initial commit of ebook 705HEADmain

1 files changed, 2994 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/rmend10.txt b/old/rmend10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3be14d0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/rmend10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2994 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Roadmender, by Michael Fairless
+(#1 in our series by Michael Fairless)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Roadmender
+
+Author: Michael Fairless
+
+Release Date: November, 1996  [EBook #705]
+[This file was first posted on November 6, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: September 8, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ROADMENDER ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1911 Duckworth and Co. edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+THE ROADMENDER
+
+
+
+
+I have attained my ideal:  I am a roadmender, some say
+stonebreaker.  Both titles are correct, but the one is more
+pregnant than the other.  All day I sit by the roadside on a
+stretch of grass under a high hedge of saplings and a tangle of
+traveller's joy, woodbine, sweetbrier, and late roses.  Opposite me
+is a white gate, seldom used, if one may judge from the trail of
+honeysuckle growing tranquilly along it:  I know now that whenever
+and wherever I die my soul will pass out through this white gate;
+and then, thank God, I shall not have need to undo that trail.
+
+In our youth we discussed our ideals freely:  I wonder how many
+beside myself have attained, or would understand my attaining.
+After all, what do we ask of life, here or indeed hereafter, but
+leave to serve, to live, to commune with our fellowmen and with
+ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into the face of
+God?  All these gifts are mine as I sit by the winding white road
+and serve the footsteps of my fellows.  There is no room in my life
+for avarice or anxiety; I who serve at the altar live of the altar:
+I lack nothing but have nothing over; and when the winter of life
+comes I shall join the company of weary old men who sit on the
+sunny side of the workhouse wall and wait for the tender mercies of
+God.
+
+Just now it is the summer of things; there is life and music
+everywhere--in the stones themselves, and I live to-day beating out
+the rhythmical hammer-song of The Ring.  There is real physical joy
+in the rise and swing of the arm, in the jar of a fair stroke, the
+split and scatter of the quartz:  I am learning to be ambidextrous,
+for why should Esau sell his birthright when there is enough for
+both?  Then the rest-hour comes, bringing the luxurious ache of
+tired but not weary limbs; and I lie outstretched and renew my
+strength, sometimes with my face deep-nestled in the cool green
+grass, sometimes on my back looking up into the blue sky which no
+wise man would wish to fathom.
+
+The birds have no fear of me; am I not also of the brown brethren
+in my sober fustian livery?  They share my meals--at least the
+little dun-coated Franciscans do; the blackbirds and thrushes care
+not a whit for such simple food as crumbs, but with legs well apart
+and claws tense with purchase they disinter poor brother worm,
+having first mocked him with sound of rain.  The robin that lives
+by the gate regards my heap of stones as subject to his special
+inspection.  He sits atop and practises the trill of his summer
+song until it shrills above and through the metallic clang of my
+strokes; and when I pause he cocks his tail, with a humorous
+twinkle of his round eye which means--"What! shirking, big
+brother?"--and I fall, ashamed, to my mending of roads.
+
+The other day, as I lay with my face in the grass, I heard a gentle
+rustle, and raised my head to find a hedge-snake watching me
+fearless, unwinking.  I stretched out my hand, picked it up
+unresisting, and put it in my coat like the husbandman of old.  Was
+he so ill-rewarded, I wonder, with the kiss that reveals secrets?
+My snake slept in peace while I hammered away with an odd
+quickening of heart as I thought how to me, as to Melampus, had
+come the messenger--had come, but to ears deafened by centuries of
+misrule, blindness, and oppression; so that, with all my longing, I
+am shut out of the wondrous world where walked Melampus and the
+Saint.  To me there is no suggestion of evil in the little silent
+creatures, harmless, or deadly only with the Death which is Life.
+The beasts who turn upon us, as a rule maul and tear
+unreflectingly; with the snake there is the swift, silent strike,
+the tiny, tiny wound, then sleep and a forgetting.
+
+My brown friend, with its message unspoken, slid away into the
+grass at sundown to tell its tale in unstopped ears; and I, my task
+done, went home across the fields to the solitary cottage where I
+lodge.  It is old and decrepit--two rooms, with a quasi-attic over
+them reached by a ladder from the kitchen and reached only by me.
+It is furnished with the luxuries of life, a truckle bed, table,
+chair, and huge earthenware pan which I fill from the ice-cold well
+at the back of the cottage.  Morning and night I serve with the
+Gibeonites, their curse my blessing, as no doubt it was theirs when
+their hearts were purged by service.  Morning and night I send down
+the moss-grown bucket with its urgent message from a dry and dusty
+world; the chain tightens through my hand as the liquid treasure
+responds to the messenger, and then with creak and jangle--the
+welcome of labouring earth--the bucket slowly nears the top and
+disperses the treasure in the waiting vessels.  The Gibeonites were
+servants in the house of God, ministers of the sacrament of service
+even as the High Priest himself; and I, sharing their high office
+of servitude, thank God that the ground was accursed for my sake,
+for surely that curse was the womb of all unborn blessing.
+
+The old widow with whom I lodge has been deaf for the last twenty
+years.  She speaks in the strained high voice which protests
+against her own infirmity, and her eyes have the pathetic look of
+those who search in silence.  For many years she lived alone with
+her son, who laboured on the farm two miles away.  He met his death
+rescuing a carthorse from its burning stable; and the farmer gave
+the cottage rent free and a weekly half-crown for life to the poor
+old woman whose dearest terror was the workhouse.  With my shilling
+a week rent, and sharing of supplies, we live in the lines of
+comfort.  Of death she has no fears, for in the long chest in the
+kitchen lie a web of coarse white linen, two pennies covered with
+the same to keep down tired eyelids, decent white stockings, and a
+white cotton sun-bonnet--a decorous death-suit truly--and enough
+money in the little bag for self-respecting burial.  The farmer
+buried his servant handsomely--good man, he knew the love of
+reticent grief for a 'kind' burial--and one day Harry's mother is
+to lie beside him in the little churchyard which has been a
+cornfield, and may some day be one again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+On Sundays my feet take ever the same way.  First my temple
+service, and then five miles tramp over the tender, dewy fields,
+with their ineffable earthy smell, until I reach the little church
+at the foot of the grey-green down.  Here, every Sunday, a young
+priest from a neighbouring village says Mass for the tiny hamlet,
+where all are very old or very young--for the heyday of life has no
+part under the long shadow of the hills, but is away at sea or in
+service.  There is a beautiful seemliness in the extreme youth of
+the priest who serves these aged children of God.  He bends to
+communicate them with the reverent tenderness of a son, and reads
+with the careful intonation of far-seeing love.  To the old people
+he is the son of their old age, God-sent to guide their tottering
+footsteps along the highway of foolish wayfarers; and he, with his
+youth and strength, wishes no better task.  Service ended, we greet
+each other friendly--for men should not be strange in the acre of
+God; and I pass through the little hamlet and out and up on the
+grey down beyond.  Here, at the last gate, I pause for breakfast;
+and then up and on with quickening pulse, and evergreen memory of
+the weary war-worn Greeks who broke rank to greet the great blue
+Mother-way that led to home.  I stand on the summit hatless, the
+wind in my hair, the smack of salt on my cheek, all round me
+rolling stretches of cloud-shadowed down, no sound but the shrill
+mourn of the peewit and the gathering of the sea.
+
+The hours pass, the shadows lengthen, the sheep-bells clang; and I
+lie in my niche under the stunted hawthorn watching the to and fro
+of the sea, and AEolus shepherding his white sheep across the blue.
+I love the sea with its impenetrable fathoms, its wash and
+undertow, and rasp of shingle sucked anew.  I love it for its
+secret dead in the Caverns of Peace, of which account must be given
+when the books are opened and earth and heaven have fled away.  Yet
+in my love there is a paradox, for as I watch the restless,
+ineffective waves I think of the measureless, reflective depths of
+the still and silent Sea of Glass, of the dead, small and great,
+rich or poor, with the works which follow them, and of the Voice as
+the voice of many waters, when the multitude of one mind rends
+heaven with alleluia:  and I lie so still that I almost feel the
+kiss of White Peace on my mouth.  Later still, when the flare of
+the sinking sun has died away and the stars rise out of a veil of
+purple cloud, I take my way home, down the slopes, through the
+hamlet, and across miles of sleeping fields; over which night has
+thrown her shifting web of mist--home to the little attic, the
+deep, cool well, the kindly wrinkled face with its listening eyes--
+peace in my heart and thankfulness for the rhythm of the road.
+
+Monday brings the joy of work, second only to the Sabbath of rest,
+and I settle to my heap by the white gate.  Soon I hear the distant
+stamp of horsehoofs, heralding the grind and roll of the wheels
+which reaches me later--a heavy flour-waggon with a team of four
+great gentle horses, gay with brass trappings and scarlet ear-caps.
+On the top of the craftily piled sacks lies the white-clad
+waggoner, a pink in his mouth which he mumbles meditatively, and
+the reins looped over the inactive whip--why should he drive a
+willing team that knows the journey and responds as strenuously to
+a cheery chirrup as to the well-directed lash?  We greet and pass
+the time of day, and as he mounts the rise he calls back a warning
+of coming rain.  I am already white with dust as he with flour,
+sacramental dust, the outward and visible sign of the stir and beat
+of the heart of labouring life.
+
+Next to pass down the road is an anxious ruffled hen, her speckled
+breast astir with maternal troubles.  She walks delicately, lifting
+her feet high and glancing furtively from side to side with comb
+low dressed.  The sight of man, the heartless egg-collector, from
+whose haunts she has fled, wrings from her a startled cluck, and
+she makes for the white gate, climbs through, and disappears.  I
+know her feelings too well to intrude.  Many times already has she
+hidden herself, amassed four or five precious treasures, brooding
+over them with anxious hope; and then, after a brief desertion to
+seek the necessary food, she has returned to find her efforts at
+concealment vain, her treasures gone.  At last, with the courage of
+despair she has resolved to brave the terrors of the unknown and
+seek a haunt beyond the tyranny of man.  I will watch over her from
+afar, and when her mother-hope is fulfilled I will marshal her and
+her brood back to the farm where she belongs; for what end I care
+not to think, it is of the mystery which lies at the heart of
+things; and we are all God's beasts, says St Augustine.
+
+Here is my stone-song, a paraphrase of the Treasure Motif.
+
+[Music score which cannot be reproduced.  It is F# dotted crotchet,
+F# quaver, F# quaver, F# dotted crotchet, D crotchet, E crotchet.
+This bar is then repeated once more.]
+
+What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating
+the toil of life into the readable script of music!  For those who
+seek the tale of other worlds his magic is silent; but earth-
+travail under his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an
+accompaniment of the elements, and the blare and crash of the
+bottomless pit itself.  The Pilgrim's March is the sad sound of
+footsore men; the San Graal the tremulous yearning of servitude for
+richer, deeper bondage.  The yellow, thirsty flames lick up the
+willing sacrifice, the water wails the secret of the river and the
+sea; the birds and beasts, the shepherd with his pipe, the
+underground life in rocks and caverns, all cry their message to
+this nineteenth-century toiling, labouring world--and to me as I
+mend my road.
+
+Two tramps come and fling themselves by me as I eat my noonday
+meal.  The one, red-eyed, furtive, lies on his side with restless,
+clutching hands that tear and twist and torture the living grass,
+while his lips mutter incoherently.  The other sits stooped, bare-
+footed, legs wide apart, his face grey, almost as grey as his
+stubbly beard; and it is not long since Death looked him in the
+eyes.  He tells me querulously of a two hundred miles tramp since
+early spring, of search for work, casual jobs with more kicks than
+halfpence, and a brief but blissful sojourn in a hospital bed, from
+which he was dismissed with sentence passed upon him.  For himself,
+he is determined to die on the road under a hedge, where a man can
+see and breathe.  His anxiety is all for his fellow; HE has said he
+will "do for a man"; he wants to "swing," to get out of his "dog's
+life."  I watch him as he lies, this Ishmael and would-be Lamech.
+Ignorance, hunger, terror, the exhaustion of past generations, have
+done their work.  The man is mad, and would kill his fellowman.
+
+Presently we part, and the two go, dogged and footsore, down the
+road which is to lead them into the great silence.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+Yesterday was a day of encounters.
+
+First, early in the morning, a young girl came down the road on a
+bicycle.  Her dressguard was loose, and she stopped to ask for a
+piece of string.  When I had tied it for her she looked at me, at
+my worn dusty clothes and burnt face; and then she took a Niphetos
+rose from her belt and laid it shyly in my dirty disfigured palm.
+I bared my head, and stood hat in hand looking after her as she
+rode away up the hill.  Then I took my treasure and put it in a
+nest of cool dewy grass under the hedge.  Ecce ancilla Domini.
+
+My next visitor was a fellow-worker on his way to a job at the
+cross-roads.  He stood gazing meditatively at my heap of stones.
+
+"Ow long 'ave yer bin at this job that y'ere in such a hurry?"
+
+I stayed my hammer to answer--"Four months."
+
+"Seen better days?"
+
+"Never," I said emphatically, and punctuated the remark with a
+stone split neatly in four.
+
+The man surveyed me in silence for a moment; then he said slowly,
+"Mean ter say yer like crackin' these blamed stones to fill 'oles
+some other fool's made?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Well, that beats everything.  Now, I 'AVE seen better days; worked
+in a big brewery over near Maidstone--a town that, and something
+doing; and now, 'ere I am, 'ammering me 'eart out on these blasted
+stones for a bit o' bread and a pipe o' baccy once a week--it ain't
+good enough."  He pulled a blackened clay from his pocket and began
+slowly filling it with rank tobacco; then he lit it carefully
+behind his battered hat, put the spent match back in his pocket,
+rose to his feet, hitched his braces, and, with a silent nod to me,
+went on to his job.
+
+Why do we give these tired children, whose minds move slowly, whose
+eyes are holden that they cannot read the Book, whose hearts are
+full of sore resentment against they know not what, such work as
+this to do--hammering their hearts out for a bit of bread?  All the
+pathos of unreasoning labour rings in these few words.  We fit the
+collar on unwilling necks; and when their service is over we bid
+them go out free; but we break the good Mosaic law and send them
+away empty.  What wonder there is so little willing service, so few
+ears ready to be thrust through against the master's door.
+
+The swift stride of civilisation is leaving behind individual
+effort, and turning man into the Daemon of a machine.  To and fro
+in front of the long loom, lifting a lever at either end, paces he
+who once with painstaking intelligence drove the shuttle.  THEN he
+tasted the joy of completed work, that which his eye had looked
+upon, and his hands had handled; now his work is as little finished
+as the web of Penelope.  Once the reaper grasped the golden corn
+stems, and with dexterous sweep of sickle set free the treasure of
+the earth.  Once the creatures of the field were known to him, and
+his eye caught the flare of scarlet and blue as the frail poppies
+and sturdy corn-cockles laid down their beauty at his feet; now he
+sits serene on Juggernaut's car, its guiding Daemon, and the field
+is silent to him.
+
+As with the web and the grain so with the wood and stone in the
+treasure-house of our needs.  The ground was accursed FOR OUR SAKE
+that in the sweat of our brow we might eat bread.  Now the many
+live in the brain-sweat of the few; and it must be so, for as
+little as great King Cnut could stay the sea until it had reached
+the appointed place, so little can we raise a barrier to the wave
+of progress, and say, "Thus far and no further shalt thou come."
+
+What then?  This at least; if we live in an age of mechanism let us
+see to it that we are a race of intelligent mechanics; and if man
+is to be the Daemon of a machine let him know the setting of the
+knives, the rise of the piston, the part that each wheel and rod
+plays in the economy of the whole, the part that he himself plays,
+co-operating with it.  Then, when he has lived and served
+intelligently, let us give him of our flocks and of our floor that
+he may learn to rest in the lengthening shadows until he is called
+to his work above.
+
+So I sat, hammering out my thoughts, and with them the conviction
+that stonebreaking should be allotted to minor poets or vagrant
+children of nature like myself, never to such tired folk as my poor
+mate at the cross-roads and his fellows.
+
+At noon, when I stopped for my meal, the sun was baking the hard
+white road in a pitiless glare.  Several waggons and carts passed,
+the horses sweating and straining, with drooping, fly-tormented
+ears.  The men for the most part nodded slumberously on the shaft,
+seeking the little shelter the cart afforded; but one shuffled in
+the white dust, with an occasional chirrup and friendly pressure on
+the tired horse's neck.
+
+Then an old woman and a small child appeared in sight, both with
+enormous sun-bonnets and carrying baskets.  As they came up with me
+the woman stopped and swept her face with her hand, while the
+child, depositing the basket in the dust with great care, wiped her
+little sticky fingers on her pinafore.  Then the shady hedge
+beckoned them and they came and sat down near me.  The woman looked
+about seventy, tall, angular, dauntless, good for another ten years
+of hard work.  The little maid--her only grandchild, she told me--
+was just four, her father away soldiering, and the mother died in
+childbed, so for four years the child had known no other guardian
+or playmate than the old woman.  She was not the least shy, but had
+the strange self-possession which comes from associating with one
+who has travelled far on life's journey.
+
+"I couldn't leave her alone in the house," said her grandmother,
+"and she wouldn't leave the kitten for fear it should be lonesome"-
+-with a humorous, tender glance at the child--"but it's a long
+tramp in the heat for the little one, and we've another mile to
+go."
+
+"Will you let her bide here till you come back?" I said.  "She'll
+be all right by me."
+
+The old lady hesitated.
+
+"Will 'ee stay by him, dearie?" she said.
+
+The small child nodded, drew from her miniature pocket a piece of
+sweetstuff, extracted from the basket a small black cat, and
+settled in for the afternoon.  Her grandmother rose, took her
+basket, and, with a nod and "Thank 'ee kindly, mister," went off
+down the road.
+
+I went back to my work a little depressed--why had I not white
+hair?--for a few minutes had shown me that I was not old enough for
+the child despite my forty years.  She was quite happy with the
+little black cat, which lay in the small lap blinking its yellow
+eyes at the sun; and presently an old man came by, lame and bent,
+with gnarled twisted hands, leaning heavily on his stick.
+
+He greeted me in a high, piping voice, limped across to the child,
+and sat down.  "Your little maid, mister?" he said.
+
+I explained.
+
+"Ah," he said, "I've left a little darlin' like this at 'ome.  It's
+'ard on us old folks when we're one too many; but the little mouths
+must be filled, and my son, 'e said 'e didn't see they could keep
+me on the arf-crown, with another child on the way; so I'm tramping
+to N-, to the House; but it's a 'ard pinch, leavin' the little
+ones."
+
+I looked at him--a typical countryman, with white hair, mild blue
+eyes, and a rosy, childish, unwrinkled face.
+
+"I'm eighty-four," he went on, "and terrible bad with the
+rheumatics and my chest.  Maybe it'll not be long before the Lord
+remembers me."
+
+The child crept close and put a sticky little hand confidingly into
+the tired old palm.  The two looked strangely alike, for the world
+seems much the same to those who leave it behind as to those who
+have but taken the first step on its circular pathway.
+
+"'Ook at my kitty," she said, pointing to the small creature in her
+lap.  Then, as the old man touched it with trembling fingers she
+went on--"'Oo isn't my grandad; he's away in the sky, but I'll kiss
+'oo."
+
+I worked on, hearing at intervals the old piping voice and the
+child-treble, much of a note; and thinking of the blessings
+vouchsafed to the simple old age which crowns a harmless working-
+life spent in the fields.  The two under the hedge had everything
+in common and were boundlessly content together, the sting of the
+knowledge of good and evil past for the one, and for the other
+still to come; while I stood on the battlefield of the world, the
+flesh, and the devil, though, thank God, with my face to the foe.
+
+The old man sat resting:  I had promised him a lift with my friend
+the driver of the flour-cart, and he was almost due when the
+child's grandmother came down the road.
+
+When she saw my other visitor she stood amazed.
+
+"What, Richard Hunton, that worked with my old man years ago up at
+Ditton, whatever are you doin' all these miles from your own
+place?"
+
+"Is it Eliza Jakes?"
+
+He looked at her dazed, doubtful.
+
+"An' who else should it be?  Where's your memory gone, Richard
+Hunton, and you not such a great age either?  Where are you
+stayin'?"
+
+Shame overcame him; his lips trembled, his mild blue eyes filled
+with tears.  I told the tale as I had heard it, and Mrs Jakes's
+indignation was good to see.
+
+"Not keep you on 'alf a crown!  Send you to the House!  May the
+Lord forgive them!  You wouldn't eat no more than a fair-sized cat,
+and not long for this world either, that's plain to see.  No,
+Richard Hunton, you don't go to the House while I'm above ground;
+it'd make my good man turn to think of it.  You'll come 'ome with
+me and the little 'un there.  I've my washin', and a bit put by for
+a rainy day, and a bed to spare, and the Lord and the parson will
+see I don't come to want."
+
+She stopped breathless, her defensive motherhood in arms.
+
+The old man said quaveringly, in the pathetic, grudging phrase of
+the poor, which veils their gratitude while it testifies their
+independence, "Maybe I might as well."  He rose with difficulty,
+picked up his bundle and stick, the small child replaced the kitten
+in its basket, and thrust her hand in her new friend's.
+
+"Then 'oo IS grandad tum back," she said.
+
+Mrs Jakes had been fumbling in her pocket, and extracted a penny,
+which she pressed on me.
+
+"It's little enough, mister," she said.
+
+Then, as I tried to return it:  "Nay, I've enough, and yours is
+poor paid work."
+
+I hope I shall always be able to keep that penny; and as I watched
+the three going down the dusty white road, with the child in the
+middle, I thanked God for the Brotherhood of the Poor.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+Yesterday a funeral passed, from the work-house at N-, a quaint
+sepulture without solemnities.  The rough, ungarnished coffin of
+stained deal lay bare and unsightly on the floor of an old market-
+cart; a woman sat beside, steadying it with her feet.  The husband
+drove; and the most depressed of the three was the horse, a broken-
+kneed, flea-bitten grey.  It was pathetic, this bringing home in
+death of the old father whom, while he lived, they had been too
+poor to house; it was at no small sacrifice that they had spared
+him that terror of old age, a pauper's grave, and brought him to
+lie by his wife in our quiet churchyard.  They felt no emotion,
+this husband and wife, only a dull sense of filial duty done,
+respectability preserved; and above and through all, the bitter but
+necessary counting the cost of this last bed.
+
+It is strange how pagan many of us are in our beliefs.  True, the
+funeral libations have made way for the comfortable bake-meats;
+still, to the large majority Death is Pluto, king of the dark
+Unknown whence no traveller returns, rather than Azrael, brother
+and friend, lord of this mansion of life.  Strange how men shun him
+as he waits in the shadow, watching our puny straining after
+immortality, sending his comrade sleep to prepare us for himself.
+When the hour strikes he comes--very gently, very tenderly, if we
+will but have it so--folds the tired hands together, takes the way-
+worn feet in his broad strong palm; and lifting us in his wonderful
+arms he bears us swiftly down the valley and across the waters of
+Remembrance.
+
+Very pleasant art thou, O Brother Death, thy love is wonderful,
+passing the love of women.
+
+* * * * * *
+
+To-day I have lived in a whirl of dust.  To-morrow is the great
+annual Cattle Fair at E-, and through the long hot hours the beasts
+from all the district round have streamed in broken procession
+along my road, to change hands or to die.  Surely the lordship over
+creation implies wise and gentle rule for intelligent use, not the
+pursuit of a mere immediate end, without any thought of community
+in the great sacrament of life.
+
+For the most part mystery has ceased for this working Western
+world, and with it reverence.  Coventry Patmore says:  "God clothes
+Himself actually and literally with His whole creation.  Herbs take
+up and assimilate minerals, beasts assimilate herbs, and God, in
+the Incarnation and its proper Sacrament, assimilates us, who, says
+St Augustine, 'are God's beasts.'"  It is man in his blind self-
+seeking who separates woof from weft in the living garment of God,
+and loses the more as he neglects the outward and visible signs of
+a world-wide grace.
+
+In olden days the herd led his flock, going first in the post of
+danger to defend the creatures he had weaned from their natural
+habits for his various uses.  Now that good relationship has ceased
+for us to exist, man drives the beasts before him, means to his
+end, but with no harmony between end and means.  All day long the
+droves of sheep pass me on their lame and patient way, no longer
+freely and instinctively following a protector and forerunner, but
+DRIVEN, impelled by force and resistless will--the same will which
+once went before without force.  They are all trimmed as much as
+possible to one pattern, and all make the same sad plaint.  It is a
+day on which to thank God for the unknown tongue.  The drover and
+his lad in dusty blue coats plod along stolidly, deaf and blind to
+all but the way before them; no longer wielding the crook,
+instrument of deliverance, or at most of gentle compulsion, but
+armed with a heavy stick and mechanically dealing blows on the
+short thick fleeces; without evil intent because without thought--
+it is the ritual of the trade.
+
+Of all the poor dumb pilgrims of the road the bullocks are the most
+terrible to see.  They are not patient, but go most unwillingly
+with lowered head and furtive sideways motion, in their eyes a
+horror of great fear.  The sleek cattle, knee deep in pasture,
+massed at the gate, and stared mild-eyed and with inquiring bellow
+at the retreating drove; but these passed without answer on to the
+Unknown, and for them it spelt death.
+
+Behind a squadron of sleek, well-fed cart-horses, formed in fours,
+with straw braid in mane and tail, came the ponies, for the most
+part a merry company.  Long strings of rusty, shaggy two-year-olds,
+unbroken, unkempt, the short Down grass still sweet on their
+tongues; full of fun, frolic, and wickedness, biting and pulling,
+casting longing eyes at the hedgerows.  The boys appear to
+recognise them as kindred spirits, and are curiously forbearing and
+patient.  Soon both ponies and boys vanish in a white whirl, and a
+long line of carts, which had evidently waited for the dust to
+subside, comes slowly up the incline.  For the most part they carry
+the pigs and fowls, carriage folk of the road.  The latter are hot,
+crowded, and dusty under the open netting; the former for the most
+part cheerfully remonstrative.
+
+I drew a breath of relief as the noise of wheels died away and my
+road sank into silence.  The hedgerows are no longer green but
+white and choked with dust, a sight to move good sister Rain to
+welcome tears.  The birds seem to have fled before the noisy
+confusion.  I wonder whether my snake has seen and smiled at the
+clumsy ruling of the lord he so little heeds?  I turned aside
+through the gate to plunge face and hands into the cool of the
+sheltered grass that side the hedge, and then rested my eyes on the
+stretch of green I had lacked all day.  The rabbits had apparently
+played and browsed unmindful of the stir, and were still flirting
+their white tails along the hedgerows; a lark rose, another and
+another, and I went back to my road.  Peace still reigned, for the
+shadows were lengthening, and there would be little more traffic
+for the fair.  I turned to my work, grateful for the stillness, and
+saw on the white stretch of road a lone old man and a pig.  Surely
+I knew that tall figure in the quaint grey smock, surely I knew the
+face, furrowed like nature's face in springtime, and crowned by a
+round, soft hat?  And the pig, the black pig walking decorously
+free?  Ay, I knew them.
+
+In the early spring I took a whole holiday and a long tramp; and
+towards afternoon, tired and thirsty, sought water at a little
+lonely cottage whose windows peered and blinked under overhanging
+brows of thatch.  I had, not the water I asked for, but milk and a
+bowl of sweet porridge for which I paid only thanks; and stayed for
+a chat with my kindly hosts.  They were a quaint old couple of the
+kind rarely met with nowadays.  They enjoyed a little pension from
+the Squire and a garden in which vegetables and flowers lived side
+by side in friendliest fashion.  Bees worked and sang over the
+thyme and marjoram, blooming early in a sunny nook; and in a homely
+sty lived a solemn black pig, a pig with a history.
+
+It was no common utilitarian pig, but the honoured guest of the old
+couple, and it knew it.  A year before, their youngest and only
+surviving child, then a man of five-and-twenty, had brought his
+mother the result of his savings in the shape of a fine young pig:
+a week later he lay dead of the typhoid that scourged Maidstone.
+Hence the pig was sacred, cared for and loved by this Darby and
+Joan.
+
+"Ee be mos' like a child to me and the mother, an' mos' as sensible
+as a Christian, ee be," the old man had said; and I could hardly
+credit my eyes when I saw the tall bent figure side by side with
+the black pig, coming along my road on such a day.
+
+I hailed the old man, and both turned aside; but he gazed at me
+without remembrance.
+
+I spoke of the pig and its history.  He nodded wearily.  "Ay, ay,
+lad, you've got it; 'tis poor Dick's pig right enow."
+
+"But you're never going to take it to E--?"
+
+"Ay, but I be, and comin' back alone, if the Lord be marciful.  The
+missus has been terrible bad this two mouths and more; Squire's in
+foreign parts; and food-stuffs such as the old woman wants is hard
+buying for poor folks.  The stocking's empty, now 'tis the pig must
+go, and I believe he'd be glad for to do the missus a turn; she
+were terrible good to him, were the missus, and fond, too.  I
+dursn't tell her he was to go; she'd sooner starve than lose poor
+Dick's pig.  Well, we'd best be movin'; 'tis a fairish step."
+
+The pig followed comprehending and docile, and as the quaint couple
+passed from sight I thought I heard Brother Death stir in the
+shadow.  He is a strong angel and of great pity.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+
+There is always a little fire of wood on the open hearth in the
+kitchen when I get home at night; the old lady says it is "company"
+for her, and sits in the lonely twilight, her knotted hands lying
+quiet on her lap, her listening eyes fixed on the burning sticks.
+
+I wonder sometimes whether she hears music in the leap and lick of
+the fiery tongues, music such as he of Bayreuth draws from the
+violins till the hot energy of the fire spirit is on us, embodied
+in sound.
+
+Surely she hears some voice, that lonely old woman on whom is set
+the seal of great silence?
+
+It is a great truth tenderly said that God builds the nest for the
+blind bird; and may it not be that He opens closed eyes and unstops
+deaf ears to sights and sounds from which others by these very
+senses are debarred?
+
+Here the best of us see through a mist of tears men as trees
+walking; it is only in the land which is very far off and yet very
+near that we shall have fulness of sight and see the King in His
+beauty; and I cannot think that any listening ears listen in vain.
+
+The coppice at our back is full of birds, for it is far from the
+road and they nest there undisturbed year after year.  Through the
+still night I heard the nightingales calling, calling, until I
+could bear it no longer and went softly out into the luminous dark.
+
+The little wood was manifold with sound, I heard my little brothers
+who move by night rustling in grass and tree.  A hedgehog crossed
+my path with a dull squeak, the bats shrilled high to the stars, a
+white owl swept past me crying his hunting note, a beetle boomed
+suddenly in my face; and above and through it all the nightingales
+sang--and sang!
+
+The night wind bent the listening trees, and the stars yearned
+earthward to hear the song of deathless love.  Louder and louder
+the wonderful notes rose and fell in a passion of melody; and then
+sank to rest on that low thrilling call which it is said Death once
+heard, and stayed his hand.
+
+They will scarcely sing again this year, these nightingales, for
+they are late on the wing as it is.  It seems as if on such nights
+they sang as the swan sings, knowing it to be the last time--with
+the lavish note of one who bids an eternal farewell.
+
+At last there was silence.  Sitting under the big beech tree, the
+giant of the coppice, I rested my tired self in the lap of mother
+earth, breathed of her breath and listened to her voice in the
+quickening silence until my flesh came again as the flesh of a
+little child, for it is true recreation to sit at the footstool of
+God wrapped in a fold of His living robe, the while night smoothes
+our tired face with her healing hands.
+
+The grey dawn awoke and stole with trailing robes across earth's
+floor.  At her footsteps the birds roused from sleep and cried a
+greeting; the sky flushed and paled conscious of coming splendour;
+and overhead a file of swans passed with broad strong flight to the
+reeded waters of the sequestered pool.
+
+Another hour of silence while the light throbbed and flamed in the
+east; then the larks rose harmonious from a neighbouring field, the
+rabbits scurried with ears alert to their morning meal, the day had
+begun.
+
+I passed through the coppice and out into the fields beyond.  The
+dew lay heavy on leaf and blade and gossamer, a cool fresh wind
+swept clear over dale and down from the sea, and the clover field
+rippled like a silvery lake in the breeze.
+
+There is something inexpressibly beautiful in the unused day,
+something beautiful in the fact that it is still untouched,
+unsoiled; and town and country share alike in this loveliness.  At
+half-past three on a June morning even London has not assumed her
+responsibilities, but smiles and glows lighthearted and smokeless
+under the caresses of the morning sun.
+
+Five o'clock.  The bell rings out crisp and clear from the
+monastery where the Bedesmen of St Hugh watch and pray for the
+souls on this labouring forgetful earth.  Every hour the note of
+comfort and warning cries across the land, tells the Sanctus, the
+Angelus, and the Hours of the Passion, and calls to remembrance and
+prayer.
+
+When the wind is north, the sound carries as far as my road, and
+companies me through the day; and if to His dumb children God in
+His mercy reckons work as prayer, most certainly those who have
+forged through the ages an unbroken chain of supplication and
+thanksgiving will be counted among the stalwart labourers of the
+house of the Lord.
+
+Sun and bell together are my only clock:  it is time for my water
+drawing; and gathering a pile of mushrooms, children of the night,
+I hasten home.
+
+The cottage is dear to me in its quaint untidiness and want of
+rectitude, dear because we are to be its last denizens, last of the
+long line of toilers who have sweated and sown that others might
+reap, and have passed away leaving no trace.
+
+I once saw a tall cross in a seaboard churchyard, inscribed, "To
+the memory of the unknown dead who have perished in these waters."
+There might be one in every village sleeping-place to the
+unhonoured many who made fruitful the land with sweat and tears.
+It is a consolation to think that when we look back on this stretch
+of life's road from beyond the first milestone, which, it is
+instructive to remember, is always a grave, we may hope to see the
+work of this world with open eyes, and to judge of it with a due
+sense of proportion.
+
+A bee with laden honey-bag hummed and buzzed in the hedge as I got
+ready for work, importuning the flowers for that which he could not
+carry, and finally giving up the attempt in despair fell asleep on
+a buttercup, the best place for his weary little velvet body.  In
+five minutes--they may have been five hours to him--he awoke a new
+bee, sensible and clear-sighted, and flew blithely away to the hive
+with his sufficiency--an example this weary world would be wise to
+follow.
+
+My road has been lonely to-day.  A parson came by in the afternoon,
+a stranger in the neighbourhood, for he asked his way.  He talked
+awhile, and with kindly rebuke said it was sad to see a man of my
+education brought so low, which shows how the outside appearance
+may mislead the prejudiced observer.  "Was it misfortune?"  "Nay,
+the best of good luck," I answered, gaily.
+
+The good man with beautiful readiness sat down on a heap of stones
+and bade me say on.  "Read me a sermon in stone," he said, simply;
+and I stayed my hand to read.
+
+He listened with courteous intelligence.
+
+"You hold a roadmender has a vocation?" he asked.
+
+"As the monk or the artist, for, like both, he is universal.  The
+world is his home; he serves all men alike, ay, and for him the
+beasts have equal honour with the men.  His soul is 'bound up in
+the bundle of life' with all other souls, he sees his father, his
+mother, his brethren in the children of the road.  For him there is
+nothing unclean, nothing common; the very stones cry out that they
+serve."
+
+Parson nodded his head.
+
+"It is all true," he said; "beautifully true.  But need such a view
+of life necessitate the work of roadmending?  Surely all men should
+be roadmenders."
+
+O wise parson, so to read the lesson of the road!
+
+"It is true," I answered; "but some of us find our salvation in the
+actual work, and earn our bread better in this than in any other
+way.  No man is dependent on our earning, all men on our work.  We
+are 'rich beyond the dreams of avarice' because we have all that we
+need, and yet we taste the life and poverty of the very poor.  We
+are, if you will, uncloistered monks, preaching friars who speak
+not with the tongue, disciples who hear the wise words of a silent
+master."
+
+"Robert Louis Stevenson was a roadmender," said the wise parson.
+
+"Ay, and with more than his pen," I answered.  "I wonder was he
+ever so truly great, so entirely the man we know and love, as when
+he inspired the chiefs to make a highway in the wilderness.  Surely
+no more fitting monument could exist to his memory than the Road of
+Gratitude, cut, laid, and kept by the pure-blooded tribe kings of
+Samoa."
+
+Parson nodded.
+
+"He knew that the people who make no roads are ruled out from
+intelligent participation in the world's brotherhood."  He filled
+his pipe, thinking the while, then he held out his pouch to me.
+
+"Try some of this baccy," he said; "Sherwood of Magdalen sent it me
+from some outlandish place."
+
+I accepted gratefully.  It was such tobacco as falls to the lot of
+few roadmenders.
+
+He rose to go.
+
+"I wish I could come and break stones," he said, a little
+wistfully.
+
+"Nay," said I, "few men have such weary roadmending as yours, and
+perhaps you need my road less than most men, and less than most
+parsons."
+
+We shook hands, and he went down the road and out of my life.
+
+He little guessed that I knew Sherwood, ay, and knew him too, for
+had not Sherwood told me of the man he delighted to honour.
+
+Ah, well!  I am no Browning Junior, and Sherwood's name is not
+Sherwood.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+A while ago I took a holiday; mouched, played truant from my road.
+Jem the waggoner hailed me as he passed--he was going to the mill--
+would I ride with him and come back atop of the full sacks?
+
+I hid my hammer in the hedge, climbed into the great waggon white
+and fragrant with the clean sweet meal, and flung myself down on
+the empty flour bags.  The looped-back tarpaulin framed the long
+vista of my road with the downs beyond; and I lay in the cool dark,
+caressed by the fresh breeze in its thoroughfare, soothed by the
+strong monotonous tramp of the great grey team and the music of the
+jangling harness.
+
+Jem walked at the leaders' heads; it is his rule when the waggon is
+empty, a rule no "company" will make him break.  At first I
+regretted it, but soon discovered I learnt to know him better so,
+as he plodded along, his thickset figure slightly bent, his hands
+in his pockets, his whip under one arm, whistling hymn tunes in a
+low minor, while the great horses answered to his voice without
+touch of lash or guiding rein.
+
+I lay as in a blissful dream and watched my road unfold.  The sun
+set the pine-boles aflare where the hedge is sparse, and stretched
+the long shadows of the besom poplars in slanting bars across the
+white highway; the roadside gardens smiled friendly with their
+trim-cut laurels and rows of stately sunflowers--a seemly proximity
+this, Daphne and Clytie, sisters in experience, wrapped in the warm
+caress of the god whose wooing they need no longer fear.  Here and
+there we passed little groups of women and children off to work in
+the early cornfields, and Jem paused in his fond repetition of "The
+Lord my pasture shall prepare" to give them good-day.
+
+It is like Life, this travelling backwards--that which has been,
+alone visible--like Life, which is after all, retrospective with a
+steady moving on into the Unknown, Unseen, until Faith is lost in
+Sight and experience is no longer the touchstone of humanity.  The
+face of the son of Adam is set on the road his brothers have
+travelled, marking their landmarks, tracing their journeyings; but
+with the eyes of a child of God he looks forward, straining to
+catch a glimpse of the jewelled walls of his future home, the city
+"Eternal in the Heavens."
+
+Presently we left my road for the deep shade of a narrow country
+way where the great oaks and beeches meet overhead and no hedge-
+clipper sets his hand to stay nature's profusion; and so by
+pleasant lanes scarce the waggon's width across, now shady, now
+sunny, here bordered by thickset coverts, there giving on fruitful
+fields, we came at length to the mill.
+
+I left Jem to his business with the miller and wandered down the
+flowery meadow to listen to the merry clack of the stream and the
+voice of the waters on the weir.  The great wheel was at rest, as I
+love best to see it in the later afternoon; the splash and churn of
+the water belong rather to the morning hours.  It is the chief
+mistake we make in portioning out our day that we banish rest to
+the night-time, which is for sleep and recreating, instead of
+setting apart the later afternoon and quiet twilight hours for the
+stretching of weary limbs and repose of tired mind after a day's
+toil that should begin and end at five.
+
+The little stone bridge over the mill-stream is almost on a level
+with the clear running water, and I lay there and gazed at the huge
+wheel which, under multitudinous forms and uses, is one of the
+world's wonders, because one of the few things we imitative
+children have not learnt from nature.  Is it perchance a memory out
+of that past when Adam walked clear-eyed in Paradise and talked
+with the Lord in the cool of the day?  Did he see then the flaming
+wheels instinct with service, wondrous messengers of the Most High
+vouchsafed in vision to the later prophets?
+
+Maybe he did, and going forth from before the avenging sword of his
+own forging to the bitterness of an accursed earth, took with him
+this bright memory of perfect, ceaseless service, and so fashioned
+our labouring wheel--pathetic link with the time of his innocency.
+It is one of many unanswered questions, good to ask because it has
+no answer, only the suggestion of a train of thought:  perhaps we
+are never so receptive as when with folded hands we say simply,
+"This is a great mystery."  I watched and wondered until Jem
+called, and I had to leave the rippling weir and the water's side,
+and the wheel with its untold secret.
+
+The miller's wife gave me tea and a crust of home-made bread, and
+the miller's little maid sat on my knee while I told the sad tale
+of a little pink cloud separated from its parents and teazed and
+hunted by mischievous little airs.  To-morrow, if I mistake not,
+her garden will be wet with its tears, and, let us hope, point a
+moral; for the tale had its origin in a frenzied chicken driven
+from the side of an anxious mother, and pursued by a sturdy,
+relentless figure in a white sun-bonnet.
+
+The little maid trotted off, greatly sobered, to look somewhat
+prematurely for the cloud's tears; and I climbed to my place at the
+top of the piled-up sacks, and thence watched twilight pass to
+starlight through my narrow peep, and, so watching, slept until
+Jem's voice hailed me from Dreamland, and I went, only half awake,
+across the dark fields home.
+
+Autumn is here and it is already late.  He has painted the hedges
+russet and gold, scarlet and black, and a tangle of grey; now he
+has damp brown leaves in his hair and frost in his finger-tips.
+
+It is a season of contrasts; at first all is stir and bustle, the
+ingathering of man and beast; barn and rickyard stand filled with
+golden treasure; at the farm the sound of threshing; in wood and
+copse the squirrels busied 'twixt tree and storehouse, while the
+ripe nuts fall with thud of thunder rain.  When the harvesting is
+over, the fruit gathered, the last rick thatched, there comes a
+pause.  Earth strips off her bright colours and shows a bare and
+furrowed face; the dead leaves fall gently and sadly through the
+calm, sweet air; grey mists drape the fields and hedges.  The
+migratory birds have left, save a few late swallows; and as I sit
+at work in the soft, still rain, I can hear the blackbird's
+melancholy trill and the thin pipe of the redbreast's winter song--
+the air is full of the sound of farewell.
+
+Forethought and preparation for the Future which shall be;
+farewell, because of the Future which may never be--for us; "Man,
+thou hast goods laid up for many years, and it is well; but,
+remember, this night THY soul may be required"; is the unvoiced
+lesson of autumn.  There is growing up among us a great fear; it
+stares at us white, wide-eyed, from the faces of men and women
+alike--the fear of pain, mental and bodily pain.  For the last
+twenty years we have waged war with suffering--a noble war when
+fought in the interest of the many, but fraught with great danger
+to each individual man.  It is the fear which should not be, rather
+than the 'hope which is in us,' that leads men in these days to
+drape Death in a flowery mantle, to lay stress on the shortness of
+parting, the speedy reunion, to postpone their good-byes until the
+last moment, or avoid saying them altogether; and this fear is a
+poor, ignoble thing, unworthy of those who are as gods, knowing
+good and evil.  We are still paying the price of that knowledge;
+suffering in both kinds is a substantial part of it, and brings its
+own healing.  Let us pay like men, our face to the open heaven,
+neither whimpering like children in the dark, nor lulled to
+unnecessary oblivion by some lethal drug; for it is manly, not
+morbid, to dare to taste the pungent savour of pain, the lingering
+sadness of farewell which emphasises the aftermath of life; it
+should have its place in all our preparation as a part of our
+inheritance we dare not be without.
+
+There is an old couple in our village who are past work.  The
+married daughter has made shift to take her mother and the parish
+half-crown, but there is neither room nor food for the father, and
+he must go to N-.  If husband and wife went together, they would be
+separated at the workhouse door.  The parting had to come; it came
+yesterday.  I saw them stumbling lamely down the road on their last
+journey together, walking side by side without touch or speech,
+seeing and heeding nothing but a blank future.  As they passed me
+the old man said gruffly, "'Tis far eno'; better be gettin' back";
+but the woman shook her head, and they breasted the hill together.
+At the top they paused, shook hands, and separated; one went on,
+the other turned back; and as the old woman limped blindly by I
+turned away, for there are sights a man dare not look upon.  She
+passed; and I heard a child's shrill voice say, "I come to look for
+you, gran"; and I thanked God that there need be no utter
+loneliness in the world while it holds a little child.
+
+Now it is my turn, and I must leave the wayside to serve in the
+sheepfolds during the winter months.  It is scarcely a farewell,
+for my road is ubiquitous, eternal; there are green ways in
+Paradise and golden streets in the beautiful City of God.
+Nevertheless, my heart is heavy; for, viewed by the light of the
+waning year, roadmending seems a great and wonderful work which I
+have poorly conceived of and meanly performed:  yet I have learnt
+to understand dimly the truths of three great paradoxes--the
+blessing of a curse, the voice of silence, the companionship of
+solitude--and so take my leave of this stretch of road, and of you
+who have fared along the white highway through the medium of a
+printed page.
+
+Farewell!  It is a roadmender's word; I cry you Godspeed to the
+next milestone--and beyond.
+
+
+
+OUT OF THE SHADOW
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+I am no longer a roadmender; the stretch of white highway which
+leads to the end of the world will know me no more; the fields and
+hedgerows, grass and leaf stiff with the crisp rime of winter's
+breath, lie beyond my horizon; the ewes in the folding, their
+mysterious eyes quick with the consciousness of coming motherhood,
+answer another's voice and hand; while I lie here, not in the
+lonely companionship of my expectations, but where the shadow is
+bright with kindly faces and gentle hands, until one kinder and
+gentler still carries me down the stairway into the larger room.
+
+But now the veil was held aside and one went by crowned with the
+majesty of years, wearing the ermine of an unstained rule, the
+purple of her people's loyalty.  Nations stood with bated breath to
+see her pass in the starlit mist of her children's tears; a
+monarch--greatest of her time; an empress--conquered men called
+mother; a woman--Englishmen cried queen; still the crowned captive
+of her people's heart--the prisoner of love.
+
+The night-goers passed under my window in silence, neither song nor
+shout broke the welcome dark; next morning the workmen who went by
+were strangely quiet.
+
+
+'VICTORIA DEI GRATIA BRITANNIARUM REGINA.'
+
+
+Did they think of how that legend would disappear, and of all it
+meant, as they paid their pennies at the coffee-stall?  The feet
+rarely know the true value and work of the head; but all Englishmen
+have been and will be quick to acknowledge and revere Victoria by
+the grace of God a wise woman, a great and loving mother.
+
+Years ago, I, standing at a level crossing, saw her pass.  The
+train slowed down and she caught sight of the gatekeeper's little
+girl who had climbed the barrier.  Such a smile as she gave her!
+And then I caught a quick startled gesture as she slipped from my
+vision; I thought afterwards it was that she feared the child might
+fall.  Mother first, then Queen; even so rest came to her--not in
+one of the royal palaces, but in her own home, surrounded by the
+immediate circle of her nearest and dearest, while the world kept
+watch and ward.
+
+I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should a
+painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the fragrant
+pine needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie once again
+as I had lain many a time, bathed in the bitter sweetness of the
+sun-blessed pines, lapped in the manifold silence; my ear attuned
+to the wind of Heaven with its call from the Cities of Peace.  In
+sterner mood, when Love's hand held a scourge, I craved rather the
+stress of the moorland with its bleaker mind imperative of
+sacrifice.  To rest again under the lee of Rippon Tor swept by the
+strong peat-smelling breeze; to stare untired at the long cloud-
+shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths huddle and shrink
+round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too was accomplished,
+and my soul had fled.  A wild waste moor; a vast void sky; and
+naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes
+seeking afar the distant light of his own heart.
+
+With years came counsels more profound, and the knowledge that man
+was no mere dweller in the woods to follow the footsteps of the
+piping god, but an integral part of an organised whole, in which
+Pan too has his fulfilment.  The wise Venetians knew; and read
+pantheism into Christianity when they set these words round
+Ezekiel's living creatures in the altar vault of St Mark's:-
+
+
+QUAEQUE SUB OBSCURIS DE CRISTO DICTA FIGURIS HIS APERIRE DATUR ET
+IN HIS, DEUS IPSE NOTATUR.
+
+
+"Thou shalt have none other gods but me."  If man had been able to
+keep this one commandment perfectly the other nine would never have
+been written; instead he has comprehensively disregarded it, and
+perhaps never more than now in the twentieth century.  Ah, well!
+this world, in spite of all its sinning, is still the Garden of
+Eden where the Lord walked with man, not in the cool of evening,
+but in the heat and stress of the immediate working day.  There is
+no angel now with flaming sword to keep the way of the Tree of
+Life, but tapers alight morning by morning in the Hostel of God to
+point us to it; and we, who are as gods knowing good and evil,
+partake of that fruit "whereof whoso eateth shall never die"; the
+greatest gift or the most awful penalty--Eternal Life.
+
+I then, with my craving for tree and sky, held that a great capital
+with its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and pleasure,
+was an ill place for a sick man to wait in; a place to shrink from
+as a child shrinks from the rude blow of one out of authority.  Yet
+here, far from moor and forest, hillside and hedgerow, in the
+family sitting-room of the English-speaking peoples, the London
+much misunderstood, I find the fulfilment by antithesis of all
+desire.  For the loneliness of the moorland, there is the warmth
+and companionship of London's swift beating heart.  For silence
+there is sound--the sound and stir of service--for the most part
+far in excess of its earthly equivalent.  Against the fragrant
+incense of the pines I set the honest sweat of the man whose
+lifetime is the measure of his working day.  "He that loveth not
+his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath
+not seen?" wrote Blessed John, who himself loved so much that he
+beheld the Lamb as it had been slain from the beginning when Adam
+fell, and the City of God with light most precious.  The burden of
+corporate sin, the sword of corporate sorrow, the joy of corporate
+righteousness; thus we become citizens in the Kingdom of God, and
+companions of all his creatures.  "It is not good that the man
+should be alone," said the Lord God.
+
+I live now as it were in two worlds, the world of sight, and the
+world of sound; and they scarcely ever touch each other.  I hear
+the grind of heavy traffic, the struggle of horses on the frost-
+breathed ground, the decorous jolt of omnibuses, the jangle of cab
+bells, the sharp warning of bicycles at the corner, the swift
+rattle of costers' carts as they go south at night with their
+shouting, goading crew.  All these things I hear, and more; but I
+see no road, only the silent river of my heart with its tale of
+wonder and years, and the white beat of seagulls' wings in strong
+inquiring flight.
+
+Sometimes there is naught to see on the waterway but a solitary
+black hull, a very Stygian ferry-boat, manned by a solitary figure,
+and moving slowly up under the impulse of the far-reaching sweeps.
+Then the great barges pass with their coffined treasure, drawn by a
+small self-righteous steam-tug.  Later, lightened of their load,
+and waiting on wind and tide, I see them swooping by like birds set
+free; tawny sails that mind me of red-roofed Whitby with its
+northern fleet; black sails as of some heedless Theseus; white
+sails that sweep out of the morning mist "like restless
+gossameres."  They make the bridge, which is just within my vision,
+and then away past Westminster and Blackfriars where St Paul's
+great dome lifts the cross high over a self-seeking city; past
+Southwark where England's poet illuminates in the scroll of divine
+wisdom the sign of the Tabard; past the Tower with its haunting
+ghosts of history; past Greenwich, fairy city, caught in the meshes
+of riverside mist; and then the salt and speer of the sea, the
+companying with great ships, the fresh burden.
+
+At night I see them again, silent, mysterious; searching the
+darkness with unwinking yellow stare, led by a great green light.
+They creep up under the bridge which spans the river with its
+watching eyes, and vanish, crying back a warning note as they make
+the upper reach, or strident hail, as a chain of kindred phantoms
+passes, ploughing a contrary tide.
+
+Throughout the long watches of the night I follow them; and in the
+early morning they slide by, their eyes pale in the twilight; while
+the stars flicker and fade, and the gas lamps die down into a dull
+yellow blotch against the glory and glow of a new day.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+February is here, February fill-dyke; the month of purification, of
+cleansing rains and pulsing bounding streams, and white mist
+clinging insistent to field and hedgerow so that when her veil is
+withdrawn greenness may make us glad.
+
+The river has been uniformly grey of late, with no wind to ruffle
+its surface or to speed the barges dropping slowly and sullenly
+down with the tide through a blurring haze.  I watched one
+yesterday, its useless sails half-furled and no sign of life save
+the man at the helm.  It drifted stealthily past, and a little
+behind, flying low, came a solitary seagull, grey as the river's
+haze--a following bird.
+
+Once again I lay on my back in the bottom of the tarry old fishing
+smack, blue sky above and no sound but the knock, knock of the
+waves, and the thud and curl of falling foam as the old boat's
+blunt nose breasted the coming sea.  Then Daddy Whiddon spoke.
+
+"A follerin' burrd," he said.
+
+I got up, and looked across the blue field we were ploughing into
+white furrows.  Far away a tiny sail scarred the great solitude,
+and astern came a gull flying slowly close to the water's breast.
+
+Daddy Whiddon waved his pipe towards it.
+
+"A follerin' burrd," he said, again; and again I waited; questions
+were not grateful to him.
+
+"There be a carpse there, sure enough, a carpse driftin' and
+shiftin' on the floor of the sea.  There be those as can't rest,
+poor sawls, and her'll be mun, her'll be mun, and the sperrit of
+her is with the burrd."
+
+The clumsy boom swung across as we changed our course, and the
+water ran from us in smooth reaches on either side:  the bird flew
+steadily on.
+
+"What will the spirit do?" I said.
+
+The old man looked at me gravely.
+
+"Her'll rest in the Lard's time, in the Lard's gude time--but now
+her'll just be follerin' on with the burrd."
+
+The gull was flying close to us now, and a cold wind swept the
+sunny sea.  I shivered:  Daddy looked at me curiously.
+
+"There be reason enough to be cawld if us did but knaw it, but I he
+mos' used to 'em, poor sawls."  He shaded his keen old blue eyes,
+and looked away across the water.  His face kindled.  "There be a
+skule comin', and by my sawl 'tis mackerel they be drivin'."
+
+I watched eagerly, and saw the dark line rise and fall in the
+trough of the sea, and, away behind, the stir and rush of tumbling
+porpoises as they chased their prey.
+
+Again we changed our tack, and each taking an oar, pulled lustily
+for the beach.
+
+"Please God her'll break inshore," said Daddy Whiddon; and he
+shouted the news to the idle waiting men who hailed us.
+
+In a moment all was stir, for the fishing had been slack.  Two
+boats put out with the lithe brown seine.  The dark line had
+turned, but the school was still behind, churning the water in
+clumsy haste; they were coming in.
+
+Then the brit broke in silvery leaping waves on the shelving beach.
+The threefold hunt was over; the porpoises turned out to sea in
+search of fresh quarry; and the seine, dragged by ready hands, came
+slowly, stubbornly in with its quivering treasure of fish.  They
+had sought a haven and found none; the brit lay dying in flickering
+iridescent heaps as the bare-legged babies of the village gathered
+them up; and far away over the water I saw a single grey speck; it
+was the following bird.
+
+
+The curtain of river haze falls back; barge and bird are alike
+gone, and the lamplighter has lit the first gas-lamp on the far
+side of the bridge.  Every night I watch him come, his progress
+marked by the great yellow eyes that wake the dark.  Sometimes he
+walks quickly; sometimes he loiters on the bridge to chat, or stare
+at the dark water; but he always comes, leaving his watchful
+deterrent train behind him to police the night.
+
+Once Demeter in the black anguish of her desolation searched for
+lost Persephone by the light of Hecate's torch; and searching all
+in vain, spurned beneath her empty feet an earth barren of her
+smile; froze with set brows the merry brooks and streams; and smote
+forest, and plain, and fruitful field, with the breath of her last
+despair, until even Iambe's laughing jest was still.  And then when
+the desolation was complete, across the wasted valley where the
+starveling cattle scarcely longed to browse, came the dreadful
+chariot--and Persephone.  The day of the prisoner of Hades had
+dawned; and as the sun flamed slowly up to light her thwarted eyes
+the world sprang into blossom at her feet.
+
+We can never be too Pagan when we are truly Christian, and the old
+myths are eternal truths held fast in the Church's net.  Prometheus
+fetched fire from Heaven, to be slain forever in the fetching; and
+lo, a Greater than Prometheus came to fire the cresset of the
+Cross.  Demeter waits now patiently enough.  Persephone waits, too,
+in the faith of the sun she cannot see:  and every lamp lit carries
+on the crusade which has for its goal a sunless, moonless, city
+whose light is the Light of the world.
+
+
+"Lume e lassu, che visibile face
+lo creatore a quella creatura,
+che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace."
+
+
+Immediately outside my window is a lime tree--a little black
+skeleton of abundant branches--in which sparrows congregate to
+chirp and bicker.  Farther away I have a glimpse of graceful
+planes, children of moonlight and mist; their dainty robes, still
+more or less unsullied, gleam ghostly in the gaslight athwart the
+dark.  They make a brave show even in winter with their feathery
+branches and swinging tassels, whereas my little tree stands stark
+and uncompromising, with its horde of sooty sparrows cockney to the
+last tail feather, and a pathetic inability to look anything but
+black.  Rain comes with strong caressing fingers, and the branches
+seem no whit the cleaner for her care; but then their glistening
+blackness mirrors back the succeeding sunlight, as a muddy pavement
+will sometimes lap our feet in a sea of gold.  The little wet
+sparrows are for the moment equally transformed, for the sun turns
+their dun-coloured coats to a ruddy bronze, and cries Chrysostom as
+it kisses each shiny beak.  They are dumb Chrysostoms; but they
+preach a golden gospel, for the sparrows are to London what the
+rainbow was to eight saved souls out of a waste of waters--a
+perpetual sign of the remembering mercies of God.
+
+Last night there was a sudden clatter of hoofs, a shout, and then
+silence.  A runaway cab-horse, a dark night, a wide crossing, and a
+heavy burden:  so death came to a poor woman.  People from the
+house went out to help; and I heard of her, the centre of an
+unknowing curious crowd, as she lay bonnetless in the mud of the
+road, her head on the kerb.  A rude but painless death:  the misery
+lay in her life; for this woman--worn, white-haired, and wrinkled--
+had but fifty years to set against such a condition.  The policeman
+reported her respectable, hard-working, living apart from her
+husband with a sister; but although they shared rooms, they "did
+not speak," and the sister refused all responsibility; so the
+parish buried the dead woman, and thus ended an uneventful tragedy.
+
+Was it her own fault?  If so, the greater pathos.  The lonely souls
+that hold out timid hands to an unheeding world have their meed of
+interior comfort even here, while the sons of consolation wait on
+the thresh-hold for their footfall:  but God help the soul that
+bars its own door!  It is kicking against the pricks of Divine
+ordinance, the ordinance of a triune God; whether it be the dweller
+in crowded street or tenement who is proud to say, "I keep myself
+to myself," or Seneca writing in pitiful complacency, "Whenever I
+have gone among men, I have returned home less of a man."  Whatever
+the next world holds in store, we are bidden in this to seek and
+serve God in our fellow-men, and in the creatures of His making
+whom He calls by name.
+
+It was once my privilege to know an old organ-grinder named
+Gawdine.  He was a hard swearer, a hard drinker, a hard liver, and
+he fortified himself body and soul against the world:  he even
+drank alone, which is an evil sign.
+
+One day to Gawdine sober came a little dirty child, who clung to
+his empty trouser leg--he had lost a limb years before--with a
+persistent unintelligible request.  He shook the little chap off
+with a blow and a curse; and the child was trotting dismally away,
+when it suddenly turned, ran back, and held up a dirty face for a
+kiss.
+
+Two days later Gawdine fell under a passing dray which inflicted
+terrible internal injuries on him.  They patched him up in
+hospital, and he went back to his organ-grinding, taking with him
+two friends--a pain which fell suddenly upon him to rack and rend
+with an anguish of crucifixion, and the memory of a child's
+upturned face.  Outwardly he was the same save that he changed the
+tunes of his organ, out of long-hoarded savings, for the jigs and
+reels which children hold dear, and stood patiently playing them in
+child-crowded alleys, where pennies are not as plentiful as
+elsewhere.
+
+He continued to drink; it did not come within his new code to stop,
+since he could "carry his liquor well;" but he rarely, if ever,
+swore.  He told me this tale through the throes of his anguish as
+he lay crouched on a mattress on the floor; and as the grip of the
+pain took him he tore and bit at his hands until they were maimed
+and bleeding, to keep the ready curses off his lips.
+
+He told the story, but he gave no reason, offered no explanation:
+he has been dead now many a year, and thus would I write his
+epitaph:-
+
+He saw the face of a little child and looked on God.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+"Two began, in a low voice, 'Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this
+here ought to have been a RED rose-tree, and we put a white one in
+by mistake.'"
+
+As I look round this room I feel sure Two, and Five, and Seven,
+have all been at work on it, and made no mistakes, for round the
+walls runs a frieze of squat standard rose-trees, red as red can
+be, and just like those that Alice saw in the Queen's garden.  In
+between them are Chaucer's name-children, prim little daisies,
+peering wideawake from green grass.  This same grass has a history
+which I have heard.  In the original stencil for the frieze it was
+purely conventional like the rest, and met in spikey curves round
+each tree; the painter, however, who was doing the work, was a
+lover of the fields; and feeling that such grass was a travesty, he
+added on his own account dainty little tussocks, and softened the
+hard line into a tufted carpet, the grass growing irregularly, bent
+at will by the wind.
+
+The result from the standpoint of conventional art is indeed
+disastrous; but my sympathy and gratitude are with the painter.  I
+see, as he saw, the far-reaching robe of living ineffable green, of
+whose brilliance the eye never has too much, and in whose weft no
+two threads are alike; and shrink as he did from the
+conventionalising of that windswept glory.
+
+The sea has its crested waves of recognisable form; the river its
+eddy and swirl and separate vortices; but the grass!  The wind
+bloweth where it listeth and the grass bows as the wind blows--
+"thou canst not tell whither it goeth."  It takes no pattern, it
+obeys no recognised law; it is like a beautiful creature of a
+thousand wayward moods, and its voice is like nothing else in the
+wide world.  It bids you rest and bury your tired face in the green
+coolness, and breathe of its breath and of the breath of the good
+earth from which man was taken and to which he will one day return.
+Then, if you lend your ear and are silent minded, you may hear
+wondrous things of the deep places of the earth; of life in mineral
+and stone as well as in pulsing sap; of a green world as the stars
+saw it before man trod it under foot--of the emerald which has its
+place with the rest in the City of God.
+
+
+"What if earth
+Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein,
+Each to each other like, more than on earth to thought?"
+
+
+It is a natural part of civilisation's lust of re-arrangement that
+we should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world
+into decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents.  It is a phase, and
+will melt into other phases; but it tends to the increase of
+artificiality, and exists not only in art but in everything.  It is
+no new thing for jaded sentiment to crave the spur of the
+unnatural, to prefer the clever imitation, to live in a Devachan
+where the surroundings appear that which we would have them to be;
+but it is an interesting record of the pulse of the present day
+that 'An Englishwoman's Love Letters' should have taken society by
+storm in the way it certainly has.
+
+It is a delightful book to leave about, with its vellum binding,
+dainty ribbons, and the hallmark of a great publisher's name.  But
+when we seek within we find love with its thousand voices and
+wayward moods, its shy graces and seemly reticences, love which has
+its throne and robe of state as well as the garment of the beggar
+maid, love which is before time was, which knew the world when the
+stars took up their courses, presented to us in gushing
+outpourings, the appropriate language of a woman's heart to the
+boor she delights to honour.
+
+"It is woman who is the glory of man," says the author of 'The
+House of Wisdom and Love,' "Regina mundi, greater, because so far
+the less; and man is her head, but only as he serves his queen."
+Set this sober aphorism against the school girl love-making which
+kisses a man's feet and gaily refuses him the barren honour of
+having loved her first.
+
+There is scant need for the apologia which precedes the letters; a
+few pages dispels the fear that we are prying into another's soul.
+As for the authorship, there is a woman's influence, an artist's
+poorly concealed bias in the foreign letters; and for the rest a
+man's blunders--so much easier to see in another than to avoid
+oneself--writ large from cover to cover.  King Cophetua, who sends
+"profoundly grateful remembrances," has most surely written the
+letters he would wish to receive.
+
+"Mrs Meynell!" cries one reviewer, triumphantly.  Nay, the saints
+be good to us, what has Mrs Meynell in common with the
+"Englishwoman's" language, style, or most unconvincing passion?
+Men can write as from a woman's heart when they are minded to do so
+in desperate earnestness--there is Clarissa Harlowe and Stevenson's
+Kirstie, and many more to prove it; but when a man writes as the
+author of the "Love Letters" writes, I feel, as did the painter of
+the frieze, that pattern-making has gone too far and included that
+which, like the grass, should be spared such a convention.
+
+"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess, "and the moral of that
+is--'Be what you would seem to be'--or, if you'd like to put it
+more simply--'never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what
+it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was
+not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to
+be otherwise.'"  And so by way of the Queen's garden I come back to
+my room again.
+
+My heart's affections are still centred on my old attic, with
+boarded floor and white-washed walls, where the sun blazoned a
+frieze of red and gold until he travelled too far towards the
+north, the moon streamed in to paint the trees in inky wavering
+shadows, and the stars flashed their glory to me across the years.
+But now sun and moon greet me only indirectly, and under the red
+roses hang pictures, some of them the dear companions of my days.
+Opposite me is the Arundel print of the Presentation, painted by
+the gentle "Brother of the Angels."  Priest Simeon, a stately
+figure in green and gold, great with prophecy, gazes adoringly at
+the Bambino he holds with fatherly care.  Our Lady, in robe of red
+and veil of shadowed purple, is instinct with light despite the
+sombre colouring, as she stretches out hungering, awe-struck hands
+for her soul's delight.  St Joseph, dignified guardian and
+servitor, stands behind, holding the Sacrifice of the Poor to
+redeem the First-begotten.
+
+St Peter Martyr and the Dominican nun, gazing in rapt contemplation
+at the scene, are not one whit surprised to find themselves in the
+presence of eternal mysteries.  In the Entombment, which hangs on
+the opposite wall, St Dominic comes round the corner full of
+grievous amaze and tenderest sympathy, but with no sense of shock
+or intrusion, for was he not "famigliar di Cristo"?  And so he
+takes it all in; the stone bed empty and waiting; the Beloved
+cradled for the last time on His mother's knees to be washed,
+lapped round, and laid to rest as if He were again the Babe of
+Bethlehem.  He sees the Magdalen anointing the Sacred Feet; Blessed
+John caring for the living and the Dead; and he, Dominic--hound of
+the Lord--having his real, living share in the anguish and hope,
+the bedding of the dearest Dead, who did but leave this earth that
+He might manifest Himself more completely.
+
+Underneath, with a leap across the centuries, is Rossetti's
+picture; Dante this time the onlooker, Beatrice, in her pale
+beauty, the death-kissed one.  The same idea under different
+representations; the one conceived in childlike simplicity, the
+other recalling, even in the photograph, its wealth of colour and
+imagining; the one a world-wide ideal, the other an individual
+expression of it.
+
+Beatrice was to Dante the inclusion of belief.  She was more to him
+than he himself knew, far more to him after her death than before.
+And, therefore, the analogy between the pictures has at core a
+common reality.  "It is expedient for you that I go away," is
+constantly being said to us as we cling earthlike to the outward
+expression, rather than to the inward manifestation--and blessed
+are those who hear and understand, for it is spoken only to such as
+have been with Him from the beginning.  The eternal mysteries come
+into time for us individually under widely differing forms.  The
+tiny child mothers its doll, croons to it, spends herself upon it,
+why she cannot tell you; and we who are here in our extreme youth,
+never to be men and women grown in this world, nurse our ideal,
+exchange it, refashion it, call it by many names; and at last in
+here or hereafter we find in its naked truth the Child in the
+manger, even as the Wise Men found Him when they came from the East
+to seek a great King.  There is but one necessary condition of this
+finding; we must follow the particular manifestation of light given
+us, never resting until it rests--over the place of the Child.  And
+there is but one insurmountable hindrance, the extinction of or
+drawing back from the light truly apprehended by us.  We forget
+this, and judge other men by the light of our own soul.
+
+I think the old bishop must have understood it.  He is my friend of
+friends as he lies opposite my window in his alabaster sleep, clad
+in pontifical robes, with unshod feet, a little island of white
+peace in a many-coloured marble sea.  The faithful sculptor has
+given every line and wrinkle, the heavy eyelids and sunken face of
+tired old age, but withal the smile of a contented child.
+
+I do not even know my bishop's name, only that the work is of the
+thirteenth century; but he is good to company with through the day,
+for he has known darkness and light and the minds of many men; most
+surely, too, he has known that God fulfils Himself in strange ways,
+so with the shadow of his feet upon the polished floor he rests in
+peace.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+On Sunday my little tree was limned in white and the sparrows were
+craving shelter at my window from the blizzard.  Now the mild thin
+air brings a breath of spring in its wake and the daffodils in the
+garden wait the kisses of the sun.  Hand-in-hand with memory I slip
+away down the years, and remember a day when I awoke at earliest
+dawn, for across my sleep I had heard the lusty golden-throated
+trumpeters heralding the spring.
+
+The air was sharp-set; a delicate rime frosted roof and road; the
+sea lay hazy and still like a great pearl.  Then as the sky stirred
+with flush upon flush of warm rosy light, it passed from misty
+pearl to opal with heart of flame, from opal to gleaming sapphire.
+The earth called, the fields called, the river called--that pied
+piper to whose music a man cannot stop his ears.  It was with me as
+with the Canterbury pilgrims:-
+
+
+"So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
+Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages."
+
+
+Half an hour later I was away by the early train that carries the
+branch mails and a few workmen, and was delivered at the little
+wayside station with the letters.  The kind air went singing past
+as I swung along the reverberating road between the high tree-
+crowned banks which we call hedges in merry Devon, with all the
+world to myself and the Brethren.  A great blackbird flew out with
+a loud "chook, chook," and the red of the haw on his yellow bill.
+A robin trilled from a low rose-bush; two wrens searched diligently
+on a fallen tree for breakfast, quite unconcerned when I rested a
+moment beside them; and a shrewmouse slipped across the road
+followed directly by its mate.  March violets bloomed under the
+sheltered hedge with here and there a pale primrose; a frosted
+bramble spray still held its autumn tints clinging to the semblance
+of the past; and great branches of snowy blackthorn broke the
+barren hedgeway as if spring made a mock of winter's snows.
+
+Light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year I sped on
+again, stray daffodils lighting the wayside, until I heard the
+voice of the stream and reached the field gate which leads to the
+lower meadows.  There before me lay spring's pageant; green pennons
+waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow
+trumpeters proclaiming 'Victory' to an awakened earth.  They range
+in serried ranks right down to the river, so that a man must walk
+warily to reach the water's edge where they stand gazing down at
+themselves in fairest semblance like their most tragic progenitor,
+and, rising from the bright grass in their thousands, stretch away
+until they melt in a golden cloud at the far end of the misty mead.
+Through the field gate and across the road I see them, starring the
+steep earth bank that leads to the upper copse, gleaming like pale
+flames against the dark tree-boles.  There they have but frail
+tenure; here, in the meadows, they reign supreme.
+
+At the upper end of the field the river provides yet closer
+sanctuary for these children of the spring.  Held in its embracing
+arms lies an island long and narrow, some thirty feet by twelve, a
+veritable untrod Eldorado, glorious in gold from end to end, a
+fringe of reeds by the water's edge, and save for that--daffodils.
+A great oak stands at the meadow's neck, an oak with gnarled and
+wandering roots where a man may rest, for it is bare of daffodils
+save for a group of three, and a solitary one apart growing close
+to the old tree's side.  I sat down by my lonely little sister,
+blue sky overhead, green grass at my feet decked, like the pastures
+of the Blessed, in glorious sheen; a sea of triumphant, golden
+heads tossing blithely back as the wind swept down to play with
+them at his pleasure.
+
+It was all mine to have and to hold without severing a single
+slender stem or harbouring a thought of covetousness; mine, as the
+whole earth was mine, to appropriate to myself without the burden
+and bane of worldly possession.  "Thou sayest that I am--a King,"
+said the Lord before Pilate, and "My kingdom is not of this world."
+We who are made kings after His likeness possess all things, not
+after this world's fashion but in proportion to our poverty; and
+when we cease to toil and spin, are arrayed as the lilies, in a
+glory transcending Solomon's.  Bride Poverty--she who climbed the
+Cross with Christ--stretched out eager hands to free us from our
+chains, but we flee from her, and lay up treasure against her
+importunity, while Amytas on his seaweed bed weeps tears of pure
+pity for crave-mouth Caesar of great possessions.
+
+Presently another of spring's lovers cried across the water
+"Cuckoo, cuckoo," and the voice of the stream sang joyously in
+unison.  It is free from burden, this merry little river, and
+neither weir nor mill bars its quick way to the sea as it completes
+the eternal circle, lavishing gifts of coolness and refreshment on
+the children of the meadows.
+
+It has its birth on the great lone moor, cradled in a wonderful
+peat-smelling bog, with a many-hued coverlet of soft mosses--pale
+gold, orange, emerald, tawny, olive and white, with the red stain
+of sun-dew and tufted cotton-grass.  Under the old grey rocks which
+watch it rise, yellow-eyed tormantil stars the turf, and bids
+"Godspeed" to the little child of earth and sky.  Thus the journey
+begins; and with ever-increasing strength the stream carves a way
+through the dear brown peat, wears a fresh wrinkle on the patient
+stones, and patters merrily under a clapper bridge which spanned
+its breadth when the mistletoe reigned and Bottor, the grim rock
+idol, exacted the toll of human life that made him great.  On and
+on goes the stream, for it may not stay; leaving of its freshness
+with the great osmunda that stretches eager roots towards the
+running water; flowing awhile with a brother stream, to part again
+east and west as each takes up his separate burden of service--my
+friend to cherish the lower meadows in their flowery joyance--and
+so by the great sea-gate back to sky and earth again.
+
+The river of God is full of water.  The streets of the City are
+pure gold.  Verily, here also having nothing we possess all things.
+
+
+The air was keen and still as I walked back in the early evening,
+and a daffodil light was in the sky as if Heaven mirrored back
+earth's radiance.  Near the station some children flitted past,
+like little white miller moths homing through the dusk.  As I
+climbed the hill the moon rode high in a golden field--it was
+daffodils to the last.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+
+The seagulls from the upper reaches pass down the river in sober
+steady flight seeking the open sea.  I shall miss the swoop and
+circle of silver wings in the sunlight and the plaintive call which
+sounds so strangely away from rock and shore, but it is good to
+know that they have gone from mudbank and murky town back to the
+free airs of their inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs
+and the curling crest of the wind-beaten waves, to brood again over
+the great ocean of a world's tears.
+
+My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of
+promise.  The sparrows busied with nest-building in the
+neighbouring pipes and gutters use it for a vantage ground, and
+crowd there in numbers, each little beak sealed with long golden
+straw or downy feather.
+
+The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of winter's
+storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and steadily oust the dark;
+the air is loud with a growing clamour of life:  spring is not only
+proclaimed, but on this Feast she is crowned, and despite the
+warring wind the days bring their meed of sunshine.  We stand for a
+moment at the meeting of the ways, the handclasp of Winter and
+Spring, of Sleep and Wakening, of Life and Death; and there is
+between them not even the thin line which Rabbi Jochanan on his
+death-bed beheld as all that divided hell from heaven.
+
+"Sphaera cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibus," was said
+of Mercury, that messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant
+spirits to the Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with
+Death as its great sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be
+dreaded only as we dread to partake unworthily of great benefits.
+Like all sacraments it has its rightful time and due solemnities;
+the horror and sin of suicide lie in the presumption of free will,
+the forestalling of a gift,--the sin of Eve in Paradise, who took
+that which might only be given at the hand of the Lord.  It has too
+its physical pains, but they are those of a woman in travail, and
+we remember them no more for joy that a child-man is born into the
+world naked and not ashamed:  beholding ourselves as we are we
+shall see also the leaves of the Tree of Life set for the healing
+of the nations.
+
+We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden and
+violent transitions for a surer and fuller acceptance of the
+doctrine of evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of
+demarcation between this world and the next, and expect a radical
+change in ourselves and our surroundings, a break in the chain of
+continuity entirely contrary to the teaching of nature and
+experience.  In the same way we cling to the specious untruth that
+we can begin over and over again in this world, forgetting that
+while our sorrow and repentance bring sacramental gifts of grace
+and strength, God Himself cannot, by His own limitation, rewrite
+the Past.  We are in our sorrow that which we have made ourselves
+in our sin; our temptations are there as well as the way of escape.
+We are in the image of God.  We create our world, our undying
+selves, our heaven, or our hell.  "Qui creavit te sine te non
+salvabit te sine te."  It is stupendous, magnificent, and most
+appalling.  A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of
+the larger room.  His personality remains the same, although the
+expression of it may be altered.  Here we have material bodies in a
+material world--there, perhaps, ether bodies in an ether world.
+There is no indecency in reasonable speculation and curiosity about
+the life to come.  One end of the thread is between our fingers,
+but we are haunted for the most part by the snap of Atropos'
+shears.
+
+Socrates faced death with the magnificent calm bred of dignified
+familiarity.  He had built for himself a desired heaven of colour,
+light, and precious stones--the philosophic formula of those who
+set the spiritual above the material, and worship truth in the
+beauty of holiness.  He is not troubled by doubts or regrets, for
+the path of the just lies plain before his face.  He forbids
+mourning and lamentations as out of place, obeys minutely and
+cheerily the directions of his executioner, and passes with
+unaffected dignity to the apprehension of that larger truth for
+which he had constantly prepared himself.  His friends may bury him
+provided they will remember they are not burying Socrates; and that
+all things may be done decently and in order, a cock must go to
+AEsculapius.
+
+Long before, in the days of the Captivity, there lived in godless,
+blood-shedding Nineveh an exiled Jew whose father had fallen from
+the faith.  He was a simple man, child-like and direct; living the
+careful, kindly life of an orthodox Jew, suffering many
+persecutions for conscience' sake, and in constant danger of death.
+He narrates the story of his life and of the blindness which fell
+on him, with gentle placidity, and checks the exuberance of his
+more emotional wife with the assurance of untroubled faith.
+Finally, when his pious expectations are fulfilled, his sight
+restored, and his son prosperously established beside him, he
+breaks into a prayer of rejoicing which reveals the secret of his
+confident content.  He made use of two great faculties:  the sense
+of proportion, which enabled him to apprise life and its accidents
+justly, and the gift of in-seeing, which led Socrates after him,
+and Blessed John in lonely exile on Patmos, to look through the
+things temporal to the hidden meanings of eternity.
+
+"Let my soul bless God the great King," he cries; and looks away
+past the present distress; past the Restoration which was to end in
+fresh scattering and confusion; past the dream of gold, and
+porphyry, and marble defaced by the eagles and emblems of the
+conqueror; until his eyes are held by the Jerusalem of God, "built
+up with sapphires, and emeralds, and precious stones," with
+battlements of pure gold, and the cry of 'Alleluia' in her streets.
+
+Many years later, when he was very aged, he called his son to him
+and gave him as heritage his own simple rule of life, adding but
+one request:  "Keep thou the law and the commandments, and shew
+thyself merciful and just, that it may go well with thee. . . .
+Consider what alms doeth, and how righteousness doth deliver. . . .
+And bury me decently, and thy mother with me."  Having so said, he
+went his way quietly and contentedly to the Jerusalem of his heart.
+
+It is the simple note of familiarity that is wanting in us; that by
+which we link world with world.  Once, years ago, I sat by the
+bedside of a dying man in a wretched garret in the East End.  He
+was entirely ignorant, entirely quiescent, and entirely
+uninterested.  The minister of a neighbouring chapel came to see
+him and spoke to him at some length of the need for repentance and
+the joys of heaven.  After he had gone my friend lay staring
+restlessly at the mass of decrepit broken chimney pots which made
+his horizon.  At last he spoke, and there was a new note in his
+voice:-
+
+"Ee said as 'ow there were golding streets in them parts.  I ain't
+no ways particler wot they're made of, but it'll feel natral like
+if there's chimleys too."
+
+The sun stretched a sudden finger and painted the chimney pots red
+and gold against the smoke-dimmed sky, and with his face alight
+with surprised relief my friend died.
+
+We are one with the earth, one in sin, one in redemption.  It is
+the fringe of the garment of God.  "If I may but touch the hem,"
+said a certain woman.
+
+On the great Death-day which shadows the early spring with a shadow
+of which it may be said Umbra Dei est Lux, the earth brought gifts
+of grief, the fruit of the curse, barren thorns, hollow reed, and
+the wood of the cross; the sea made offering of Tyrian purple; the
+sky veiled her face in great darkness, while the nation of priests
+crucified for the last time their Paschal lamb.  "I will hear,
+saith the Lord; I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the
+earth, and the earth shall hear the corn and wine and oil, and they
+shall hear Jezreel, and I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I
+will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy, and I will
+say unto them which were not my people, 'Thou art my people,' and
+they shall say 'Thou art my God.'"
+
+The second Adam stood in the garden with quickening feet, and all
+the earth pulsed and sang for joy of the new hope and the new life
+quickening within her, to be hers through the pains of travail, the
+pangs of dissolution.  The Tree of Life bears Bread and Wine--food
+of the wayfaring man.  The day of divisions is past, the day of
+unity has dawned.  One has risen from the dead, and in the Valley
+of Achor stands wide the Door of Hope--the Sacrament of Death.
+
+
+Scio Domine, et vere scio . . . quia non sum dignus accedere ad
+tantum mysterium propter nimia peccata mea et infinitas
+negligentias meas.  Sed scio . . . quia tu potes me facere dignum.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+"Anytus and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot hurt me," said
+Socrates; and Governor Sancho, with all the itch of newly-acquired
+authority, could not make the young weaver of steel-heads for
+lances sleep in prison.  In the Vision of Er the souls passed
+straight forward under the throne of necessity, and out into the
+plains of forgetfulness, where they must severally drink of the
+river of unmindfulness whose waters cannot be held in any vessel.
+The throne, the plain, and the river are still here, but in the
+distance rise the great lone heavenward hills, and the wise among
+us no longer ask of the gods Lethe, but rather remembrance.
+Necessity can set me helpless on my back, but she cannot keep me
+there; nor can four walls limit my vision.  I pass out from under
+her throne into the garden of God a free man, to my ultimate
+beatitude or my exceeding shame.  All day long this world lies open
+to me; ay, and other worlds also, if I will but have it so; and
+when night comes I pass into the kingdom and power of the dark.
+
+I lie through the long hours and watch my bridge, which is set with
+lights across the gloom; watch the traffic which is for me but so
+many passing lamps telling their tale by varying height and
+brightness.  I hear under my window the sprint of over-tired
+horses, the rattle of uncertain wheels as the street-sellers hasten
+south; the jangle of cab bells as the theatre-goers take their
+homeward way; the gruff altercation of weary men, the unmelodious
+song and clamorous laugh of women whose merriment is wearier still.
+Then comes a time of stillness when the light in the sky waxes and
+wanes, when the cloud-drifts obscure the stars, and I gaze out into
+blackness set with watching eyes.  No sound comes from without but
+the voice of the night-wind and the cry of the hour.  The clock on
+the mantelpiece ticks imperatively, for a check has fallen on the
+familiarity which breeds a disregard of common things, and a reason
+has to be sought for each sound which claims a hearing.  The pause
+is wonderful while it lasts, but it is not for long.  The working
+world awakes, the poorer brethren take up the burden of service;
+the dawn lights the sky; remembrance cries an end to forgetting.
+
+Sometimes in the country on a night in early summer you may shut
+the cottage door to step out into an immense darkness which palls
+heaven and earth.  Going forward into the embrace of the great
+gloom, you are as a babe swaddled by the hands of night into
+helpless quiescence.  Your feet tread an unseen path, your hands
+grasp at a void, or shrink from the contact they cannot realise;
+your eyes are holden; your voice would die in your throat did you
+seek to rend the veil of that impenetrable silence.
+
+Shut in by the intangible dark, we are brought up against those
+worlds within worlds blotted out by our concrete daily life.  The
+working of the great microcosm at which we peer dimly through the
+little window of science; the wonderful, breathing earth; the
+pulsing, throbbing sap; the growing fragrance shut in the calyx of
+to-morrow's flower; the heart-beat of a sleeping world that we
+dream that we know; and around, above, and interpenetrating all,
+the world of dreams, of angels and of spirits.
+
+It was this world which Jacob saw on the first night of his exile,
+and again when he wrestled in Peniel until the break of day.  It
+was this world which Elisha saw with open eyes; which Job knew when
+darkness fell on him; which Ezekiel gazed into from his place among
+the captives; which Daniel beheld as he stood alone by the great
+river, the river Hiddekel.
+
+For the moment we have left behind the realm of question and
+explanation, of power over matter and the exercise of bodily
+faculties; and passed into darkness alight with visions we cannot
+see, into silence alive with voices we cannot hear.  Like helpless
+men we set our all on the one thing left us, and lift up our
+hearts, knowing that we are but a mere speck among a myriad worlds,
+yet greater than the sum of them; having our roots in the dark
+places of the earth, but our branches in the sweet airs of heaven.
+
+It is the material counterpart of the 'Night of the Soul.'  We have
+left our house and set forth in the darkness which paralyses those
+faculties that make us men in the world of men.  But surely the
+great mystics, with all their insight and heavenly love, fell short
+when they sought freedom in complete separateness from creation
+instead of in perfect unity with it.  The Greeks knew better when
+they flung Ariadne's crown among the stars, and wrote Demeter's
+grief on a barren earth, and Persephone's joy in the fruitful
+field.  For the earth is gathered up in man; he is the whole which
+is greater than the sum of its parts.  Standing in the image of
+God, and clothed in the garment of God, he lifts up priestly hands
+and presents the sacrifice of redeemed earth before the throne of
+the All-Father.  "Dust and ashes and a house of devils," he cries;
+and there comes back for answer, "Rex concupiscet decorem tuam."
+
+The Angel of Death has broad wings of silence and mystery with
+which he shadows the valley where we need fear no evil, and where
+the voice which speaks to us is as the "voice of doves, tabering
+upon their breasts."  It is a place of healing and preparation, of
+peace and refreshing after the sharply-defined outlines of a garish
+day.  Walking there we learn to use those natural faculties of the
+soul which are hampered by the familiarity of bodily progress, to
+apprehend the truths which we have intellectually accepted.  It is
+the place of secrets where the humility which embraces all
+attainable knowledge cries "I know not"; and while we proclaim from
+the house-tops that which we have learnt, the manner of our
+learning lies hid for each one of us in the sanctuary of our souls.
+
+The Egyptians, in their ancient wisdom, act in the desert a great
+androsphinx, image of mystery and silence, staring from under level
+brows across the arid sands of the sea-way.  The Greeks borrowed
+and debased the image, turning the inscrutable into a semi-woman
+who asked a foolish riddle, and hurled herself down in petulant
+pride when OEdipus answered aright.  So we, marring the office of
+silence, question its mystery; thwart ourselves with riddles of our
+own suggesting; and turn away, leaving our offering but half
+consumed on the altar of the unknown god.  It was not the theft of
+fire that brought the vengeance of heaven upon Prometheus, but the
+mocking sacrifice.  Orpheus lost Eurydice because he must see her
+face before the appointed time.  Persephone ate of the pomegranate
+and hungered in gloom for the day of light which should have been
+endless.
+
+The universe is full of miracle and mystery; the darkness and
+silence are set for a sign we dare not despise.  The pall of night
+lifts, leaving us engulphed in the light of immensity under a
+tossing heaven of stars.  The dawn breaks, but it does not surprise
+us, for we have watched from the valley and seen the pale twilight.
+Through the wondrous Sabbath of faithful souls, the long day of
+rosemary and rue, the light brightens in the East; and we pass on
+towards it with quiet feet and opening eyes, bearing with us all of
+the redeemed earth that we have made our own, until we are
+fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and the peoples
+come from north and south and east and west to the City which lieth
+foursquare--the Beatific Vision of God.
+
+
+Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
+Cuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas;
+Ubi non praevenit rem desiderium,
+Nec desiderio minus est praemium.
+
+
+
+AT THE WHITE GATE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+A great joy has come to me; one of those unexpected gifts which
+life loves to bestow after we have learnt to loose our grip of her.
+I am back in my own place very near my road--the white gate lies
+within my distant vision; near the lean grey Downs which keep watch
+and ward between the country and the sea; very near, nay, in the
+lap of Mother Earth, for as I write I am lying on a green carpet,
+powdered yellow and white with the sun's own flowers; overhead a
+great sycamore where the bees toil and sing; and sighing shimmering
+poplars golden grey against the blue.  The day of Persephone has
+dawned for me, and I, set free like Demeter's child, gladden my
+eyes with this foretaste of coming radiance, and rest my tired
+sense with the scent and sound of home.  Away down the meadow I
+hear the early scythe song, and the warm air is fragrant with the
+fallen grass.  It has its own message for me as I lie here, I who
+have obtained yet one more mercy, and the burden of it is life, not
+death.
+
+I remember when, taking a grace from my road, I helped to mow
+Farmer Marler's ten-acre field, rich in ripe upstanding grass.  The
+mechanism of the ancient reaper had given way under the strain of
+the home meadows, and if this crop was to be saved it must be by
+hand.  I have kept the record of those days of joyous labour under
+a June sky.  Men were hard to get in our village; old Dodden, who
+was over seventy, volunteered his services--he had done yeoman work
+with the scythe in his youth--and two of the farm hands with their
+master completed our strength.
+
+We took our places under a five o'clock morning sky, and the larks
+cried down to us as we stood knee-deep in the fragrant dew-steeped
+grass, each man with his gleaming scythe poised ready for its
+sweeping swing.  Old Dodden led by right of age and ripe
+experience; bent like a sickle, brown and dry as a nut, his face a
+tracery of innumerable wrinkles, he has never ailed a day, and the
+cunning of his craft was still with him.  At first we worked
+stiffly, unreadily, but soon the monotonous motion possessed us
+with its insistent rhythm, and the grass bowed to each sibilant
+swish and fell in sweet-smelling swathes at our feet.  Now and then
+a startled rabbit scurried through the miniature forest to vanish
+with white flick of tail in the tangled hedge; here and there a
+mother lark was discovered sitting motionless, immovable upon her
+little brood; but save for these infrequent incidents we paced
+steadily on with no speech save the cry of the hone on the steel
+and the swish of the falling swathes.  The sun rose high in the
+heaven and burnt on bent neck and bare and aching arms, the blood
+beat and drummed in my veins with the unwonted posture and
+exercise; I worked as a man who sees and hears in a mist.  Once, as
+I paused to whet my scythe, my eye caught the line of the
+untroubled hills strong and still in the broad sunshine; then to
+work again in the labouring, fertile valley.
+
+Rest time came, and wiping the sweat from brow and blade we sought
+the welcome shadow of the hedge and the cool sweet oatmeal water
+with which the wise reaper quenches his thirst.  Farmer Marler
+hastened off to see with master-eye that all went well elsewhere;
+the farm men slept tranquilly, stretched at full length, clasped
+hands for pillow; and old Dodden, sitting with crooked fingers
+interlaced to check their trembling betrayal of old age, told how
+in his youth he had "swep" a four-acre field single-handed in three
+days--an almost impossible feat--and of the first reaping machine
+in these parts, and how it brought, to his thinking, the ruin of
+agricultural morals with it.  "'Tis again nature," he said, "the
+Lard gave us the land an' the seed, but 'Ee said that a man should
+sweat.  Where's the sweat drivin' round wi' two horses cuttin' the
+straw down an' gatherin' it again, wi' scarce a hand's turn i' the
+day's work?"
+
+Old Dodden's high-pitched quavering voice rose and fell, mournful
+as he surveyed the present, vehement as he recorded the heroic
+past.  He spoke of the rural exodus and shook his head mournfully.
+"We old 'uns were content wi' earth and the open sky like our
+feythers before us, but wi' the children 'tis first machines to
+save doin' a hand's turn o' honest work, an' then land an' sky
+ain't big enough seemin'ly, nor grand enough; it must be town an' a
+paved street, an' they sweat their lives out atwixt four walls an'
+call it seein' life--'tis death an' worse comes to the most of 'em.
+Ay, 'tis better to stay by the land, as the Lard said, till time
+comes to lie under it."  I looked away across the field where the
+hot air throbbed and quivered, and the fallen grass, robbed already
+of its freshness, lay prone at the feet of its upstanding fellows.
+It is quite useless to argue with old Dodden; he only shakes his
+head and says firmly, "An old man, seventy-five come Martinmass
+knows more o' life than a young chap, stands ter reason"; besides,
+his epitome of the town life he knows nothing of was a just one as
+far as it went; and his own son is the sweeper of a Holborn
+crossing, and many other things that he should not be; but that is
+the parson's secret and mine.
+
+We took rank again and swept steadily on through the hot still
+hours into the evening shadows, until the sinking sun set a Gloria
+to the psalm of another working day.  Only a third of the field lay
+mown, for we were not skilled labourers to cut our acre a day; I
+saw it again that night under the moonlight and the starlight,
+wrapped in a shroud of summer's mist.
+
+The women joined us on the third day to begin haymaking, and the
+air was fragrant of tossed and sun-dried grass.  One of them walked
+apart from the rest, without interest or freedom of movement; her
+face, sealed and impassive, was aged beyond the vigour of her
+years.  I knew the woman by sight, and her history by hearsay.  We
+have a code of morals here--not indeed peculiar to this place or
+people--that a wedding is 'respectable' if it precedes child-birth
+by a bare month, tolerable, and to be recognised, should it succeed
+the same by less than a year (provided the pair are not living in
+the same village); but the child that has never been 'fathered' and
+the wife without a ring are 'anathema,' and such in one was
+Elizabeth Banks.  She went away a maid and came back a year ago
+with a child and without a name.  Her mother was dead, her father
+and the village would have none of her:  the homing instinct is
+very strong, or she would scarcely have returned, knowing the
+traditions of the place.  Old Dodden, seeing her, grumbled to me in
+the rest-time.--"Can't think what the farmer wants wi' Lizzie Banks
+in 'is field."  "She must live," I said, "and by all showing her
+life is a hard one."  "She 'ad the makin' of 'er bed," he went on,
+obstinately.  "What for do she bring her disgrace home, wi' a
+fatherless brat for all folks to see?  We don't want them sort in
+our village.  The Lord's hand is heavy, an' a brat's a curse that
+cannot be hid."
+
+When tea-time came I crossed the field to look for a missing hone,
+and saw Elizabeth Banks far from the other women, busied with a
+bundle under the hedge.  I passed close on my search, and lo! the
+bundle was a little boy.  He lay smiling and stretching, fighting
+the air with his small pink fists, while the wind played with his
+curls.  "A curse that cannot be hid," old Dodden had said.  The
+mother knelt a moment, devouring him with her eyes, then snatched
+him to her with aching greed and covered him with kisses.  I saw
+the poor, plain face illumined, transfigured, alive with a mother's
+love, and remembered how the word came once to a Hebrew prophet:-
+
+
+Say unto your brethren Ammi, and to your sisters Ruhamah.
+
+
+The evening sky was clouding fast, the sound of rain was in the
+air; Farmer Marler shook his head as he looked at the grass lying
+in ordered rows.  I was the last to leave, and as I lingered at the
+gate drinking in the scent of the field and the cool of the coming
+rain, the first drops fell on my upturned face and kissed the poor
+dry swathes at my feet, and I was glad.
+
+David, child of the fields and the sheepfolds, his kingship laid
+aside, sees through the parted curtain of the years the advent of
+his greater Son, and cries in his psalm of the hilltops, his last
+prophetic prayer:-
+
+
+He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass.
+
+
+Even so He came, and shall still come.  Three days ago the field,
+in its pageant of fresh beauty, with shimmering blades and tossing
+banners, greeted sun and shower alike with joy for the furtherance
+of its life and purpose; now, laid low, it hears the young grass
+whisper the splendour of its coming green; and the poor swathes are
+glad at the telling, but full of grief for their own apparent
+failure.  Then in great pity comes the rain, the rain of summer,
+gentle, refreshing, penetrating, and the swathes are comforted, for
+they know that standing to greet or prostrate to suffer, the
+consolations of the former and the latter rain are still their own,
+with tender touch and cool caress.  Then, once more parched by the
+sun, they are borne away to the new service their apparent failure
+has fitted them for; and perhaps as they wait in the dark for the
+unknown that is still to come they hear sometimes the call of the
+distant rain, and at the sound the dry sap stirs afresh--they are
+not forgotten and can wait.
+
+"Say unto your sisters Ruhamah," cries the prophet.
+
+"He shall come down like rain on the mown grass," sang the poet of
+the sheepfolds.
+
+"My ways are not your ways, saith the Lord."
+
+
+I remember how I went home along the damp sweet-scented lanes
+through the grey mist of the rain, thinking of the mown field and
+Elizabeth Banks and many, many more; and that night, when the sky
+had cleared and the nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon
+riding at anchor, a silver boat in a still blue sea ablaze with the
+headlights of the stars, and the saying of the herdsman of Tekoa
+came to me--as it has come oftentimes since:-
+
+
+Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the
+shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with
+night; that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out
+upon the face of earth; the Lord is His name.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+This garden is an epitome of peace; sun and wind, rain, flowers,
+and birds gather me into the blessedness of their active harmony.
+The world holds no wish for me, now that I have come home to die
+with my own people, for verify I think that the sap of grass and
+trees must run in my veins, so steady is their pull upon my heart-
+strings.  London claimed all my philosophy, but the country gives
+all, and asks of me only the warm receptivity of a child in its
+mother's arms.
+
+When I lie in my cool light room on the garden level, I look across
+the bright grass--il verde smalto--to a great red rose bush in
+lavish disarray against the dark cypress.  Near by, amid a tangle
+of many-hued corn-flowers I see the promise of coming lilies, the
+sudden crimson of a solitary paeony; and in lowlier state against
+the poor parched earth glow the golden cups of the eschseholtzias.
+Beyond the low hedge lies pasture bright with buttercups, where the
+cattle feed.  Farther off, where the scythe has been busy, are
+sheep, clean and shorn, with merry, well-grown lambs; and in the
+farthest field I can see the great horses moving in slow steady
+pace as the farmer turns his furrow.
+
+The birds are noisy comrades and old friends, from the lark which
+chants the dew-steeped morning, to the nightingale that breaks the
+silence of the most wonderful nights.  I hear the wisdom of the
+rooks in the great elms; the lifting lilt of the linnet, and the
+robin's quaint little summer song.  The starlings chatter
+ceaselessly, their queer strident voices harsh against the
+melodious gossip of the other birds; the martins shrill softly as
+they swoop to and fro busied with their nesting under the caves;
+thrush and blackbird vie in friendly rivalry like the Meister-
+singer of old; sometimes I hear the drawling cry of a peacock
+strayed from the great house, or the laugh of the woodpecker; and
+at night the hunting note of the owl reaches me as he sweeps by in
+search of prey.
+
+To-day I am out again; and the great sycamore showers honey and
+flowers on me as I lie beneath it.  Sometimes a bee falls like an
+over-ripe fruit, and waits awhile to clean his pollen-coated legs
+ere he flies home to discharge his burden.  He is too busy to be
+friendly, but his great velvety cousin is much more sociable, and
+stays for a gentle rub between his noisy shimmering wings, and a
+nap in the hollow of my hand, for he is an idle friendly soul with
+plenty of time at his own disposal and no responsibilities.
+Looking across I can watch the martins at work; they have a
+starling and a sparrow for near neighbours in the wooden gutter.
+One nest is already complete all but the coping, the other two are
+a-building:  I wonder whether I or they will be first to go south
+through the mist.
+
+This great tree is a world in itself, and the denizens appear full
+of curiosity as to the Gulliver who has taken up his abode beneath
+it.  Pale green caterpillars and spiders of all sizes come spinning
+down to visit me, and have to be persuaded with infinite difficulty
+to ascend their threads again.  There are flies with beautiful
+iridescent wings, beetles of all shapes, some of them like tiny
+jewels in the sunlight.  Their nomenclature is a sealed book to me;
+of their life and habits I know nothing; yet this is but a little
+corner of the cosmos I am leaving, and I feel not so much desire
+for the beauty to come, as a great longing to open my eyes a little
+wider during the time which remains to me in this beautiful world
+of God's making, where each moment tells its own tale of active,
+progressive life in which there is no undoing.  Nature knows naught
+of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but
+goes steadily on in ever widening circle towards the fulfilment of
+the mystery of God.
+
+There are, I take it, two master-keys to the secrets of the
+universe, viewed sub specie aeternitatis, the Incarnation of God,
+and the Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the
+pantheistic little man of contemptible speech, that "all things are
+ours," yea, even unto the third heaven.
+
+I have lost my voracious appetite for books; their language is less
+plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees; and for me the
+clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather than in
+the learning of men.  "Libera me ab fuscina Hophni," prayed the
+good Bishop fearful of religious greed.  I know too much, not too
+little; it is realisation that I lack, wherefore I desire these
+last days to confirm in myself the sustaining goodness of God, the
+love which is our continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length,
+breadth, and height are all one.  It is a time of exceeding peace.
+There is a place waiting for me under the firs in the quiet
+churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties or
+personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them
+unknown to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to
+live on the charity of one's fellow-men.  I am most gladly in debt
+to all the world; and to Earth, my mother, for her great beauty.
+
+I can never remember the time when I did not love her, this mother
+of mine with her wonderful garments and ordered loveliness, her
+tender care and patient bearing of man's burden.  In the earliest
+days of my lonely childhood I used to lie chin on hand amid the
+milkmaids, red sorrel, and heavy spear-grass listening to her many
+voices, and above all to the voice of the little brook which ran
+through the meadows where I used to play:  I think it has run
+through my whole life also, to lose itself at last, not in the
+great sea but in the river that maketh glad the City of God.
+Valley and plain, mountain and fruitful field; the lark's song and
+the speedwell in the grass; surely a man need not sigh for greater
+loveliness until he has read something more of this living letter,
+and knelt before that earth of which he is the only confusion.
+
+It is a grave matter that the word religion holds such away among
+us, making the very gap seem to yawn again which the Incarnation
+once and for ever filled full.  We have banished the protecting
+gods that ruled in river and mountain, tree and grove; we have
+gainsayed for the most part folk-lore and myth, superstition and
+fairy-tale, evil only in their abuse.  We have done away with
+mystery, or named it deceit.  All this we have done in an
+enlightened age, but despite this policy of destruction we have
+left ourselves a belief, the grandest and most simple the world has
+ever known, which sanctifies the water that is shed by every
+passing cloud; and gathers up in its great central act vineyard and
+cornfield, proclaiming them to be that Life of the world without
+which a man is dead while he liveth.  Further, it is a belief whose
+foundations are the most heavenly mystery of the Trinity, but whose
+centre is a little Child:  it sets a price upon the head of the
+sparrow, and reckons the riches of this world at their true value;
+it points to a way of holiness where the fool shall not err, and
+the sage may find the realisation of his far-seeking; and yet,
+despite its inclusiveness, it is a belief which cannot save the
+birds from destruction, the silent mountains from advertisement, or
+the stream from pollution, in an avowedly Christian land.  John
+Ruskin scolded and fought and did yeoman service, somewhat hindered
+by his over-good conceit of himself; but it is not the worship of
+beauty we need so much as the beauty of holiness.  Little by little
+the barrier grows and 'religion' becomes a RULE of life, not life
+itself, although the Bride stands ready to interpret, likened in
+her loveliness to the chief treasures of her handmaid-Earth.  There
+is more truth in the believing cry, "Come from thy white cliffs, O
+Pan!" than in the religion that measures a man's life by the letter
+of the Ten Commandments, and erects itself as judge and ruler over
+him, instead of throwing open the gate of the garden where God
+walks with man from morning until morning.
+
+As I write the sun is setting; in the pale radiance of the sky
+above his glory there dawns the evening star; and earth like a
+tired child turns her face to the bosom of the night.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+Once again I have paid a rare visit to my tree to find many things
+changed since my last sojourn there.  The bees are silent, for the
+honey-laden flowers of the sycamore are gone and in their place
+hang dainty two-fold keys.  The poplar has lost its metallic
+shimmer, the chestnut its tall white candles; and the sound of the
+wind in the fully-leaved branches is like the sighing of the sea.
+The martins' nests are finished, and one is occupied by a shrill-
+voiced brood; but for the most part the birds' parental cares are
+over, and the nestlings in bold flight no longer flutter on
+inefficient wings across the lawn with clamorous, open bill.  The
+robins show promise of their ruddy vests, the slim young thrush is
+diligently practising maturer notes, and soon Maid June will have
+fled.
+
+It is such a wonderful world that I cannot find it in my heart to
+sigh for fresh beauty amid these glories of the Lord on which I
+look, seeing men as trees walking, in my material impotence which
+awaits the final anointing.  The marigolds with their orange suns,
+the lilies' white flame, the corncockle's blue crown of many
+flowers, the honeysuckle's horn of fragrance--I can paraphrase
+them, name, class, dissect them; and then, save for the purposes of
+human intercourse, I stand where I stood before, my world bounded
+by my capacity, the secret of colour and fragrance still kept.  It
+is difficult to believe that the second lesson will not be the
+sequence of the first, and death prove a "feast of opening eyes" to
+all these wonders, instead of the heavy-lidded slumber to which we
+so often liken it.  "Earth to earth?"  Yes, "dust thou art, and
+unto dust thou shalt return," but what of the rest?  What of the
+folded grave clothes, and the Forty Days?  If the next state be, as
+it well might, space of four dimensions, and the first veil which
+will lift for me be the material one, then the "other" world which
+is hidden from our grosser material organism will lie open, and
+declare still further to my widening eyes and unstopped ears the
+glory and purpose of the manifold garment of God.  Knowledge will
+give place to understanding in that second chamber of the House of
+Wisdom and Love.  Revelation is always measured by capacity:  "Open
+thy mouth wide," and it shall be filled with a satisfaction that in
+itself is desire.
+
+There is a child here, a happy quiet little creature holding gently
+to its two months of life.  Sometimes they lay it beside me, I the
+more helpless of the two--perhaps the more ignorant--and equally
+dependent for the supply of my smallest need.  I feel indecently
+large as I survey its minute perfections and the tiny balled fist
+lying in my great palm.  The little creature fixes me with the wise
+wide stare of a soul in advance of its medium of expression; and I,
+gazing back at the mystery in those eyes, feel the thrill of
+contact between my worn and sustained self and the innocence of a
+little white child.  It is wonderful to watch a woman's rapturous
+familiarity with these newcomers.  A man's love has far more awe in
+it, and the passionate animal instinct of defence is wanting in
+him.  "A woman shall be saved through the child-bearing," said St
+Paul; not necessarily her own, but by participation in the great
+act of motherhood which is the crown and glory of her sex.  She is
+the "prisoner of love," caught in a net of her own weaving; held
+fast by little hands which rule by impotence, pursued by feet the
+swifter for their faltering.
+
+It seems incredible that this is what a woman will barter for the
+right to "live her own life"--surely the most empty of desires.
+Man--vir, woman--femina, go to make up THE man--homo.  There can be
+no comparison, no rivalry between them; they are the complement of
+each other, and a little child shall lead them.  It is easy to
+understand that desire to shelter under the dear mantle of
+motherhood which has led to one of the abuses of modern Romanism.
+I met an old peasant couple at Bornhofen who had tramped many weary
+miles to the famous shrine of Our Lady to plead for their only son.
+They had a few pence saved for a candle, and afterwards when they
+told me their tale the old woman heaved a sigh of relief, "Es wird
+bald gut gehen:  Die da, Sie versteht," and I saw her later paying
+a farewell visit to the great understanding Mother whom she could
+trust.  Superstitious misapprehension if you will, but also the
+recognition of a divine principle.
+
+It was Behmen, I believe, who cried with the breath of inspiration,
+"Only when I know God shall I know myself"; and so man remains the
+last of all the riddles, to be solved it may be only in Heaven's
+perfection and the light of the Beatific Vision.  "Know thyself" is
+a vain legend, the more so when emphasised by a skull; and so I
+company with a friend and a stranger, and looking across at the
+white gate I wonder concerning the quiet pastures and still waters
+that lie beyond, even as Brother Ambrose wondered long years ago in
+the monastery by the forest.
+
+
+The Brother Ambrose was ever a saintly man approved of God and
+beloved by the Brethren.  To him one night, as he lay abed in the
+dormitory, came the word of the Lord, saying, "Come, and I will
+show thee the Bride, the Lamb's wife."  And Brother Ambrose arose
+and was carried to a great and high mountain, even as in the Vision
+of Blessed John.  'Twas a still night of many stars, and Brother
+Ambrose, looking up, saw a radiant path in the heavens; and lo! the
+stars gathered themselves together on either side until they stood
+as walls of light, and the four winds lapped him about as in a
+mantle and bore him towards the wondrous gleaming roadway.  Then
+between the stars came the Holy City with roof and pinnacle aflame,
+and walls aglow with such colours as no earthly limner dreams of,
+and much gold.  Brother Ambrose beheld the Gates of Pearl, and by
+every gate an angel with wings of snow and fire, and a face no man
+dare look on because of its exceeding radiance.
+
+Then as Brother Ambrose stretched out his arms because of his great
+longing, a little grey cloud came out of the north and hung between
+the walls of light, so that he no longer beheld the Vision, but
+only heard a sound as of a great multitude crying 'Alleluia'; and
+suddenly the winds came about him again, and lo! he found himself
+in his bed in the dormitory, and it was midnight, for the bell was
+ringing to Matins; and he rose and went down with the rest.  But
+when the Brethren left the choir Brother Ambrose stayed fast in his
+place, hearing and seeing nothing because of the Vision of God; and
+at Lauds they found him and told the Prior.
+
+He questioned Brother Ambrose of the matter, and when he heard the
+Vision bade him limn the Holy City even as he had seen it; and the
+Precentor gave him uterine vellum and much fine gold and what
+colours he asked for the work.  Then Brother Ambrose limned a
+wondrous fair city of gold with turrets and spires; and he inlaid
+blue for the sapphire, and green for the emerald, and vermilion
+where the city seemed aflame with the glory of God; but the angels
+he could not limn, nor could he set the rest of the colours as he
+saw them, nor the wall of stars on either hand; and Brother Ambrose
+fell sick because of the exceeding great longing he had to limn the
+Holy City, and was very sad; but the Prior bade him thank God, and
+remember the infirmity of the flesh, which, like the little grey
+cloud, veiled Jerusalem to his sight.
+
+
+As I write the monastery bell hard by rings out across the lark's
+song.  They still have time for visions behind those guarding
+walls, but for most of us it is not so.  We let slip the ideal for
+what we call the real, and the golden dreams vanish while we clutch
+at phantoms:  we speed along life's pathway, counting to the full
+the sixty minutes of every hour, yet the race is not to the swift
+nor the battle to the strong.  Lying here in this quiet backwater
+it is hard to believe that the world without is turbulent with
+storm and stress and the ebb and flow of uncertain tides.  The
+little yellow cat rolling on its back among the daisies, the staid
+tortoise making a stately meal off the buttercups near me, these
+are great events in this haven of peace.  And yet, looking back to
+the working days, I know how much goodness and loving kindness
+there is under the froth and foam.  If we do not know ourselves we
+most certainly do not know our brethren:  that revelation awaits
+us, it may be, first in Heaven.  To have faith is to create; to
+have hope is to call down blessing; to have love is to work
+miracles.  Above all let us see visions, visions of colour and
+light, of green fields and broad rivers, of palaces laid with fair
+colours, and gardens where a place is found for rosemary and rue.
+
+It is our prerogative to be dreamers, but there will always be men
+ready to offer us death for our dreams.  And if it must be so let
+us choose death; it is gain, not loss, and the gloomy portal when
+we reach it is but a white gate, the white gate maybe we have known
+all our lives barred by the tendrils of the woodbine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+Rain, rain, rain:  the little flagged path outside my window is a
+streaming way, where the coming raindrops meet again the grey
+clouds whose storehouse they have but just now left.  The grass
+grows greener as I watch it, the burnt patches fade, a thousand
+thirsty beads are uplifted for the cooling draught.
+
+The great thrush that robs the raspberry canes is busy; yesterday
+he had little but dust for his guerdon, but now fresh, juicy fruit
+repays him as he swings to and fro on the pliant branches.  The
+blackbirds and starlings find the worms an easy prey--poor brother
+worm ever ready for sacrifice.  I can hear the soft expectant
+chatter of the family of martins under the roof; there will be good
+hunting, and they know it, for the flies are out when the rain is
+over, and there are clamorous mouths awaiting.  My little brown
+brothers, the sparrows, remain my chief delight.  Of all the birds
+these nestle closest to my heart, be they grimy little cockneys or
+their trim and dainty country cousins.  They come day by day for
+their meed of crumbs spread for them outside my window, and at this
+season they eat leisurely and with good appetite, for there are no
+hungry babies pestering to be fed.  Very early in the morning I
+hear the whirr and rustle of eager wings, and the tap, tap, of
+little beaks upon the stone.  The sound carries me back, for it was
+the first to greet me when I rose to draw water and gather kindling
+in my roadmender days; and if I slip back another decade they
+survey me, reproving my laziness, from the foot of the narrow bed
+in my little attic overseas.
+
+Looking along the roadway that we have travelled we see the
+landmarks, great and small, which have determined the direction of
+our feet.  For some those of childhood stand out above all the
+rest; but I remember few notable ones, and those few the emphatic
+chord of the universe, rather than any commerce with my fellows.
+There was the night of my great disappointment, when I was borne
+from my comfortable bed to see the wonders of the moon's eclipse.
+Disappointment was so great that it sealed my lips; but, once back
+on my pillow, I sobbed for grief that I had seen a wonder so far
+below my expectation.  Then there was a night at Whitby, when the
+wind made speech impossible, and the seas rushed up and over the
+great lighthouse like the hungry spirits of the deep.  I like
+better to remember the scent of the first cowslip field under the
+warm side of the hedge, when I sang to myself for pure joy of their
+colour and fragrance.  Again, there were the bluebells in the
+deserted quarry like the backwash of a southern sea, and below them
+the miniature forest of sheltering bracken with its quaint
+conceits; and, crowned above all, the day I stood on Watcombe Down,
+and looked across a stretch of golden gorse and new-turned blood-
+red field, the green of the headland, and beyond, the sapphire sea.
+
+Time sped, and there came a day when I first set foot on German
+soil and felt the throb of its paternity, the beat of our common
+Life.  England is my mother, and most dearly do I love her swelling
+breasts and wind-swept, salt-strewn hair.  Scotland gave me my
+name, with its haunting derivation handed down by brave men; but
+Germany has always been to me the Fatherland par excellence.  True,
+my love is limited to the southern provinces, with their medieval
+memories; for the progressive guttural north I have little
+sympathy, but the Rhine claimed me from the first, calling,
+calling, with that wonderful voice which speaks of death and life,
+of chivalry and greed of gold.  If you would have the river's
+company you should wander, a happy solitary, along its banks,
+watching its gleaming current in the early morning, its golden
+glory as it answers the farewell of parting day.  Then, in the
+silence of the night, you can hear the wash and eddy calling one to
+another, count the heart-beats of the great bearer of burdens, and
+watch in the moonlight the sisters of the mist as they lament with
+wringing hands the days that are gone.
+
+The forests, too, are ready with story hid in the fastness of their
+solitude, and it is a joy to think that those great pines, pointing
+ever upwards, go for the most part to carry the sails of great
+ships seeking afar under open sky.  The forest holds other wonders
+still.  It seems but last night that I wandered down the road which
+led to the little unheeded village where I had made my temporary
+home.  The warm-scented breath of the pines and the stillness of
+the night wrapped me in great content; the summer lightning leapt
+in a lambent arch across the east, and the stars, seen dimly
+through the sombre tree crests, were outrivalled by the glow-worms
+which shone in countless points of light from bank and hedge; even
+two charcoal-burners, who passed with friendly greeting, had
+wreathed their hats with the living flame.  The tiny shifting lamps
+were everywhere; pale yellow, purely white, or green as the
+underside of a northern wave.  By day but an ugly, repellent worm;
+but darkness comes, and lo, a star alight.  Nature is full for us
+of seeming inconsistencies and glad surprises.  The world's asleep,
+say you; on your ear falls the nightingale's song and the stir of
+living creatures in bush and brake.  The mantle of night falls, and
+all unattended the wind leaps up and scatters the clouds which veil
+the constant stars; or in the hour of the great dark, dawn parts
+the curtain with the long foregleam of the coming day.  It is hard
+to turn one's back on night with her kiss of peace for tired eye-
+lids, the kiss which is not sleep but its neglected forerunner.  I
+made my way at last down to the vine-girt bridge asleep under the
+stars and up the winding stairs of the old grey tower; and a
+stone's-throw away the Rhine slipped quietly past in the midsummer
+moonlight.  Switzerland came in its turn, unearthly in its white
+loveliness and glory of lake and sky.  But perhaps the landmark
+which stands out most clearly is the solitary blue gentian which I
+found in the short slippery grass of the Rigi, gazing up at the sky
+whose blue could not hope to excel it.  It was my first; and what
+need of another, for finding one I had gazed into the mystery of
+all.  This side the Pass, snow and the blue of heaven; later I
+entered Italy through fields of many-hued lilies, her past glories
+blazoned in the flowers of the field.
+
+Now it is a strangely uneventful road that leads to my White Gate.
+Each day questions me as it passes; each day makes answer for me
+"not yet."  There is no material preparation to be made for this
+journey of mine into a far country--a simple fact which adds to the
+'unknowableness' of the other side.  Do I travel alone, or am I one
+of a great company, swift yet unhurried in their passage?  The
+voices of Penelope's suitors shrilled on the ears of Ulysses, as
+they journeyed to the nether-world, like nocturnal birds and bats
+in the inarticulateness of their speech.  They had abused the gift,
+and fled self-condemned.  Maybe silence commends itself as most
+suitable for the wayfarers towards the sunrise--silence because
+they seek the Word--but for those hastening towards the confusion
+they have wrought there falls already the sharp oncoming of the
+curse.
+
+While we are still here the language of worship seems far, and yet
+lies very nigh; for what better note can our frail tongues lisp
+than the voice of wind and sea, river and stream, those grateful
+servants giving all and asking nothing, the soft whisper of snow
+and rain eager to replenish, or the thunder proclaiming a majesty
+too great for utterance?  Here, too, stands the angel with the
+censer gathering up the fragrance of teeming earth and forest-tree,
+of flower and fruit, and sweetly pungent herb distilled by sun and
+rain for joyful use.  Here, too, come acolytes lighting the dark
+with tapers--sun, moon, and stars--gifts of the Lord that His
+sanctuary may stand ever served.
+
+It lies here ready to our hand, this life of adoration which we
+needs must live hand in hand with earth, for has she not borne the
+curse with us?  But beyond the white gate and the trail of woodbine
+falls the silence greater than speech, darkness greater than light,
+a pause of "a little while"; and then the touch of that healing
+garment as we pass to the King in His beauty, in a land from which
+there is no return.
+
+At the gateway then I cry you farewell.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ROADMENDER ***
+
+This file should be named rmend10.txt or rmend10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, rmend11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, rmend10a.txt
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04
+
+Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+