 Part 1 Chapter 7 of Rubble and Rose-Leaves and Things of that Kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. Rubble and Rose-Leaves by Frank W. Borum. A Good Wife and a Gallant Ship. 1. Why is a Good Wife like a Gallant Ship? This is not a riddle. It is a sincere and earnest inquiry. An ancient philosopher in the East and a modern poet in the West have both remarked upon the resemblance between the two. Solomon's been nearly half of his life thinking about ships. He was the only Jewish king who felt much enthusiasm for maritime affairs. Solomon reminds me of Peter the Great. Those who have Peru's Walzowski's biography of that monarch are scarcely likely to forget the passage in which the historian describes the finding by the boy Peter of the Broken Boat. It was an old half-rotten wooden skiff, thrown to the scrap-heap with some useless lumber in the little village of Ismaloth. But captivating the boy's fancy and storing his imagination, he could not take his eyes from it. It changed the whole current of his life. He is destined to rule over a great continental people who have no access to the sea. Yet from that day he dreams of nothing but brave ships and romantic voyages. He comes to England to learn shipbuilding. He returns to Russia and builds useless navies. He claps his hands in delirious ecstasy as he launches his huge toys on his inland lakes. He is like a caged eagle, the passion of the infinite throbs in his veins. Yet he is cribbed, cabined, and confined in this cruel way. Solomon was in a very similar case. He ruled over a people who regarded the sea with distrust and disdain. He himself heard in his soul the challenging call of the mighty waters, the ships, the ships that bring the food, the merchant ships, the ships that lie be calmed in the oily seas of the tropics, the ships that get caught in the ice-pack at the poles, the ships that fight their way doggedly through howling gales and icy blizzards round the cape. Those stately ships with their dizzy mass and shapely bows captivated his imagination. And when he desired to speak of the virtuous and faithful housewife in terms of superlative appreciation the only image that seemed worthy of her was the gallant ship riding at anchor in the bay. Who can find a virtuous woman, he asks, for her price is far above rubies. She is like the merchant ships. She bringeth her food from afar, too. So much for the Eastern philosopher. Now for the Western bard. Longfellow likens a good wife to a gallant ship, and in order that we may see how much alike the two are he places them side by side. He describes the old shipbuilder who has resolved to build one more ship, his last and his best. He comes down to the yards, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, carrying the model in his hand. He approaches his assistant, shows him the model, and confides to him his dream. The younger man, a stalwart and fiery youth, has a dream of his own. He aspires to marry his master's daughter. The two are engrossed in conversation. The elder man, depicting to the younger the stately ship that is to be, he will build a vessel that shall laugh at all disaster, and with wave and whirlwind wrestle. And he concludes his eager communication by promising that the day that give a third to the sea shall give my daughter unto thee. The younger man starts at the radiant prospect. As he turned his face aside, with a look of joy and a thrill of pride, standing before her father's door, he saw the form of his promised bride, the sun shone on her golden hair, and her cheek was glowing fresh and fair, with the breath of mourn and the soft sea air, like a beautyous barge was she. And so on, all through the poem, right up to the wedding on the ship's deck, on the day of her launching. Longfellow draws the analogy between the shapely vessel, the bride of the ocean, and the fair maiden, the bride of the proud young builder. She is like the merchant ships, says the ancient eastern sage. Like a beautyous barge was she, claims the western poet. It is difficult to resist the testimony of two such witnesses. III Neither the good wife nor the gallant ship need resent of the analogy. If the good wife does not like being compared to a ship, let her sit down for five minutes and think, and it will occur to her that of all our ingenious inventions and bewildering contrivances, a ship is the only one that has a divine origin and a divine authority. The Ark was the first ship, and its plans and specifications were divinely dictated. Moreover, it is obvious that since the Lord God divided his world into islands and continents, with vast expanses of ocean rolling between, and commanded that all those scattered territories should be peopled and developed, he contemplated the existence of the ships. The ships were part of the original program. The ships were to be the instruments of those distributive and meditative ministries on which the history of the world was to be based. Or if instead of thinking abstract thoughts, the good wife prefers to read, let her reach down Rudyard Kiplie's ballad of the big steamers. Well, where are you going to, all you big steamers, with England's own coal, up and down the salt seas? We are going to vetch you your bread and butter, your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples, and cheese. For the bread that you eat, and the biscuits you nibble, the sweets that you suck, and the joints that you carve, they are brought to you daily by all us big steamers, and if any one hinders our coming, you'll starve. The ships then represent the indispensabilities of life, the things without which we cannot live. I am writing here in Australia, and even here in Australia, with our immense open spaces, spaces in which we can grow almost anything, how dependent we are upon the coming of the ships. We need the ships, ships to bring us our supplies from the great looms and factories of the old world, ships to take the produce of our boundless planes to the congested populations of the other hemisphere, ships to bring the letters for which our hearts are hungry and to take the letters for which distant friends are waiting. Even here in Australia the ships are the light of our eyes and the breath of our nostrils. Even here in Australia the good wife, when she spreads her table in the morning, brings her food from afar. For none of these dainties that tempt my appetite and nourish my frame are native foods. They were not here until the ships began to come. The wheat is not indigenous, the meat is not native meat. The corn and cattle and the coffee came to Australia on the ships. And but for the ships we ourselves could never have been here. Let a man register a vow that he will not eat, drink, wear, or use anything that has, in a remote or in an immediate sense, been upon a ship, and he will be reduced to abject wretchedness in no time. God has built his world in such a way that the ship is the foundation of everything. Every climate needs what other climes produce, and offer something to the general use, though land but listens to the common call, and in return receives supplies from all. The great weaver stands continually at his loom, working out an intricate and beautiful pattern. The nations are the threads that run up and down, up and down, not far apart, yet never meeting. The gallant ship is the shuttle, the busy shuttle, that flies to and fro, to and fro, weaving them all into one compact and wonderful hole. The web depends entirely on the shuttle, the world depends entirely on the ships. I never see a great ship come into port at the end of a long voyage, without feeling a sense of admiration, amounting almost to awe, at the masterly achievement. To say nothing of the perils to which she has been exposed at sea, it seems an amazing thing that after having been for months on the trackless waters she can pick up the heads as easily as though she had been following a well-blazed trail. There's a famous story on record in the memoirs of Captain Basil Hall. It tells how the erudite commander once brought his vessel round Cape Horn on a voyage from Zanblas to Rio de Janeiro. Without any other observations than those of the sun and moon he laid his vessel in a thick fog outside what he believed to be the entrance to the harbour. The fog cleared, and the land slowly loomed up through it. The first that had been seen for more than three months, it was Rio. The sailors were electrified at the accuracy of their commander's calculations, and rushing to the bridge greeted him by way of congratulation with three ringing cheers. I suppose no man ever watched a brave ship drop anchor in the bay at the end of her voyage without some such feeling as this, and certainly no man ever looked into the face of his bride on his wedding day without being conscious of some such emotion. She is like the merchant ship. She bringeth her food from afar. It seems so wonderful to the bridegroom that she should have reached his side in safety. The chances against her safe arrival were a million to one. She is the daughter of a thousand generations. For countless centuries her ancestors were fighting men. If in that long chain of warring progenitors only one had fallen before he mated she could never have been born. Time after time in those rude days the earth was desolated by war, pestilence, and famine, yet the line of genealogy that led to her remained unbroken. More than once whole nations were depopulated by the plague, but still her ancestry was unaffected. The providence that guards the good ship on the seething waters, bringing it safely through storm and tempest to its desired haven, watched over her as she floated down the restless ages to her husband's side. She was like the ark upborn by the very waters that destroyed everything beside. Or to return to Solomon simile, she is like the merchant ships. She bringeth her food from afar. Her safe arrival seems a miracle, and a golden miracle at that. It seems to her husband that threatened by such perils as she has braved only an escort of angels could have brought her safely to his side, and he bows his head in wondering gratitude. Fire. We owe everything to the ships. All our food comes from afar. Yes, all of it, including food for thought. The school, the college, the university. They all resemble the virtuous housewife spreading her table. They bring food from afar. Only this afternoon I was shown over Dennington College. The principal, Miss Gertrude Milman, B.A., took me into a classroom in which a geography lesson was in progress. The teacher was giving her pupils food from afar. Hardy adventurers and patient explorers sailed across unknown seas, charted unknown lands, and returned with the priceless results of their hazardous investigations. And those results, brought home by the ships, were being dispensed in the classroom at Dennington College. Miss Milman herself teaches philosophy, but she owes it all to the ships. Far away over the sea, Plato and Aristotle and Socrates wrestled with the problems of the universe in the old days. And far away over the sea, Kant and Hegel and Bergson pondered those same problems in a later time. And the ships have brought us the wealthy fruitage of their profound cogitations. And here, Miss Milman told me, the girls assemble in the morning for the scripture lesson. I do not know exactly how that half hour is spent, but I am certain that even then Miss Milman sets before her pupils food from afar. The Bible itself has come to us across the ocean. The world is only rolling into light because the ships, with their white sails, have dotted every sea. The prayers you offer, says J. M. Neal. The prayers you offer, the hymns you sing. The books of devotion you use. How far, far, hence in time. How far, far, hence in distance. Do their sources lie? Perhaps from some quaint medieval German house, with its surrounding fields and lanes and gardens buried deep in snow. You get a prayer which we use at Christmastide. Perhaps from the dog days of the Andalusian convent, with its orange trees and its pomegranates and its fountains, you get such music as that lovely entoyed, like as the heart desires after the water-brooks. Perhaps from the tomb of a martyr you get such a hymn as, O God, thy soldiers, crowd and guard. Prayers, music, hymns. They are all the same. They come from afar, from afar. I left Dennington College feeling that, after all, Miss Milman is very much like Solomon's housewife. She is entirely dependent on the ships. She brings with her food from afar. Six. Now that I come to look a little more closely at the comely features of this virtuous woman, the woman who has liked the merchant ships, I fancy that I recognize her, for she is none other than the bride, the lamb's wife. When the church spreads her white cloth and sets her wondrous table, she invariably decks it with food from afar. Listen as she invites you to partake of her heavenly fare. The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving. And listen again. The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that Christ's blood was shed for thee, and be thankful. Food from afar. Food from afar. She is like the merchant ships. She brings with her food from afar. Such vines can have been procured from no earthly source. This bread was made from wheat that grew in no earthly field. This wine was pressed from clusters that hung on no earthly vine. The happy guests who sit at the church's table find that as they partake of her sacred hospitality's, there is minister to them a comfort that wipes all tears from all faces, a hope that transfigures with strange radiance every unborn day, and a peace that passeth all understanding. They know as they taste this delectable fare that such fruits grew in no earthly garden. And then with faces that shine like the faces of the angels, they remember at whose table they are seated, and they say one to another. She is like the merchant ships that bring with her food from afar. And that golden testimony is true. CHAPTER VII. We have had a kind of wedding in my study this morning. The bride arrived by post. It happened in this wise. Twenty years ago I attended an auction sale at Mosgill. A valuable library was under the hammer, and the chance was too good to be missed. The books were all tied up in bundles and laid out on tables. I took a note of the numbers of those lots that contained works that I wanted. Then on the arrival of the carrier's cart, I proudly inspected my purchases, I found among them an odd volume. It was the first part of Foster's life in correspondence. The book was bound up with a number of others, and I could not buy them without becoming responsible for it. My first inclination was to throw it away, and the temptation recurred when I left Mosgill for Hobart, and again when I left Hobart for Armadale. Of what use was an odd volume? In packing up at Hobart I actually tossed it to the heap of rubbish that was to be left behind. But an aching void in the last case led to its ultimate rescue. This is the first part of our little romance. Last week I was visiting a country minister. In the ordinary course of things I glanced over his bookshelves. I was just turning away when, among some dusty volumes away on the topmost shelf, my eye caught the words, Foster's life in correspondence. It too was an odd volume. On hearing of my own experience, the good man urged me to transfer the volume to my portmanteau and say no more about it. It was, he said, of no use to him. But my dear fellow, I replied, I might just as well say that mine is of no use to me. We must leave the matter in the meantime. It is so long since I looked at the volume on my shelves that I cannot be sure that they are companions. They may be duplicates. Yours I see is volume two. If on my return I find that mine is volume one, we will come to some arrangement. If not, neither of us can help the other. My Mosgill purchase turned out to be the first volume. I posted my friend a copy of Bleak House, which, as I happened to know, he had never read, and he forwarded the Foster by return of post. And this morning I took the odd volume from the lumber on the top shelf, introduced it to its mate, and now the two stand proudly side by side among my biographies. They make a handsome pair. No bride and bridegroom could look more perfectly matched. I do not suppose that they had ever met before, but that circumstance in itself presents no lawful impediment to their being united in a lifelong partnership. The mating of books is a very mechanical affair. In a big publishing house you may see two huge cases side by side just as they have come from the printers. The one is packed with copies of volume one. The other contains copies of volume two. An assistant, asked by a customer for a copy of the complete work, takes a book from the one box and a book from the other, claps them together with a bang, and they are mated for all time to come. There is no question of selection and no question of consent. There is no wilt thou have, and no I will. The volume in the top right corner of the one box is unable to steal a shy and furtive glance at the book lying in a corresponding position in the other box. His destined partner may be a little plumper or a little thinner than himself. She may be neatly attired in a pretty cover that sets off her charms to perfection, or she may be dressed in an ill-fitting wrapper that is smudged or torn. He cannot tell. She can only wait, and she can only wait, until they are unceremoniously snatched from their respective corners, bang together, and thus, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, made partners in a bond that is indissoluble. There is no question of sexual selection such as Darwin, Wallace, and the great biologists like to portray. The books in the one box do not strut and parade and show off their beauties in order to win the admiration of the books in the other box. That may be because they are conscious that they are all so much alike. They feel that there is little to pick and choose between them. Or on the other hand, it may be because they suspect that the books in the other box are all much of a muchness, and that it matters very little which bride each bridegroom has. But whatever the reason, there it is. There is no element of selection such as we find in the fields and the forests. There is no love-making and courtship such as we mortals know. The volumes are arbitrarily paired off, and the thing is done. And strangely enough, they appear to belong to each other from that very moment. One would feel that he was conniving at a kind of literary adultery if he were to take the second volume of this set and the second volume of that set and deliberately transpose them. I call the earth and the heavens to witness that in my procedure this morning I have been guilty of no such enormity. We are living in a rough world. With some books, as with some people, things go hardly. In the course of years, a volume may be cruelly deserted by its companion, or its partner may come to an untimely end. The law of the land provides that in such sad cases a second marriage is no shame. One does not like to think of my first volume of fosters spending all its days among the lumber on my top shelf, and my friend's second volume spending all its days in the dust and neglect of his top shelf. I do not often take my stand on my ministerial dignity, but I maintain that being a minister I have at least as good a right as any publisher's assistant to take those two sad and lonely volumes, the one from my top shelf in the city and the other from my friend's top shelf in the country, and to unite them in the holy bond of matrimony. And as they stand before me side by side, never to perch upon a top shelf any more, I feel that I have done myself, my friend, and them good service by having taken pity on their loneliness and launched them on a united career of happiness and usefulness. As things stood, neither was of any use to anybody. Their union has made it possible for each to fulfill its destiny. Let it be distinctly understood that I am not writing of single volumes. A single volume is not an odd volume. As I sit here at my desk and survey my shelves, I see at a glance that many of the books are complete in one volume. It would be the height of absurdity for me to take one such book, say Pilgrim's Progress, and another such book, say Pickwick Papers, and declare them volumes one and two for the mere sake of pairing them off. Neither the publisher's assistant nor the minister is vested with authority to mate the books after so arbitrary a fashion. The Pilgrim's Progress is a single volume, and the Pickwick Papers is a single volume, and it is better for them to do the work that they were sent into the world to do as single volumes, rather than to enter into an alliance that will make them each ridiculous and stultify them both. I am not arguing for the celibacy of the clergy or for the celibacy of the laity. How could I consistently adopt such a line of reasoning immediately after having celebrated the marriage of the fosters? I am simply telling all the single volumes in my study, who are looking a little downcast and unhappy, now that the excitement of the wedding is past, that single volumes are not odd volumes. It is very nice, of course, to be happily mated, but it is quite possible for a solitary life to be a very useful one. Robert Louis Stevenson would have gone further. In his, where guinebos puerisque, he as good as says that no man can be a hero after he is married. The fact that he has a home of his own, and is surrounded by love and tenderness and thoughtful care, militates against the culture of the stern of virtues. If comfortable, Stevenson says, marriage is not heroic. It inevitably narrows and damps the spirit of generous men. In marriage a man becomes stark and selfish and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. The air of the fireside withers up all the fine wildings of the husband's heart. He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer comfort and happiness to anything else on earth, his wife included. Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling. Today his first duty is to his family, and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty years ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism. Now he is fit for neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without restraint, for you will not waken him. In his references to women, Stevenson does not speak quite so confidently. It is true, he says, that some of the merriest and most genuine of women are old maids, and that those old maids, and wives who are unhappily married, have often most of the motherly touch. And this would seem to show, even for women, the same narrowing influence in comfortable married life. Yet on the other hand, he feels that marriage affects a woman differently. It makes greater demands upon her. The very comfort which is the husband's peril is largely the fruit of her thoughtfulness, her industry, and her unselfishness. With wifehood too comes motherhood. And motherhood, side by side with felicities that only mothers know, inflicts a ceaseless discipline of suffering and self-denial. For women, Stevenson admits, there is less danger. Because of so much use to a woman, opens out so much more in life, and puts her in the way of so much freedom and usefulness that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss the benefit. And he sums up by advising you, if you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife. Since however, if all women became good wives, all men could not remain good bachelors, it is obvious that Stevenson is crying for the moon. But he is set enough to dispel the gloomy and downcast looks that disfigured the countenances of all my single volumes immediately after the wedding. Single volumes are certainly not odd volumes. They are complete in themselves, and we are all very glad of them. But there are odd volumes. Charles Wagner says that in certain shelters for old people, where husbands and wives may pass a tranquil old age together, a very expressive term is used to designate one who is left alone. The bereft solitary is called an odd volume. How appropriate. Like a book, a stray from its companion tome. Odd volumes indeed, those who have hitherto been one of two inseparables. They celebrated their silver and golden weddings, and suddenly find themselves desolate. They seem like guests left behind at the end of the feast or the play. The lights are out, the curtain is down. They wander about in the emptiness like souls in torment, possessed with the idea of continually searching for something they have lost. They hardly refrain from asking, have you seen my husband? Where shall I find my wife? Odd volumes, these. And you may find them in palaces, as well as in almshouses. Did we not all hear the cry that reigned through the halls of Windsor on the day on which the Prince Consort passed away? I have now no one to call me Victoria. And there are others. They knew no golden wedding, no silver wedding, no wedding at all, and yet felt themselves mated. Some, like Evangeline and Gabriel, and like my two fosters, are separated by distance and ignorance of each other's whereabouts. Some, like Drumshoog and Margit Howe, are separated by the iron hand of circumstance. Some are kept apart by cruel misunderstandings and mistaken judgments. And some, women there are on earth, most sweet and high, who lose their own and walk bereft and lonely, loving that one lost heart until they die, loving it only. And so they never see beside them grow children whose coming is like breath of flowers, consoled by subtler loves than angels know, through childless hours. Faithful in life and faithful unto death, such souls in sooth, a loom with luster splendid, that glimpsed, glad land wherein, the vision saith, earth's wrongs are ended. The purest spirit that ever walked this earth of ours was, I say it reverently, an odd volume. I do not mean that he was a single volume. I mean far more than that. He felt that he was not single. He was not complete in himself. In some wonderful and mystical way, deity and humanity were odd volumes, volumes that were intended to supplement and complement each other, volumes that had become alienated and torn asunder. The amazing thing about the scriptures is that in both testaments they employ the very phraseology of mating and marriage. The quest that led to the cross is the quest of the lover for his betrothed, and the consummation of all things is to be a marriage supper, the marriage supper of the lamb. And it may be that, in the larger, the lesser is included. It may be that when deity and humanity, so long as changed, are at length perfectly united. Other odd volumes will find their mates, and the isolations of this life be swallowed up in the glad reunions of the life everlasting. End of Part 2 Chapter 1 Part 2 Chapter 2 of Rubble and Rose Leaves and Things of That Kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Maddie Mast of Virginia, USA. Rubble and Rose Leaves by Frank W. Borham. Or Craig and Torrent. Lexie Drummond had a place of her own in the hearts of the Masjil people. To begin with, she was lonely, and lonely folk have a remarkable way of exacting secret homage. Lexie worked at a loom in the woollen factory and lived by herself in one of the factory cottages nearby. I wish you could have seen it, the door invariably stood open even when Lexie was away at her work. Everything was faultlessly natty and clean. An enormous tabby cat, Metie, purred on the mat while a golden canary sang bravely from his cage in the creeper just outside the door. Lexie had a trim little garden in which she grew lavender and mignette, roses and carnations. Lexie's white carnations always took the prize at our local flower show. Lexie mothered Masjil. If anybody was in trouble, she would be sure to drop in and in cases of serious sickness, she would often stay the night. Some people would deny that Lexie was beautiful, yet she had a loveliness peculiar to herself. She was tall, finely built and wonderfully strong. When Roger Gunton, the heaviest man on the plane, was seized with sudden illness and his body was wracked with excruciating pain, Lexie alone could turn him from side to side and he would allow nobody else to touch him. If her face lacked the vivacity and sparkle of more voluptuous beauties, it possessed, nevertheless, a quiet gravity, a serious winsomeness that rendered it extremely attractive. The furrows in her face and the strands of gray in her hair made her look older than she really was. Everybody knew Lexie's age, her name was a perpetual reminder of the number of her years. For in an unguarded moment she had once revealed the circumstance that she was born on the day on which the princes of Wales, afterwards Queen Alexandra, was married and she was named after the royal bride. Masjil never forgot personal details of that kind. In addition to all this, Masjil vaguely suspected that Lexie carried a secret in her breast. She came to Masjil only a few years before I did and everybody felt that her previous history was involved in tantalizing mystery. It was Friday night. In the dining room at the Masjil Mons we were enjoying a quiet evening by the fire. I was lounging in an armchair with a novel. I could afford to be restful for, that week, I had but one sermon to prepare. When the approaching Sunday the anniversary of the Sunday school was to be celebrated. In the morning John Broadbanks and I were exchanging pulpits in honour of the occasion and availing myself of a minister's immemorial prerogative, I had decided to preach an old sermon at Silverstream. All at once we were startled by the ringing of the front doorbell. It was the Sunday school superintendent. We are in an awful hole, he exclaimed, after having discussed the weather, the health of our respective families and a few other inevitable preliminaries. Lexi Drummond has been taken ill and the doctor won't hear of her leaving the house for a week or two. She has been preparing the children for their part songs and has the whole program at her fingers ends. I don't know how on earth we are going to manage without her. I promised to run down and see Lexi about it first thing in the morning and did so. Lexi was confined to her bed and old Janet Davidson was nursing her. Lexi was curled up close to his minister's feet while the canary was singing bleathly from his cage near the open window. I saw at a glance that Lexi had been crying and I attributed her grief to anxiety and disappointment in connection with the anniversary. She quickly un-deceived me. You'll never notice that I'm not there, she said with a watery smile. The children know their parts thoroughly and Bella Christie, who has been helping me, is as familiar with the program as I am. I assured her that we should miss her sadly but expressed my relief that everything had been so well arranged. And now, Lexi, I said as I took her hand in parting, you must worry no more about it. We will do our very best to make it pass off well. Oh, she replied quickly, recognizing in my words a reference to her tell-tale eyes, it wasn't the anniversary that I was worrying about. Indeed, it was silly of me to cry at all. And to show how extremely silly it was, she broke with womanish perseverity into a fresh outburst of tears. She has something she wants to tell you, Janet interposed, but she doesn't like to. Lexi pretended to look vexed at the old lady's garrulathy, but I fancy that I detected behind the frown a look of real relief. Some other time, she said, goodbye, I shall think of you all tomorrow. Janet opened the door and I left. The anniversary passed off happily. Lexi was soon herself again, and a fortnight later I saw her in her old place at church. We knew that she would insist on taking her class in the afternoon, so to save her the long walk home, we took her to the Mons to dinner. Several of the teachers have been telling me of the address that you gave on the evening of the Sunday school anniversary she said on our way to the Mons. I wish you would let me see the manuscript. I can do better than that, I replied. The address was printed in yesterday's Tyari Advocate. I have several copies to spare if you care to have one. On arrival at the Mons, she insisted on going round the garden and admiring the flowers before composing herself on the sofa in the dining room. I gave her the paper I had promised her and hurried away to prepare for dinner. When I returned a few minutes later, the paper was lying on the floor beside her and she was crying as if her heart would break. By a supreme effort, she regained her self-possession, promised to explain in the afternoon, and, in obedience to the summons, took her place at the table. During dinner, I mentally reviewed the address which has so strangely reopened the fountains of her grief. It was the address which, under the title The Little Palace Beautiful, appears in The Golden Milestone. It begins, there are only four children in the wide, wide world, and each of us is the parent of at least one of them. The first of the four is the little child that never was. He is, the address says, an equicently beautiful child. He is the child of all lonely men and lonely women, the child of their dreams and their fancies, the child that will never be born. He is the son of the solitary. And the address goes on to quote from Ada Cambridge's Virgin Martyrs. Every wild she-bird has nest and mate in the warm April weather, but a captive woman made for love, no mate, no nest, has she. In the spring of young desire, young men and maids are wed together, and the happy mothers flaunt their bliss for all the world to see. Nature's sacramental feast for them, an empty board for me. Time that heals so many sorrows keeps mine ever freshly aching, though my face is growing furrowed and my brown hair turning white. Still I mourn my irremediable loss, asleep or waking. Still I hear my son's voice calling, mother, in the dead of night, and am haunted by my girl's eyes that will never see the light. As the address came back to me, I began to understand. I remembered what the gossips said about the mystery in Lexi's life. What was it, I wondered, that she meant to tell me after dinner. You don't know me, she cried passionately when once more we found ourselves alone. You treat me as if I were a good woman. You let me work at the church and you bring me into your home, but you don't know me, really, really you don't. I have committed a great sin, a very great sin, and am suffering for it, and others are suffering for it. She paused as if wondering how to begin her story, and then started afresh. I was brought up in the country, she said, not far from Hukatui. My parents both died when I was a little girl. My guardians followed them a few years ago so that now I am quite alone. At school I became very fond of Davy Bannerman, and he made no secret of his partiality for me. He used to bring me something, an apple or a cake or a picture or some sweets, every day. When I was nineteen we became engaged and we were both very happy about it. Everybody in the Hukatui district loved Davy. He was handsome and good-natured. I used to think his laugh the grandest music I had ever heard, but I was proud, terribly proud. And being proud I was selfish, and being selfish I was jealous. Davy was good to everybody, yet I could not bear to see him paying attention to anybody but myself. He was a member of the Hukatui church, and used to spend a good deal of time there. I had no interest in such things in those days, and I was angry with him for neglecting me. But most of all I was jealous of Sadie McKay. Sadie was his cousin. She was one of the church girls, and I hated to think that when he was not with me that he was with her. Davy always took my scoldings merrily and quickly cooked me into a better mind, and I dare say that all would have gone well but for the accident that spoiled everything. Sadie was riding in from the farm one morning when, on the outskirts of Hukatui, she met a traction engine. Her horse bolted and was soon out of control. As luck would have it, Davy was standing at his shop door near the township corner and saw the horse galloping madly towards him. He rushed into the road and managed to check the animal before Sadie was thrown, but in doing so he was hurled to the ground, and the horse tried on his right arm crushing it. He lay in the hospital for nearly two months, but I never went near him. When he left the hospital he wrote to me, it was a pitiful scroll written with his left hand, his right was amputated. I have had a heavy loss, he said, and I do not know how I can manage without my arm, but now I must suffer a still heavier loss, and I do not know how I can live without you. But it would not be right for me to burden you and you must find somebody else like she who can care for you better than I can. I returned the engagement ring and that was the end of it. If he had lost his arm in any other way I could have endured life-long poverty with him, but to have lost his arm for Sadie. She paused and seemed to be looking out of the window, but I knew that her story was not finished. A few months later I took a situation in Ashburton. There I met Eddie Pardi, a young Englishman, Horace Latchford, who took a fancy to me. He was visiting New Zealand for the sake of his health. He told me that he owned a large estate in Devonshire and would make me a perfect queen. During his stay, a period of about four months, life was one long frolic. Six months later he sent for me to go to him, and I went. But my eyes were soon opened. There was no estate in Devonshire. Horace was often intoxicated when he came to see me, and instead of getting married, I returned to New Zealand in disgust. I came to MozzChill partly because I knew that I could get work in the factory and partly because I knew that nobody here would know me. Since I returned from England ten years ago, I have only met one person who knew me in the old days at Hukatui. I was spending a holiday at Mooraki and she was staying at the same boarding-house. I did not tell her that I had settled in MozzChill, but she told me that none of the bannermans were now living in Hukatui. Devi, she said, was the first to leave. He went to one of the cities to learn a profession that did not imperatively demand the use of two hands. She paused again and I waited. When I came to MozzChill, she went on, I got in the way of coming to church. I became deeply impressed and you received me into membership. And every day since, as I have done little things and taken little duties in connection with the work, I have come to understand Devi as I never understood him in the old days. I hated his fondness for the church, and every day now my sin seems to be more and more terrible. Just lately it has been with me night and day, and when I read your address my punishment seemed greater than I could bear. I have prayed thousands of times that the dreadful tangle might be unraveled. I have not prayed selfishly. I could be perfectly contented if only I knew that Devi is happy, and that his faith in God and womanhood has not been shaken by my wickedness. We sang Lead Kindly Light in church this morning. Do you think that God really guides us? Has he put us right even when we have done wrong? Will he straighten things out? I would give anything to be quite sure. I seem to be in a maze and can find no way out of it. It seemed an infinite relief to Lexi to have told me her story. She was much more often at the Mons after that, a new bond seemed to have sprung up between us. I fancied that there came into Lexi's face a deeper peace and a greater content. The peace was, however, rudely broken. About two years after Lexi had unburdened her soul to me, I opened the paper one morning and confronted a startling announcement. The personal paragraphs contain the statement that Mr. David Bannerman, the brilliant Auckland solicitor, has been a pointed lecturer in common law at the Arego University. There followed a brief outline of the new professor's career which left no shadow of doubt as to his identity. I particularly noticed that there was no reference to his marriage. What, if anything, was to be done? The Arego University was in Dunedin, only 10 miles from Masjil. Ought I to allow these two people to drift on, perhaps for years, eating their hearts out within a few miles of each other? Was it not due to David that he should know that Lexi was at Masjil? He might desire to seek her, or he might desire to avoid her. In either case, the information would be of value. I stated the position in this way to Lexi, but she would not hear of my taking any action. After a while, however, she agreed to my writing telling the professor-elect that I knew of her whereabouts. I added that she was universally loved and honoured for her fine work in the church and in the district. I enclosed a copy of The Little Palace Beautiful and mentioned the fact that I had once caught her weeping bitterly as she read it. It took four days for a mail from Masjil to reach Auckland. After a long talk with Lexi, I posted my letter on a Sunday evening. On Friday afternoon, I received a reply-paid telegram. Why are ladies addressed immediately? The new professor was married three months after entering upon the duties of his chair at the university, and when I last saw her, Lexi was enthroned in the centre of a charming little circle. I received a letter from her yesterday, the letter that suggested this record. She tells me with pardonable pride that her eldest boy has matriculated and also joined the church. I am getting to be an old woman now, she says, and I spend a lot of time in looking backward. Isn't it wonderful? It all came right after all. But for the accident, David would never have been a professor, and if we had been married in the old days, I should only have been a drag and a hindrance. As it is, we have passed her or more and Fen, or Craig and Torrent, but the kindly light that I once doubted has led us all the way. Let's pretend, cried Jean. They were enjoying a rump after tea, but the game had been suddenly interrupted. How can we drown him when there is no water? asked Ernest, looking wonderfully wise. Oh, let's pretend the lawn's the water, replied Jean, brushing aside with impatience, so trifling a difficulty. Let's pretend. I used to wonder why Bonnie Prince Charlie was called the pretender, as though he enjoyed some monopoly in that regard. We are all pretenders. Some perhaps are more skewful than others. Jean was especially clever. One day, a lady called and gave her a beautiful bunch of flowers. Ernest was particularly fond of flowers and thought that he could capture them by guile. I say, Jean, he cried. Let's have a game. We'll tend that flowers are mine. All right, Jean replied, with a slight twinkle. I knew ten, you've got him. Precisely. There is no end to the possibilities of pretending. It is the one game of which we never grow tired. We're learned to play it as soon as we're out of the cradle, and it still fascinates us as we totter on the brink of the grave. Indeed, as H.C. Banner shows, childhood and age often play the game together. Look at this. It was an old, old, old, old lady and a boy who was half past three, and the way that they played together was beautiful to see. She couldn't go running and jumping, and the boy no more could he, for he was a pale little fellow with a thin, little twisted knee. They sat in the yellow sunlight, out under the maple tree, and the game that they played, I'll tell you, just as it was told to me. It was hide-and-seek they were playing, though you would never have known it to be, with an old, old, old, old lady and the boy with a twisted knee. The boy would bend down his face, close his eyes, and guess where she was hiding. He was allowed three guesses. She was in the china closet. Wrong. Well, she was in the chest in Papa's bedroom, the chest with the queer old key. Wrong again, but warmer. Well then, she was in the clothes press. It was his third guess, and it was right. In the clothes press she was. It was his turn to hide, and Granny's turn to guess. Then she covered her face with her fingers, which were wrinkled and white and wee, and she guessed where the boy was hiding, with a one and a two and a three. And they never had steer from their places right under the maple tree. This old, old, old, old lady and the boy with a lame little knee. This dear, dear, dear, old lady and the boy who was half past three. It is the oldest game in the world. It was played just as it is played today before any other game was dreamed of. And the children of tomorrow will be playing it when the games of today are all forgotten. It is the most universal game in the world. It is played in Beijing just as it is played in London. It is played in Misore, just as it is played in New York. It is played in Timbuktu, just as we play it here in Melbourne. The rules of the game never alter with the period or change with the place. It is equally popular in all grades of society. The royal children play it in the palace grounds and the street urchins play it in the alleys and the slums. For the beauty of it is that it needs no paraphernalia or tackle or gear. You have not to buy a bat or a ball, a racket or a net. You do not require special grounds or courts or links. The old, old, old, old lady and the boy with the twisted knee take it into their heads to have a game. And then and there without moving an inch or getting a thing, they set to work and play it. Jean cries, let's pretend. And straight away, everybody is pretending. Let's pretend, cried Jean. There was nothing original in the suggestion. If the words are not actually a quotation from Shakespeare, it is perfectly certain that Shakespeare uttered them. They voiced the very spirit of the drama. The play and the pantomime are all a matter of pretending. It happened last evening that I had an appointment in the city. I had promised to meet a friend on the town hall steps at half past seven. I was early. It was a delicious summer's evening and I enjoyed watching the crowd. The crowd is always worth watching but at that hour the crowd is at its best. The strain of the day is over and the weariness of night has not yet come. The crowd is fresh, vivacious, lighthearted. As I stood upon the steps, I saw young men and maidens keeping their trists with each other. They were making no effort to conceal their joy in each other's society. As they tripped off together, they were laughingly anticipating the entertainment to which they were hastening. Gentleman in evening dress, accompanied by handsome women, beautifully gowned, swept by insomptuous cars that were brightly lit and dainty adorned with choices flowers. Here and there in this unbroken tide of traffic, I caught a glimpse of features more quaint and of garments more fantastic. I saw a troubadour, a Viking, a knight errant, a pierrot, and a Spanish cavalier. I saw a gypsy queen, a geisha girl, a milkmaid and Egyptian princess and the lady of the court of Louis XIV. They were on their way to a fancy dress ball at Government House. I stood entranced as this pageant of pleasure swept past me and a strange thought seized my fancy. I reminded myself that in any one of 10,000 cities I might witness at the same hour an identically similar spectacle. If I could have taken my stand in the Strand in London or in Princess Street, Edinburgh or in Sackville Street, Dublin or in Broadway, New York or in the main thoroughfare of any city in Christendom, I should have gazed upon a scene which would have seemed like a mere reflection of this one. And then I asked myself for an interpretation of it all. What did it all mean? This throng of happy pedestrians laughing and chatting as they search along the pavements. This ceaseless procession of gay vehicles in the brilliantly illuminated roadway. Part two. It is a tribute to our human passion for pretending. His excellency stands in the reception hall at Government House and laughingly welcomes his guests. They are pretenders, everyone. The troubadour is no troubadour. The Viking, no Viking. The gypsy, no gypsy. And the milkmaid, no milkmaid. They are just pretending and they have gone to all this trouble and to all this expense that the full orb joy of pretending may be for one crowded hour their own. And the other people, the gentleman in evening dress, the ladies richly begunned and be jeweled. The surging crowd upon the path. They are making their way to the theatres. They are going to see the great actors and actresses pretend. One actor will pretend to be a cripple and another will pretend to be a king. One actress will pretend to be an empress and one will pretend to be a slave. And the better the actors and the actresses pretend, the better these people will like it. For the people love pretending. That is how the theatre came to be. Like Topsy, it had no father and no mother. It sprang from our insatiable fondness for make-believe. In his short history of the English people, John Richard Green says that it was the people itself that created the stage and he graphically describes their initial ventures. The theatre, he says, was the courtyard of an inn or a mere booth such as is still seen at a country fair. The bulk of the audience sat beneath the open sky. A few cover seats accommodated the wealthier spectators while patrons and nobles sprawled upon the actual boards. In those days, the audience had to do its part of the pretending. If the spectators saw a few flowers, they accepted the hint and imagined that the play was being enacted in a beautiful garden. In a battle scene, the arrival of an army was represented by a stampede across the stage of a dozen clumsy scene-shifters brandishing swords and bucklers. In order to assist the audience to master appropriate emotions, the stage was draped with black when a tragedy was about to be presented and with blue when the performance was to portray life in some lighter vein. What is this but a group of children playing at charades at dressing up, at just pretending? Children pretend in order that they may escape from the limitations of reality into the infinities of romance. Once they begin to pretend, all life is open to them. They have uttered the magic sesame and every gate and bars. Their seniors invade the same realm for the same reason. This is the significance of those crowded streets last night. Part three. Now, this brings me to a very interesting point. Is it wrong to pretend? In the greatest sermon ever preached, the sermon on the mount, Jesus calls certain people hypocrites. But did he by doing so condemn all forms of hypocrisy? If so, the people upon whom I looked last night were all of them earning for themselves his malediction. And so were the people gathered in the quaint old English courtyard. And so was Jean when she called to her playmates, let's pretend. And so was the old, old, old, old lady and the boy with the twisted knee. For a hypocrite, as the very word suggests, is simply a pretender. A hypocrite is one who colors his face or dresses up or acts apart. Does it follow therefore because Jesus condemned the Pharisees and called them hypocrites that all pretenders fall beneath his frown? To ask the question is to answer it. Fancy Jesus frowning at Dean. Fancy Jesus frowning at the old, old, old, old lady and the boy with the twisted knee. Why Jesus himself pretended on occasions, he behaved towards the syrophilician woman as though he had no sympathy with her in her distress. He saw the disciples in trouble on the lake and walking on the water, he made as though he would have passed them by. When after joining with two of his disciples to Emmaus, he reached the door of their home, he made as though he would have gone farther. He made as though, he made as though, he made as though, the faints of deity. Let a man but keep his eyes wide open and he will seem some very lovable hypocrites, some very amiable pretenders in the course of a day's march. I have been reading The Butterfly Man and here in the early part of the book is a scene in which a child and a criminal take part. Mary Virginia shows John Flint a pasteboard box. It contains a dark colored and rather ugly gray moth with his wings turned down. You wouldn't think him pretty would you? Asked the child. No, replied John Flint disappointedly. I shouldn't. Mary Virginia smiled and picking up the little moth held his body very gently between her fingertips. He fluttered, spreading out his gray wings and then John saw the beautiful pansy like underwings and the glorious lower pair of scarlet velvet barred and bordered with black. I got to thinking, said the girl, thoughtfully lifting her clear and candid eyes to John Flint's. I got to thinking when he threw aside his plain gray cloak and showed me his lovely underwings that he's like some people. You couldn't be expected to know what was underneath, could you? So you passed them by thinking how ordinary and interesting and ugly they are and you feel rather sorry for them because you don't know. But if you once get close enough to touch them why then you find out? You only think of the dust colored outside and all the while the underwings are right there waiting for you to find them. Isn't it wonderful and beautiful? And the best of it all is it's true. In this artless sentences tripping so easily from a child's tongue Mary Omler sums up the burden of her book. The incident is a parable. For John Flint was himself the drug and ugly moth. In the opening chapters of the story he's a horrible object, coarse, brutal, loathsome, revolting. But there were underwings and gradually beneath the touch of gentle influences those underwings became visible and in the later stages of the story all men admired and revered and loved the beautiful nobleness of the butterfly man. Part four. There are people I suppose who trick themselves out to make themselves appear much prettier or much nicer or worse still much holier than they really are. Let's pretend they cry and there is something sinister in their pretending. It is against these people and against them only that the anathemas of the Sermon on the Mount are directed. Again, there are people who like E. M. McLaren's drum-tucked default go through life dreading less their underwings should be seen, their virtues exposed, their goodness discovered. They bear themselves distantly and give an impression of aloofness. You would never dream unless you got to know them that their dispositions were so sweet, their characters so strong, their souls so saintly. I am told that a great actor achieves his triumphs through contemplating so closely the character that he impersonates. His own individuality becomes for the time being absorbed in another. Henry Irving forgets that he's Henry Irving and believes himself to be Macbeth. I have read of one who, seeming to possess no form nor comeliness nor any beauty that men should desire him was nevertheless the chiefest among 10,000 and the altogether lovely. It may be that these amiable pretenders of whom we are also fond had contemplated so closely his character that they have unconsciously caught his spirit and acquired his ways. They cleverly concealed the rainbow-tinted underwings beneath a coat of drab, but having once caught a glimpse of their glory, we ever after feel it shining through the gray. End of part two, chapter three, recording by Marcela Goyado. Part two, chapter four, of Rubble and Rose Leaves and Things of that Kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Lawrence Trask, Mount Vernon, Ohio, interfaceaudio.com. Rubble and Rose Leaves by Frank W. Borham. Chapter four. Gilt-edged Securities are all very well, but men do not make their fortunes out of guilt-edged securities. Gilt-edged securities may suit those whose circumstances compel them to husband jealously their meager savings, but the big dividends are made out of the risky speculations. There are investments in which a man cannot, by any possibility, lose his treasure, and in which he must, with mathematical certainty, reap a modest margin of profit. And on the other hand, there are investments in which a man may quite easily lose every penny that he hazards, but in which he may quite conceivably make a perfectly golden haul. An Eastern sage with a well-established reputation for wisdom urges us to venture fearlessly at times upon those more perilous but more profitable ventures. Cast thy bread, he says, upon the waters. The man who believes in guilt-edged securities will prefer to cast it upon the land. The land is a fixture. The land does not float away or fly away or fade away. You find it where you left it. It is stable, substantial, secure. Because of its fixity, men trust it. For thousands of years it was the bank of the nations. Men hid their treasures in fields, as many a lucky finder afterwards discovered to his delight. But the waters cast thy bread upon the waters. The waters are the very emblem of all that is fickle, variable, and inconstant. They ebb and they flow. They rise and they fall. They are restless, unstable, fluctuating. They suck down into their dark depths the treasures confided to their care and leave no trace upon the surface of the hiding place in which the booty lies concealed. The waters cast thy bread upon the waters. The man who believes only in guilt-edged securities shakes his head. This is no investment for him. But the man who can afford to take desperate hazards pricks up his ears. The waters, he exclaims. He tells me to cast my bread upon the waters. It is the last place in the world to which I should have thought of casting it, but I shall venture. And he becomes immensely rich in consequence. Ahmed Ali is a young Egyptian farmer. His lands are in the Nile Valley, and in flood time, two-thirds of his property is underwater. But flood time is also sowing time. And what is he to do? He can, of course, sow that portion of his land that stands above the waterline, and he does. This is his guilt-edged security. He is practically certain of getting back in the late summer the grain that he sows in the spring, with a fair proportion of increase in addition. But on that narrow margin of profit, Ahmed Ali cannot support wife and children and pay all the expenses of his farm. He turns wistfully towards the river. He surveys the section of his farm over which the waters are sluggishly drifting. Sometimes they recede, leaving a broad strip of shining, gurgling mud. He is tempted to scatter his seed over that belt of ooze at once. He waits a few hours, however, hoping that the retreat of the waters will continue, and that, in a few days, he will be able to carry his seed basket over the whole area that is now submerged. But his hopes are soon shattered. The swaying waters come welling in again and even lick the edges of the land he has already sown. If only he could get at those inundated fields. The land is soft and moist. It has been enriched and fertilized by the action of the floodwaters. Saturated by the moisture in the soil and warmed by the rays of the tropical sun, the seed would germinate and spring up as if by magic, and the harvest would beggar that of the land that the river has never touched. But these are castles in the air. The flood is there. It shows no sign of withdrawing. He knows that, after it has gone, it will be a day or two before he can cross the soft, sticky, slimy soil with his basket. And by that time the season may have passed. It will be too late to sow. It is to Ahmed Ali that our eastern sage is speaking. Why wait for the flood, he asks. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Much good grain, grain that thou canst ill afford to lose, will float away and never more be seen. Much of it will be greatly devoured by fish and waterfowl. But what of that? Much of it will drift about on the shallow waters and be deposited as they recede on the soft warm mud from which they ebb. With thy heavy feet and clumsy form and weighty basket, thou couldst not cross the soil till long after the waters leave it. Let the waters do their work for thee. Turn thy foe into a friend. Make of the tyrant a slave. Cast thy bread upon the waters. It is no guilt-edged security, but Ahmed Ali resolves to take the risk. Among the reeds round the bend of the river, his flat bottom boat is moored. He hurries up to the barn for his basket of seed. He gazes almost fondly upon the precious grain that he is about to invest in such a precarious speculation. He bears it down to the boat and pushes out on to the shallow waters. A tall ibis stalking with stately stride along the edge of the stream is startled by the commotion and flies away, flapping its wings with slow and measured beat. Ahmed is now well out upon the river. The flood that had defied him now supports him. He feels as the Philistines must have felt when they harnessed Samson to their mill. He paddles up to one end of his property and works his way down to the other, scattering the seed broadcast as he goes. Then, having disposed of every grain, he paddles back to his starting point and ties up his boat. He stands for a moment on the bank, watching the seed floating hither and thither upon the eddying waters. In some places it is still strone evenly upon the tide. In others it has drifted into snake-like formations that curl and straighten themselves out again on the surface of the flood. It seems an awful waste. But is it? In a day or two the waters recede, leaving the saturated seeds strone over the oozy soil. It sinks in of its own weight and is quickly lost to view. And then Ahmed sees the wisdom of the council he has followed, and in the summer, when he garners a rich harvest from the very lands over which his boat had drifted, he blesses that eastern sage for those wise words. In my old Mosgail days I was often invited to address evening meetings in Dunedin. The trouble lay in the return. A train left Dunedin at twenty past nine, and there was no other until twenty past ten, or on some nights, twenty past eleven. It was sometimes difficult to leave a meeting in time to catch the first of these trains, yet if I stayed for a later one, it meant a midnight arrival at the mats in a woeful sense of weariness next morning. On the particular night of which I am now thinking, I missed the early train. There was no other until twenty past eleven. I sat on the railway platform, feeling very sorry for myself. When at length the train started, I found myself sharing with one companion a long compartment, with doors at either extremity and seats along the sides, capable of accommodating fifty people. He sat at one end, and I at the other. I expected I looked to him as woe be gone and disconsole it as he looked to me. The train rumbled on through the night. The light was too dim to permit of reading, the jolting was too great to permit of sleeping, and I was just about to record a solemn vow, never to speak in town again, when a curious line of thought captivated me. I could not read, I could not sleep, but I could talk. And here in the far corner of the compartment was another belated unfortunate, who could neither read nor sleep, and who might like to beguile the time with conversation. And then it occurred to me not only that I could do it, but that I should do it. We had been thrown together for an hour, in this strange way at dead of night. We should probably never meet again until the day of judgment. What right had I to let him go, as though our tracks had never crossed at all? Was the great message that on Sundays I delivered to my Mosgile people, intended exclusively for them, and was it only to be delivered on Sundays? I felt that my Sunday congregation was a guilt-edged security. But here was a chance for a rash speculation. The train stopped at Burnside. I stepped out onto the station and walked up and down for a moment, inhaling the fresh mountain air. I wanted to have all my wits about me and to be at my best. The engine whistled, and on returning to the compartment, I was careful to re-enter it by the door near which my companion was sitting, and I took the seat immediately opposite to him. I then saw he was quite a young fellow, probably a farmer's son. We soon struck up a pleasant conversation, and then, having created an atmosphere, I expressed the hope that we were fellow travelers on life's greater journey. It's so strange that you should ask me that," he said. I'd been thinking a lot about such things lately. We became so engrossed in our conversation that the train had been standing a minute or so at Mosgile before we realized that we had reached the end of our journey. I found that our ways took us in diametrically opposite directions. He had a long walk ahead of him. Well, I said, and taking farewell of him, you may see your way to a decision as you walk along the road. If so, remember that you need no one to help you. Lift up your heart to the Saviour. He will understand. We parted with a warm hand-clasp. Long before I reached the manse, I was biting my lips at having omitted to take his name and address. However, like Ahmed Ali, I had cast my bread upon the waters. Five years passed. One morning I was seated in the train for Dunedin. The compartment was nearly full. Between Abbotsford and Burnside, the door at one end of the carriage opened, and a tall dark man came through, handing each passenger a neat little pamphlet. He gave me a copy of safety, certainty, and enjoyment. I looked up to thank him, and as our eyes met, he recognized me. Why, he exclaimed, you were the very man. I made room for him to sit beside me. I told him that his face seemed familiar, although I could not remember where we had met before. Why, he said, don't you remember that night in the train? You told me, if I saw my way to a decision, to lift up my heart to the Saviour on the road, and I did. I felt sorry ever since that I didn't ask who you were, so that I could come and tell you. But as the light came to me in a railway train, I have always tried to do as much good as possible, when I have had occasion to travel. I can't speak to people as you spoke to me, but I always bring a packet of booklets with me. I recalled the inward struggle that preceded my approach that night. I remember bracing myself on the Burnside Station for the ordeal. It seemed at the time a very rash and risky speculation. But here was my harvest. I have invested most of my time and energy in guilt-edged securities, and on the whole I have no reason to be dissatisfied with the return that they have yielded me. But I have seldom obtained from my guilt-edged security so handsome a profit, as that unpromising venture ultimately brought to me. The only way to keep a thing is to throw it away. The only way to hold your money is to invest it. The only way to ensure remembering a poem is to keep repeating it to others. If you hear a good story and attempt to keep it for your own delectation, you will forget it in a week. Laugh over it with every man you meet, and it will ripple in your soul for years. It sometimes happens when I have finished one of these screeds of mine that I feel a fatherly solicitude concerning it. You sometimes grow fond of a thing, not because you cherish an inflated conception of its value, but because through sheer familiarity it has become a part of you. So I look at these white sheets over which I have been bending for days, and into which I have poured all my soul. I feel anxious about them, yet it is absurd to keep them. If I store them away I shall soon forget their contents, and my labor will all be lost. But the printer is six hundred miles away. I think of all the hands through which they must pass on their way from me to him. I register them at the post office, but still I think of all the risks. These white sheets of mine are such frail and flimsy things, an accident, a fire, and where then would they be? But one happy morning I see my screed in print. I feel that I have it at last. It is beyond the reach of fire or accident. If this house is burned down I can obtain a copy in that one. I feel that nothing now can rob me of the child I have brought into being. It is scattered, broadcast, and having been scattered, broadcast, is at last my very, very own. The only way to keep a thing is to throw it away. Ahmed Ali knows that. He looks fondly at the grain and the basket, but he knows that he cannot keep it in the barn. Seeds which mildew and the garner, scattered, fill with gold the plain. And so he casts some of it on the land, his guilt-edged security, and gets it back with interest. And he casts the rest upon the water, his risky speculation, and gets it back, many times multiplied. And things of that kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. And it is a great phase. We all catch ourselves at odd moments, living over again some of the unforgettable Saturdays of long ago. In actual fact, a man may be lounging in an armchair beside his winter fire, or sprawling on the lawn on a drowsy summer afternoon. But under such conditions, the actual fact is soon relegated to oblivion. A faraway look comes into his eyes. A wayward smile flits over his face, and, giving rain to his fancy, he sees landscapes on which his gaze has not rested for many a long year. He roams at will among the golden Saturdays of old Lang Syne. He feels a fresh, the mighty thrill that swept his soul win, after a long heroic struggle, his side one that famous match upon a certain village green. He lives again through the fierce excitement of a paper chase that led the hare and hounds over the great green hills, and down through the dark pine forest in the valley. He enjoys once more the bird's nesting expedition in the winding lane, and he sees as vividly as he saw them at the time the shining trophies that rewarded his fishing excursions to the milpons and trout streams of the outlying countryside. In those far-off days, Saturday was the wild romance of the week. I remember being told by my first schoolmaster that Saturday was named after Saturn, and that Saturn was the planet that had rings all rounded. From that hour, by a singular confusion of ideas, I always thought of Saturday as the day that had the rings rounded. I somehow associated the day with the lady of the nursery rhyme, who has rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and who, therefore, has music wherever she goes. I like to think that Saturday moved among the other days of the week in such melodious pomp and splendor. The notion intensified the zest with which I welcomed the great day. For Saturday was great. It was great in its coming, and great in its going. It began gloriously, and it ended gloriously. I do not mean that it ended as it began, by no means. There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon. The glory of Saturday's dawn was one glory. The glory of Saturday's dusk was another glory. Saturday began like a red Indian shouting his war-hoop, as he takes to the trail. It ended like a monk who, in the stillness of his cloister, chants his evening hymn. It takes a boy a minute or two, on waking, to assure himself that it is really Saturday. He is not quite sure of himself. The notion seems too good to be true. He sits bolt upright, rubs his eyes, and stares about him for some confirmation of the joyous suspicion that is bringing the blood to his cheeks in excitement. Is it really Saturday? He distrusts, and not without cause, the confused sensations of those waking moments. He made a mistake once before. He fancied that it was Saturday, made all his plans accordingly, and discovered, to his disgust, a few minutes later, that it was only Friday after all. That Friday, at any rate, was a most unlucky day. But Saturday, with what tingling exhilaration and boisterous delight, the conviction that it was Saturday fastened upon us, Saturday was our day. We raced out after breakfast like so many colts turned loose upon the heath. We tossed up our caps for the sheer joy of it. Whatever the ordeals of the week had been, we forgave all our tyrants and tormentors on Saturday morning. And in that gracious and benignant absolution, we experienced a foretaste of the saintliness with which the great day wore to its close. For Saturday, however spent, reached its climax in a consciousness of virtue so complete, and so serene, and so beatific, as to be almost unearthly. Such a delicious content seldom falls within the experience of mortals. Saturday night was bath night, and few sensations in life are more delectable than the angelic self-satisfaction that overtakes the average boy, after having been subjected to the magic discipline of hot water and clean sheets. The outward change is wonderful, but the inward transformation exceeds it by far. He feels good, looks good, smells good, is good. A boy after a bath is at peace with all the world. The week may have gone hardly with him. Parents and teachers may have shown a vexatious incapacity to see things from a boy's standpoint. The proprietors of orchards and gardens may have exhibited, perhaps even on Saturday afternoon, a singular inflexibility in their interpretation of the laws relating to property. The world as a whole may have behaved in a manner woefully inconsiderate and unjust. But on Saturday night, under the softening influence of a hot bath and a clean bed, a boy finds it in his heart to forgive everything and everybody. A vast charity wells up in his soul. As he lays his damp head on his snowy pillow, he revokes all his harsh judgments and cancels all his stern resolves. He will not run away from home after all. Instead of abandoning his unfeeling seniors to their hatred, malice, and uncharitableness, he will treat them with magnanimity and tolerance. He will give them another chance. It is possible, appearances to the contrary not withstanding, that they do not mean to be unsympathetic. They simply do not understand. Thinking thus, the young saint falls asleep in the odor of sanctity and soap. The more wayward and troublesome he has been in the daytime, the more angelic will he appear under these new conditions. Watching him as he slumbers, one of the Saturnian rings seems to encompass his brow like a halo. Saturday has come to an end. Now this saintly young savage of ours will learn, as the years go by, that life itself has its Saturday face. Dr. Chalmers used to say that our allotted span of three score years and ten divides itself into seven decades, corresponding with the seven days of the week. The seventh, the stretch of life that opens out before a man on his sixtieth birthday, is, the doctor used to say, a sabatic period. In it, he should shake himself free, as far as possible, from the toil and moll of life, and give himself to the cultivation of a quiet and restful spirit. That being so, it follows that the sixth period, the period that opens out before a man on his fiftieth birthday, is the Saturday of life. It is a great time, every way. Like the Saturday of the old days, and like the Saturday of ripe years, it has characteristics peculiarly its own. On his fiftieth birthday, if Mr. J. W. Robertson Scott is to be believed, a man enters the gates of a new world. It is not of necessity a better world or a worse one, it is simply a different one. We seldom enter upon a new experience, without finding that the change has involved us in a few drawbacks and deprivations, as well as in some distinct benefits and advantages. The step that a man takes on his fiftieth birthday is no exception to this rule. Mr. Robertson Scott caught sight of the gates of the new era, sometime before he actually reached them. In the tram, one evening, about six months ago, a schoolboy rose and offered me his seat, he tells us. The incident startled him. A man who is still in the forties does not expect to receive such courtesies. He consoled himself, however, with the assumption that the attentive schoolboy was probably a boy scout who had suddenly realized that the day was closing in without his having done the good deed prescribed for each twenty-four hours of the life of the perfect Baden poalite. Four months later, however, the same thing happened again, and then, shortly after, came the fiftieth birthday. Clearly it was Saturday morning. Now, the striking thing about Mr. Robertson Scott's experience is the fact that his attainment of his jubilee appealed to him, not as an end, but as a beginning. It was not so much a premonition of senility and decay as the entrance upon a fresh phase of life. When Horace Walpole wrote to Thomas Gray in 1766, urging him to write more poetry, Gray replied that when a man has turned fifty, as he had just done, there is nothing for it but to think of finishing. He voiced the feeling of the period. In the eighteenth century, a man of fifty was classified among the veterans. A hundred years later, a very different conviction held the field. Tolstoy tells us that his fiftieth year was the year of his greatest awakening and enlightenment. And, in The Poet at the Breakfast Table, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the old master witness to something of a similar kind. His friends are anxious to know how and when he acquired his wealth of wisdom, and he is able to reply with remarkable precision. It was on the morning of my fiftieth birthday that the solution of life's great problem came to me. It took me just fifty years to find my place in the eternal order of things. Such testimonies go a long way towards vindicating Mr. Robertson Scott's assumption that the fiftieth birthday marks rather a new beginning than a sad regretful close. The fiftieth birthday is Saturday morning, and who, on Saturday morning, feels that the week is over. On the contrary, Saturday morning is, to most people, more insistent than any other morning in its demands upon their energies. Walk up the street on a Saturday afternoon, and you will see your neighbors garbed and employed as they are never garbed or employed on any other day. On Saturday we weed the garden, mow the lawn, and effect the week's repairs. On Saturday we attend to a multitude of minor matters, for which we have had no time during the week. On Saturday we clear up, and on Saturday night we are tired. It by no means follows, therefore, that, because a man's fiftieth birthday is his Saturday morning, his week's work is done. It is indisputable, of course, that a man of fifty has left the greater part of life behind him. He may be pardoned if he pauses at times, to take long and wistful glances along the road that he has trodden. It will not be considered strange if, on very slight provocation, he drops into a rapture of reminiscence. There is a subtle stage in the development of fruit, at which, having attained its full size, it ripens rapidly. A man enters upon that stage on his fiftieth birthday. A shrewd observer has said that, like peaches and pears, we grow sweet for a while before we begin to decay. The Saturday of life is sweetening time. We become less harsh in our criticisms, less overbearing in our opinions, more considerate towards our contemporaries, and more sympathetic towards our juniors. The week's work is by no means finished. Much remains to be done. But it will be done in a new spirit, a Saturday spirit. And if the man of fifty be spared to enjoy octogenarian honors, he will smile as he recalls the immaturity and unripeness of life's first five decades. It is a poor week that has no Saturday and no Sunday in it. To have finished at fifty, an old man will tell you, would have meant missing the best. It has often struck me as an impressive coincidence, that it was when Dr. Johnson was approaching his fiftieth birthday, life's Saturday morning, that he discovered a significance in Saturday that, until then, had eluded him. He felt, as we all feel on Saturdays, that the time had come to clear up, to put things in their places, and to overtake neglected tasks. And this is the entry he makes in his journal. Having lived, not without an habitual reverence for the Sabbath, yet without that attention to its religious duties which Christianity requires, I resolve henceforth, first, to rise early on Sabbath morning, and, in order to that, to go to sleep early on Saturday night. Second, to use some more than ordinary devotion as soon as I rise. Third, to examine into the tenor of my life, and particularly the last week, and to mark my advances in religion or my recessions from it. Fourth, to read the scriptures methodically, with such helps as are at hand. Fifth, to go to church twice. Sixth, to read books of divinity, either speculative or practical. Seventh, to instruct my family. Eighth, to wear off by meditation any worldly soil contracted in the week. The significance of this heroic record lies in the resolve that Saturday, so far from unfitting him for Sunday, shall lead up to it, as a stately avenue leads up to a noble entrance hall. I resolve to go to sleep early on Saturday night. Exactly a hundred years after the great doctor had inscribed this famous entry on the pages of his journal, Charlotte Elliott wrote her well-known hymn in praise of Saturday. Before the majesty of heaven, tomorrow we appear. No honor half so great is given throughout man's sojourn here. The altar must be cleansed today. Meet for the offered lamb. The wood in order we must lay, and wait tomorrow's flame. I have heard scores of sermons on the proper observance of Sunday, and, somehow, I have never been impressed by their utility. One of these days some pulpit genius will preach on the proper observance of Saturday, and then, quite conceivably, the new day will dawn. As I lay down my pen, a pair of experiences rush back upon my mind. The one befell me at sea, the other on land. One. In the course of a voyage from New Zealand to England, it became necessary in order to harmonize the clocks and calendars on board with the clocks and calendars ashore to take in an extra day. We awoke one morning, and it was Saturday. We awoke next morning, and it was Saturday again. That second Saturday was the strangest day that I have ever spent. I never realized the extent to which Saturday leads up to Sunday, as I realized it that day. Two. I once numbered among my intimate friends a Jewish rabbi. I found his society extremely delightful and wonderfully instructive. He often took me to his synagogue, showed me its treasures, and initiated me into its mysteries. It was all very beautiful and very suggestive, but I invariably came away feeling dissatisfied and disappointed. I had been gazing upon the emblems and symbols of a Saturday faith, like that weird Saturday on board the Tongarero. It was a Saturday that led to a Saturday, a Saturday that ushered in nothing holier or sweeter than itself. Saturn with all his rings is grand, but the sun is grander still. It is from the sun that Saturn derives his brightness and his glory. Ask Saturn the secret of his splendor, and it is to the sun that he unhesitatingly points. As it is with these mighty orbs themselves, so it is with the days that bear their names. As Samuel Johnson and Charlotte Elliott knew so well, it is the glory of Saturday to prepare the way for Sunday. Saturday belongs to the Order of Saint John the Baptist. John was the greatest of all the sons of men. Yet it was his mission to clear the path for the coming of a greater. The Old World Saturday Sabbath, commemorating a completed creation, led up to the New World Sunday Sabbath, commemorating a completed redemption. The oracles and mysteries that I saw in the synagogue, the emblems and expressions of a Saturday faith, were sublime. But their sublimity lay in the fact that they pointed men to, and prepared men for, a Sunday faith, a faith that gathers about a wondrous cross and an empty tomb, a faith from which that Saturday faith, like Saturn bathed in sunlight, derives alike its luster and its fame. Rubble and rose leaves and things of that kind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. Rubble and Rose Leaves by Frank W. Borough. The Chimes It was Christmas Eve. An Australian Christmas Eve. To an Englishman it must always seem a weird uncanny hot potch. He never grows accustomed to the scorching Christmases that come to him beneath the Southern Cross. Southie once declared that however long a man lives, the first twenty years of his life will always represent the biggest half of it. This is indisputably so. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. The first twenty years of life fasten upon our hearts sentiments and traditions that will dominate all our days. I spent my first twenty Christmases in the old land. I have spent far more than twenty in the new. Yet whenever I find old Father Christmas wiping the perspiration from his brow as he wanders among the roses and strawberries of our fierce Australian midsummer, I feel secretly sorry for him. He looks as jolly as ever, yet he gives you the impression of having lost his way. He seems to be casting about him for snowflakes and icicles. But as I was saying, it was Christmas Eve, an Australian Christmas Eve. The day had been sultry and tiring. After tea I sauntered off across the fields to a spot among the fir trees, at which I can always rely upon meeting a few grey squirrels, an old brown possum, and some other friends of mine. I had scarcely taken my seat on a grassy knoll overlooking a belt of bush when the laughing jackass has broken to a wild, unearthly course in the wooded valley below. And then, a few minutes later, the cool evening air was flooded with a torn of harmony that transported me across the years and across the seas. The squirrels, the possum, and the cuckaburras were left leagues and leagues behind. From a lofty steeple that crowned a distant crest there floated over hill and hollow, the appealing and chiming of the bells. The magic that slept in the lute of the Pied Piper was as nothing compared with the magic of the bells. Beneath the witchery of their music, time and space shrivel into nothingness and are no more. We are wafted to old familiar places. We see the old familiar faces. We enter into fellowship with lands far off and ages long departed. Frank Bullen heard our Australian bells. He was only a sailor-boy at the time. Often, he says, I would stand on deck when my ship was anchored in Sydney Harbour on Sunday morning and listen to the church bells playing Sicilian mariners with a dull ache in my heart, a deep longing for something. I knew not what. The bells, according to their want, were annihilating time and space. Beneath the enchantment of their minstrel-sea, he sped as on angels' wings away from the realities of his rough and roving sea-life into the quiet haven of a tender past. He was back in his old seat in a little chapel on Harrow Road. Every Englishman overseas will understand. The bells throw bridges across the yawning chasms of space and link up hearts that stand severed by the tyrannies of time. In his golden legend, Longfellow describes Prince Henry and Elsie standing in the twilight on the terrace of the old castle of Votsburg on the Rhine. Suddenly they catch the strains of distant bells. Elsie asked what bells they are. The Prince replies, They are the bells of Gassenheim, that with their melancholy chime ring out the curfew of the sun. And then he adds, Dear Elsie, many years ago those same soft bells at Eventide rang in the ears of Charlemagne, as he did at Faustrata's side at Engelheim, in all his pride he heard their sound with secret pain. And so, through the melodious medium of the bells, the royal lovers on the terrace crossed the long centuries that intervene and enter into fellowship with those other royal lovers of an earlier time. I remember many years ago spending a few days at a beautiful country home in Hampshire. My hostess was a little old lady, very little and very old. I can see her now with her prim little cap, her golden ear rings, and her silver ringlets. It was summer time, and one evening she invited me to accompany her on a walk across the deer park. She was a happy little body, and that evening she was specially vivacious. Her conversation was punctuated with pretty ripples of silvery laughter. She was too proud to confess to feeling tired. But when we reached the style with a step to it on the brow of a hill, she took a seat upon the step to drink in as she was careful to explain the beauty of the view. I perched myself upon the style itself, and watched with interest the antics of a fine stag among some oak trees not far away. Then all at once the bells from the village behind us rang out blithely. For a while I listened in silence, and then turned to my companion to ask a question. On glancing down at her face, however, I was astonished to notice tears upon her cheek. What could be the matter with my gay little friend? I immediately transferred my attention to the stag, who was by this time ambling away across the park, but she knew that I had seen the teardrops. On our way back to the house she explained. My mother died, she said, while I was on my honeymoon in Italy. I was only a girl, and she was not much more. She was only twenty when I was born, and I was only eighteen on my wedding day. I never dreamed when I left England that I should never see her again. On the eve of my wedding she came up to me, put her arm around me, and led me away to spend one more hour alone with her. We sauntered off to the style on which you and I rested this evening, and as we sat there hand in hand, the bells pealed out just as they did tonight. And as I listened to them just now, her face, her form, her voice, her words, the very feeling of that other evening more than sixty years ago came back upon me, more vividly than they have ever done before. I could almost fancy that I was a girl again. My marriage, my children, my travels, and my long widowhood seemed all a dream. It was the bells that took me back again. I wonder if it was. I wonder if the great iron bells that hung in the dusty old bell-free of that English hamlet knew anything of the sweet and sacred secrets that my little old friend kept locked up in that gentle heart of hers. I wonder if the bells of Geisenheim knew anything of the loves of Charlemagne and Fristata of Elsie and Prince Henry. I wonder if the bells that drove the squirrels from my mind that summer evening knew anything of the Christmas thoughts and Christmas memories with which they flooded my soul. I wonder. And in my wonderment I find myself in excellent company, for here is little Paul Dumbey. He has only a few days to live, although today he is slightly better and able to get about the house a little. And in moving about the house he finds a workman mending the great clock in the hall, and Paul sees an opportunity of asking a few questions. Indeed Dickon says that he asks not a few, but a long string of them. He asks the man a multitude of questions about chimes and clocks, as whether people watched up in the lonely church steeples by night to make them strike, and how the bells were rung when people died, and whether those were different bells from wedding bells, or only sounded different in the fancies of the living. In this last question Paul gets very near to our own. Do the bells say the things they seem to say, or do they only seem to say those things? Did the bells of Geisenheim speak of love to the lovers on the castle terrace? Did the bells of that Hampshire village speak to the little old lady in the deer park, concerning the days of old Langzein? Or happy girlhood in her mother's face? Did the bells of that Australian steeple speak of the old-fashioned English Christmases as their delicious music fell on my delighted ears that summer night? Of course not. The bells take us as they find us, and set us to music. That is all. Paul Dumbay, who died young, half suspected it. The trotty veck of the chimes, who lived to be old, proved it from experience, and proved it up to the hilt. When things were going badly with trotty and Richard and Begg, and the magistrates said that people like them should be put down with the utmost rigor of the law, the chimes, when they suddenly peeled out, made the air ring with the refrain, put them down, put them down, facts and figures, facts and figures, put them down, put them down. If, says Dickens, the chimes said anything, they said this, and they said it until trotty's brain fairly reeled. Later on in the story we have the same chimes, and the same people listening to them. But this time all is going well. Meg and Richard are to be married on the morrow, and trotty is at the height of his felicity. Just then the bells, the old familiar bells, his own dear, constant, steady friends the chimes began to ring. When had they ever rung like that before, they chimed out so lustily, so merrily, so happily, so gaily, that he leapt to his feet and broke the spell that bound him. And a few minutes later trotty and Richard and Meg were dancing with delight to the gay glad music of the bells. When they themselves were sad, the chimes seemed mournful, when they were glad the chimes seemed blithe. Are they different bells, asked little Paul Dumbay, or do they only sound different? Paul was getting very near to the heart of a great truth, and if only trotty Vec and he could have talked things over together, they might have given us a philosophy of bells that would have immeasurably enriched our thought. The chimes are among the things to which distance lends enchantment. The bells, as my little old lady and I heard them from the deer park, were sweeter than the same bells heard in the churchyard under the belfry. In his cheap side to Arcady, Mr. Arthur Scammel suggests that the music of the bells awakens the echoes of all the infinities and all the eternities. He finds himself up in the bell tower, after the last stroke of the bell ceases to be heard down in the church, he says. The sound is continued up here in a long demuindo, and how long will it be before that vibrant hum is completely extinguished. All through the night the air about the bells may still be throbbing with faint echoes and reverberations, and if an hour or a night, why not a year or a century, may not even the sound of the first ringing of these old bells yet lisp against the walls and roof in infinitesimal vibrations. The tower may be alive with a thin ghost of all the joyous and mournful notes that have endeared and embittered the sound of bells to hundreds of human hearts, and if following the same line of argument the music of the bells falls so sweetly on my ear as I sit upon my grassy knoll two miles away from the steeple, who is to say that twenty miles away, a thousand miles away, the air is not trilling and trembling with their delicious melodies. It may be only because my perceptive faculties are so gross, my ears so heavy that I do not, in this Australian presence of mine, catch the chimes of Big Ben and the echoes of bow-bells. And if Mr. Scamble's philosophy be true of bells, why not of other sounds? As I ponder his striking suggestion, I find it more easy to understand that great saying that whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light, and that which ye have whispered in the ear shall be shouted from the housetops. The deeds we do, the words we say, into still air they seem to fleet. We count them past, but they shall last, to the great judgment day, and we shall meet. The bells are not only heard at a distance, they are better heard at a distance. It is possible to get so near to them as to miss the music. In his autobiography James Naysmith tells of the visit he paid to the Tower of St. Giles Edinburgh. He had often been charmed by the chimes, and longed to get nearer to them. But the experience brought a rude disillusionment. The frantic movements of the musician as he rushed wildly from one key to another, often widely apart, gave me the idea that the man was mad, while the banging of his mallets completely drowned the music of the chimes. It is possible to get too near to things. You do not see the grandeur of a mountain as you recline upon its slopes. The disciples were too near to Jesus. That explains some of the most poignant tragedies of the New Testament. A minister through constant association with the sublimities of divine truth may lose the vision of their eternal grandeur. And unless things in the mass are very carefully managed, the members of a minister's family may easily suffer through being too near to things. They do not see the mountain in the grand perspective. The banging of the mallets drowns the music of the bells. One beautiful June evening, years ago, I was walking along the banks of the Thames. It was Saturday night. I had undertaken to preach at Twickenham on the Sunday. All at once I was arrested by the pealing of the bells. Strangers stopped each other to inquire why the belfries had become vocal at that strange hour. We learned later that the bells were proclaiming the birth of an heir to the British throne. A prince had been born at White Lodge just across the river. Well, might the bells peal that night? Well, too, may the bells peal on Christmas Eve. I like to think that over the birth of that babe, born in Bethlehem, and cradled in a manger, more bells have been rung than over all the princes since the world began. The Chinese cherished a lovely legend concerning the great bell at Peking. The emperor, they say, sent for Guanyin, the caster of the bells, and described the bell that he desired. It was to be larger than any bell ever made, and its tone more beautiful. Its music was to be heard a hundred miles away. Great honors were to be heaped upon the bell-maker if he succeeded. A cruel death was to follow his failure. Guanyin set to work. He mixed the costliest metals. He labored night and day, and at last he finished the bell. He tested it and was disappointed. He tried again and was again mortified. He was at his wits' end. Then Kou'ai, his beautiful daughter, consulted an astrologer. The oracle assured her that if the blood of a fair virgin mingled with the molten metals, the music would ravish the ears of every listener. Kou'ai returned to the foundry, and when the glowing metal poured white hot from the furnace, she plunged into the shining bath before her. The music of the great bell the eastern say is the music of her sacrifice. It is only an oriental myth, but it strangely helps me to interpret to my heart the solemn sweetness that I recognize in all these Christmas chimes.