauties, it possessed,
+nevertheless, a quiet gravity, a serious winsomeness, that rendered it
+extremely attractive. The furrows in her face, and the strands of grey
+in her hair, made her look older than she really was. Everybody knew
+Lexie's age; her name was a perpetual reminder of the number of her
+years. For, in an unguarded moment, she had once revealed the
+circumstance that she was born on the day on which the Princess of
+Wales—afterwards Queen Alexandra—was married, and she was named after
+the royal bride. Mosgiel never forgot personal details of that kind. In
+addition to all this, Mosgiel vaguely suspected that Lexie carried a
+secret in her breast. She came to Mosgiel only a few years before I did;
+and everybody felt that her previous history was involved in tantalizing
+mystery.
+
+
+ II
+
+It was Friday night. In the dining-room at the Mosgiel manse we were
+enjoying a quiet evening by the fire. I was lounging in an armchair with
+a novel. I could afford to be restful, for, that week, I had but one
+sermon to prepare. On the approaching Sunday, the anniversary of the
+Sunday school was to be celebrated; in the morning John Broadbanks and I
+were exchanging pulpits in honor of the occasion; and, availing myself
+of a minister's immemorial prerogative, I had decided to preach an old
+sermon at Silverstream. All at once we were startled by the ringing of
+the front door bell. It was the Sunday school superintendent.
+
+'We are in an awful hole,' he exclaimed, after having discussed the
+weather, the health of our respective families, and a few other
+inevitable preliminaries. 'Lexie Drummond has been taken ill, and the
+doctor won't hear of her leaving the house for a week or two. She has
+been preparing the children for their part-songs, and has the whole
+programme at her fingers' ends; I don't know how on earth we are going
+to manage without her.'
+
+I promised to run down and see Lexie about it first thing in the
+morning; and did so. Lexie was confined to her bed, and old Janet
+Davidson was nursing her. 'Matey' was curled up close to his mistress's
+feet, while the canary was singing blithely from his cage near the open
+window. I saw at a glance that Lexie had been crying, and I attributed
+her grief to anxiety and disappointment in connection with the
+anniversary. She quickly undeceived me.
+
+'You'll never notice that I'm not there,' she said, with a watery smile.
+'The children know their parts thoroughly, and Bella Christie, who has
+been helping me, is as familiar with the program as I am.'
+
+I assured her that we should miss her sadly; but expressed my relief
+that everything had been so well arranged.
+
+'And now, Lexie,' I said, as I took her hand in parting, 'you must worry
+no more about it; we will do our very best to make it pass off well.'
+
+'Oh,' she replied, quickly, recognizing in my words a reference to her
+tell-tale eyes, 'it wasn't the anniversary that I was worrying about;
+indeed, it was silly of me to cry at all!' And, to show how extremely
+silly it was, she broke, with womanish perversity, into a fresh outburst
+of tears.
+
+'She has something she wants to tell you,' Janet interposed, 'but she
+doesn't like to.'
+
+Lexie pretended to look vexed at the old lady's garrulity; but I fancied
+that I detected, behind the frown, a look of real relief.
+
+'Some other time,' she said. 'Good-bye, I shall think of you all
+to-morrow!' Janet opened the door and I left her.
+
+
+ III
+
+The anniversary passed off happily; Lexie was soon herself again; and, a
+fortnight later, I saw her in her old place at church. We knew that she
+would insist on taking her class in the afternoon; so, to save her the
+long walk home, we took her to the manse to dinner.
+
+'Several of the teachers have been telling me of the address that you
+gave on the evening of the Sunday school anniversary,' she said, on our
+way to the manse. 'I wish you would let me see the manuscript.'
+
+'I can do better than that,' I replied. 'The address was printed in
+yesterday's _Taieri Advocate_. I have several copies to spare if you
+care to have one.'
+
+On arrival at the manse she insisted on going round the garden and
+admiring the flowers before composing herself on the sofa in the
+dining-room. I gave her the paper I had promised her, and hurried away
+to prepare for dinner. When I returned a few minutes later the paper was
+lying on the floor beside her, and she was crying as if her heart would
+break. By a supreme effort she regained her self-possession, promised to
+explain in the afternoon, and, in obedience to the summons, took her
+place at table.
+
+During dinner I mentally reviewed the address which had so strangely
+reopened the fountains of her grief. It was the address which, under the
+title 'The Little Palace Beautiful,' appears in _The Golden Milestone_.
+It begins: 'There are only four children in the wide, wide world, and
+each of us is the parent of at least one of them.' The first of the four
+is _The Little Child that Never Was_. 'He is,' the address says, 'an
+exquisitely beautiful child. He is the child of all lonely men and
+lonely women, the child of their dreams and their fancies, the child
+that will never be born. He is the son of the solitary.' And the address
+goes on to quote from Ada Cambridge's _Virgin Martyrs_:
+
+ Every wild she-bird has nest and mate in the warm April weather,
+ But a captive woman, made for love, no mate, no nest, has she.
+ In the spring of young desire, young men and maids are wed together,
+ And the happy mothers flaunt their bliss for all the world to see;
+ Nature's sacramental feast for them—an empty board for me.
+
+ Time, that heals so many sorrows, keeps mine ever freshly aching,
+ Though my face is growing furrowed and my brown hair turning white.
+ Still I mourn my irremediable loss, asleep or waking;
+ Still I hear my son's voice calling 'Mother' in the dead of night,
+ And am haunted by my girl's eyes that will never see the light.
+
+As the address came back to me, I began to understand. I remembered what
+the gossips said about the mystery in Lexie's life. What was it, I
+wondered, that she meant to tell me after dinner?
+
+
+ IV
+
+'You don't know me!' she cried passionately, when, once more, we found
+ourselves alone together. 'You treat me as if I were a good woman; you
+let me work at the church, and you bring me into your home; but you
+don't know me; really, really, you don't! I have committed a great sin,
+a very great sin; and I am suffering for it; and others are suffering
+for it.' She paused, as if wondering how to begin her story, and then
+started afresh.
+
+'I was brought up in the country,' she said, 'not far from Hokitui. My
+parents both died when I was a little girl; my guardians followed them a
+few years ago; so that now I am quite alone. At school I became very
+fond of Davie Bannerman, and he made no secret of his partiality for me.
+He used to bring me something—an apple or a cake or a picture or some
+sweets—every day. When I was nineteen we became engaged and were both
+very happy about it. Everybody in the Hokitui district loved Davie; he
+was handsome and good-natured; I used to think his laugh the grandest
+music I had ever heard. But I was proud, terribly proud. And, being
+proud, I was selfish. And, being selfish, I was jealous. Davie was good
+to everybody; yet I could not bear to see him paying attention to
+anybody but myself. He was a member of the Hokitui church, and used to
+spend a good deal of time there. I had no interest in such things in
+those days, and I was angry with him for neglecting me. But most of all
+was I jealous of Sadie McKay. Sadie was his cousin; she was one of the
+church girls; and I hated to think, when he was not with _me_, that he
+was with _her_. Davie always took my scoldings merrily, and quickly
+coaxed me into a better mind. And I dare say that all would have gone
+well but for the accident that spoiled everything.
+
+'Sadie was riding in from the farm one morning when, on the outskirts of
+Hokitui, she met a traction engine. Her horse bolted, and was soon out
+of control. As luck would have it, Davie was standing at a shop door
+near the township corner, and saw the horse galloping madly towards him.
+He rushed into the road and managed to check the animal before Sadie was
+thrown; but, in doing so, he was hurled to the ground, and the horse
+trod on his right arm, crushing it. He lay in the hospital for nearly
+two months; but I never went near him. When he left the hospital he
+wrote to me. It was a pitiful scrawl, written with his left hand; his
+right was amputated. "I have had a heavy loss," he said, "and I do not
+know how I can manage without my arm; but now I must suffer a still
+heavier loss, and I do not know how I can live without _you_. But it
+would not be right for me to burden you, and you must find somebody
+else, Lexie, who can care for you better than I can." I returned the
+engagement ring, and that was the end of it. If he had lost his arm in
+any other way I could have endured life-long poverty with him; but to
+have lost his arm for Sadie!' She paused and seemed to be looking out of
+the window, but I knew that her story was not finished.
+
+'A few months later I took a situation in Ashburton. There I met, at a
+party, a young Englishman—Horace Latchford—who took a fancy to me. He
+was visiting New Zealand for the sake of his health. He told me that he
+owned a large estate in Devonshire, and would make me a perfect queen.
+During his stay—a period of about four months—life was one long
+frolic. Six months later he sent for me to go to him; and I went. But my
+eyes were soon opened. There was no estate in Devonshire; Horace was
+often intoxicated when he came to see me; and, instead of getting
+married, I returned to New Zealand in disgust. I came to Mosgiel, partly
+because I knew that I could get good work in the factory, and partly
+because I knew that nobody here would know me. Since I returned from
+England, ten years ago, I have only met one person who knew me in the
+old days at Hokitui. I was spending a holiday at Moeraki, and she was
+staying at the same boarding-house. I did not tell her that I had
+settled at Mosgiel; but she told me that none of the Bannermans were now
+living at Hokitui. Davie, she said, was the first to leave. He went to
+one of the cities to learn a profession that did not imperatively demand
+the use of two hands.' She paused again, and I waited.
+
+'When I came to Mosgiel,' she went on, 'I got in the way of coming to
+the church. I became deeply impressed, and you received me into
+membership. And, every day since, as I have done little things, and
+taken little duties, in connection with the work, I have come to
+understand Davie as I never understood him in the old days. I hated his
+fondness for the church. And, every day now, my sin seems to be more and
+more terrible. Just lately it has been with me night and day. And when I
+read your address my punishment seemed greater than I could bear. I have
+prayed thousands of times that the dreadful tangle might be unravelled.
+I have not prayed selfishly; I could be perfectly contented if only I
+knew that Davie is happy, and that his faith in God and womanhood has
+not been shaken by my wickedness. We sang _Lead, Kindly Light_ in church
+this morning. Do you think that God really guides us? Does He put us
+right even when we have done wrong? Will He straighten things out? I
+would give anything to be quite sure! I seem to be in a maze, and can
+find no way out of it!'
+
+
+ V
+
+It seemed an infinite relief to Lexie to have told me her story. She was
+much more often at the manse after that; a new bond seemed to have
+sprung up between us. I fancied that there came into Lexie's face a
+deeper peace and a greater content. The peace was, however, rudely
+broken. About two years after Lexie had unburdened her soul to me, I
+opened the paper one morning and confronted a startling announcement.
+The personal paragraphs contained the statement that '_Mr. David
+Bannerman, the brilliant Auckland solicitor, has been appointed Lecturer
+in Common Law at the Otago University._' There followed a brief outline
+of the new professor's career which left no shadow of doubt as to his
+identity. I particularly noticed that there was no reference to his
+marriage. What, if anything, was to be done? The Otago University was in
+Dunedin, only ten miles from Mosgiel. Ought I to allow these two people
+to drift on, perhaps for years, eating their hearts out within a few
+miles of each other? Was it not due to Davie that he should know that
+Lexie was at Mosgiel? He might desire to _seek_ her; or he might desire
+to _avoid_ her; in either case the information would be of value. I
+stated the position in this way to Lexie, but she would not hear of my
+taking any action. After a while, however, she agreed to my writing,
+telling the professor-elect that I knew of her whereabouts. I added that
+she was universally loved and honored for her fine work in the church
+and in the district. I enclosed a copy of 'The Little Palace Beautiful,'
+and mentioned the fact that I had once caught her weeping bitterly as
+she read it. It took four days for a mail from Mosgiel to reach
+Auckland. After a long talk with Lexie, I posted my letter on a Sunday
+evening. On Friday afternoon I received a reply-paid telegram: '_Wire
+lady's address immediately._'
+
+The new professor was married three months after entering upon the
+duties of his chair at the University; and, when I last saw her, Lexie
+was enthroned in the center of a charming little circle. I received a
+letter from her yesterday—the letter that suggested this record. She
+tells me, with pardonable pride, that her eldest boy has matriculated
+and also joined the church.
+
+'I am getting to be an old woman now,' she says, 'and I spend a lot of
+time in looking backward. Isn't it wonderful? It all came right after
+all! But for the accident, Davie would never have been a professor; and,
+if we had been married in the old days, I should only have been a drag
+and a hindrance. As it is, we have passed o'er moor and fen, o'er crag
+and torrent; but the Kindly Light that I once doubted has led us all the
+way!'
+
+
+
+
+ III—THE PRETENDER
+
+
+ I
+
+'_Let's pretend!_' cried Jean.
+
+They were enjoying a romp after tea; but the game had been suddenly
+interrupted.
+
+'How can we drown him when there's no water?' asked Ernest, looking
+wonderfully wise.
+
+'Oh, let's pretend the lawn's the water!' replied Jean, brushing aside
+with impatience so trifling a difficulty.
+
+_Let's pretend!_ I used to wonder why Bonnie Prince Charlie was called
+the Pretender, as though he enjoyed some monopoly in that regard. We are
+all pretenders. Some, perhaps, are more skilful than others. Jean was
+especially clever. One day a lady called and gave her a beautiful bunch
+of flowers. Ernest was particularly fond of flowers, and thought that he
+could capture them by guile.
+
+'I say, Jean,' he cried, 'let's have a game! We'll 'tend the flowers are
+mine!'
+
+'All right,' Jean replied, with a sly twinkle, 'and you 'tend you've got
+'em!'
+
+Precisely! There is no end to the possibilities of pretending. It is the
+one game of which we never grow tired. We learn to play it as soon as we
+are out of the cradle and it still fascinates us as we totter on the
+brink of the grave. Indeed, as H. C. Bunner shows, childhood and age
+often play the game together. Look at this!
+
+ It was an old, old, old, old lady,
+ And a boy who was half-past three;
+ And the way that they played together
+ Was beautiful to see.
+
+ She couldn't go running and jumping,
+ And the boy no more could he,
+ For he was a pale little fellow,
+ With a thin, little twisted knee.
+
+ They sat in the yellow sunlight,
+ Out under the maple tree;
+ And the game that they played I'll tell you,
+ Just as it was told to me.
+
+ It was Hide-and-Seek they were playing,
+ Though you'd never have known it to be—
+ With an old, old, old, old lady,
+ And a boy with a twisted knee.
+
+The boy would bend down his face, close his eyes, and guess where she
+was hiding. He was allowed three guesses. She was in the china-closet!
+Wrong! Well, she was in the chest in Papa's bedroom—the chest with the
+queer old key! Wrong again; but warmer! Well, then, she was in the
+clothes-press! It was his third guess, and it was right. In the
+clothes-press she was! It was his turn to hide and Granny's turn to
+guess!
+
+ Then she covered her face with her fingers,
+ Which were wrinkled and white and wee;
+ And she guessed where the boy was hiding,
+ With a one and a two and a three.
+
+ And they never had stirred from their places
+ Right under the maple tree,
+ This old, old, old, old lady
+ And the boy with the lame little knee.
+ This dear, dear, dear, old lady
+ And the boy who was half-past three.
+
+It is the oldest game in the world; it was played—just as it is played
+to-day—before any other game was dreamed of, and the children of
+to-morrow will be playing it when the games of to-day are all forgotten.
+It is the most universal game in the world; it is played in Pekin just
+as it is played in London; it is played in Mysore just as it is played
+in New York; it is played in Timbuctoo just as we play it here in
+Melbourne. The rules of the game never alter with the period or change
+with the place. It is equally popular in all grades of society. The
+royal children play it in the palace-grounds and the street urchins play
+it in the alleys and the slums. For the beauty of it is, that it needs
+no paraphernalia or tackle or gear; you have not to buy a bat or a ball,
+a racket or a net; you do not require special grounds or courts or
+links. The 'old, old, old, old lady,' and 'the boy with the twisted
+knee' take it into their heads to have a game; and, then and there,
+without moving an inch or getting a thing, they set to work and play it!
+Jean cries, 'Let's pretend!' and straightway everybody is pretending!
+
+'Let's pretend!' cried Jean. There was nothing original in the
+suggestion. If the words are not actually a quotation from Shakespeare,
+it is perfectly certain that Shakespeare uttered them. They voice the
+very spirit of the drama. The play and the pantomime are all a matter of
+pretending. It happened last evening that I had an appointment in the
+city. I had promised to meet a friend on the Town Hall steps at
+half-past seven. I was early; it was a delicious summer's evening, and I
+enjoyed watching the crowd. The crowd is always worth watching, but at
+that hour the crowd is at its best. The strain of the day is over and
+the weariness of night has not yet come. The crowd is fresh, vivacious,
+light-hearted. As I stood upon the steps, I saw young men and maidens
+keeping their trysts with each other; they were making no effort to
+conceal their joy in each other's society; as they tripped off together,
+they were laughingly anticipating the entertainment to which they were
+hastening. Gentlemen in evening dress, accompanied by handsome women,
+beautifully gowned, swept by in sumptuous cars that were brightly lit
+and daintily adorned with choicest flowers. Here and there, in this
+unbroken tide of traffic, I caught a glimpse of features more quaint and
+of garments more fantastic. I saw a troubadour, a viking, a
+knight-errant, a pierrot and a Spanish cavalier. I saw a gipsy queen, a
+geisha-girl, a milkmaid, an Egyptian princess, and a lady of the court
+of Louis the Fourteenth. They were on their way to a fancy dress ball at
+Government House. I stood entranced as this pageant of pleasure swept
+past me, and a strange thought seized my fancy. I reminded myself that,
+in any one of ten thousand cities, I might witness, at this same hour,
+an identically similar spectacle. If I could have taken my stand in the
+Strand in London, or in Princes Street, Edinburgh, or in Sackville
+Street, Dublin, or in Broadway, New York, or in the main thoroughfare of
+any city in Christendom, I should have gazed upon a scene which would
+have seemed like a mere reflection of this one. And then I asked myself
+for an interpretation of it all. What did it all mean—this throng of
+happy pedestrians laughing and chatting as they surged along the
+pavements; this ceaseless procession of gay vehicles in the
+brilliantly-illumined roadway?
+
+
+ II
+
+It is a tribute to our human passion for pretending. His Excellency
+stands in the reception hall at Government House and laughingly welcomes
+his guests. They are pretenders, every one. The troubadour is no
+troubadour; the viking, no viking; the gipsy, no gipsy; and the
+milkmaid, no milkmaid. They are just pretending and they have gone to
+all this trouble and to all this expense that the full-orbed joy of
+pretending may be for one crowded hour their own. And the other
+people—the gentlemen in evening dress; the ladies richly begowned and
+bejewelled; the surging crowd upon the path. They are making their way
+to the theatres. They are going to see the great actors and actresses
+pretend. One actor will pretend to be a cripple and another will pretend
+to be a king; one actress will pretend to be an empress and one will
+pretend to be a slave; and the better the actors and the actresses
+pretend the better these people will like it.
+
+For the people love pretending; that is how the theatre came to be. Like
+Topsy, it had no father and no mother. It sprang from our insatiable
+fondness for make-believe. In his _Short History of the English People_
+John Richard Green says that 'it was the people itself that created the
+stage'; and he graphically describes their initial ventures. 'The
+theatre,' he says, 'was the courtyard of an inn or a mere booth such as
+is still seen at a country fair; the bulk of the audience sat beneath
+the open sky; a few covered seats accommodated the wealthier spectators
+while patrons and nobles sprawled upon the actual boards.' In those days
+the audience had to do its part of the pretending. If the spectators saw
+a few flowers they accepted the hint and imagined that the play was
+being enacted in a beautiful garden. In a battle scene the arrival of an
+army was represented by a stampede across the stage of a dozen clumsy
+sceneshifters brandishing swords and bucklers. In order to assist the
+audience to muster appropriate emotions, the stage was draped with black
+when a tragedy was about to be presented and with blue when the
+performance was to portray life in some lighter vein. What is this but a
+group of children playing at charades, at dressing-up, at 'just
+pretending?' Children pretend in order that they may escape from the
+limitations of reality into the infinitudes of romance. Once they begin
+to pretend all life is open to them. They have uttered the magic
+'Sesame' and every gate unbars. Their seniors invade the same realm for
+the same reason. This is the significance of those crowded streets last
+night.
+
+
+ III
+
+Now this brings me to a very interesting point. Is it wrong to pretend?
+In the greatest sermon ever preached—the Sermon on the Mount—Jesus
+called certain people hypocrites. But, did He, by doing so, condemn all
+forms of hypocrisy? If so, the people upon whom I looked last night were
+all of them earning for themselves His malediction. And so were the
+people gathered in the quaint old English courtyard. And so was Jean
+when she called to her playmates: 'Let's pretend!' And so was 'the old,
+old, old, old lady' and 'the boy with the twisted knee.' For a
+hypocrite—as the very word suggests—is simply a pretender. A hypocrite
+is one who colors his face, or dresses up or acts a part. Does it
+follow, therefore, because Jesus condemned the Pharisees and called them
+hypocrites, that all pretenders fall beneath His frown? To ask the
+question is to answer it. Fancy Jesus frowning at Jean! Fancy Jesus
+frowning at 'the old, old, old, old lady' and 'the boy with the twisted
+knee!' Why Jesus Himself _pretended_ on occasions. He behaved towards
+the Syro-Phœnician woman as though He had no sympathy with her in her
+distress. He saw the disciples in trouble on the lake; and, walking on
+the water, He made as though He would have passed them by. When, after
+journeying with two of His disciples to Emmaus, He reached the door of
+their home, He made as though He would have gone further! 'He made as
+though!' 'He made as though!' 'He made as though!' The feints of Deity!
+
+Let a man but keep his eyes wide open and he will see some very lovable
+hypocrites, some very amiable pretenders, in the course of a day's
+march. I have been reading _The Butterfly Man_. And here in the early
+part of the book is a scene in which a child and a criminal take part.
+Mary Virginia shows John Flint a pasteboard box. It contains a
+dark-colored and rather ugly grey moth with his wings turned down.
+
+'You wouldn't think him pretty, would you?' asked the child.
+
+'No,' replied John Flint disappointedly, 'I shouldn't!'
+
+Mary Virginia smiled, and, picking up the little moth, held his body,
+very gently, between her finger tips. He fluttered, spreading out his
+grey wings; and then John saw the beautiful pansy-like underwings, and
+the glorious lower pair of scarlet velvet, barred and bordered with
+black.
+
+'I got to thinking,' said the girl, thoughtfully, lifting her clear and
+candid eyes to John Flint's, 'I got to thinking, when he threw aside his
+plain grey cloak and showed me his lovely underwings, that he's like
+some people. You couldn't be expected to know what was underneath, could
+you? So you pass them by, thinking how ordinary and uninteresting and
+ugly they are, and you feel rather sorry for them—because you don't
+know. But if you once get close enough to touch them—why, then you find
+out! You only think of the dust-colored outside, and all the while the
+underwings are right there, waiting for you to find them! Isn't it
+wonderful and beautiful? And the best of it all is, it's true!'
+
+In these artless sentences, tripping, so easily from a child's tongue,
+Marie Oemler sums up the burden of her book. The incident is a parable.
+For John Flint was _himself_ the drab and ugly moth. In the opening
+chapters of the story, he is a horrible object—coarse, brutal,
+loathsome, revolting. But there were underwings. And gradually, beneath
+the touch of gentle influences, those underwings became visible; and, in
+the later stages of the story, all men admired and revered and loved the
+beautiful nobleness of the Butterfly Man.
+
+
+ IV
+
+There are people, I suppose, who trick themselves out to make themselves
+appear much prettier or much nicer or—worse still—much holier than
+they really are. 'Let's pretend!' they cry; and there is something
+sinister in their pretending. It is against these people—and against
+them only—that the anathemas of the Sermon on the Mount are directed.
+
+Again, there are people who, like Ian Maclaren's Drumtochty folk, go
+through life dreading lest their underwings should be seen, their
+virtues exposed, their goodness discovered. They bear themselves
+distantly and give an impression of aloofness; you would never dream,
+unless you got to know them, that their dispositions were so sweet,
+their characters so strong, their souls so saintly.
+
+I am told that a great actor achieves his triumphs through contemplating
+so closely the character that he impersonates. His own individuality
+becomes, for the time being, absorbed in another. Henry Irving forgets
+that he is Henry Irving and believes himself to be Macbeth. I have read
+of One who, seeming to possess no form nor comeliness, nor any beauty
+that men should desire Him, was nevertheless the chiefest among ten
+thousand and the altogether lovely. It may be that these amiable
+pretenders of whom we are all so fond have contemplated so closely _His_
+character that they have unconsciously caught His spirit and acquired
+His ways. They cleverly conceal the rainbow-tinted underwings, beneath a
+coat of drab; but, having once caught a glimpse of their glory, we ever
+after feel it shining through the grey.
+
+
+
+
+ IV—ACHMED'S INVESTMENT
+
+
+ I
+
+Gilt-edged securities are all very well; but men do not make their
+fortunes out of gilt-edged securities. Gilt-edged securities may suit
+those whose circumstances compel them to husband jealously their meagre
+savings; but the big dividends are made out of the risky speculations.
+There are investments in which a man cannot, by any possibility, lose
+his treasure, and in which he must, with mathematical certainty, reap a
+modest margin of profit. And, on the other hand, there are investments
+in which a man may, quite easily, lose every penny that he hazards, but
+in which he may, quite conceivably, make a perfectly golden haul. An
+Eastern sage with a well-established reputation for wisdom urges us to
+venture fearlessly at times upon these more perilous but more profitable
+ventures, '_Cast thy bread_,' he says, '_upon the waters._' The man who
+believes in gilt-edged securities will prefer to cast it upon _the
+land_. The land is a fixture. The land does not float away or fly away
+or fade away. You find it where you left it. It is stable, substantial,
+secure. Because of its fixity, men trust it. For thousands of years it
+was the bank of the nations. Men hid their treasures in fields, as many
+a lucky finder afterwards discovered to his delight. But the waters!
+_Cast thy bread upon the waters!_ The waters are the very emblem of all
+that is fickle, variable and inconstant. They ebb and they flow; they
+rise and they fall; they are restless, unstable, fluctuating. They suck
+down into their dark depths the treasures confided to their care and
+leave no trace upon the surface of the hiding-place in which the booty
+lies concealed. The waters! _Cast thy bread upon the waters!_ The man
+who believes only in gilt-edged securities shakes his head. This is no
+investment for him. But the man who can afford to take desperate hazards
+pricks up his ears.
+
+'The waters!' he exclaims. 'He tells me to cast my bread upon the
+waters! It is the last place in the world to which I should have thought
+of casting it! But I shall venture!'
+
+And he becomes immensely rich in consequence.
+
+
+ II
+
+Achmed Ali is a young Egyptian farmer. His lands are in the Nile Valley,
+and, in the flood-time, two thirds of his property is under water. But
+flood-time is also sowing-time, and what is he to do? He can, of course,
+sow that portion of his land that stands above the waterline. And he
+does. This is his gilt-edged security. He is practically certain of
+getting back in the late summer the grain that he sows in the spring,
+with a fair proportion of increase in addition. But on that narrow
+margin of profit Achmed Ali cannot support wife and children and pay all
+the expenses of his farm. He turns wistfully towards the river. He
+surveys the section of his farm over which the waters are sluggishly
+drifting. Sometimes they recede, leaving a broad strip of shining,
+gurgling mud. He is tempted to scatter his seed over that belt of ooze
+at once. He waits a few hours, however, hoping that the retreat of the
+waters will continue, and that, in a few days, he will be able to carry
+his seed-basket over the whole area that is now submerged. But his hopes
+are soon shattered. The swaying waters come welling in again and even
+lick the edges of the land he has already sown. If only he could get at
+those inundated fields! The land is soft and moist! It has been enriched
+and fertilized by the action of the flood-waters. Saturated by the
+moisture in the soil, and warmed by the rays of the tropical sun, the
+seed would germinate and spring up as if by magic; and the harvest would
+beggar that of the land that the river has never touched! But these are
+castles in the air. The flood is there. It shows no sign of withdrawing.
+He knows that, after it has gone, it will be a day or two before he can
+cross the soft, sticky, slimy soil with his basket. And by that time the
+season may have passed. It will be too late to sow.
+
+It is to Achmed Ali that our Eastern sage is speaking. 'Why wait for the
+flood?' he asks. '_Cast thy bread upon the waters!_ Much good
+grain—grain that thou canst ill afford to lose—will float away and
+never more be seen. Much of it will be greedily devoured by fish and
+water-fowl. But what of that? Much of it will drift about on the shallow
+waters, and be deposited, as they recede, on the soft warm mud from
+which they ebb. With thy heavy feet and clumsy form and weighty basket
+thou couldst not cross the soil till long after the waters leave it. Let
+the waters do their work for thee! Turn thy foe into a friend! Make of
+the tyrant a slave! _Cast thy bread upon the waters!_'
+
+It is no gilt-edged security; but Achmed Ali resolves to take the risk.
+
+Among the reeds round the bend of the river his flat-bottomed boat is
+moored. He hurries up to the barn for his basket of seed. He gazes
+almost fondly, upon the precious grain that he is about to invest in
+such a precarious speculation. He bears it down to the boat and pushes
+out on to the shallow waters. A tall ibis, stalking with stately stride
+along the edge of the stream, is startled by the commotion and flies
+away, flapping its wings with slow and measured beat. Achmed is now well
+out upon the river. The flood that had defied him now supports him. He
+feels as the Philistines must have felt when they harnessed Samson to
+their mill. He paddles up to one end of his property and works his way
+down to the other, scattering the seed broadcast as he goes. Then,
+having disposed of every grain, he paddles back to his starting-point
+and ties up his boat. He stands for a moment on the bank watching the
+seed floating hither and thither upon the eddying waters. In some places
+it is still strewn evenly upon the tide; in others it has drifted into
+snakelike formations that curl and straighten themselves out again on
+the surface of the flood. It seems an awful waste. But is it?
+
+In a day or two the waters recede, leaving the saturated seed strewn
+over the oozy soil. It sinks in of its own weight and is quickly lost to
+view. And then Achmed sees the wisdom of the counsel he has followed.
+And in the summer, when he garners a rich harvest from the very lands
+over which his boat had drifted, he blesses that Eastern sage for those
+wise words.
+
+
+ III
+
+In my old Mosgiel days, I was often invited to address evening meetings
+in Dunedin. The trouble lay in the return. A train left Dunedin at
+twenty past nine and there was no other until twenty past ten, or, on
+some nights, twenty past eleven. It was sometimes difficult to leave a
+meeting in time to catch the first of these trains, yet, if I stayed for
+a later one, it meant a midnight arrival at the manse and a woeful sense
+of weariness next morning. On the particular night of which I am now
+thinking, I missed the early train. There was no other until twenty past
+eleven. I sat on the railway platform, feeling very sorry for myself.
+When at length the train started, I found myself sharing with one
+companion a long compartment, with doors at either extremity and seats
+along the sides, capable of accommodating fifty people. He sat at one
+end and I at the other. I expect that I looked to him as woebegone and
+disconsolate as he looked to me. The train rumbled on through the night.
+The light was too dim to permit of reading; the jolting was too great to
+permit of sleeping; and I was just about to record a solemn vow never to
+speak in town again when a curious line of thought captivated me. I
+could not read; I could not sleep; but I could talk! And here, in the
+far corner of the compartment, was another belated unfortunate who could
+neither read nor sleep and who might like to beguile the time with
+conversation! And then it occurred to me not only that I _could_ do it
+but that I _should_ do it. We had been thrown together for an hour in
+this strange way at dead of night; we should probably never meet again
+until the Day of Judgement; what right had I to let him go as though our
+tracks had never crossed at all? Was the great message that, on Sundays,
+I delivered to my Mosgiel people, intended exclusively for them, and was
+it only to be delivered on Sundays? I felt that my Sunday congregation
+was a gilt-edged security; but here was a chance for a rash speculation!
+
+The train stopped at Burnside. I stepped out on to the station and
+walked up and down for a moment inhaling the fresh mountain air. I
+wanted to have all my wits about me and to be at my best. The engine
+whistled, and, on returning to the compartment, I was careful to
+re-enter it by the door near which my companion was sitting, and I took
+the seat immediately opposite to him. I then saw that he was quite a
+young fellow, probably a farmer's son. We soon struck up a pleasant
+conversation, and then, having created an atmosphere, I expressed the
+hope that we were fellow-travellers on life's greater journey.
+
+'It's strange that you should ask me that,' he said, 'I've been thinking
+a lot about such things lately.'
+
+We became so engrossed in our conversation that the train had been
+standing a minute or so at Mosgiel before we realized that we had
+reached the end of our journey. I found that our ways took us in
+diametrically opposite directions. He had a long walk ahead of him.
+
+'Well,' I said, in taking farewell of him, 'you may see your way to a
+decision as you walk along the road. If so, remember that you need no
+one to help you. Lift up your heart to the Saviour; He will understand!'
+
+We parted with a warm handclasp. Long before I reached the manse I was
+biting my lips at having omitted to take his name and address. However,
+like Achmed Ali, I had cast my bread upon the waters.
+
+Five years passed. One Monday morning I was seated in the train for
+Dunedin. The compartment was nearly full. Between Abbotsford and
+Burnside the door at one end of the carriage opened, and a tall, dark
+man came through, handing each passenger a neat little pamphlet. He gave
+me a copy of _Safety, Certainty, and Enjoyment_. I looked up to thank
+him, and, as our eyes met, he recognized me.
+
+'Why,' he exclaimed, 'you're the very man!'
+
+I made room for him to sit beside me. I told him that his face seemed
+familiar, although I could not remember where we had met before.
+
+'Why,' he said, 'don't you remember that night in the train? You told
+me, if I saw my way to a decision, to lift up my heart to the Saviour on
+the road. And I did. I've felt sorry ever since that I didn't ask who
+you were, so that I could come and tell you. But, as the light came to
+me in a railway train, I have always tried to do as much good as
+possible when I have had occasion to travel. I can't _speak_ to people
+as you spoke to me; but I always bring a packet of booklets with me.'
+
+I recalled the inward struggle that preceded my approach that night. I
+remembered bracing myself on the Burnside station for the ordeal. It
+seemed at the time a very rash and risky speculation.
+
+But here was my harvest! I have invested most of my time and energy in
+gilt-edged securities, and, on the whole, I have no reason to be
+dissatisfied with the return that they have yielded me. But I have
+seldom obtained from my gilt-edged securities so handsome a profit as
+that unpromising venture ultimately brought to me.
+
+
+ IV
+
+The only way to keep a thing is to throw it away. The only way to hold
+your money is to invest it. The only way to ensure remembering a poem is
+to keep repeating it to others. If you hear a good story and attempt to
+keep it for your own delectation, you will forget it in a week. Laugh
+over it with every man you meet and it will ripple in your soul for
+years.
+
+It sometimes happens, when I have finished one of these screeds of mine,
+that I feel a fatherly solicitude concerning it. You sometimes grow fond
+of a thing, not because you cherish an inflated conception of its value,
+but because through sheer familiarity, it has become a part of you. So I
+look at these white sheets over which I have been bending for days and
+into which I have poured all my soul. I feel anxious about them. Yet it
+is absurd to keep them. If I store them away I shall soon forget their
+contents and my labor will all be lost. But the printer is six hundred
+miles away. I think of all the hands through which they must pass on
+their way from me to him. I register them at the Post Office, but still
+I think of all the risks. These white sheets of mine are such frail and
+flimsy things; an accident, a fire, and where then would they be? But
+one happy morning I see my screed in print! I feel that I have it at
+last! It is beyond the reach of fire or accident. If _this_ house is
+burned down, I can obtain a copy in _that_ one! I feel that nothing now
+can rob me of the child I brought into being. It is scattered broadcast,
+and, having been scattered broadcast, is at last my very, very own!
+
+The only way to keep a thing is to throw it away. Achmed Ali knows that.
+He looks fondly at the grain in the basket but he knows that he cannot
+keep it in the barn. 'Seeds which mildew in the garner, scattered, fill
+with gold the plain.' And so he casts some of it on the land—his
+gilt-edged security—and gets it back with interest; and he casts the
+rest upon the water—his risky speculation—and gets it back many times
+multiplied.
+
+
+
+
+ V—SATURDAY
+
+
+Saturday is the name, not so much of a day, as of a specific phase of
+human experience. And it is a great phase. We all catch ourselves at odd
+moments living over again some of the unforgettable Saturdays of long
+ago. In actual fact, a man may be lounging in an armchair beside his
+winter fire or sprawling on the lawn on a drowsy summer afternoon. But,
+under such conditions, the actual fact is soon relegated to oblivion. A
+far-away look comes into his eyes, a wayward smile flits over his face,
+and, giving rein to his fancy, he sees landscapes on which his gaze has
+not rested for many a long year. He roams at will among the golden
+Saturdays of auld lang syne. He feels afresh the mighty thrill that
+swept his soul when, after a long heroic struggle, his side won that
+famous match upon a certain village green; he lives again through the
+fierce excitement of a paper-chase that led the hare and hounds over the
+great green hills and down through the dark pine forest in the valley;
+he enjoys once more the birds'-nesting expedition in the winding lane;
+and he sees, as vividly as he saw them at the time, the shining trophies
+that rewarded his fishing excursions to the millponds and trout-streams
+of the outlying countryside. In those far-off days, Saturday was the
+wild romance of the week.
+
+I remember being told by my first schoolmaster that Saturday was named
+after Saturn, and that Saturn was the planet that had rings all round
+it. From that hour, by a singular confusion of ideas, I always thought
+of Saturday as the day that had the rings round it. I somehow associated
+the day with the lady of the nursery rhyme who has rings on her fingers
+and bells on her toes, and who, therefore, has music wherever she goes.
+I liked to think that Saturday moved among the other days of the week in
+such melodious pomp and splendor. The notion intensified the zest with
+which I welcomed the great day. For Saturday was great; it was great in
+its coming and great in its going. It began gloriously and it ended
+gloriously. I do not mean that it ended as it began. By no means. There
+is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon. The glory of
+Saturday's dawn was one glory; the glory of Saturday's dusk was another
+glory. Saturday began like a Red Indian shouting his war-whoop as he
+takes to the trail; it ended like a monk who, in the stillness of his
+cloister, chants his evening hymn.
+
+It takes a boy a minute or two, on waking, to assure himself that it is
+really Saturday. He is not quite sure of himself; the notion seems too
+good to be true. He sits bolt upright; rubs his eyes; and stares about
+him for some confirmation of the joyous suspicion that is bringing the
+blood to his cheeks in excitement. Is it really Saturday? He
+distrusts—and not without cause—the confused sensations of those
+waking moments. He made a mistake once before; he fancied that it was
+Saturday; made all his plans accordingly; and discovered to his disgust
+a few minutes later that it was only Friday after all. That Friday, at
+any rate, was a most unlucky day! But Saturday! With what tingling
+exhilaration and boisterous delight the conviction that it was Saturday
+fastened upon us! Saturday was our day! We raced out after breakfast
+like so many colts turned loose upon the heath. We tossed up our caps
+for the sheer joy of it. Whatever the ordeals of the week had been, we
+forgave all our tyrants and tormentors on Saturday morning. And in that
+gracious and benignant absolution we experienced a foretaste of the
+saintliness with which the great day wore to its close.
+
+For Saturday, however spent, reached its climax in a consciousness of
+virtue so complete and so serene and so beatific as to be almost
+unearthly. Such a delicious content seldom falls within the experience
+of mortals. Saturday night was bath-night; and few sensations in life
+are more delectable than the angelic self-satisfaction that overtakes
+the average boy after having been subjected to the magic discipline of
+hot water and clean sheets. The outward change is wonderful; but the
+inward transformation exceeds it by far. He feels good; looks good;
+smells good; _is_ good. A boy after a bath is at peace with all the
+world. The week may have gone hardly with him. Parents and teachers may
+have shown a vexatious incapacity to see things from a boy's standpoint;
+the proprietors of orchards and gardens may have exhibited—perhaps even
+on Saturday afternoon—a singular inflexibility in their interpretation
+of the laws relating to property; the world as a whole may have behaved
+in a manner wofully inconsiderate and unjust. But on Saturday night,
+under the softening influence of a hot bath and a clean bed, a boy finds
+it in his heart to forgive everything and everybody. A vast charity
+wells up in his soul. As he lays his damp head on his snowy pillow, he
+revokes all his harsh judgements and cancels all his stern resolves. He
+will not run away from home after all! Instead of abandoning his
+unfeeling seniors to their hatred, malice and uncharitableness, he will
+treat them with magnanimity and tolerance; he will give them another
+chance. It is possible—appearances to the contrary
+notwithstanding—that they do not mean to be unsympathetic. They simply
+do not understand. Thinking thus the young saint falls asleep in the
+odor of sanctity—and soap! The more wayward and troublesome he has been
+in the daytime, the more angelic will he appear under these new
+conditions. Watching him as he slumbers, one of the Saturnian rings
+seems to encompass his brow like a halo. Saturday has come to an end!
+
+Now, this saintly young savage of ours will learn, as the years go by,
+that life itself has its Saturday phase. Dr. Chalmers used to say that
+our allotted span of three score years and ten divides itself into seven
+decades corresponding with the seven days of the week. The seventh—the
+stretch of life that opens out before a man on his _sixtieth_
+birthday—is, the doctor used to say, a Sabbatic period. In it, he
+should shake himself free, as far as possible, from the toil and moil of
+life, and give himself to the cultivation of a quiet and restful spirit.
+That being so, it follows that the sixth period—the period that opens
+out before a man on his _fiftieth_ birthday—is the Saturday of life. It
+is a great time, every way. Like the Saturday of the old days, and like
+the Saturday of riper years, it has characteristics peculiarly its own.
+On his fiftieth birthday, if Mr. J. W. Robertson Scott is to be
+believed, a man enters the gates of a new world. It is not of necessity
+a better world or a worse one; it is simply a different one. We seldom
+enter upon a new experience without finding that the change has involved
+us in a few drawbacks and deprivations, as well as in some distinct
+benefits and advantages. The step that a man takes on his fiftieth
+birthday is no exception to this rule. Mr. Robertson Scott caught sight
+of the gates of the new era some time before he actually reached them.
+'In the tram, one evening, about six months ago, a schoolboy rose and
+offered me his seat,' he tells us. The incident startled him. A man who
+is still in the forties does not expect to receive such courtesies. He
+consoled himself, however, with the assumption that the attentive
+schoolboy was probably a boy scout who had suddenly realized that the
+day was closing in without his having done the good deed prescribed for
+each twenty-four hours of the life of the perfect Baden-Powellite. Four
+months later, however, the same thing happened again; and then, shortly
+after, came the fiftieth birthday! Clearly it was Saturday morning!
+
+Now, the striking thing about Mr. Robertson Scott's experience is the
+fact that his attainment of his jubilee appealed to him, not as an end,
+but as a beginning. It was not so much a premonition of senility and
+decay as the entrance upon a fresh phase of life. When Horace Walpole
+wrote to Thomas Gray in 1766, urging him to write more poetry, Gray
+replied that when a man has turned fifty—as he had just done—there is
+nothing for it but to think of finishing. He voiced the feeling of the
+period. In the eighteenth century, a man of fifty was classified among
+the veterans. A hundred years later, a very different conviction held
+the field. Tolstoy tells us that his fiftieth year was the year of his
+greatest awakening and enlightenment; and, in _The Poet at the Breakfast
+Table_, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the old master witness to
+something of a similar kind. His friends are anxious to know how and
+when he acquired his wealth of wisdom; and he is able to reply with
+remarkable precision: 'It was on the morning of my fiftieth birthday
+that the solution of life's great problem came to me. It took me just
+fifty years to find my place in the Eternal Order of Things.' Such
+testimonies go a long way towards vindicating Mr. Robertson Scott's
+assumption that the fiftieth birthday marks rather a new beginning than
+a sad, regretful close. The fiftieth birthday is Saturday morning; and
+who, on Saturday morning, feels that the week is over?
+
+On the contrary, Saturday morning is, to most people, more insistent
+than any other morning in its demands upon their energies. Walk up the
+street on a Saturday afternoon, and you will see your neighbors garbed
+and employed as they are never garbed or employed on any other day. On
+Saturday we weed the garden, mow the lawn and effect the week's repairs.
+On Saturday we attend to a multitude of minor matters for which we have
+had no time during the week. On Saturday we clear up. And on Saturday
+night we are tired. It by no means follows, therefore, that, because a
+man's fiftieth birthday is his Saturday morning, his week's work is
+done. It is indisputable, of course, that a man of fifty has left the
+greater part of life behind him; he may be pardoned if he pauses at
+times to take long and wistful glances along the road that he has
+trodden; it will not be considered strange if, on very slight
+provocation, he drops into a rapture of reminiscence. There is a subtle
+stage in the development of fruit at which, having attained its full
+size, it ripens rapidly. A man enters upon that stage on his fiftieth
+birthday. A shrewd observer has said that, like peaches and pears, we
+grow sweet for awhile before we begin to decay. The Saturday of life is
+sweetening time. We become less harsh in our criticisms, less
+overbearing in our opinions, more considerate towards our contemporaries
+and more sympathetic towards our juniors. The week's work is by no means
+finished. Much remains to be done. But it will be done in a new
+spirit—a Saturday spirit. And if the man of fifty be spared to enjoy
+octogenarian honors, he will smile as he recalls the immaturity and
+unripeness of life's first five decades. It is a poor week that has no
+Saturday and no Sunday in it. To have finished at fifty, an old man will
+tell you, would have meant missing the best.
+
+It has often struck me as an impressive coincidence that it was when Dr.
+Johnson was approaching his fiftieth birthday—life's Saturday
+morning—that he discovered a significance in Saturday that, until then,
+had eluded him. He felt, as we all feel on Saturdays, that the time had
+come to clear up, to put things in their places and to overtake
+neglected tasks. And this is the entry he makes in his Journal:
+
+'Having lived, not without an habitual reverence for the Sabbath, yet
+without that attention to its religious duties which Christianity
+requires: I resolve henceforth—_First_, to rise early on Sabbath
+morning, and, in order to that, to go to sleep early on Saturday night.
+_Second_, to use some more than ordinary devotion as soon as I rise.
+_Third_, to examine into the tenor of my life, and particularly the last
+week, and to mark my advances in religion, or my recessions from it.
+_Fourth_, to read the Scriptures methodically, with such helps as are at
+hand. _Fifth_, to go to church twice. _Sixth_, to read books of
+divinity, either speculative or practical. _Seventh_, to instruct my
+family. _Eighth_, to wear off by meditation any worldly soil contracted
+in the week.'
+
+The significance of this heroic record lies in the resolve that
+Saturday, so far from unfitting him for Sunday, shall lead up to it as a
+stately avenue leads up to a noble entrance-hall. 'I resolve to go to
+sleep early on Saturday night.' Exactly a hundred years after the great
+doctor had inscribed this famous entry on the pages of his Journal,
+Charlotte Elliott wrote her well-known hymn in praise of Saturday:
+
+ Before the Majesty of heaven
+ To-morrow we appear;
+ No honor half so great is given
+ Throughout man's sojourn here.
+
+ The altar must be cleansed to-day,
+ Meet for the offered lamb;
+ The wood in order we must lay,
+ And wait to-morrow's flame.
+
+I have heard scores of sermons on _The Proper Observance of Sunday_;
+and, somehow, I have never been impressed by their utility. One of these
+days some pulpit genius will preach on _The Proper Observance of
+Saturday_, and then, quite conceivably, the new day will dawn.
+
+As I lay down my pen, a pair of experiences rush back upon my mind. The
+one befell me at sea, the other on land.
+
+1. In the course of a voyage from New Zealand to England it became
+necessary—in order to harmonize the clocks and calendars on board with
+the clocks and calendars ashore—to take in an extra day. We awoke one
+morning and it was Saturday; we awoke next morning and it was Saturday
+again! That second Saturday was the strangest day that I have ever
+spent. I never realized the extent to which Saturday leads up to Sunday
+as I realized it that day.
+
+2. I once numbered among my intimate friends a Jewish rabbi. I found his
+society extremely delightful and wonderfully instructive. He often took
+me to his synagogue, showed me its treasures, and initiated me into its
+mysteries. It was all very beautiful and very suggestive. But I
+invariably came away feeling dissatisfied and disappointed. I had been
+gazing upon the emblems and symbols of a Saturday faith. Like that weird
+Saturday on board the _Tongariro_, it was a Saturday that led to a
+Saturday, a Saturday that ushered in nothing holier or sweeter than
+itself.
+
+Saturn with all his rings is grand; but the Sun is grander still! It is
+from the Sun that Saturn derives his brightness and his glory. Ask
+Saturn the secret of his splendor, and it is to the Sun that he
+unhesitatingly points. As it is with these mighty orbs themselves, so is
+it with the days that bear their names. As Samuel Johnson and Charlotte
+Elliott knew so well, it is the glory of Saturday to prepare the way for
+Sunday. Saturday belongs to the Order of St. John the Baptist. John was
+the greatest of all the sons of men, yet it was his mission to clear the
+path for the coming of a greater. The old world's Saturday-Sabbath,
+commemorating a completed Creation, led up to the new world's
+Sunday-Sabbath, commemorating a completed Redemption. The oracles and
+mysteries that I saw in the synagogue, the emblems and expressions of a
+Saturday faith, were sublime. But their sublimity lay in the fact that
+they pointed men to, and prepared men for, a Sunday faith, a faith that
+gathers about a wondrous Cross and an empty tomb, a faith from which
+that Saturday faith, like Saturn bathed in sunlight, derives alike its
+lustre and its fame.
+
+
+
+
+ VI—THE CHIMES
+
+
+It was Christmas Eve—an Australian Christmas Eve. To an Englishman it
+must always seem a weird, uncanny hotch-potch. He never grows accustomed
+to the scorching Christmases that come to him beneath the Southern
+Cross. Southey once declared that, however long a man lives, the first
+twenty years of his life will always represent the biggest half of it.
+That is indisputably so. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
+The first twenty years of life fasten upon our hearts sentiments and
+traditions that will dominate all our days. I spent my first twenty
+Christmases in the old land. I have spent far more than twenty in the
+new. Yet, whenever I find old Father Christmas wiping the perspiration
+from his brow as he wanders among the roses and strawberries of our
+fierce Australian mid-summer, I feel secretly sorry for him. He looks as
+jolly as ever, yet he gives you the impression of having lost his way.
+He seems to be casting about him for snowflakes and icicles.
+
+But, as I was saying, it was Christmas Eve—an Australian Christmas Eve.
+The day had been sultry and trying. After tea I sauntered off across the
+fields to a spot among the fir-trees, at which I can always rely upon
+meeting a few grey squirrels, an old brown 'possum, and some other
+friends of mine. I had scarcely taken my seat on a grassy knoll,
+overlooking a belt of bush, when the laughing-jackasses broke into a
+wild, unearthly chorus in the wooded valley below. And then, a few
+minutes later, the cool evening air was flooded with a torrent of
+harmony that transported me across the years and across the seas. The
+squirrels, the 'possum, and the kookaburras were left leagues and
+leagues behind. From a lofty steeple that crowned a distant crest there
+floated over hill and hollow the pealing and the chiming of the bells.
+
+The magic that slept in the lute of the Pied Piper was as nothing
+compared with the magic of the bells. Beneath the witchery of their
+music, time and space shrivel into nothingness and are no more. We are
+wafted to old familiar places; we see the old familiar faces; we enter
+into fellowship with lands far off and ages long departed. Frank Bullen
+heard our Australian bells. He was only a sailor-boy at the time.
+'Often,' he says, 'I would stand on deck when my ship was anchored in
+Sydney Harbor on Sunday morning, and listen to the church bells playing
+"Sicilian Mariners" with a dull ache at my heart, a deep longing for
+something, I knew not what.' The bells, according to their wont, were
+annihilating time and space. Beneath the enchantment of their minstrelsy
+he sped, as on angels' wings, away from the realities of his rough and
+roving sea-life, into the quiet haven of a tender past. He was back in
+his old seat in a little chapel in Harrow Road. Every Englishman
+overseas will understand.
+
+The bells throw bridges across the yawning chasms of space, and link up
+hearts that stand severed by the tyrannies of time. In his _Golden
+Legend_, Longfellow describes Prince Henry and Elsie standing in the
+twilight on the terrace of the old castle of Vautsberg on the Rhine.
+Suddenly they catch the strains of distant bells. Elsie asks what bells
+they are. The Prince replies:
+
+ They are the bells of Geisenheim,
+ That, with their melancholy chime,
+ Ring out the curfew of the sun.
+
+And then he adds:
+
+ Dear Elsie, many years ago
+ Those same soft bells at eventide
+ Rang in the ears of Charlemagne,
+ As, seated at Fastrada's side,
+ At Ingelheim, in all his pride,
+ He heard their sound with secret pain.
+
+And so, through the melodious medium of the bells, the royal lovers on
+the terrace cross the long centuries that intervene and enter into
+fellowship with those other royal lovers of an earlier time.
+
+I remember, many years ago, spending a few days at a beautiful country
+home in Hampshire. My hostess was a little old lady—_very_ little and
+_very_ old. I can see her now with her prim little cap, her golden
+earrings, and her silver ringlets. It was summer-time, and one evening
+she invited me to accompany her on a walk across the deer-park. She was
+a happy little body, and that evening she was specially vivacious. Her
+conversation was punctuated with pretty ripples of silvery laughter. She
+was too proud to confess to feeling tired; but when we reached a stile
+with a step to it on the brow of a hill, she took a seat upon the
+step—to drink in, as she was careful to explain, the beauty of the
+view. I perched myself upon the stile itself and watched with interest
+the antics of a fine stag among some oak-trees not far away. Then, all
+at once, the bells from the village behind us rang out blithely. For a
+while I listened in silence, and then turned to my companion to ask a
+question. On glancing down at her face, however, I was astonished to
+notice tears upon her cheek. What could be the matter with my gay little
+friend? I immediately transferred my attention to the stag, who was by
+this time ambling away across the park, but she knew that I had seen the
+tear-drops. On our way back to the house she explained.
+
+'My mother died,' she said, 'while I was on my honeymoon in Italy. I was
+only a girl, and she was not much more. She was only twenty when I was
+born, and I was only eighteen on my wedding day. I never dreamed, when I
+left England, that I should never see her again. On the eve of my
+wedding she came up to me, put her arm round me, and led me away to
+spend one more hour alone with her. We sauntered off to the stile on
+which you and I rested this evening; and as we sat there, hand in hand,
+the bells pealed out just as they did to-night. And, as I listened to
+them just now, her face, her form, her voice, her words—the very
+_feeling_ of that other evening more than sixty years ago—came back
+upon me more vividly than they have ever done before. I could almost
+fancy that I was a girl again. My marriage, my children, my travels, and
+my long widowhood seemed all a dream. It was the bells that took me back
+again!'
+
+I wonder if it was! I wonder if the great iron bells that hung in the
+dusty old belfry of that English hamlet knew anything of the sweet and
+sacred secrets that my little old friend kept locked up in that gentle
+heart of hers! I wonder if the bells of Geisenheim knew anything of the
+loves of Charlemagne and Fastrada, of Elsie and Prince Henry! I wonder
+if the bells that drove the squirrels from my mind that summer evening
+knew anything of the Christmas thoughts and Christmas memories with
+which they flooded my soul! I wonder!
+
+And, in my wonderment, I find myself in excellent company. For here is
+little Paul Dombey! He has only a few days to live, although, to-day, he
+is slightly better and able to get about the house a little. And, in
+moving about the house, he finds a workman mending the great clock in
+the hall, and Paul sees an opportunity of asking a few questions.
+Indeed, Dickens says that he asked, not a few, but a long string of
+them. 'He asked the man a multitude of questions about chimes and
+clocks; as, whether people watched up in the lonely church steeples by
+night to make them strike, and how the bells were rung when people died,
+and whether those were different bells from wedding bells, or only
+_sounded_ different in the fancies of the living.' In this last
+question, Paul gets very near to our own. Do the bells say the things
+they seem to say, or do they only _seem_ to say those things? Did the
+bells of Geisenheim speak of love to the lovers on the castle terrace?
+Did the bells of that Hampshire village speak to the little old lady in
+the deer-park concerning the days of auld lang syne—her happy girlhood
+and her mother's face? Did the bells of that Australian steeple speak of
+the old-fashioned English Christmases as their delicious music fell on
+my delighted ears that summer night?
+
+Of course not! The bells take us as they find us and set us to music;
+that is all! Paul Dombey, who died young, half suspected it; and Trotty
+Veck of _The Chimes_, who lived to be old, proved it from experience,
+and proved it up to the hilt. When things were going badly with Trotty
+and Richard and Meg, and the magistrate said that people like them
+should be 'put down' with the utmost rigor of the law, the chimes, when
+they suddenly pealed out, made the air ring with the refrain 'Put 'em
+down; Put 'em down; Facts and Figures; Facts and Figures! Put 'em down!
+Put 'em down!!' 'If,' says Dickens, 'the chimes said anything, they said
+this; and they said it until Trotty's brain fairly reeled.' Later on in
+the story, we have the same chimes, and the same people listening to
+them. But this time all is going well: Meg and Richard are to be married
+on the morrow: and Trotty is at the height of his felicity. 'Just then
+the bells, the old familiar bells, his own dear constant, steady
+friends—the chimes—began to ring. When had they ever rung like that
+before? They chimed out so lustily, so merrily, so happily, so gaily,
+that he leapt to his feet and broke the spell that bound him.' And, a
+few minutes later, Trotty and Richard and Meg were dancing with delight
+to the gay, glad music of the bells!
+
+When they themselves were sad, the chimes seemed mournful; when they
+were glad, the chimes seemed blithe. 'Are they different bells?' asked
+little Paul Dombey, 'or do they only _sound_ different?' Paul was
+getting very near to the heart of a great truth; and, if only Trotty
+Veck and he could have talked things over together, they might have
+given us a philosophy of bells that would have immeasurably enriched our
+thought.
+
+The chimes are among the things to which distance lends enchantment. The
+bells, as my little old lady and I heard them from the deer-park, were
+sweeter than the same bells heard in the churchyard under the belfry. In
+his _Cheapside to Arcady_, Mr. Arthur Scammell suggests that the music
+of the bells awakens the echoes of all the infinites and all the
+eternities. He finds himself up in the belltower. 'After the last stroke
+of the bell ceases to be heard down in the church,' he says, 'the sound
+is continued up here in a long diminuendo; and how long will it be
+before that vibrant hum is completely extinguished? All through the
+night, the air about the bells may still be throbbing with faint echoes
+and reverberations; and, if an hour or a night, why not a year or a
+century? May not even the sound of the first ringing of these old bells
+yet lisp against the walls and roof in infinitesimal vibrations? The
+tower may be alive with the thin ghosts of all the joyous and mournful
+notes that have endeared and embittered the sound of bells to hundreds
+of human hearts.' And if, following the same line of argument, the music
+of the bells falls so sweetly on my ear as I sit upon my grassy knoll
+two miles away from the steeple, who is to say that twenty miles away, a
+thousand miles away, the air is not trilling and trembling with their
+delicious melodies? It may be only because my perceptive faculties are
+so gross, my ears so heavy, that I do not, in this Australian pleasance
+of mine, catch the chimes of Big Ben and the echoes of Bow Bells. And if
+Mr. Scammell's philosophy be true of bells, why not of other sounds? As
+I ponder his striking suggestion, I find it more easy to understand that
+great saying that _whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard
+in the light, and that which ye have whispered in the ear shall be
+shouted from the housetops_.
+
+ The deeds we do, the words we say,
+ Into still air they seem to fleet;
+ We count them past,
+ But they shall last
+ To the Great Judgment Day,
+ And we shall meet!
+
+The bells are not only _heard_ at a distance, they are _better heard_ at
+a distance. It is possible to get so near to them as to miss the music.
+In his autobiography, James Nasmyth tells us of a visit he paid to the
+tower of St. Giles, Edinburgh. He had often been charmed by the chimes,
+and longed to get nearer to them. But the experience brought a rude
+disillusionment. 'The frantic movements of the musician as he rushed
+wildly from one key to another, often widely apart, gave me the idea
+that the man was mad, while the banging of his mallets completely
+drowned the music of the chimes.' It is possible to get too near to
+things. You do not see the grandeur of a mountain as you recline upon
+its slopes. The disciples were too near to Jesus; that explains some of
+the most poignant tragedies of the New Testament. A minister, through
+constant association with the sublimities of divine truth, may lose the
+vision of their eternal grandeur. And, unless things in the manse are
+very carefully managed, the members of a minister's family may easily
+suffer through being too near to things. They do not see the mountain in
+its grand perspective. The banging of the mallets drowns the music of
+the bells.
+
+One beautiful June evening, years ago, I was walking along the banks of
+the Thames. It was Saturday night; I had undertaken to preach at
+Twickenham on the Sunday. All at once I was arrested by the pealing of
+the bells. Strangers stopped each other to inquire why the belfries had
+become vocal at that strange hour. We learned later that the bells were
+proclaiming the birth of an heir to the British throne. A prince had
+been born at White Lodge, just across the river! Well might the bells
+peal that night!
+
+Well, too, may the bells peal on Christmas Eve! I like to think that,
+over the birth of _that_ babe, born in Bethlehem, and cradled in a
+manger, more bells have been rung than over all the princes since the
+world began. The Chinese cherish a lovely legend concerning the great
+bell at Pekin. The Emperor, they say, sent for Kuan-Yin, the caster of
+the bells, and described the bell that he desired. It was to be larger
+than any bell ever made, and its tone more beautiful. Its music was to
+be heard a hundred miles away. Great honors were to be heaped upon the
+bell-maker if he succeeded; a cruel death was to follow his failure.
+Kuan-Yin set to work; he mixed the costliest metals; he labored night
+and day; and at last he finished the bell. He tested it, and was
+disappointed. He tried again, and was again mortified. He was at his
+wits' end. Then Ko-ai, his beautiful daughter, consulted an astrologer.
+The oracle assured her that, if the blood of a fair virgin mingled with
+the molten metals, the music would ravish the ears of every listener.
+Ko-ai returned to the foundry; and, when the glowing metal poured
+white-hot from the furnace, she plunged into the shining bath before
+her. The music of the great bell, the Easterns say, is the music of her
+sacrifice. It is only an Oriental myth; but it strangely helps me to
+interpret to my heart the solemn sweetness that I recognize in all these
+Christmas chimes.
+
+
+
+
+ VII—'BE SHOD WITH SANDALS'
+
+
+Is there anything fresh to be said by way of a charge to a young
+minister? I confess that, until this morning, I thought not. But this
+morning, to my inexpressible delight, I struck a vein that, so far as I
+know, has never yet been exploited. On these solemn and impressive
+occasions, we have talked about the minister's _scholarship_ and the
+minister's _spirituality_ until we have come to feel that we have
+completely exhausted that line of things. And in the process we have
+given the awkward impression that the minister, so far from being made
+of pretty much the same stuff as the butcher, the baker, and the
+candlestick-maker, is a kind of biological monstrosity consisting of a
+very big head and a very big heart—and of _nothing else_!
+
+But this morning I made a discovery. Before delivering a charge to a
+young minister, I took the precaution to have a good look at him. And I
+found to my surprise that, in addition to the head and the heart upon
+which we have always laid such inordinate emphasis, he also possesses a
+fine pair of legs with a substantial pair of feet at the end of them!
+Nobody could have supposed from the most careful perusal of all the
+ministerial charges in our literature, that any minister was ever before
+known to possess these useful appendages; but there they are! I saw them
+with my own eyes! Perhaps those who delivered the great classical
+charges only saw the young minister in the pulpit, in which case the
+limbs which I this morning discovered would naturally be invisible. Like
+the feet of the seraphim in the prophet's vision, they would be modestly
+concealed. But, though hidden, they exist; and it occurred to me that a
+few very useful things could be said concerning them. Why should it be
+considered _infra dig._, I should like to know, to talk about people's
+feet, and especially about a minister's feet? The Bible has no
+hesitation in talking about them. 'How beautiful upon the mountains,'
+said the prophet, 'are _the feet_ of him that bringeth good tidings,
+that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that
+publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth.' And did
+not the Master Himself, when He ordained His first disciples, deliver to
+them this striking charge? '_Take no shoes_,' He said, '_but be shod
+with sandals!_' The African natives thought of Livingstone's boots as a
+contrivance for carpeting all the slave-tracks of Africa with leather,
+so that he might walk harmlessly and painlessly along them; and when the
+Saviour tells His first disciples to be shod with sandals I fancy I see
+miles and miles of meaning in those arresting words.
+
+'_Be shod with sandals!_' It is an appeal for ministerial simplicity.
+There were three classes of people in Palestine. The slaves went
+barefoot; the grandees wore elaborate shoes; the working classes wore
+sandals. The sandals were simple, serviceable, and strong. Therefore,
+said the Master to His men, '_be shod with sandals!_' The line of
+simplicity is invariably the line of strength. Gibbon has shown us that
+it is the simplest architecture that has defied both the vandalism of
+the barbarians and the teeth of time. Macaulay has proved that it is the
+simplest language that lasts longest. John Bunyan's books threaten to
+survive all later literature. Why? 'The style of Bunyan,' Macaulay says,
+'is delightful to every reader, and is invaluable as a study to every
+person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language.
+The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an
+expression which would puzzle the rudest peasant. Several pages do not
+contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said
+more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence; for pathos; for
+vehement exhortation; for subtle disquisition; for every purpose of the
+poet, the orator and the divine; this homely dialect, the dialect of
+plain working men, was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our
+literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old
+unpolluted English language, no book which shows so well how rich that
+language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been
+improved by all that it has borrowed.' It is ever so. The simplest
+language is the strongest language, and the simplest lives are the
+strongest lives. In his 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,'
+Tennyson says that the illustrious Duke was rich in saving commonsense.
+
+ And as the greatest only are
+ In his simplicity sublime.
+
+Wherefore, said the Master, avoid the vulgarities of the slave market on
+the one hand, and the stilted affectations of the schools on the other.
+Let simplicity ally itself with strength. '_Be shod with sandals!_'
+
+It is a great thing for Christ's minister to eschew this vice of
+extremes. All through the ages the pendulum of ecclesiastical fashion
+has been swinging between bare feet and golden slippers. From the
+excessive worship of unholy revelries, to which the Roman world was
+abandoned, the Christians of the first century went to the opposite
+extremity, and courted persecution by their rigid abstinence from, and
+their severe condemnation of, the most legitimate and necessary
+pleasures. Back again swung the pendulum, until the churches became the
+scenes of voluptuous luxury and extravagance. We read on, and the next
+chapters of our ecclesiastical histories bring us to the story of the
+monks and the hermits. We no sooner discover an age of unexampled
+self-indulgence, than we straightway come upon the Puritanism that
+banned _Pilgrim's Progress_ as a wanton frivolity, and that denounced
+the _Fairy Queen_ as a wicked and devilish invention! And so we go on.
+One day Christ's minister would go bare-footed like a slave; the next he
+must needs affect a pair of golden slippers. There was a time when the
+Church gloried in her poverty; her emissaries wore no shoes on their
+feet; they dressed in rags and tatters; they ate the berries of the
+hedgerow; they drank the waters of the wayside spring. And then, hey
+presto, the scene is changed. The Church gloried in her wealth. All the
+world paid tribute to the Popes. Rome rolled in riches; and her proud
+bishop, Innocent the Fourth, laughed as he looked upon his countless
+hoards and boasted that never again need the Church lament that of
+silver and gold she had none! Here is the Church going barefooted like a
+slave; and here is the Church mincing in golden slippers; and neither
+spectacle is an edifying one. The Master urges His men to avoid both the
+bare feet and the golden slippers. Let your moderation be known unto all
+men. _Be shod with sandals!_
+
+It is the solemn and imperative duty of a Christian minister to conserve
+both the dignity and the modesty of holy things. A certain offence in
+the ancient law was to be punished by the deprivation of dignity. '_Thou
+shalt loose his shoe from off his foot, and his name shall be called in
+Israel, the house of him that hath his shoe loosed._' Those who have
+carefully read that graceful and dramatic story unfolded in the Book of
+Ruth know the bitterness of that reproach. The man whose shoes were
+publicly removed was like an officer whose stripes are taken from his
+arm in the sight of the whole regiment. He became an object of derision
+and contempt. Anyone, Dr. Samuel Cox points out, might laugh at him and
+call him 'Old Baresole,' and his family would be stigmatized as the
+family of a barefooted vagabond. _Be shod with sandals!_ says the
+Master. Do not expose the Church to the contempt of the multitude!
+Conserve her dignity! Cast not her pearls before swine! Nor is such
+dignity inconsistent with simplicity. Dr. Johnson penning from his
+modest room at Gough Square, that famous letter in which he proudly
+declined the patronage of the Earl of Chesterfield, makes a much more
+dignified picture than the gilded aristocrat who tardily fawned to the
+great man's fame. And George Gissing has shown that the solitaries of
+Port Royal, reading and praying in their poor apartments, cut a much
+more stately figure in history than his refulgent Majesty, King Louis
+the Fourteenth, strutting among the palatial chambers and the spacious
+gardens of Versailles. When I see the ministers of Christ organizing
+nail-driving competitions for women, and hat-trimming competitions for
+men, in order to replenish a depleted treasury, I remember what Jesus
+said about the sandals. He pleaded with His men not to expose His Church
+to contempt. It is better to do things modestly and preserve the
+Church's dignity than to swell her funds and make her an object of
+derision. It is better to wear sandals and be respected than to wear
+golden slippers and provoke disgust.
+
+Modesty and dignity invariably go together. Every man who aspires to the
+Christian ministry should read every word that Charles Dickens ever
+wrote. In the course of that humanizing process he will then come upon
+that terrible fourth chapter of _The Uncommercial Traveller_. It is the
+most powerful appeal for ministerial modesty in our literature. Can any
+man read without a shudder that revolting description of evangelistic
+bluster? And who is he that can read without tenderness that closing
+appeal of the novelist to preachers? He entreats us to remember the
+twelve poor men whom Jesus chose, and to model our behavior, our
+language, our style, and our choice of illustration on the exquisite
+simplicity and charming grace of the New Testament records.
+
+But we must sound yet a deeper depth. '_Be shod with sandals!_' said the
+Master. Now sandals are easily slipped _off_ and easily slipped _on_.
+And why should the minister be ready, at a moment's notice, to bare his
+feet? The man who has read his Bible knows. There came to Moses the
+Vision of the Burning Bush. 'And the Lord said unto Moses, I am the God
+of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
+Jacob. Draw not nigh hither; _put off thy shoes_ from off thy feet, for
+the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.' And when Moses the
+servant of the Lord died, the Vision of the Captain of the Lord's Host
+came to Joshua. 'And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did
+worship, and said unto him, What saith my Lord unto his servant? And the
+captain of the Lord's host said unto Joshua, _Loose thy shoe_ from off
+thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did
+so.' '_Be shod with sandals_,' said the Master, so that, the moment the
+vision comes, you may be ready adoringly to welcome it. Nothing in the
+ministry is more important than that the minister should keep in touch
+with his dreams, with his visions, with his revelations. The tragedy of
+the ministry is reached when we lace up our elaborate shoes and say
+good-bye to the place of open vision. We never expect again to behold
+the glory. The ashes are black on the altar of the soul, the altar on
+which the sacred fires once blazed. The light has gone out of the eye
+and the ring of passion has forsaken the voice. '_Be shod with
+sandals!_' said the Master to His men. 'Take no shoes, but be shod with
+sandals.' The vision that led you into the ministry may come again and
+again and again. _Be shod with sandals_ that you may be ready for the
+revelation!
+
+Yes, ready for the _Revelation_ and ready, also, for the _Road_! For
+sandals are easily _slipped on_. And the minister must expect the call
+of the road at any moment. He must be at home in the silence; he must be
+ready for the revelation, but he must not become a recluse. That was
+what Longfellow meant by his _Legend Beautiful_. The vision appeared to
+the monk in his cell, and he worshipped in its wondrous presence. Then
+he remembered the hungry at the convent gate.
+
+ Should he slight his radiant guest,
+ Slight his visitant celestial,
+ For a crowd of ragged, bestial
+ Beggars at the convent gate?
+ Would the Vision there remain?
+ Would the Vision come again?
+
+A voice within bade him go and feed the hungry in the road outside,
+
+ Do thy duty; that is best
+ Leave unto thy Lord the rest.
+
+He went; and when he returned he found to his delight that the Vision
+was still there.
+
+ Through the long hours intervening,
+ It had waited his return,
+ And he felt his bosom burn,
+ Comprehending all the meaning,
+ When the blessed Vision said:
+ 'Hads't thou stayed, I must have fled!'
+
+'_Be shod with sandals!_' said the Master; so that at a moment's notice,
+you may slip them _off_ to welcome the vision or slip them _on_ to take
+to the road. The crest of the Baptist Missionary Society is a picture of
+an ox between a plough and an altar, while, underneath the symbols, are
+the words '_Ready for Either!_' The ox is ready for service in the field
+or for sacrifice in the temple. Christ's minister stands between the
+glory and the majesty of things divine on the one hand and all the paths
+and the prose of human life on the other. He must be ready at any moment
+to enter into fellowship with the skies; and he must be ready at any
+moment to hurry forth to see a sick child, to comfort a broken-hearted
+woman or to share the burden of a man whose load is greater than he can
+bear. '_Be shod with sandals_'; so that, whether the Revelation or the
+Road shall call, you are ready for either. The ministry is neither
+mundane nor monastic; the minister wears sandals that he may keep in
+touch with two worlds.
+
+ Let me live in my house by the side of the road,
+ Where the race of men go by;
+ They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong,
+ Wise, foolish. So am I.
+
+ Let me turn not away from their smiles nor their tears,—
+ Both parts of an infinite plan,—
+ Let me live in my house by the side of the road,
+ And be a friend to man!
+
+And there, in his house by the side of the road, the minister will
+welcome his wondrous visions, and will take good care to _be shod with
+sandals_. Gurnall concludes the first volume of his great work in _The
+Christian Armour_ with 'Six Directions for the Helping On of this
+Spiritual Shoe'; but the man who is wise enough to wear sandals stands
+in no need of any such elaborate instructions.
+
+
+
+
+ PART III
+
+
+
+
+ I—WE ARE SEVEN!
+
+
+Tall, bronzed and bearded, Bruce Sinclair was a typical New Zealand
+farmer. He was born in Fifeshire, it is true, but his parents had
+emigrated when he was so young that he seemed to belong to the land of
+his adoption. They had come out on the _John Macintyre_—one of the
+first ships to bring settlers to these shores. I never saw the old
+people. By the time I reached New Zealand, Bruce had laid them to rest
+in the little God's-acre on the crest, and was himself farming the lands
+on which they had originally settled. The homestead was up among the
+foothills near Otokia—about nine miles south of Mosgiel—and Bruce
+usually rode over on Sundays. One felt that something was missing, if,
+on going round to the vestry door, 'Oscar,' Bruce's chestnut pony, was
+not to be seen in the yard. Bruce was quiet and reserved: he seldom
+spoke unless he was spoken to: but he gave an impression of depth and
+stability. In his light blue eyes—eyes that seemed paler than they
+really were by contrast with his sunburned and weatherbeaten
+countenance—there was a subtle suggestion of secret struggle and secret
+suffering. You somehow felt that the calm of his sturdy personality was
+the peace that comes when mighty forces have been vanquished, and fierce
+storms stilled. I had heard it whispered that in the early colonial
+days—the days of his youth—Bruce had chafed under the restraints of
+home and had for some years gone his own way; but except that I fancied
+that I saw a look of pain in his face when he first directed my
+attention to the framed portraits of his parents as they hung on either
+side of the fireplace at Otokia, he had given me no hint of anything of
+the kind.
+
+One Sunday morning I missed the chestnut pony. During the week Mrs.
+Sinclair called at the manse to tell me that Bruce was ill.
+
+'But don't trouble to come,' she said. 'He couldn't see you even if you
+did; and it's a long way to come for nothing. I'll let you know when
+he's able to see you.'
+
+True to her word, she at length gave me permission. But, as it happened,
+I was just setting out for a distant part of the colony—a journey of a
+thousand miles—and it was nearly a month before I was able to turn my
+face towards the farm at Otokia. But the day to which I had so long
+looked forward dawned at last. The dwelling that served Bruce as a
+homestead was a plain, white box-like little cottage, nestling among the
+hills about a quarter of a mile back from the road. Seated at the open
+window, he had seen me enter the big gate at the farm-entrance and drive
+up the track from the road to the door. Bowed, and leaning heavily upon
+two sticks, he came to the doorway to greet me, a wan smile lighting up
+a countenance that seemed strangely pale. I saw at a glance that he had
+been very ill.
+
+'But there, I'm better now,' he said, cheerfully, 'and shall soon be all
+right again. Sit down!' and he pointed to a lounge-chair on the
+verandah.
+
+We sat there chatting for awhile, and then Mrs. Sinclair brought out the
+afternoon tea. As soon as the cups had been removed, I rose as if to go.
+
+'Oh, don't be in a hurry!' he said. 'Sit down! I want to tell you of a
+strange experience I've had.' I resumed my seat.
+
+'You see,' he went on, 'I had a birthday—my fiftieth—just as my
+illness was at its worst. I had intended having a few very old friends
+here to celebrate the occasion; but that, of course, was out of the
+question. The idea had, however, fastened itself so firmly upon my mind
+that, in my delirium, I thought I was sending out the invitations.' He
+laughed; but I could see that there was a good deal of seriousness
+behind it.
+
+'You know how at such times, things get mixed up in your brain,' he went
+on, 'well, my birthday invitations and the other thoughts that had come
+to me in the earlier stages of my sickness got hopelessly confused. I
+was in great distress because I could only think of three people whom I
+wanted to invite. I wrote out invitations to _The Man I Used to Be_,
+_The Man I Might Have Been_, and _The Man I Shall Be_. I remember
+thinking that these were strange people to ask; and I was surprised that
+the number was so small. But the odd part is to come. For, in the same
+dream or in another—I cannot be sure—I thought that I was welcoming my
+guests. I had set the table for the four of us—my three visitors and
+myself—but, to my amazement, twice as many people came as I had
+invited! I had invited _The Man I Used to Be_; but two men arrived, each
+of them claiming to be the personage indicated by that description.
+Exactly the same thing happened in the case of _The Man I Might Have
+Been_, and again in the case of _The Man I Shall Be_. I was at first
+very bewildered and confused by the arrival of so many guests; but,
+excusing myself, I added three chairs to the number at the table, making
+seven in all. Then, when all was ready, I ushered them in and showed
+them to their places. And there we sat—the seven of us.
+
+ 1. _The Man I Am_—at the head of the table.
+ 2. _The Man I Used To Be_, No. 1 }
+ 3. _The Man I Used To Be_, No. 2 } facing me.
+ 4. _The Man I Might Have Been_, No. 1 }
+ 5. _The Man I Might Have Been_, No. 2 } on my left.
+ 6. _The Man I Shall Be_, No. 1 }
+ 7. _The Man I Shall Be_, No. 2 } on my right.
+
+'The first thing that struck me as I surveyed the six faces about me was
+that, although they seemed arranged in pairs, no two of the same name
+bore much resemblance to each other. The couples were contrasts rather
+than duplicates.' Mrs. Sinclair appeared, bringing her husband's
+medicine; he drank it quickly and continued his story.
+
+'I can't help laughing as I think of it now,' he went on, 'it seems so
+very fantastic and absurd; but it was a grimly serious business at the
+time; and I am afraid that, considered as a birthday frolic, it was
+scarcely a success. There I sat at the head of the table, my six selves
+around me. In each of them I could see something of the features that I
+regularly behold in the mirror; but in each case the general impression
+was either disfigured or idealized. Let me describe them two by two.
+
+'To begin with, there was _The Man I Used To Be_—the first of that
+name. He was my guest, and I tried to be civil, but in my heart I could
+not welcome him. I sat there wondering—you know how such things happen
+in dreams—by what strange impulse I had invited him to my table. For,
+truth to tell, I have always dreaded his return. Have you read Grant
+Allen's story, _The Reverend John Creedy_? I have it inside there: I
+will ask Mrs. Sinclair to bring it out before you go, and you shall take
+it with you. I read it a few weeks before my illness, and it made a
+great impression upon me. It is the story of an African boy, taken from
+the hold of a slaver on the Gold Coast and carried away to England. He
+is committed to a Christian home; is most carefully trained and
+educated; and is denied nothing that can add to his culture and
+refinement. He goes to Oxford; becomes a Bachelor of Arts; is ordained,
+and is designated to return as a missionary to his native land. Before
+leaving, he marries Miss Ethel Berry, a gently nurtured English lady;
+and, amidst the good wishes of a great host of admiring friends, the two
+sail from Southampton for Central Africa. For awhile all goes well; they
+are very happy and very useful. But, amidst the old environment, the old
+feelings are stirred. His blood leaps to the sound of the toms-toms; the
+native feasts and dances have a singular fascination for him; he learns
+to love once more the native foods and drinks. It is too much for him;
+his old self masters his new self. He abandons the work; leaves his wife
+to die; tears up his English clothes; and goes back to savagery. And
+to-day—so Grant Allen concludes the story—to-day, the old half-caste
+Portuguese rum-dealer at Butabue, can point out to any English pioneer
+who comes up the river, which one, among a crowd of dilapidated negroes
+who lie basking in the soft dust outside his hut, was once the Rev. John
+Creedy, B.A., of Magdalen College, Oxford. This story, so recently read,
+may have helped to shape my dream. At any rate, I remember sitting at
+the head of the table looking into the face of _The Man I Used To Be_.
+"It is bad enough," I thought to myself, "when the old life comes
+rushing resistlessly back upon one as it rushed back upon John Creedy,
+no bolts or bars being strong enough to keep it out; but by what folly
+had I _invited_ my old self back and seated him at my table?" I felt, as
+I gazed into his face, as though I had committed the unpardonable sin.
+
+'And there, sitting beside him, was his namesake! You can imagine no
+more striking contrast. For this second edition of _The Man I Used to
+Be_ appeared to be not only a better man than the other, but a better
+man than _The Man I Am_. I have never told you much about the past—one
+does not make a song of such things—but I can tell you that it was a
+wonderful experience when, nearly thirty years ago, I renounced the old
+life, entered the kingdom of heaven, and joined a Christian church. As I
+have said, I would not go back to the old life for anything on earth.
+And yet, looking back, I can see that, in those early days, I had a few
+fine qualities that are not mine to-day. I love money more now than I
+did then. I love comfort more now than I did then. In those days,
+wayward as I was, I would gladly have given the last coin that I
+possessed to help a chum. I remember once drawing every penny of my
+balance at the savings bank to get a comrade out of trouble. I would
+have faced any discomfort, privation, or even death itself, in an
+enterprise in which we fellows were engaged together. I am afraid that I
+am now too smug to be heroic and too self-centred to be really generous.
+And, strange as it may seem, as I looked across the table at _The Man I
+Used To Be_—the second one—I felt heartily ashamed of _The Man I Am_.
+I was reading in a book of George Eliot's that there are only two kinds
+of religious people—the people who are the better for their religion
+and the people who are the worse for it. I am not sure, I know that, on
+the whole, I am the better for my faith; but I know, too, that before my
+conversion I had some good points that I have since lost.
+
+'I need not describe my other guests in such detail. If the contrast
+between the two who answered to the name of _The Man I Used To Be_ was
+great, the contrast between the two who described themselves as _The Man
+I Might Have Been_ was greater still. I was ashamed to admit the first
+of them to the house, and I could see that several of my guests felt
+extremely uncomfortable in his presence. This is the man that I should
+have been to-day had that radiant experience of nearly thirty years ago
+never visited me. I saw, as I gazed into the repulsive face of this
+guest, that, had I continued the career in which, until then, I had
+delighted, the heroic qualities of my waywardness would soon have
+vanished, and the sordid elements of that lawless life would have become
+dominant and supreme. The chivalry of those early days would, in time,
+have died out of my soul, just as it died out of King Arthur's Court,
+and the shame and the squalor would have become more pronounced with the
+years.' Even sitting on the verandah, Bruce Sinclair shuddered as he
+recalled this aspect of his dream.
+
+'The companion picture—the other edition of _The Man I Might Have
+Been_—was,' he continued, 'as different as different could be. It
+seemed ridiculous that they bore the same name. As I looked upon the
+_first_ of this pair I felt thankful that I am as I am; but, when I
+turned to the _second_, that feeling completely forsook me. For I saw,
+as I gazed into that face—the face on my immediate left—what I should
+have been if, jealously retaining all the magnanimous and open-hearted
+qualities of my early days, I had added to them all the graces and
+excellences which Christian experience and the membership of the church
+have made possible to me. But I have done neither the one nor the other.
+I have lost the high-spirited virtues of my youth, and, like a man who
+has been walking among diamonds, but has been too indolent to pick them
+up, I have failed to acquire the ripe devoutness which these later years
+should have brought. It seems strange now, but on the very last Sunday
+morning on which I came to church, you were preaching on _The Additions
+of Grace_: "Add to your faith, virtue: and to virtue, knowledge." Do you
+remember? You were saying that the art of life lies in adding virtue to
+virtue as a mason adds tier to tier or as a tree adds ring to ring. I
+thought a good deal about it afterwards, and it may have woven itself
+into my dream. At any rate, I looked into the face beside me; I saw the
+man that I should have been if only I had added to the generous
+sentiments of youth the nobler attainments that Christian experience and
+service offered me; and it was like turning from a masterpiece to a daub
+when I once more contemplated _The Man I Am_.
+
+'The third pair did not present so strong a contrast. They might easily
+have passed for brothers, one of whom had enjoyed greater advantages,
+and moved in better society than the other. The first of those who
+presented himself as _The Man I Shall Be_ strongly resembled, except
+that he was older, _The Man I Am_. The fact is, I suppose, that, of late
+years, I have been content to take life, at least on its religious side,
+pretty much as I found it. I have become complacent, easy-going,
+readily-satisfied, willing to follow the drift. There was a time, twenty
+years ago or more, when I used to submit myself to periodical
+examinations. I tested myself; tried to ascertain whether or not I was
+growing in grace; felt anxious as to whether the spirit was gaining upon
+the flesh or the flesh upon the spirit. But of late years I have taken
+things less seriously, and, now that I have time to think about such
+matters, I can see that I have settled down to a condition that is
+perilously like stagnation. Going on at the same sluggish rate for a few
+more years, I cannot expect that I shall at last differ
+essentially—except in age—from _The Man I Am_; and _that_, I suppose,
+is why the _first_ of these two seems in some respects to resemble so
+closely the man that I see each day in the mirror.
+
+'The _second_—the guest on my immediate right—was a much finer man.
+He, too, was old; but there was a grace and a sweetness and a charm
+about his age that was quite absent from the person of his companion.
+Indeed, but for the association of ideas suggested by the circumstances
+under which we met, I should never have recognized myself in him. But he
+has taught me—and I feel that life has been inestimably enriched by the
+lesson—that, if I set myself to recapture the better qualities that I
+have lost, and begin diligently to cultivate the graces that I have
+neglected, I may yet make something of life, and stand, not altogether
+confused and ashamed, before my Lord at the last.
+
+'I am not sure,' my old friend concluded, 'I am not sure that all this
+occurred to me in the course of my dream. Much of it has probably
+suggested itself in my subsequent reflections. In time of sickness and
+of convalescence a man sees life from a new angle. He is able to do a
+little stocktaking. And I feel that, in my case, the operation—perhaps
+because it was particularly necessary—has been particularly
+profitable.'
+
+Mrs. Sinclair came out to ask if he was feeling chilly. The afternoon
+sun was certainly sinking; and I am afraid that I had allowed my friend
+to tire himself in telling me his tale. He made an excellent recovery,
+however, and, in the years that followed, was at church more frequently
+than ever. And it may have been a fond illusion of my own, but somehow I
+fancied that, as time went on, he became more and more like that nobler,
+lovelier, kindlier self that he had so graphically described to me.
+
+
+
+
+ II—THE FISH-PENS
+
+
+I was holiday-making at Lake King. As a matter of fact, Lake King is no
+lake at all. It used to be; and, like the Church at Sardis, and like so
+many of us, it bears the name that it once earned but no longer
+deserves. In former days, a picturesque rampart of sand hummocks, richly
+draped in native verdure, intervened between the fresh waters of the
+land-locked lake and the heaving tides of the Southern Ocean. Then the
+engineers arrived; and when the engineers take off their coats no man
+can tell what is likely to happen next. At Panama they split a continent
+in two. At Lake King they wedded the lake to the ocean. Through the
+range of sand-dunes they cut a broad, deep channel by which the big
+ships could pass in and out, and, as an inevitable consequence, Lake
+King is a lake no longer. But it was not the big ships that interested
+me. It was the trawlers. I liked to see the fishing-boats come in from
+the ocean and liberate their shining spoil at the pens. On the shores of
+the lake the fishermen have fenced off a sheet of water, a quarter of an
+acre or so in area; and into this sheltered reserve they discharge their
+daily catch. I never tired of visiting the fish-pens. As I looked down
+into their clear waters they seemed to be one moving mass of beautiful
+fish. Never in my life had I seen so congested an aquarium. There were
+thousands upon thousands, tons upon tons, of them.
+
+'You should row across in the early morning,' one of the fishermen was
+good enough to say. 'You would see us dragging the pens and filling the
+boats with the fish that we were about to pack for the market.'
+
+I took the hint, and shall never forget the animated spectacle that I
+then witnessed. The waters that had previously seemed so tranquil were a
+seething tumult of commotion. The men were wading up to their thighs
+dragging the nets through the crowded pens. Thousands upon thousands of
+splendid fish were fighting for dear life, excitedly darting and
+flapping and leaping and diving and splashing in a hopeless attempt to
+escape the enmeshment of the enfolding toils. Netful after netful was
+emptied into the boats. In half an hour the boats themselves were filled
+to the brim with the poor stiffened creatures from which all life and
+beauty had departed.
+
+'And do the fish keep good in the pens for an indefinite period?' I
+asked my fisherman friend—the man who had invited me across.
+
+'Oh, dear, no,' he replied, 'that's the trouble. If we could keep them
+here until the market suited us, we should quickly make our fortunes.
+But they soon get slack and soft and flabby. The life in the pens isn't
+a natural one. They haven't to work for their living and they are in no
+danger of attack. The palings and wire-netting that keep them in keep
+their natural enemies _out_. In the ocean they have to be active and
+vigilant and spry. But here they lie at their ease; they move to and fro
+sluggishly for the mere fun of the thing; and they soon go to pieces in
+consequence.'
+
+Away on the Dogger Bank the fishermen cherish a tradition which, on
+suitable occasions, they recite with infinite relish. It belongs to the
+heroic age that enfolded land and sea before the day of the
+steam-trawler had dawned. In those unhurried times, the fishing-boats
+spread their tawny sails, and, to the accompaniment of chanties and
+choruses such as sailors love, crept slowly out to sea. In sleepy little
+fishing-villages along the English coast, you may still see craft of
+this romantic—and historic—build. One little hamlet of the sort I
+often visit in my dreams. Years ago I knew every pebble on its beach.
+Winds and waves have scooped out a kind of alcove in the massive cliffs.
+High up, pressing closely against the rugged wall of chalk, stands a
+cluster of weather-beaten cottages. In front of them the fishing-boats
+are drawn up. Nets are spread out on the beach to dry, coils of rope lie
+about, and piles of tackle are everywhere. If you are as fortunate as I
+should like you to be, you will see, moving to and fro between his
+cottage and his boat, a tall bronzed figure in a blue jersey and a
+sou'wester. He is the most popular fisherman in the place. He was born
+here; and, save for two years of which he does not like to think, has
+spent all his days on this beach. Just once he wandered. He joined the
+fleet on the Dogger Bank. He worked on the trawler that raced out and
+raced round and raced back. He saw the cutters darting to and fro
+between the fleet and the market. And, the more he saw of this side of
+life, the less he liked it. He returned to the quiet little cove among
+the cliffs. If, some day, you can catch him in one of his leisure hours,
+and in one of his garrulous moods, he may be beguiled into telling you
+of the tales he heard told on the Dogger. For, out there where they fish
+by machinery, and use tackle of which the little hamlet never dreams,
+the men like to poke fun at the old-fashioned craft on the beach. And,
+when they speak of the old days and the old ways, they remind each other
+that, years ago, each fishing-boat was fitted with a tank or well,
+constructed with perforated sides so that the water it contained was
+part and parcel of the sea through which the boat was sailing. Into
+these wells the fish were transferred from the nets immediately upon
+their arrival from the deep. In this new environment the graceful
+creatures gave no evidence of discontent or resentment. They would live
+indefinitely in their floating homes. But the fishermen found that, like
+the fish in these Australian pens, the fish in the wells waxed limp and
+listless. They lost their flavor and sweetness. This, according to the
+tradition, happened to all the fishing-boats save one.
+
+One fisherman, and one only, brought his fish to market in excellent
+condition. He landed them at Billingsgate as healthy and brisk and firm
+as though he had caught them ten minutes earlier under London Bridge.
+The dealers soon learned to distinguish between the fish from his boat
+and the fish from all the others. His fish brought the highest prices on
+the market, and the happy fisherman rejoiced in his abounding
+prosperity. His comrades marvelled at his success and vainly endeavored
+to cajole his secret from him. He was not to be drawn. The matter
+remained an inscrutable mystery until the day of the old fisherman's
+death. Then, acting upon her father's instructions, his daughter
+unfolded the secret. Her father, she said, made it a rule to keep a
+catfish in the well of his boat. The catfish kept the other fish in a
+ferment of agitation and alarm. They were never at rest. And, because a
+catfish compelled them to live in the well under conditions that were
+approximately normal, they came to market in as wholesome a state as
+though they had just been dragged from the deep.
+
+I often take myself into a quiet corner and remind myself of my visit to
+the fish-pens or repeat to myself the famous tradition of the catfish. I
+find myself at times in a rebellious mood. Why is life so troubled, so
+agitated, so disturbed? If only I could be left alone! Why may I not
+fold my hands and be quiet? I am hunted up hill and down dale; I am
+driven from pillar to post. I have to work for my living—an irksome
+necessity. I often have to go out when I would rather stay in, and have
+to stay in when I would rather go out. I am the prey of antagonisms of
+many kinds. Life is full of irritations, annoyances, mortifications, and
+disappointments. I am not my own master. Like Paul, _I find a law that,
+when I would do good, evil is present with me; the good that I would I
+do not and the evil which I would not that I do_. Paul found it
+extremely exasperating, and so do I. If only I could live without work
+and without worry and without any of my present vexations! Why, oh why,
+must there always be a catfish in my well?
+
+A catfish is an animated compliment. I do not suppose that a _Dictionary
+of Oceanography_ or a _Cyclopædia of Pisciculture_ would define a
+catfish precisely in that way. But I prefer my own definition to that of
+the encyclopædia; it is more brief and it is quite as accurate. A
+catfish, I repeat, is an animated compliment. It is because the
+fisherman values his fish that he puts the catfish into the well to
+annoy them. 'I remember,' says Dr. James Stalker, 'I remember hearing a
+celebrated naturalist describe a species of jellyfish, which, he said,
+lives fixed to a rock from which it never stirs. It does not require to
+go in search of food, because in the decayed tissues of its own organism
+there grows a kind of seaweed on which it subsists. I thought I had
+never heard of any creature so comfortable. But the eminent naturalist
+who was describing it went on to say that it is one of the very lowest
+forms of animal life, and the extreme comfort which it enjoys is the
+badge of its degraded position.' Now this seems to throw a little light
+on my own discontent. No fisherman would take any pains to preserve such
+worthless things. When the fisherman drops the hideous catfish into the
+well, it is his way of telling the shiny creatures that are already
+there of the high esteem in which he holds them.
+
+This leads me to Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe caught a glimpse of
+this doctrine of the catfish, and it dispelled some of his most acute
+perplexities. The pity of it is that, later on, when he found himself
+confronted by the gravest and most baffling bewilderment of all, he
+failed to apply to it the same vital principle. He saw the law at work
+among his _minor_ difficulties; it did not occur to him that it might
+also operate among the _major_ ones.
+
+A day came on which Crusoe discovered that he was not, as he had
+fancied, the monarch of all he surveyed. His sovereignty was disputed.
+Everybody remembers the haunting passage about the footprint on the
+sand. 'It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was
+exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's foot on the shore. How
+it came thither I knew not, nor could I in the least imagine; but after
+innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out
+of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the
+ground I trod upon, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me
+at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying
+every stump to be a man. Nor is it possible to describe how many various
+shapes my affrighted imagination represented things to me in, how many
+wild ideas were found every moment in my fancy, and what strange,
+unaccountable whimseys came into my thoughts by the way.' Now this story
+of Crusoe and the cannibals is simply the story of the cod and the
+catfish in another form. The cod would have liked the well all to
+itself: it is horrified at discovering that it must share it with a
+catfish!
+
+Yet, as we have seen, the cod were the better for the catfish; and, as
+Crusoe afterwards recognized, the island was enriched by the coming of
+the cannibals. _Robinson Crusoe_ is essentially a story with a moral;
+and Crusoe leaves you in no doubt as to the moral. He is most explicit
+in that regard. 'For,' he tells us, 'I began to be very well contented
+with the life that I was leading, if only I could have been secured from
+the dread of the savages.' How little he thought that, so far from
+hurting a single hair of his head, the savages would provide him, in the
+person of his man Friday, with the most devoted servant and most
+constant friend that any man could possibly possess! '_Wherefore_,' he
+says, in formulating the moral to be deduced from his sensational
+experience, '_wherefore it may not be amiss for all people who shall
+read this story of mine to learn from it that very frequently the evil
+which we seek most to shun, and which, when we are fallen into, is the
+most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our
+deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction
+into which we have fallen_.'
+
+Now this was the _minor_ perplexity; the _major_ one came later. And the
+extraordinary thing is that, confronted by that larger perplexity,
+Crusoe's own maxim does not seem to have recurred to him. Crusoe has met
+the cannibals; they have come and gone; and they have left Friday behind
+them. Crusoe has taught Friday to speak English, and is doing his best
+to store his mind with the highest knowledge of all. 'One day,' so runs
+his narrative, 'I had been teaching him that the devil was God's enemy
+in the hearts of men, and used all his malice and skill to defeat the
+good designs of Providence, and to ruin the kingdom of Christ in the
+world. "Well," replies Friday, in broken English, "but you say God is so
+strong, so great; is he not much strong, much mighty as the devil?"
+"Yes, yes, Friday," I replied, "God is stronger than the devil; God is
+above the devil, and therefore we pray to God to tread him down under
+our feet and enable us to resist his temptations and quench his fiery
+darts." "But," says he again, "if God much stronger, much mighty as the
+wicked devil, _why God no kill the devil_, so make him no more do
+wicked?" I was strangely surprised at this question; and, after all,
+though I was now an old man, yet I could not tell what to say, so I
+pretended not to hear him. But Friday kept repeating his question in the
+same broken words: "_Why God no kill the devil?_" I therefore diverted
+the discourse by rising up hastily and sending him for something a long
+way off.' It was the greatest humiliation that Robinson Crusoe sustained
+during his long sojourn on the island.
+
+'_Why God no kill the devil?_' asked Friday. It sometimes happens that
+the best way of answering one question is to ask a few more. Let us try.
+'_Why God no kill the devil?_' Why did the shrewd old fisherman not kill
+the catfish in the well of his boat? Why did the fish in the pens grow
+slack and soft and flabby as soon as the palings and wire-netting cut
+them off from the assaults of their natural enemies? 'In the Louvre,'
+says Professor William James, in his _Varieties of Religious
+Experience_, 'in the Louvre there is a picture by Guido Reni of St.
+Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in
+large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its
+allegorical meaning also is due to his being there. The world, that is
+to say, is _all the richer for having a devil in it_, so long as we keep
+our foot upon his neck.'
+
+It is an old story. It is the tree that is buffeted by the wind that
+develops the strongest roots and the sturdiest fibre. It is in the
+carcase of the lion with which he fought for his life that Samson finds
+the honey. 'I did not learn to preach all at once,' says Martin Luther,
+in a delightful burst of confidence. 'It was my temptations and my
+corruptions that best prepared me for my pulpit. The devil has been my
+best professor of exegetical and experimental divinity. Before that
+great schoolmaster took me in hand, I was a sucking child and not a
+grown man. It was my combats with sin and with Satan that made me a true
+minister of the New Testament. It is always a great grace to me, and to
+my people, for me to be able to say to them, "I _know_ this text to be
+true! I know it _for certain_!" Without incessant combat and pain and
+sweat and blood, no ignorant stripling of a student ever yet became a
+powerful preacher.' That is the lesson that I learned at the fish-pens.
+That is the secret that the wise old fisherman, of catfish fame,
+bequeathed to his mystified companions. That is what Robinson Crusoe
+learned in the course of his long and lonely exile. And, in the rough
+and tumble of common life, there is scarcely any lesson of greater value
+to be learned.
+
+
+
+
+ III—EDGED TOOLS
+
+
+I was motoring among the semi-tropical landscapes of Queensland. We
+swept past gardens that were gay with scarlet flame trees, brilliant
+creepers, bright-red corals, and bougainvilleas of many gorgeous hues.
+Spread out in endless panorama about us were orange groves, vineyards,
+sugar plantations, and fields in which the pineapple, the banana, the
+paw-paw, the mango, and the breadfruit luxuriated. And then we burst
+into the bush, which only differed from the bush to which I was more
+accustomed in that it was sprinkled with enormous anthills and dotted
+with green clumps of prickly pear.
+
+After several hours spent in this delightful way, the car unexpectedly
+stopped, and my host and hostess prepared to alight. I peered about me
+for some explanation of their behavior, but could nowhere discover one.
+There was no house to be seen nor any sign of civilization or of
+settlement. My first impulse was to remain in the car with the driver.
+
+'We are going a little way into the bush,' my host explained, addressing
+me; 'if you care to come with us, we shall be very pleased.'
+
+I joined them instantly, and we were soon out of sight of the car. We
+picked our way through the thick undergrowth for about a quarter of a
+mile, then emerged upon a little plot carefully fenced off from the
+surrounding wilderness. It was a cemetery only a few feet square; and it
+contained three graves! It was evidently to the central one that our
+pilgrimage had been made. My companions stood in silence for a moment
+beside it, and then seated themselves on the grass near by.
+
+'In our early days,' my host explained, 'we used to live not very far
+from here. It was a lonely place and a hard life; and it had joys and
+sorrows of its own. The greatest of its joys was the birth of Don, our
+firstborn; and the greatest of our sorrows was his death. He was only
+five when we buried him.'
+
+'Yes,' added his wife, brushing a tear from her eye, 'and we buried him
+with a broken penknife in his hand. A swagman who had sheltered for the
+night in one of the out-buildings had given it to him before leaving in
+the morning, and Don thought it the most wonderful thing he had ever
+possessed. He was working away with it from morning to night. He would
+not trust it out of his sight. He had it in his hand when, a few days
+afterwards, he was taken ill. He clung to it all through his sickness.
+If he dropped it in his sleep, he asked for it as soon as he woke. He
+raved about it in his delirium. And it was firmly clasped in his hand
+when he died. We had not the heart to take it from him, and so he went
+down to his grave still holding it.'
+
+Often since I have thought of that burial in the bush, not merely
+because the incident was so touching, but because it was so intensely
+characteristic. A boy's infatuation for his first pocket knife! It may
+have a rusty handle and a broken blade; the edge may be as jagged as the
+edge of a saw and the spring may have vanished with the days of long
+ago; it makes no difference. With a knife in his hand a boy feels that
+he is monarch of all he surveys. With a knife in his hand he feels
+himself every inch a man. A boy's first consciousness of power, of
+dominion, of authority comes to him on the day on which he grasps his
+first knife. It is by means of a knife that he carves his way to
+destiny.
+
+Civilization may be said to have dawned on the day on which the first
+man in the world held in his hand the first knife in the world. It was
+made of stone, like the knives of all savage and primitive peoples. It
+came into his possession almost by chance. He was gathering together
+some huge stones, and building for himself a wall. Presently one heavy
+stone slipped from his hands, fell with a crash upon another, and broke.
+But it was not a clean break. There lay at that first man's feet two
+large fragments of stone and a multitude of splinters. He picked up the
+largest of the splinters and found that it had a keen, sharp edge. He
+cut his finger as he stroked it, and the blood crimsoned the stone. He
+dropped it as he would have dropped a snake that had bitten him. But, as
+he nursed his smarting hand, he saw the possibilities that the
+sharp-edged splinter opened to him. He remembered the toil with which he
+had torn down branches of trees and shaped them to his use. The splinter
+would simplify his task. He forgot his lacerated finger. He seized
+another stone, dashed it against its neighbor, and, by repeating the
+process, soon secured for himself a more shapely splinter—a splinter
+with which he could cut down the branches less laboriously. He tried it.
+He laughed as he found that, armed with the splinter, he could hack the
+yielding timber to his will. He was more excited than he had ever been
+before. Here was the first man with his first knife—the pioneer man
+with the pioneer knife! For that first man was the father of men of many
+colors, and that first knife was the father of blades of many kinds.
+From it sprang the sickle and the scythe, the chisel and the saw, the
+spade and the tomahawk, the rapier and the dagger, the scalpel and the
+poniard, the razor and the sword.
+
+The joy that the boy feels as he looks lovingly on his first knife is
+the joy of shaping things. The world about him has suddenly become
+plastic. It is a block of marble and he is the sculptor. He may make of
+it what he will. Until he possessed a knife, the hard inanimate
+substances about him defied him. He was the bird and they were the bars.
+But now _he_ defies _them_. The knife makes all the difference. The
+knife is his sceptre. He is a king and all things are subject to him.
+
+He may, of course, abuse his power. He probably will. A boy with a knife
+is very liable to carve his name in the polished walnut of the piano or
+to cut notches out of the neatly-turned legs of the dining-room table.
+From all parts of the world people go on pilgrimage to Westminster
+Abbey. And, at the Abbey, they are shown the Coronation Chair. Seated in
+it, all our English sovereigns have been crowned, and it is encrusted
+with traditions that go back to the days of the patriarchs. But a boy
+with a knife feels no reverence for antiquity. On the night of July 5,
+1800, a Westminster schoolboy got locked in the Abbey. He curled himself
+up in the Coronation Chair and made it his resting-place until morning.
+And, in the morning, he thought of his pocket-knife. And, as the dawn
+came streaming through the storied eastern windows, he carved deeply
+into the solid oak of the seat of the chair, the notable inscription:
+_P. Abbot slept in this chair, July 5, 1800._ Thus he buried his blade
+in one of the noblest of our great historic treasures. It was enough to
+make the illustrious dead, by whom he was everywhere surrounded, turn in
+their ancient graves. George the Fourth and all his successors have
+since been crowned in a Chair that bears that impertinent record! Yet,
+as the chips flew, the boy felt no compunction. And, in his stolid calm,
+he is the type and representative of all who abuse the authority with
+which they are invested. He feels, as he wields the knife, that all
+things are at his mercy; he can shape them to his liking. He forgets
+that power carries its attendant obligations, and that, foremost among
+those obligations, is the obligation to restraint. A boy with a knife in
+his hand is merely a miniature edition of a man with a sword in his
+hand. And a man with a sword in his hand is often tempted to bury his
+blade in that which is even more precious than the oak of a Coronation
+Chair. Piano-frames and table-legs are not the only things that cry
+aloud for protection. The greatest lesson that the world has learned in
+our time is that the power of the sword involves its possessor in a
+responsibility that is simply frightful. The blood of brave men, the
+tears of good women, and the hard-earned wealth of nations must never be
+frivolously or lightheartedly outpoured.
+
+From the moment at which, with sparkling eyes, that first man seized
+that first sharp splinter, the knife has steadily grown upon the
+imaginations of men. It took a thousand generations to discover its
+potentialities. Indeed, our own generation is only just beginning to
+realize the possibilities that it unfolds. Think of the marvels—I had
+almost said the miracles—of modern surgery.
+
+'Let nothing share your heart with your knife!' said Dr. Ferguson to
+Barney Boyle, in _The Doctor of Crow's Nest_. The old doctor had just
+fallen in love with Barney. He liked his looks, he liked his
+temperament, and he liked his hands.
+
+'You must be a surgeon, Barney! You've got the fingers and the nerves! A
+surgeon, sir! That's the only thing worth while. The physician can't see
+further below the skin than any one else. He guesses and experiments,
+treats symptoms; tries one drug and then another. But the knife, my
+boy!' The doctor rose and paced the floor in his enthusiasm. 'The knife,
+boy! There's no guess in the knifepoint. The knife lays bare the evil,
+fights it, eradicates it! The knife at the proper moment saves a man's
+life. A slight incision an inch or two long, the removal of the diseased
+part, a few stitches, and, in a couple of weeks, the patient's well! Ah,
+boy, God knows I'd give my life to be a great surgeon. But he didn't
+give me the fingers. Look at these!' and he held up a coarse, heavy
+hand. 'I haven't the touch. But you have! You have the nerve and the
+fingers and the mechanical ingenuity; you can be a great surgeon. You
+shall have all my time and all my books and all my money; I'll put you
+through! You must think, dream, sleep, eat, drink bones and muscles and
+sinews and nerves! Push everything else aside!' he cried, waving his
+great hands excitedly. 'And remember!'—here his voice took a solemn
+tone—'_let nothing share your heart with your knife!_'
+
+Let nothing share your heart with your knife! That is always the knife's
+appeal. It is a plea for concentration. I was talking to an old gardener
+the other day. He was pruning his trees. The gleaming blade was in his
+hand and the path was littered with the wreckage of the branches. He
+seemed to be working a shocking havoc, and I told him so. He laughed.
+
+'Oh, they're well-meaning things, are trees!' he exclaimed. 'They are
+anxious to do their best for you, but they attempt too much, far too
+much. Just look at this one!' and he laughed again. 'It thought it could
+cover all these branches with roses; and, if we left it alone, it would
+try. But what sort of roses would they be, I should like to know? No,
+no, no; it is better for them to produce fewer blossoms but to produce
+good ones. We mustn't let them attempt too much!'
+
+'Let nothing share your heart with your knife!' said old Dr. Ferguson,
+as he urged Barney to do just one thing and to do that one thing well.
+
+'We mustn't let the rose-trees attempt too much,' said the old gardener,
+as he lopped off the branches with his pruning-knife.
+
+That seems to be the lesson that the knife is always teaching. I
+remember going one bright afternoon to see Gregor Fawcett of Mosgiel.
+Gregor was passing through a troublous and trying time. Hard on top of
+heavy business losses had come the collapse of his health. To my
+delight, however, I found him in a particularly cheerful mood.
+
+'I've been reading aboot the knife, d'ye ken?' he explained. 'It's a
+bonny passage!' He took the open Bible from the table beside the bed and
+pointed me to the fifteenth of John. '_Every branch in Me that beareth
+not fruit, he cutteth away; and every branch that beareth fruit, he
+pruneth it that it may bring forth more fruit._'
+
+'It brought me a power o' comfort,' Gregor explained. 'For it says, ye
+ken, that there are only two sorts o' wood on the tree—the _dead_ wood
+and the _live_ wood. He cuts away the _dead_ wood for the sake of the
+live wood that he leaves; and he cuts the _live_ wood that bears fruit
+so that it may bear still more and still better fruit. Well, I thocht o'
+all the losses I've had lately. I dinna ken whether the things that have
+been taken were _dead_ things or _live_ things, but it doesna matter. If
+they were _dead_ things, I'm better without them. And, if they were
+_live_ things, they were only cut away because my life is like a tree
+that bears fruit and that may yet bear more. And, in either case, the
+best remains. The tree is the richer and not the poorer for the pruning.
+The pruning only shows that the gardener cares. Ay, it's a bonny passage
+that!' and Gregor laid the open Bible lovingly on the pillow beside him.
+'After you've gone,' he said, 'I shall go over it again!'
+
+And, from the frequency with which he quoted the words to buffeted
+spirits in the days that followed, I could see that, on that further
+inspection, Gregor had kissed the husbandman's knife even more
+reverently and rapturously than before.
+
+
+
+
+ IV—OLD PHOTOGRAPHS
+
+
+We badly need an Asylum for Antiquated Portraiture—a pleasant and
+hospitable refuge in which all our old photographs could be carefully
+preserved and reverently handled. For lack of such an institution we are
+all in difficulties. People come into our lives; we become attached to
+them and value their friendship; we exchange photographs; and, as soon
+as we have done so, the inevitable happens. The photographs get
+hopelessly out of date. Friends come and go; we come and go; but the
+photographs remain. Or, if the friends themselves abide, they change;
+fashions change; and, in a few years, the photographs look singularly
+archaic if not positively ridiculous. They go away into a drawer or a
+box. Once or twice a year a spring-cleaning or other volcanic upheaval
+reminds us of their existence. 'We must really sort these out and
+destroy a lot of them!' we say; but we never do it. Everybody knows why.
+It seems a betrayal of old confidences, an outrage upon sentiment, a
+heartless sacrilege. There should be an asylum for obsolete portraiture,
+or, if that is out of the question, we should do with the photographs
+what Nansen and Johansen, the Polar explorers, did with their dogs.
+Neither had the heart to shoot his own; so, amid the ice and snow of the
+far north, they exchanged their canine companions, and each went sadly
+and silently away and shot the other's!
+
+Such a course must, however, be regarded as a makeshift and a
+subterfuge. The asylum is the thing. I am opposed, tooth and nail, to
+the destruction of old photographs under any conditions. I spent an hour
+yesterday afternoon down by the lake reading some of the love-letters
+that Mozart wrote to his wife nearly two centuries ago. Poor Johann and
+poor Stanzerl! They were so pitifully penniless that when, one bitter
+winter's morning, a kindly neighbor fought his way through the deep snow
+to see how the young couple were getting on, he found them dancing a
+waltz on the bare boards of their narrow room. They could not afford a
+fire, and this was their device for keeping warm. And now Johann is away
+on a business trip. In our time a husband so situated would send his
+wife a telegram to say that he had arrived safely, or, perhaps, buy her
+a picture-postcard of the view from his hotel window. But Mozart wrote
+the prettiest love-letters. 'Dear little wife,' he says, 'if I only had
+a letter from you! If I were to tell you all that I do with your dear
+likeness, how you would laugh! For instance, when I take it out of its
+case, I say "God greet thee, Stanzerl, God greet thee, thou rascal,
+shuttlecock, pointy-nose, nicknack, bit and sup!" And, when I put it
+back, I let it slip in very slowly, saying, with each little push,
+"Now—now—now!" and at the last, quickly—"Good-night, little mouse,
+sleep well!"' Where is that portrait now? I dread to hazard a
+conjecture! There was, alas, no asylum to which it could be fondly and
+reverently entrusted. Photographs, like fashions, are capable of strange
+revivals. One never knows when crinolines or hobble skirts will
+reappear; and in the same way, one never knows the moment at which some
+quaint old faded photograph will acquire new and absorbing interest.
+
+'Why, bless me,' you exclaim, as you lay down the newspaper, 'here's
+Charlie Brown become famous! You remember Charlie; he was the second son
+of the Browns who lived opposite us at Kensington! Why, I have a
+photograph of him, taken when he was a little boy; I'll run and get it!'
+But alas, it has been destroyed. Or the regret may be even more
+poignant.
+
+'Dear me,' you say, 'poor old Mary Smith is dead!' The announcement
+brings with it, as such announcements have a way of doing, a rush of
+reminiscence. A simple old soul was Mary Smith. She was very good to us,
+five and twenty years ago, when the children were all small and
+sicknesses were frequent. Mary always knew exactly what to do. But we
+moved away, and the years went by. Letter-writing was not in Mary's
+line. With the obituary notice still before us, we talk of Mary and the
+old days for awhile, and then we suddenly remember that, when we came
+away, Mary gave us her photograph. It was a quaint, old-fashioned
+picture; it had been taken some years earlier; but we were glad to have
+it, and we put it with the others. We must slip up and get it! But it,
+too, has vanished! Somehow, Mary _living_ did not seem quite so pathetic
+and lovable a figure as Mary _dead_. At some spring-cleaning we must
+have glanced at the creased and faded portrait, and, without pausing to
+allow memory to do such vivid work as she has done to-day, we must have
+tossed it out. We feel horribly ashamed. If only we could recover the
+old photograph we would stand it on the mantelpiece and do it signal
+honor. And to think that, in the confusion of cleaning-up, we threw it
+out, perhaps tore it up, perhaps even burned it. We shudder at the
+thought, and half hope that, in her new and larger life, Mary—who seems
+nearer to us now than she did before we read of her passing—does not
+know that we were guilty of treachery so base.
+
+Thus there come into our lives moments when photographs assert their
+worth and insist on being appraised at their true value. In the stirring
+chapter in which Sir Ernest Shackleton tells of the loss of his ship
+among the ice-floes, he describes an incident that must have set all his
+readers thinking. In the grip of the ice, the _Endurance_ had been
+smashed to splinters; and the entire party were out on a frozen sea at
+the mercy of the pitiless elements. Shackleton came to the conclusion
+that their best chance of eventually sighting land lay in marching to
+the opposite extremity of the floe; at any rate, it would give them
+something to do, and there is always solace in activity. He thereupon
+ordered his men to reduce their personal baggage to two pounds weight
+each. For the next few hours every man was busy in sorting out his
+belongings—the treasures that he had saved from the ship. It was a
+heart-breaking business. Men stole gloomily and silently away and dug
+little graves in the snow, to which they committed books, letters, and
+various nicknacks of sentimental value. And, when the final decisions
+had to be made, they threw away their little hoards of golden sovereigns
+and kept the photographs of their sweethearts and wives!
+
+The same perplexity arises, sooner or later, in relation to the
+portraits and pictures on our walls. They become obsolete; but we find
+it difficult to order their removal. I had intended, long before this,
+devoting an essay to the whole subject of _Pictures_. Why must we
+smother our walls with pictures? To begin with, the pattern of the paper
+is often a series of pictures in itself, while the dado and the border
+simply add to the collection. Then, over these, we carefully arrange a
+multitude of others. Paintings, engravings, and photographs hang
+everywhere. Why do we cover the walls in this way? The answer is that we
+cover the walls in order to cover the walls. The walls represent an
+imprisonment; the pictures represent an escape. On the wall in front of
+me, for example, there hangs a water-color sketch of Piripiki Gorge, our
+New Zealand holiday resort. On a winter's night, when the rain is
+lashing against the windows and the wind shrieking round the house, I
+glance up at it, and, by some magic transition, I am roaming on a
+summer's evening over the old familiar hills with my gun in my hand and
+John Broadbanks by my side. Through the medium of those landscapes, how
+many tireless excursions have I taken, by copse and beach and riverbank,
+without so much as rising from my chair? The photographs hanging here
+and there around the room transport my mind to other days and other
+places. The apartment in which I sit may be extremely small, just as the
+space that I occupy on the summit of a mountain may be extremely small.
+But, occupying that small space upon that lofty eminence, I command a
+view that loses itself in infinity; and, lounging in my comfortable
+chair in this little snuggery of mine, the pictures transform it into an
+observatory, and I am able to survey the entire universe. You do not
+hang pictures in the cells of a jail; the reason is obvious; you do not
+wish the prisoners to escape; you think it good that they should feel
+the stern tyranny of those four uncompromising walls. Conversely, you
+deck the dining-room with pictures because, there, you do _not_ desire
+to feel imprisoned; you do _not_ wish the walls to seem tyrannical. As
+Mr. Stirling Bowen sings:
+
+ Four walls enclose men, yet how calm they are!
+ They hang up pictures that they may forget
+ What walls are for in part, forget how far
+ They may not run and riotously let
+ Their laughter taunt the never-changing stars.
+
+ In circus cages wolves and tigers pace
+ For ever to and fro. They do not rest,
+ But seek so nervously the longed-for place.
+ Our picture-jungles would not end their quest,
+ Or pictures of another tiger's face.
+
+ On four square walls men have their world, their strife,
+ Their painted, framed endeavors, joys and pain;
+ And two curators known as man and wife
+ Hang up the sunrise, wipe the dust from rain,
+ And gaze excitedly on painted life.
+
+A picture on the wall is like a window—only more so! A window looks out
+on the garden or the street; a picture is an opening into infinity. The
+view from my window is controlled by circumstances. I cannot, for
+example, live in this Australian home of mine and command, from my
+window, a view of York Minster, the Bridge of Sighs, or the Rocky
+Mountains. And, even if I could, the darkness of each night would enfold
+the pleasing prospect in its sombre and impenetrable veil. But the
+pictures do for me what windows could never do. By means of the pictures
+I cut holes in the walls and look out upon any landscape that takes my
+fancy. And, when evening comes, I draw the blinds, illumine the room
+from within, and the panorama that has so delighted me in the day-time
+reveals fresh charms in the softer radiance of the lamps.
+
+We all owe more to pictures than we have ever yet begun to suspect. Here
+is a merry young romp of a schoolboy, of tousle-head and swarthy face;
+loving the open-air and hating books like poison. A lady gives him a
+ponderous volume, and he turns away with a sneer. But one day he
+casually opens it. There is a colored picture. It represents Robinson
+Crusoe and his man Friday in the midst of one of their most exciting
+adventures. The boy—George Borrow—seized the book, carried it off, and
+never rested until he had read it from cover to cover. It opened his
+eyes to the possibilities of literature; and, to his dying day, he
+declared that, but for that colored print, the world would never have
+heard his name or read a line from his pen. Nor is this all. For it is
+probable that, in infancy, our minds receive their first bias
+towards—or away from—sacred things from the pictures of biblical
+subjects and biblical characters that are then, wisely or unwisely,
+exposed to our gaze. The Face that, in the secret chambers of our
+hearts, we think of as the Face of Jesus is, in all likelihood, the Face
+that we saw in the first picture-book that mother showed us.
+
+But I fear that I have wandered. I set out to talk, not so much about
+pictures, as about photographs—photographs in general and old
+photographs in particular. Have photographs—and especially old
+photographs—no ethical or spiritual value? Is there a man living who
+has not, at some time, felt himself rebuked by eyes that looked down at
+him from a frame on the wall? I often feel, in relation to the
+photographs around the room, as Tennyson felt in relation to the spirits
+of those whom he had loved long since and lost awhile. It is lovely to
+think that those who have passed from our sight are not, in reality, far
+from us. And yet—
+
+ Do we indeed desire the dead
+ Should still be near us at our side?
+ Is there no baseness we would hide?
+ No inner vileness that we dread?
+
+ Shall he for whose applause I strove,
+ I had such reverence for his blame,
+ See with clear eye some hidden shame
+ And I be lessen'd in his love?
+
+Who has not been conscious of a similar feeling under the searching
+glances of the eyes upon the wall? They seem at times to pierce our very
+souls. Tennyson came at last to the comfortable assurance that the
+shrinking fear with which he thought of his dead friends was not
+justified. For, he reflected, those who have gone out of the dusk into
+the daylight have acquired, not only a loftier purity, but a larger
+charity.
+
+ I wrong the grave with fears untrue:
+ Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
+ There must be wisdom with great Death:
+ The dead shall look me thro' and thro'.
+
+ Be near us when we climb or fall:
+ Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
+ With larger other eyes than ours,
+ To make allowance for us all.
+
+It is pleasant to transfer that thought to the photographs around the
+room. They hang there all day and every day; they hear all that we say
+and see all that we do; those quiet eyes seem to read us narrowly. Yet
+if, on the one hand, they see more in these secret souls of ours to
+_blame_, it is possible that, on the other, they see more to _pity_. The
+judgements that we most dread are the judgements of those who only
+partly understand. The drunkard shrinks from the eyes of those who see
+his debauchery but know nothing of his temptation. There is something
+wonderfully comforting and strengthening in the clear eyes of those who
+see, not a part merely, but the whole.
+
+Charles Simeon, of Cambridge, adorned his study wall with a fine picture
+of Henry Martyn. It is very difficult to say which of the two owed most
+to the other. In the days when he was groping after the light, Henry
+Martyn—then a student—fell under the influence of Mr. Simeon, and no
+other minister helped him so much. But, later on, when Henry Martyn was
+illumining the Orient with the light of the gospel, his magnetic
+personality and heroic example exerted a remarkable authority over the
+ardent mind of the eminent Cambridge scholar. Mr. Simeon began to feel
+that, in some subtle and inexplicable way, the portrait on the wall was
+influencing his whole life. The picture was more than a picture. A wave
+of reverential admiration swept over him whenever he glanced up at it.
+He caught himself talking to it, and it seemed to speak to him. His
+biographer says that 'Mr. Simeon used to observe of Martyn's picture,
+while looking up at it with affectionate earnestness, as it hung over
+his fireplace: "There! see that blessed man! What an expression of
+countenance! No one looks at me as he does! He never takes his eyes off
+me, and seems always to be saying: _Be serious! Be in earnest! Don't
+trifle! don't trifle!_" Then smiling at the picture and gently bowing,
+he added: "_And I won't trifle; I won't trifle!_"' His friends always
+felt that the photograph over the fireplace was one of the most profound
+and effective influences in the life and work of Charles Simeon; and
+nobody who treasures a few reproving and inspiring pictures of the kind
+will have the slightest difficulty in believing it.
+
+The photographs upon my wall are never tyrannical; else why should I
+prefer them to the cold, imprisoning walls? But, though never
+tyrannical, they are always authoritative. They speak, not harshly, but
+firmly. In the nature of the case, these are the faces I revere—the
+faces of those whom I have enthroned within my heart. Being enthroned,
+they command. They sometimes say _Thou shalt_: they sometimes say _Thou
+shalt not_. They sometimes suggest; they sometimes prohibit.
+
+And now, before I lay down my pen, shall I reveal the circumstance that
+led me to this train of thought? I am writing at Easter-time. On Good
+Friday a lady presented me with an exquisitely sad but unspeakably
+beautiful picture—a picture of the Thorn-crowned Face. Where am I to
+hang it? It will insist, tenderly but firmly, on a suitable and
+harmonious environment. Henry Drummond used to tell of a Cambridge
+undergraduate whose sweetheart visited his room. She found its walls
+covered with pictures of actresses and racehorses. She said nothing,
+but, on his birthday, presented him with a picture like this. A year
+later she again called on him at Cambridge. The Thorn-crowned Face hung
+over the fireplace; and the other walls were adorned with charming
+landscapes and reproductions of famous paintings. He caught her glancing
+at her gift.
+
+'It's made a great difference to the room,' he said; 'what's more, it's
+made a great difference _in me_!'
+
+That is a way our pictures have. They insist on ruling everything and
+everybody. I have no right to enthrone a despot in my home; nor to exalt
+a Thorn-crowned King unless I am prepared to make Him Lord of all.
+
+
+
+
+ V—A BOX OF BLOCKS
+
+
+ I
+
+We had a birthday at our house to-day, and among the presents was a
+beautiful box of blocks. Each block represented one of the letters of
+the alphabet. As I saw them being arranged and rearranged upon the
+table, I fell a-thinking. For the alphabet has, in our time, come to its
+own. We go through life muttering an interminable and incomprehensible
+jargon of initials. We tack initials on to our names—fore and aft—and
+we like to see every one of them in its place. As soon as I open my eyes
+in the morning, the postman hands me a medley of circulars, postcards
+and letters. One of them bids me attend the annual meeting of the
+S.P.C.A.; another reminds me of the monthly committee meeting of the
+M.C.M.; a third asks me to deliver an address at the P.S.A. In the
+afternoon I rush from an appointment at the Y.M.C.A. to speak on behalf
+of the W.C.T.U.; and then, having dropped in to pay my insurance premium
+at the A.M.P., I take the tram at the G.P.O., and ask the conductor to
+drop me at the A.B.C. I have accepted an invitation to a pleasant little
+function there—an invitation that is clearly marked R.S.V.P. And so on.
+There is no end to it. Life may be defined as a small amount of activity
+entirely surrounded by the letters of the alphabet.
+
+Now the alphabet has a symbolism of its own. The man who coined the
+phrase '_as simple as A.B.C._' went mad; he went mad before he coined
+it. There are, it is true, a few simplicities sprinkled among the
+intricacies of this old world of ours; but the alphabet is not one of
+them. I protest that it is most unfair to call the alphabet simple.
+Nobody likes to be thought simple nowadays; see how frantically we
+preachers struggle to avoid any suspicion of the kind! Any man living
+would rather be called a sinner—or even a saint—than a simpleton. Why,
+then, affront the alphabet, which, as we have seen, is working a
+prodigious amount of overtime in our service, by applying to it so very
+opprobrious an epithet?
+
+'_As simple as A.B.C._,' indeed! Macaulay's schoolboy may not have been
+as omniscient as the historian would lead us to believe, but he at least
+knew that there is nothing simple about the A.B.C. The alphabet is the
+hardest lesson that a child is called upon to learn. Latin roots,
+algebraic equations, and the _Pons Asinorum_ are mere nothings in
+comparison. Grown-ups have short memories. They forget the stupendous
+difficulties that they surmounted in their earliest infancy; and their
+forgetfulness renders them pitiless and unsympathetic. Few of us
+recognize the strain in which a child's brain is involved when, for the
+first time, he confronts the alphabet. The whole thing is so arbitrary;
+there is no clue. In his noble essay on _The Evolution of Language_,
+Professor Henry Drummond shows that the alphabet is really a
+picture-gallery. 'First,' he says, 'there was the onomatopoetic writing,
+the ideograph, the imitation of the actual object. This is the form we
+find in the Egyptian hieroglyphic. For a man a man is drawn, for a camel
+a camel, for a hut a hut. Then, to save time, the objects were drawn in
+shorthand—a couple of dashes for the limbs and one across, as in the
+Chinese, for a man; a square in the same language for a field; two
+strokes at an obtuse angle, suggesting the roof, for a house. To express
+further qualities, these abbreviated pictures were next compounded in
+ingenious ways. A man and a field together conveyed the idea of wealth;
+a roof and a woman represented home; and so on. And thus, little by
+little, our letters were evolved. But the pictures have become so
+truncated, abbreviated and emasculated, in the course of this
+evolutionary process, that a child, though notoriously fond of pictures,
+sees nothing fascinating in the letters of the alphabet. There is
+absolutely nothing about the first to suggest the sound A; nothing about
+the second to suggest the sound B. The whole thing is so
+incomprehensible; how can he ever hope to master it? An adult brain,
+introduced to such a conglomeration for the first time, would reel and
+stagger; is it any wonder that these childish cheeks get flushed or that
+the curly head turns at times very feverishly upon the pillow?
+
+The sequence, too, is as baffling as the symbols. There is every reason
+why _two_ should come between _one_ and _three_; and that reason is so
+obvious that the tiniest tot in the class can appreciate it. But why
+must B come between A and C? There is no natural advance, as in the case
+of the numerals. The letter B is not a little more than the letter A,
+nor a little less than the letter C. Except through the operation of the
+law of association, which only weaves its spell with the passing of the
+years, there is nothing about A to suggest B, and nothing about B to
+suggest C. The combination is a rope of sand. Robert Moffat only
+realized the insuperable character of this difficulty when he attempted
+to teach the natives of Bechuanaland the English alphabet. Each of his
+dusky pupils brought to the task an observation that had been trained in
+the wilds, a brain that had been developed by the years, and an
+intelligence that had been matured by experience. They were not babies.
+Yet the alphabet proved too much for them. Why should A be A? and why
+should B be B? and why should the one follow the other? Mr. Moffat was
+on the point of abandoning his educational enterprise as hopeless, when
+one thick-lipped and woolly-headed genius suggested that he should teach
+them to sing it! At first blush the notion seemed preposterous. There
+are some things which, like Magna Charta and minute-books, cannot be set
+to music. Robert Moffat, however, was a Scotsman. The tune most familiar
+to his childhood came singing itself over and over in his brain; by the
+most freakish and fantastic conjunction of ideas it associated itself
+with the problem that was baffling him; and, before that day's sun had
+set, he had his Bechuana pupils roaring the alphabet to the tune of
+_Auld Lang Syne_!
+
+ So A B C
+ D E F G
+ H I J K L M
+ N O P Q
+ R S T U
+ V W X Y Z.
+
+The rhyme and metre fitted perfectly. The natives were so delighted that
+they strolled about the village shouting the new song at the tops of
+their voices; and Mr. Moffat declares that daylight was stealing through
+his bedroom window before the weird unearthly yells at last subsided. I
+have often wondered whether, in a more civilized environment, any
+attempt has been made to impress the letters upon the mind in the same
+way.
+
+
+ II
+
+The symbolism of the alphabet rises to a sudden grandeur, however, when
+it is enlisted in the service of revelation. Long, long ago a startled
+shepherd was ordered to visit the court of the mightiest of earthly
+potentates, and to address him on matters of state in the name of the
+Most High. '_And the Lord said unto Moses, Come now, therefore, and I
+will send thee unto Pharaoh, and I will send thee also unto the children
+of Israel. And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I am come unto them and
+shall say, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you, and they shall
+say What is His name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto
+Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent
+me unto you!_'
+
+'_I am——!_'
+
+'_I am_—what?'
+
+For centuries and centuries that question stood unanswered; that
+sentence remained incomplete. It was a magnificent fragment. It stood
+like a monument that the sculptor had never lived to finish; like a poem
+that the poet, dying with his music in him, had left with its closing
+stanzas unsung. But the sculptor of _that_ fragment was not dead; the
+singer of _that_ song had not perished. For, behold, He liveth for
+evermore! And, in the fullness of time, He reappeared and filled in the
+gap that had so long stood blank.
+
+'_I am——!_'
+
+'_I am_—what?'
+
+'I am—_the Bread of Life_!' 'I am—_the Light of the World_!' 'I
+am—_the Door_!' 'I am—_the True Vine_!' 'I am—_the Good Shepherd_!'
+'I am—_the Way, the Truth, and the Life_!' 'I am—_the Resurrection and
+the Life_!'
+
+And when I come to the end of the Bible, to the last book of all, I find
+the series supplemented and completed.
+
+'I am—_Alpha and Omega_!' 'I am—_A and Z_!' 'I am—_the Alphabet_!'
+The symbolism of which I have spoken can rise to no greater height than
+that. What, I wonder, can such symbolism symbolize? I take these
+birthday blocks that came to our house to-day and strew the letters on
+my study floor. So far as any spiritual significance is concerned, they
+seem as dead as the dry bones in Ezekiel's Valley. And yet—'_I am the
+Alphabet_!' 'Come,' I cry, with the prophet of the captivity, 'come from
+the _Four Winds_, O Breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may
+live!' And the prayer has scarcely escaped my lips when lo, all the
+letters of the alphabet shine with a wondrous lustre and glow with a
+profound significance.
+
+
+ III
+
+For see, the _North Wind_ breathes upon these letters on the floor, and
+I see at once that they are symbols of the '_Inexhaustibility of
+Jesus!_' '_I am Alpha and Omega!_' '_I am the Alphabet!_' I have
+sometimes stood in one of our great public libraries. I have surveyed
+with astonishment the serried ranks of English literature. I have looked
+up, and, in tier above tier, gallery above gallery, shelf above shelf,
+the books climbed to the very roof, while, looking before me and behind
+me, they stretched as far as I could see. The catalogue containing the
+bare names of the books ran into several volumes. And yet the whole of
+this literature consists of these twenty-six letters on the floor
+arranged and rearranged in kaleidoscopic variety of juxtaposition.
+Which, I ask myself, is the greater—the literature or the alphabet? And
+I see at once that the alphabet is the greater because it is so
+inexhaustible. Literature is in its infancy. We shall produce greater
+poets than Shakespeare, greater novelists than Dickens, greater
+philosophers, historians and humorists than any who have yet written.
+But they will draw upon the alphabet for every letter of every syllable
+of every word that they write. They may multiply our literature a
+million-million-fold; yet the alphabet will be as far from exhaustion
+when the last page is finished as it was before the first writer seized
+a pen.
+
+'_I am—the Alphabet!_' He says. He means that He cannot be exhausted.
+
+ For the love of God is broader
+ Than the measure of Man's mind;
+ And the heart of the Eternal
+ Is most wonderfully kind.
+
+The ages may draw upon His grace; the men of every nation and kindred
+and people and tongue—a multitude that no statistician can number—may
+kneel in contrition at His feet; His love is as great as His power and
+knows neither measure nor end. He is inexhaustible.
+
+
+ IV
+
+And when the _South Wind_ breathes upon these letters on the floor, I
+see at once that they are symbols of the _Indispensability of Jesus_.
+Literature, with all its hoarded wealth, is as inaccessible as the
+diamonds of the moon until I have mastered the alphabet. The alphabet is
+the golden key that unlocks to me all its treasures of knowledge, poetry
+and romance.
+
+'_I am—the Alphabet!_' He says; and He says it three separate times.
+For the words occur thrice in the Apocalypse. In the _first_ case they
+refer to the unfolding of the divine revelation; in the _second_ they
+refer to the interpretation of historic experience; and in the _third_
+they refer to the unveiled drama of the future. As the disciples
+discovered on the road to Emmaus, I cannot understand my Bible unless I
+take Him as being the key to it all; I cannot understand the processes
+of historical development until I have given Him the central place; I
+cannot anticipate with equanimity the unfoldings of the days to come
+until I have seen the keys of the eternities swinging at His girdle.
+
+The alphabet is, essentially, an individual affair. In order to read a
+single sentence, I must learn it _for myself_. My father's intimacy with
+the alphabet does not help me to enjoy the volumes on my shelves. The
+alphabet is indispensable _to me_; and so is He! There is something very
+pathetic and very instructive about the story that Legh Richmond tells
+of _The Young Cottager_. 'The rays of the morning star,' Mr. Richmond
+says, 'were not so beautiful in my sight as the spiritual lustre of this
+young Christian's character.' She was very ill when he visited her for
+the last time. 'There was animation in her look—there was
+more—something like a foretaste of heaven seemed to be felt, and gave
+an inexpressible character of spiritual beauty even in death.'
+
+'Where is your hope, my child?' Mr. Richmond asked, in the course of
+that last conversation.
+
+'Lifting up her finger,' he says, 'she pointed to heaven, and then
+directed the same finger downward to her own heart, saying successively
+as she did so, "_Christ there!_" and "_Christ here!_" These words,
+accompanied by the action, spoke her meaning more solemnly than can
+easily be conceived.'
+
+In life and in death He is our one indispensability. In relation to this
+world, and in relation to the world that is to come, He stands to the
+soul as the alphabet stands in relation to literature.
+
+
+ V
+
+And when the East Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, I see
+at once that they are symbols of the _Invincibility of Jesus_. '_I am—A
+and Z!_' He is at the beginning, that is to say, and He goes right
+through to the end. There is nothing in the alphabet before A; there is
+nothing after Z. However far back your evolutionary interpretation of
+the universe may place the beginning of things, you will find Him there.
+However remote your interpretation of prophecy may make the end of
+things, you will find Him there. He goes right through. The story of the
+ages—past, present and future—may be told in a sentence: 'Christ
+first, Christ last, and nought between but Christ.' Having begun, He
+completes. He is the Author and Finisher of our faith. He sets His face
+like a flint. Nothing daunts, deters, or dismays Him. 'I am confident,'
+Paul says, 'of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in
+you will perform it unto the end.' He never halts at H or L or P or X;
+he goes right through to Z. He never gives up.
+
+
+ VI
+
+But the greatest comfort of all comes to me on the Wings of the _West_
+Wind. For, when the West Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor,
+I see at once that they are symbols of the _Adaptability of Jesus_. The
+lover takes these twenty-six letters and makes them the vehicle for the
+expression of his passion; the poet transforms them into a song that
+shall be sung for centuries; the judge turns them into a sentence of
+death. In the hands of each they mold themselves to his necessity. The
+alphabet is the most fluid, the most accommodating, the most plastic,
+the most adaptable contrivance on the planet. Just because, in common
+with every man breathing, I possess a distinctive individuality, I
+sometimes feel as no man ever felt before, and I express myself in
+language such as no man ever used. And the beauty of the alphabet is
+that it adapts itself to my individual need. And that is precisely the
+beauty of Jesus. '_I am—the Alphabet!_' I may not have sinned more than
+others; but I have sinned differently. The experiences of others never
+sound convincing; they do not quite reflect my case. But, like the
+alphabet, He adapts Himself to _every_ case. He is the very Saviour I
+need.
+
+
+
+
+ VI—PIECRUST
+
+
+ I
+
+'What do you say to a day or two together at the Nuggets?' asked John
+Broadbanks one summer's evening. I was just returning from a long round
+of visitation among the outlying farms, and, driving into Mosgiel in the
+dusk, met him on his way home to Silverstream. We reined up for a moment
+to exchange greetings, and he made the suggestion I have just recorded.
+The prospect was certainly very alluring. We had neither of us been away
+for some time. There is no wilder or more romantic bit of scenery on the
+New Zealand coast; and a visit to the stately old lighthouse, perched on
+its rugged and precipitous cliffs, was always a delightful and bracing
+experience.
+
+'We will drive down,' he continued, seeing by my hesitation that any
+resistance on my part would be extremely feeble. 'Sidwell of Balclutha
+has often urged us to spend a night at his manse. We will break our
+journey there. We can slip our guns into the spring-cart, and the
+driving and the shooting will be half the fun of the frolic. And we may
+have time to explore the coast a bit. I should like to see the reef on
+which the _Queen of the Amazons_ was wrecked last week, and, if we are
+lucky enough to strike a low tide, we may be able to scramble on board.
+Are you on?'
+
+He found me very pliable, as, on such occasions, he usually did; and we
+spent a memorable week together. On the Sunday, there being no service
+at the Nuggets, we walked along the wet sands to Port Molyneux, and
+joined a little group of settlers who met for worship in the
+schoolhouse. We rested on the beach during the afternoon, and, in the
+evening, set out to walk to the lighthouse. It was a glorious moonlight
+night; we could see the rabbits scurrying across the road half a mile
+ahead. When we reached the crest of that bold promontory on the
+extremity of which the lighthouse stands, we found ourselves surveying a
+new stretch of coast. The cliffs at our feet were almost perpendicular,
+and, far below us, the wild waves breaking madly over her, lay all that
+was left of the _Queen of the Amazons_. We spread out a coat on the edge
+of the cliff, and sat for some time in silent contemplation of this
+weird and romantic spectacle.
+
+'Well,' I said at last, 'and how did you enjoy the service this
+morning?'
+
+The moon was shining full upon his face, and I could see at a glance
+that he was reluctant to reply.
+
+'I was afraid you would ask me that,' he said at length. 'Well, frankly,
+I was disappointed. It may have been because I was in a holiday mood, or
+perhaps our long walk on such a lovely morning had unfitted me for
+thinking on the sadder side of things; but, however that may be, I found
+the service depressing. It checked the gaiety of my spirit and deadened
+the exhilaration which I took to it. I went in singing; I came out
+sighing. I felt somehow, that the preaching was _mostly piecrust_.
+Obviously, the fellow was not well, and he allowed his dyspepsia to
+darken his doctrine. Indigestion was never intended to be an infectious
+disease; but he made it so by sending us all away suffering from the
+after-effects of his unwholesome breakfast. I usually jot down a
+preacher's heads or divisions, but I didn't trouble to make a note of
+his. It was, firstly, _piecrust_; and, secondly, _piecrust_; and,
+thirdly, _piecrust_; and _piecrust_ all the way through!'
+
+John was not usually a caustic critic. He saw the best in most of us and
+magnified it. His outburst that night on the cliff was therefore the
+more startling and the more memorable. I have quite forgotten what the
+preacher said at Port Molyneux in the morning; but, as long as I live, I
+shall remember what John said as we sat in the silvery moonlight that
+summer's evening, looking down at the great ship being torn to pieces by
+the waves on the cruel reef just below.
+
+
+ II
+
+'Why, bless me,' I heard a man exclaim yesterday in the course of an
+animated discussion at the street corner, 'if things go on like this, I
+shan't have a soul to call my own!' As though any man had! No man living
+has a soul to call his own, or a stomach to call his own. The preacher
+at Port Molyneux assumed, as he sat at breakfast, that his digestive
+organs were his own property, and poor John Broadbanks and I, as well as
+all the other members of the school-house congregation, were penalized
+in consequence. Carlyle used to argue, more or less seriously, that the
+whole course of human history has been repeatedly deflected by blunders
+of this kind. The world has never known a more decisive battle than the
+battle of Waterloo; but why did the Duke of Wellington win it? All
+authorities agree that Napoleon was the greater general. Lord Roberts
+declares that the schemes of Napoleon were more comprehensive, his
+genius more dazzling, and his imagination more vivid than Wellington's.
+Yet on that fateful day that decided the destinies of Europe, Napoleon
+descended to absolute mediocrity while Wellington rose to surpassing
+brilliance. The Emperor was never so agitated; the Duke was never so
+calm. Napoleon, with all the chances in his favor, perpetrated blunder
+after blunder; the Duke seemed omniscient and infallible. Why? Carlyle
+used to say that Napoleon threw his brain out of action by eating a
+hearty breakfast of fried potatoes. In one respect, at any rate, Carlyle
+knew what he was talking about. 'As a student,' he says, 'I discovered
+that I was the owner of a diabolical arrangement called a stomach; and I
+have never been free from the knowledge from that hour to this; and I
+suppose I never shall until I am laid away in my grave.' Warned,
+however, by the melancholy fate which he believed Napoleon to have
+suffered, he guarded against any overflow of his distress. His readers
+rarely suffer from the after-effects of his indiscreet breakfasts. We
+read _Sartor Resartus_, _Heroes and Hero-worship_, and _Past and
+Present_, and never once think of piecrust or of fried potatoes.
+
+It is true, I dare say, that all the people in the school-house were not
+affected as John Broadbanks was. Indeed, I heard next day of one lady
+who thought the sermon very affecting. It nearly made her cry, she said;
+and she felt sure that the preacher was not long for this world. I would
+not on any consideration deprive this excellent creature of her
+lachrymal felicity; but if her well-meant encomiums reached the
+preacher's ears, I hope he did not take them too seriously. Lots of
+people are fond of piecrust, but it does not follow that it is good for
+them. The sort of sermon that would have stimulated the faith of John
+Broadbanks might not have brought tears to the eyes of the lady who was
+moved to such a compassionate ecstasy, but it might have been better for
+her in the long run. John Broadbanks found the piecrust sermon
+depressing; yet, to a certain type of mind, few things are more
+attractive than sadness. We all remember Macaulay's observations on the
+inordinate popularity of Byron. 'It is,' he says, 'without a parallel in
+history. To people who are unacquainted with real calamity, nothing is
+so dainty and sweet as lovely melancholy.' And he goes on to apply this
+to the pessimism of Byron. 'People bought pictures of him; they
+treasured up the smallest relics of him; they learned his poems by
+heart; they did their best to write like him and to look like him. Many
+of them practised in the glass in the hope of catching the curl of the
+upper lip and the scowl of the brow which appear in his portraits. The
+number of hopeful undergraduates and medical students who became things
+of dark imaginings, on whom the freshness of the heart ceased to fall
+like dew, and to whom the relief of tears was denied, passes all
+calculation.' Clearly, this is the lady with the tears—indefinitely
+multiplied.
+
+Now, by way of contrast, turn for a moment from Byron to Browning.
+Professor Phelps of Yale says that Browning was too healthy to be
+popular. He was robust and vigorous, and therefore optimistic. But he is
+slowly winning his way. His star waxes as Byron's wanes. People find
+sooner or later that they cannot live for ever on piecrust. Mr.
+Chesterton says that the bravest thing about Robert Louis Stevenson is
+that he never allowed his manuscripts to smell of his medicines. The
+tortures that racked his frame never passed down his pen to the paper
+spread out before him. You read his sprightly and stirring romances; you
+live for the time being among pirates and smugglers and corsairs; you
+catch the breath of the hills and the tang of the sea; and it never
+occurs to you that you are the guest of a man who is terribly ill. You
+hear him laugh; you never hear him cough. You do not see his sunken
+eyes, his hectic cheek, his spectral form supported by a pile of
+pillows. You reflect with astonishment when you lay aside the book that
+the story was written by a creature so pitifully frail that, on all the
+earth's broad surface, he could only find one outlandish spot—a lonely
+hilltop in the Pacific—in which he could contrive to breathe. By this
+time we may hope that our preacher at Port Molyneux has read the _Life
+of Stevenson_. And, as he did so, he must have resolved that, however
+excruciating his dyspepsia, his congregation, at least, shall never be
+infected by it.
+
+I regret now that I did not ask the preacher's name. If only I knew his
+address, I should find pleasure in posting him a copy of _The Autocrat
+of the Breakfast Table_. For the autocrat knew something about piecrust.
+The pie at the boarding-house looked one day particularly attractive,
+and things happened in consequence. 'I took more of it than was good for
+me,' says the Autocrat, 'and had an indigestion in consequence. While I
+was suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a
+theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation. When I
+got better, I labelled them all _Piecrust_, and laid them by as
+scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my shelves
+that I should like to label with some such title; but, as they have
+great names on their title-pages—Doctors of Divinity, some of them—it
+wouldn't do!' I should have been tempted to mark this passage before
+posting the book to Port Molyneux.
+
+
+ III
+
+But the really extraordinary thing about piecrust is that the quality
+with which it is most frequently taunted is its one redeeming feature,
+the feature that makes it sublime. Promises, they say, are like
+piecrust, _made to be broken_. Why, the most beautiful and sacred things
+in life are made to be broken! Upon all ordinary things, breakage comes
+as the climax of disaster; upon a select few, breakage comes as the
+climax of destiny. The fountain-pen that I hold in my hand—the pen with
+which, without so much as a change of nib, all my books have been
+written—will lie broken before me one of these days. It was made; it
+will be broken; but it was not made to be broken. The enjoyment ends
+with the breakage. But with those other things, the things of the
+pie-crust class, the enjoyment begins with the breakage. When I was a
+small boy, I indulged in bird-nesting. And I never looked upon a cluster
+of delicately-tinted, prettily-speckled eggs without feeling that each
+egg was the most consummate piece of workmanship that I had ever seen.
+Its shape, its color and its pattern were alike perfect. Indeed, I
+silenced my conscience as I bore the nest home by amplifying this very
+argument. 'If I leave the nest in the tree,' I said to myself, 'these
+pretty things will all be broken! When the birds are hatched, the eggs
+will be smashed! They are far too pretty for that! I will take them home
+and keep them. I am really saving them by stealing them!' I know now
+that I was wrong. My argument was made up of casuistry and special
+pleading. In reality I destroyed the eggs by preserving them. They were
+made to be broken, and I cheated destiny by preventing the breakage. I
+have travelled a good many miles since then; but, every step of the way,
+I have learned, in some new form, the same great lesson. And when, with
+reverent footsteps, I have climbed the loftiest summits of all, the
+truth that I first discovered in the English hedgerows has become most
+radiantly clear. The two greatest events in the history of this planet
+are the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.
+
+It is _Christmas-time_; and we think with wonder and awe of the mystery
+of that holy body's making!
+
+It is _Easter-time_; and we think with wonder and awe of the mystery of
+that holy body's breaking!
+
+It is _Communion-time_! 'This is My body which is broken for you,' He
+said.
+
+And in the making of that body and the breaking of that body—the body
+that was made to be broken—a lost world has found salvation.
+
+
+
+
+ VII—ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
+
+
+It was a cruel winter's night; an icy wind was howling across the Plain;
+a glorious fire was blazing in the dining-room grate; and, happily, I
+had no engagements. To add to our felicity, the San Francisco mail had
+arrived that morning, bringing our monthly budget of news from home. The
+letters had, of course, been devoured upon delivery, but the papers and
+magazines had been laid aside for evening consumption. We had just
+opened the packages and arranged the journals in order of publication
+when there came a ring at the front-door bell. We glanced at each other
+meaningly and at the papers regretfully. All kinds of visions presented
+themselves; visions of a garrulous visitor who, with business over,
+would not go; visions of a long drive across the Plain in the biting
+wind; visions of everything but an evening with each other, a roaring
+fire and the English mail. As though to rebuke our inhospitable and
+ungracious thoughts, however, it was only Elsie Hammond. Elsie often
+dropped in of an evening; she usually brought her fancy-work; and, in
+her presence, we were perfectly at our ease. Every manse has one or two
+such visitors. We read, worked, or chatted when Elsie came just as we
+should have done if she had not dropped in.
+
+'Why, Elsie,' I exclaimed, as soon as, divested of her hat and cloak,
+she entered the dining-room and took her usual chair, 'whatever brings
+you out on a wild night like this?'
+
+'Well,' she replied, 'I wanted to see you about the Young People's
+Missionary Union. You remember that they made me Secretary last month,
+and we are arranging for the annual meeting. We have invited Mr.
+Harriford Johnson, of the North Africa Evangelization Society, to give
+an address; and I received his reply this morning. He will be coming out
+from town by the five-twenty train; and I wondered if you could let him
+come to the manse to tea, and, if needs be, stay the night.'
+
+I put Elsie at her ease by telling her that she might leave the matter
+of Mr. Johnson's reception and entertainment entirely in my hands; and
+then, resuming the pile of papers, we had a royal evening with the
+English news.
+
+The day of the missionary meeting arrived; and, as the clock struck
+five, I set out for the station. Quite a number of people were moving in
+the same direction, among them the Rev. J. M. McKerrow, my Presbyterian
+neighbor. We walked towards the station together. On the platform,
+however, he recognized a lady friend from a distance; he moved away to
+speak to her; and, in the bustle of the train's arrival, we saw each
+other no more.
+
+I had never met Mr. Johnson, nor had any description of his personal
+appearance been given me. For some reason, I had pictured to myself a
+tall, cadaverous man in a severe garb, bearing upon him the signs of the
+ravages wrought by a variety of tropical diseases; and, contrary to
+one's usual experience, a gentleman roughly according with this
+prognostication stepped from the train and began to look aimlessly about
+him.
+
+'Mr. Johnson?' I inquired, approaching him.
+
+'Ah!' he replied, 'and you're from the manse!'
+
+I admitted the impeachment, and we set off together for home. On the way
+we chatted about the weather, the place, the crops, the people, the
+church, the services, and things in general. He was a vivacious
+conversationalist, and exhibited a remarkably alert and hungry mind. He
+wanted to know all about everything; and when we discussed my own work,
+its difficulties, and its encouragements, he showed a genuine interest
+and a delightful sympathy. We had invited several of the leading
+missionary spirits of the congregation to meet him at tea. In order that
+the conversation at table might be generally enjoyable, I had stored my
+mind with a fine assortment of questions concerning conditions in
+Northern Africa which, like a quiver-full of arrows, I intended firing
+at our guest as opportunity offered. But opportunity did not offer. Mr.
+Johnson was so interested in the work of the various organizations
+represented round the table that he made it impossible for us to inquire
+about his own. Moreover, our visitor chanced to discover that one of our
+guests had in his home a little boy who was afflicted with blindness. On
+eliciting this information, Mr. Johnson lapsed into sudden silence, and
+looked, I thought, as though he had been hurt. But, after tea, he drew
+the father of the blind boy aside and explained to him that he himself
+had but one child, a little girl of ten, and she was similarly
+afflicted. As he spoke of her, his vivacity vanished, and a great depth
+of tenderness revealed itself. I wondered, but did not care to ask, if
+the blindness of his child was part of the price that he had been
+compelled to pay for residence in tropical Africa. After telling us of
+his little daughter, and of the comfort that she was to him, Mr. Johnson
+looked at his watch.
+
+'We have nearly an hour,' he said, 'before meeting time; may I peep into
+your sanctum? I love to glance over a man's books.'
+
+Rarely have I spent an hour in the study so delightfully. All his
+enthusiasm awoke again at sight of the shelves. He took down volume
+after volume, handling each with affectionate reverence, and making each
+the text of a running comment of a most fascinating character. Amusing
+anecdotes about the author; an outline of the singular circumstances
+under which certain of the books were written; illuminating criticisms
+by eminent authorities; sparkling quotations of out-of-the-way
+passages—there seemed to be no end to his fund of lively and original
+observations.
+
+'But I say,' he suddenly ejaculated, 'that conversation at table was
+most interesting and valuable. I had no idea that so much excellent work
+was being done. I have often wondered——'
+
+But at that moment the mistress of the manse intervened.
+
+'Excuse me,' she said, as she opened the study door, 'but Mr. McKerrow
+and another gentleman wish to see you at once in the drawing-room.'
+
+To the drawing-room I accordingly repaired; and there I found my
+companion of the afternoon, accompanied by a short, ruddy, thick-set
+man, who was laughing very heartily.
+
+'This is an extraordinary situation,' my friend began. 'You will have
+discovered by this time that we jumped to conclusions too hurriedly this
+afternoon. _This_ is Mr. Harriford Johnson, of the North Africa
+Evangelization Society, who is, I believe, to lecture for you to-night,
+and I think you must have walked off with Mr. Douglas E. Johnson, M.A.,
+who is to address our teachers this evening on the kindergarten method
+as applied to Sunday-school work. Mrs. McKerrow and I had invited the
+superintendent of our Sunday-school and the teachers of the primary
+classes to meet Mr. Johnson at tea at the manse, and we got into a
+beautiful tangle. It was like playing a game of cross questions and
+crooked answers. The young people were asking Mr. Johnson's advice on
+technical matters connected with their classes; and Mr. Johnson was
+modestly disclaiming all knowledge of the subject, and was telling us of
+his experiences in Central Africa. We were all beginning to feel that
+the world had suddenly turned topsy-turvy, when Mr. Johnson suddenly
+asked how long ago the Young People's Missionary Union was established,
+and seemed surprised that a Miss Elsie Hammond was not present. Then the
+truth broke upon us, and we have all been laughing ever since.'
+
+I cordially welcomed Mr. Johnson, and then we all three went through to
+the dining-room, in which, by this time, the whole of our party was
+assembled. Mr. Johnson was holding the company spell-bound. I briefly
+introduced our two visitors, and explained the position. The
+announcement was received with bursts of merriment, although our
+tea-table guest was covered with confusion and full of apologies.
+However, he quickly entered into the humor of the situation, and, after
+promising to return to lunch with the African Mr. Johnson next day, he
+went off with Mr. McKerrow laughing heartily.
+
+Both meetings were a great success. The comedy of errors may have had
+something to do with it. In comparing notes next morning, both speakers
+declared that they felt very much at home with their audiences. The joke
+had quickly spread, and created an atmosphere of sympathy and
+familiarity. Henry Drummond used to say that he could never get on with
+people until he had laughed with them. Both meetings opened that evening
+with a bond already established between speaker and audience; and that
+stands for a good deal.
+
+We had a very happy time, too, at lunch next morning. Our visitors were
+both pleased that the mistake had been made.
+
+'It's very nice,' said Mr. Harriford Johnson, 'to have got into touch
+with two ministers and two congregations instead of one. I am thankful
+to have been able to say a word for Africa to the young people with whom
+I had tea at Mr. McKerrow's.'
+
+'And for my part,' added Mr. Douglas Johnson, 'I am thoroughly ashamed
+of myself. The conversation at the tea-table last evening was a perfect
+revelation to me. I have often heard about foreign missions, and I
+suppose I ought to have interested myself in them. But one has his own
+line of things, and is apt to get into grooves. I had no idea until
+yesterday that the movement was so orderly and systematic nor that the
+operations were so extensive. It was like being taken into the
+confidence of a military commander, and shown his strategy. I go back
+feeling that my mind has been fitted with a new set of windows, and I am
+able to look out upon the world in a way that was impossible before. I
+am delighted, too, to have met my namesake, Mr. Harriford Johnson. He
+has given me'—taking a pamphlet from his pocket—'a copy of the last
+annual report of the North Africa Evangelization Society, and I shall
+always think more kindly of Africa because of this singular experience
+at Mosgiel.'
+
+It was years before I heard of either of our visitors again. Mr.
+Harriford Johnson, it is true, posted me each year a copy of the report
+of his work. In 1899, however, he enclosed the pamphlet in a note saying
+that he had found some of the hints that he had picked up in his
+conversation with Mr. McKerrow's kindergarten teachers very useful to
+his native school. 'There is something in the idea,' he wrote, 'that
+appeals to the African mind; and I am sending to London for some
+literature on the subject with a view to applying the system more
+extensively. The mistakes that we all made that evening at the Mosgiel
+railway station have proved, to me, very profitable ones.'
+
+I never heard directly from Mr. Douglas Johnson. But, about five years
+afterwards, I noticed in an Auckland paper the announcement of the death
+of his little blind girl; and, a year or two later, I saw in the annual
+report of Mr. Harriford Johnson's Mission the acknowledgement of a
+handsome donation from D.E.J., '_in loving memory of one who, though
+spending all her days in darkness, now sees, and desires that Africa
+shall have the Light of Life_.'
+
+Of all the things that are made in a world like this, mistakes are by no
+means the worst.
+
+
+
+
+ OTHER BOOKS BY MR. BOREHAM
+
+ A BUNCH OF EVERLASTINGS
+ A HANDFUL OF STARS
+ A REEL OF RAINBOW
+ FACES IN THE FIRE
+ MOUNTAINS IN THE MIST
+ MUSHROOMS ON THE MOOR
+ THE GOLDEN MILESTONE
+ THE HOME OF THE ECHOES
+ THE LUGGAGE OF LIFE
+ THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL
+ THE SILVER SHADOW
+ THE UTTERMOST STAR
+ SHADOWS ON THE WALL
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rubble and Roseleaves, by F. W. Boreham
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUBBLE AND ROSELEAVES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 59180-0.txt or 59180-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+ http://www.gutenberg.org/5/9/1/8/59180/
+
+Produced by David T. Jones, Roger Frank, Al Haines, Sue
+Clark & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team
+at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+ This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+ most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+ restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+ under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+ eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+ United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
+ are located before using this ebook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+ the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+ you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+ to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+ agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+ Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+ within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+ legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+ payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+ Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+ Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+ Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+ you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+ does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+ License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+ copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+ all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+ works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+ any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+ electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+ receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+ distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+ Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+ Chief Executive and Director
+ gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/59180-0.zip b/59180-0.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..faa4283 --- /dev/null +++ b/59180-0.zip diff --git a/59180-h.zip b/59180-h.zip Binary files differindex ee69539..d69c093 100644 --- a/59180-h.zip +++ b/59180-h.zip diff --git a/59180-h/59180-h.htm b/59180-h/59180-h.htm index f9d1c9b..529d77a 100644 --- a/59180-h/59180-h.htm +++ b/59180-h/59180-h.htm @@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
- <title>Rubble and Roseleaves, by F. W. Boreham, a Project Gutenberg eBook</title>
+ <title>Rubble and Roseleaves, by F. W. Boreham, a Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook</title>
<link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg"/>
<meta name="DC.Title" content="Rubble and Roseleaves"/>
<meta name="DC.Creator" content="F. W. Boreham"/>
@@ -73,7 +73,7 @@ Character set encoding: UTF-8 Produced by David T. Jones, Roger Frank, Al Haines, Sue
-Clark & the online Project Gutenberg team
+Clark & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
@@ -7522,7 +7522,7 @@ This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/5/9/1/8/59180/
Produced by David T. Jones, Roger Frank, Al Haines, Sue
-Clark & the online Project Gutenberg team
+Clark & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
|