Chapter V

The observations I have suggested are here touched on but lightly, and in passing. I have made no profound study of them, or of the infinitely subtle psychology which, without doubt, underlies such hauntings of the spirit. I have but known these men from childhood and from early youth: have watched with them in many watchings. If there be one boast left me when I also shall go down into the darkness to which they have so long lent splendor, it may well be that these I have loved and have cherished with a whole heart, and would have served them if I could, than Horatio not less eager: 'Here, sweet lord, at your service.'

But be all that as it may, I am yet persuaded that it is by some such means as I have here touched on that all biography of the better sort must in time be written. Turn where we will among the great, we find facts of date and birth and schooling and death and all outward circumstance to have been the lesser factors. All these Time at last--the only lastingly considerable biographer--rejects and throws away. That which Time retains as precious and imperishable is rather some fine essence of the spirit, some essential personality built up and moulded by preferences, predilections, and prepossessions of a most highly spiritual order. The loves, the desires, the dear delights of men; the returning dreams, the recurrent longings that will not be gainsaid; the dead and long-lost dreamings that revisit the glimpses of our moon--these are indeed the spirits of us, and our immortalities.

Nor is it only as aids to a more just analysis of the great that these infinitely subtle influences may be considered. _Plus on connait de langues plus on est de personnes_. If the knowledge of another language gives one another life, as it were,--makes of one yet another person,--what may not be said to be added unto us by the knowledge--not the mere speculation, but the intimate knowledge--of another soul, and that soul one of the great ones of the earth?

This can be had only by an intimate companionship, not with the mere flagrant facts, but with the spiritual visitings, the dear desires and predilections, which haunt all rich lives significantly, perpetually, even as they haunt life itself.

For life is but an infinitely ancient abode, haunted by recurring presences surpassingly spiritual; as he knows who has seen death pass in and out of the ancient chambers in the night watches, or who has heard the autumn rains how reminiscent in patient woodlands, or who has been aware of lovely springs long-gone keeping tryst at certain seasons with the evening star in the twilight, or has felt them stealing back, ghostly and exquisite, when the April crescent hangs thoughtful and remote above dark apple-boughs.

In life as in lives, the presences move dark and dread or shining and lovely; and in the lives of the great as in life itself the shining and lovely would seem to be the more constant visitants. It is not to be forgotten that, though Banquo knocks his fearful summons, and the murdered Dane speaks with hollow mouthings, yet drifting forms dance no less gayly and delicately on midsummer nights in woodsy hollows by the moon.

It is noteworthy and remarkable that even those among the great whose lives have been sombre with tragedy have been visited--indeed they often more than others--by recurring influences of a most haunting beauty, like Beethoven, who with ears dull yet heard high symphonies, and Milton, who with sight closed to all outward loveliness saw yet in the darkened chambers a vision as of squadrons of bright-harnessed angels ranged in order serviceable, and knew the pastures and the silent woods to be full of sweet voices and light steps:--

Oh, friend, I hear the tread of nimble feet,
Hasting this way!

It is of all such haunting and recurrent presences, be they dread or lovely, that he who most knows life is most aware, and that he who would know the lives of great men must be most sensitively observant. These are the things that must be watched for faithfully and with a whole heart and a single devotion: 'Here, sweet lord, at your service!' Leaving all prejudice or interest of our own, it is for us, in studying the lives of great men, to make their affair ours as wholly as may be; and to forget ourselves in a knowledge so much more dearly to be desired.

And by no means, I believe, may this be done so surely as by a patient study of those high elections, those persistent hauntings of mind and spirit which have influenced and, it may be, in so large a measure directed the lives of all great men; giving their mind its bent, their personality its leanings; often guiding, it must be, their motives, and suggesting their high behaviors; laying upon them, as the ghost upon Hamlet, purposes and duties thence never to be avoided, inevitably to be discharged; lending to their speech its lovely and broidered figures, or to the work of the hand its so memorable distinctions, and to all their activities that which we call 'characteristic'--something particularly and peculiarly their own; some chosen and essential and precious manner of expression which, mortal though they be, lives on, surviving them; and which is not to be found elsewhere in its kind or measure throughout all the rich and inexhaustible ages.

The Acropolis and Golgotha

By Anne C. E. Allinson

The following letters contain a true record of a mind's journey.

ATHENS, _May 1, 1914_.

MY DEAR FRIEND:--

We drove in from Eleusis this afternoon, once more breathlessly watching the Acropolis offer its white and golden marbles to adornment by the setting sun. Our Greek winter is drawing to an end and this was our good-bye visit to the Mysteries. How clear and lucid the beauty of the place seemed to-day, from the brightness of the sea and the firm modeling of the mountains to the bloom of the placated earth! Demeter and Persephone were evidently together in safety, the mystery of the unseen forgotten in the palpable joy of life restored.

On our way back we stopped, of course, at the Convent of Daphne, to make ourselves tea in the sunlit courtyard, and to take one more look at the Byzantine mosaics. I confess that this time they seemed to me quaint bits of the wreckage of mediaevalism cast upon the shore of Hellenism. If the mediaeval part of Christianity is as inextricable as you say it is, then I will grant you that 'Christian thought' is an outworn system compared with the immortal mind of Greece. As we crossed the bridge over the Cephisus, the Parthenon, which is far more mutilated than the little convent, once more sent abroad from broken colonnades and crumbling pediments the impression that some perennial spirit and undying vitality had, indeed, as Plutarch once suggested, mingled in its very composition. The Shrine of Wisdom seemed to take up and weld together all the mysticism and all the rationalism of the world.

Was it really ten years ago that I wrote to you after such another journey along the Sacred Way? And ten more still since I last saw you at the little station of Eleusis? You were going back to Patras to take ship for Italy, and we--and those others--had ended an afternoon spent among the ruins by speculating on

those great nights of Demeter,
Mystical, holy.

I remember how sure you were that the wilder ideas in the Mysteries, which allowed for the redeeming death of gods and over-stated immortality, were but vagrants in the ordered area of Greek reason and sanity. Somebody older and wiser than I began to appeal to Plato on behalf of Greek transcendentalism, but you retorted that he was only the most disorderly vagabond of them all. Then your train clattered into the toy station, and you held my hand for a moment and said with a kind smile, '_Au revoir, petite savante, icibas_.'

But we never have seen each other again and probably never shall. Only an odd accident, you know, led to the annual letters which have spun the leisurely web of intimacy between two travelers so disparate in age and in nationality. You said that the differences in our experience, speech and traditions were lost in our common pilgrimage to Greece. My youth reminded you of the youth of Hellas, your age embodied for me her store of wisdom.

It is your book which has set me on the trail of these old memories. For when we began our letters you said that, since we knew little of each other's objective lives, we should have to concern ourselves with inner impressions; and now your printed opinions open up the question how the years have treated us in this matter of subjective experience. For one thing, automatically they have made me your equal. When we met, you, at forty-five, had experienced middle age. At sixty-five you are but confirming its revelation. You have yet to come to the fresh experience of old age. So that now, when I am forty-five, I may for a time talk with you eye to eye.

Your twenty years, unless you have misled me, have held no transforming experiences. Joys have but grown more dear and familiar. Sorrows, of a shattering kind, have let you alone. Your work prospers, your fame is assured, your children have grown up to be well in body and mind. All your fruit is ripening in the tranquil sunshine. My years, on the other hand, sweeping me out of the twenties into the forties, have been packed with fresh happenings to heart and head and will. Disaster has been left out of the brew, but almost everything else I have tasted. Perhaps this difference between us--unless it is one of sex--explains why you, in the books you have written lately, deal with philosophies and religions as if they sprang, Athena-like, out of the intellect, while to me they seem the issue of a normal union: if they are begotten of thought they are brought forth in anguish by experience.

In this last book you are interested in Hellenism and Christianity as forms--or attributes--of 'civilization.' I cannot forget that each of them means the way in which men and women have managed and are managing their diurnal round. You remember, don't you, the delightful story of Plato lecturing one day in the Academy on the Absolute Good, and his audience drifting away from him--except one man who was Aristotle? I have often wondered about the different things the other men did that day after they had run away from the Idea! At any rate the complex was as 'Hellenic' as the conversation of the philosophers.

And when one turns to Christianity,--why, the very philosopher who first intellectualized a Way and a Life had himself been born anew of the intensely personal experience of sin and repentance. Do you know Frederic Myers's _Saint Paul_?--ah! there was a 'Greek scholar' who understood a Christian!--

So shall all speech of now and of to-morrow,
All he hath shown me or shall show me yet,
Spring from an infinite and tender sorrow,
Burst from a burning passion of regret.

You, reading history, would be willing to obliterate Christianity and restore Hellenism as a universal ideal. I would rather see them united in each separate life.

Before I explain what I mean by this I must beguile you by some agreement with you in your criticism of 'cardinal' Christian doctrines! You are right, I think, in objecting to the emphasis laid by the church upon a future life. But you seem to me unnecessarily disturbed by a theory. Christians, like the followers of many other faiths, do 'believe' in immortality. In fact, I suspect that only specifically intellectual people actually disbelieve in it--and, with all respect to yourself, I must add that the opinion of intellectualists on the destiny of the spirit fails to hold my attention! The authority of the spiritually gifted--including both Socrates and St. Francis--is overwhelmingly on the side of the soul being immortal. But does that make any more difference in the life of the flesh to-day than in the time of Alcibiades? Mediaeval Christians certainly went mad over heaven and hell; but who now neglects Demeter's green earth for apocalyptic visions? You are depressed by a shadow cast from the printed page. Stop reading and look about at your friends! They are not too startled by the white radiance of eternity to install the latest electric lights!

As to your horror over the Christian 'adoration of suffering,' that seems to me better founded in view of the historic and continued insistence upon the cross as a symbol. I agree with you. I can scarcely express the revulsion which I feel in picture galleries before the endless succession of crucifixions and tortured saints. Until we conquer disease or discard violence there will be physical suffering in the world. But it is a thing to fight against, not to worship. For man to have painted and carved as _beautiful_ a racked body seems to me an insult to the God who made straight limbs and fair flesh, and a strange betrayal of the Galilean who wished to heal the suffering of others as long as he lived, and only accepted it for himself as an incidental necessity at the end. _He_ had no mediaeval disregard for the flesh. The agony in Gethsemane consisted in facing the obligation to offer up a body and a life which were very precious to him. The glory consisted in the sacrifice, not in the temporary torture to which it led. Love, not suffering, is the core of Christianity. A truer symbol than the defeated body on the cross would be the same body strong and beneficent among men.

Here the Periclean sculptor would have done better for us than the mediaeval painter. But only here. Neither he nor any of his contemporaries could have understood Gethsemane. Their greatness consisted in their selection, out of the prodigal abundance which lies before man, of noble possessions. They were far superior to the Puritans in that they retained art with morals, and they were equally superior to the modern Romanticists in that they picked and chose only such beauty as they believed could be amalgamated with character. Their inferiority to the Christians lay in their failure to hold their treasures in trust for humanity.

And now I come back to my argument against you. We who boast of being the 'heirs of the ages' need not be as limited as you imply. The modern man or woman can combine the Greek ideal of self-development with the Christian ideal of self-dedication. In reality, I am not arguing, but asserting. I know that this union is possible by the only evidence which is admissible--the evidence of a life. I have known for many years one person who unites in a normal experience your grandiose abstractions of Christianity and Hellenism. This person is my mother. Do not take her sex as an obstacle. She is a better example than some famous man might be, because her character is not obscured by public achievement. She has none of the limitations of a profession or career, or of some unique strain of genius. What she is creates careers or feeds genius. She is the most complete human being I have ever known, and yet her wholeness is a presage of what we all might become. It is to a life like this that you ought to go when you take stock of the philosophies of the world!

My mother's external fortune, judged by Greek standards, is good--too good, of course, for a woman. She has received from fate much that would have satisfied a Greek man: the consciousness of citizenship in a proud and prospering nation; health, long life, an active mind, and enough money to live tastefully; and, finally, satisfactory children (if I may be permitted to say this) and the approval of her fellow citizens. The Greek estimate of the importance of such approval springs, I suppose, from intense feeling for the communal life. No Greek man could be mentally less confined to the walls of a house than is my mother, and an Athenian voter could scarcely have served his _polis_ more completely than she serves our little town. The only difference here between her and a Periclean citizen is that she is perplexed and shy rather than expectant and gratified when evidences of public approval are forced upon her.

In natural endowment, also, my mother is singularly Greek, because she possesses diverse qualities harmoniously welded into one whole. We are conscious of no contradictions in her, and yet she is both sane and imaginative, sensitive and practical, dominating and gentle.

Finally, in her conscious activities she is Greek. There is, for example, her moral insistence upon form and beauty. If you could live in her house for a day you would see Hellenism as a diurnal practice. Her taste is flawless; everything she touches turns to beauty and to a tranquillizing order and simplicity. She selects a vase or a baking dish with the aesthetic fastidiousness which beset the artists and artisans of Athens.

And, furthermore, she is Greek in her perennial enthusiasm for fresh knowledge. Her enjoyment of life seems to me intense because she is never tired of exploring the world through every kind of human achievement. She has the curiosity of the Hellenic mind. The Athenian men who were like her made it worth while for other men to be scientists and philosophers and poets.

And yet my mother is a Christian. You see what I believe she has and is. Well, all of this she takes in her two hands and _offers_ daily. Of course, she believes in immortality, but she never talks about the future life, and I have told you of her vigorous interest in this one. Of course, too, she has known many sorrows--who has not at seventy?--but she has consistently concealed pain and suffering instead of enthroning them. Her Christianity is compounded of Love. As it streams out from her it is the creative, regenerating passion for humanity which transcended the reasoned good-will of the pagan philosophers and transcends the materialistic serviceableness of the modern humanitarians. In the noblest pagan literature there is no emotion at all resembling that which suffuses the New Testament. In this emotion my mother lives and moves and has her being.

I snap my fingers at Nietzscheism when I realize that she is the strongest personality in my little world. She dies daily for us, but we live her way! No superman could impose his will more effectively than this Christian in whom power and sacrifice are one. God is love. If all history tried to make me a skeptic my mother's nature would keep me a believer.

Whoso hath felt the spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound nor doubt him nor deny;
Yea with one voice, O world, tho' thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.

I have spoken of my mother's health and energy. Just lately these have flagged a little, and I came away this time with some misgivings, and only for my husband's sake. But her letters have quite reassured me. Lately she wrote, 'I am daily thankful that nothing prevented you from spending this winter on the Acropolis. In thinking of you I can't manage to dislodge you from the hill long enough to eat and sleep.'

She knows me! We have traveled all over the country this year, but always come back to Athens and the Attic plain as to the heart of Greece. We went to Egypt in midwinter, and on our return hurried almost from the ship to the Parthenon. It had snowed lightly and the whitened summits of Pentelicon and Hymettus and Parnes lay in sharp relief under the brilliant sky. A Greek friend of mine, looking at these fleshless mountains, said proudly, 'It is not every one who dares show her bones.' Attica needs no softening mist, no glamorous moonlight, no romantic obscuration. Her beauty is born of light and her teaching is light. In Egypt man was mocked by the desert. Small wonder the Christian saints hid themselves there to punish their poor bodies! Here man seeks the sun and stands erect in his dignity. Mediaevalism, I grant you, must make way for this immortal humanism. The 'mystery of suffering' is an invention of distorted minds. Stripped of disguise, suffering is merely an evil to be done away with by Love. This, I take it, is the message of the Acropolis to the Christian.

We are leaving next week for a month in London, and then home. May Fortune multiply your royalties and Athena inspire another book!

Faithfully yours.

P.S. The American mail is just in. A letter from a neighbor in my native town says that no one in my mother's house will disobey her order that I am not to be sent for, but that I am greatly needed. It is possible that she will not live until I can reach her. We shall sail for New York day after to-morrow. My world begins to crumble.

PINELANDS, MAINE, _April 20, 1915_.

MY DEAR FRIEND:--

As I begin this letter there flashes into my mind the last sentence which I wrote to you a year ago from Greece--that my little world was crumbling. And since then how your own world has been shattered, and the universe almost set reeling in its course! I remember how I talked on in that letter about areas of experience, blocking you off into twenty-year periods! I thought then that only the years would carry us into new seas. But in twelve months you have been swept from the moorings of your middle life. France is again facing the enemy as she did in your boyhood, but now your sons are risking lives more precious than your own. Your wife and daughters are nursing the wounded and the stricken. You, 'too old to fight,'--and so in a flash set forward into old age,--are nevertheless finding your pen tipped with passion instead of with philosophy. One of your lyrics is being sung in the trenches. You are no longer an intellectualist, but a voice of France. And thousands upon thousands of other men and women are experiencing a similar metamorphosis. Who knows what new philosophies and religions will be born?

I have been wondering whether you would still call Plato an intruder and vagabond in Hellenism. Greek thought changed under the shock to Athenian civilization caused by the Peloponnesian War. By this abstraction do we mean anything else than that Plato and other men had brought home to them the transitoriness of prosperity, the helplessness of morals, learning, and art before a recrudescence of primitive violence, and the limitations of humanism? The material stage in those days was small,--little states wage a little war,--but in view of her spiritual importance the suffering of Athens was a world-experience of the first magnitude. Possibly Plato seems to you now less a vagrant than a pilot.

For certainly our 'new religion,' if we bring one to birth, cannot be composed of truths wholly unknown before. Some of our new creative energy will go into stripping the veil from the face of that Reality which men at one time and another have beheld. I find it easy to believe this because through an intensive personal experience of my own I have been brought to perceive a truth which is two thousand years old. Last year I argued about Christianity, choosing this part, discarding that. This year I have knelt and touched the hem of the seamless robe. The experience would be too intimate and sacred to reveal were it not bound up with your own. Let me tell you about it. It is the only way in which I can talk with you about your sons who are facing death and suffering.

I wrote you that I was called home from Athens by my mother's illness. She died last month. During the intervening months revelation after revelation came to me. My mother had grown worse rapidly and at first I was shocked to my innermost heart by the change in her. All her strength seemed turned to weakness. Her rich and varied life had shrunk to the hushed quiet of a sick-room. Her tranquil face had become haggard. Her eager intellect had slipped away from her. There was nothing left of the beautiful Hellenism of her life. A Periclean Greek would now have seen in her only an illustration of the shadow lurking within the sunshine, the tragedy of bodily weakness and old age and death.

And since she no longer had riches to offer, what had become of her Christianity? The question could not frame itself, for I was caught and lifted out of my despair by the swift impression that about my frail mother there glowed a radiance which outshone the sunlight of her active years. The dayspring from on high had but put to flight the lesser stars. Every one who could see her was conscious of it. One of her nurses said to me, 'She is so different from the weak people I've seen before. I feel so _warm_, somehow, when I'm with her.'

A further revelation was that my mother was done with life and with us. She was exquisite in her treatment of us, managing in receiving still to be the giver. One day she said to me, unforgettably, 'You are making pain and sickness very beautiful.' But that inward eagerness of hers which had led me to believe that she had the Greek feeling for this world was now turned toward a new and vaster world. She had exhausted the experiences of this life--marriage and children, work and achievement, knowledge and beauty, joy and sorrow. In seeing this I saw too how far short they fall of the potentialities of an immortal soul. With her energy and imagination she had drained every drop out of them, but now she tossed them aside for some new wine.

The only time she ever spoke to me of the death which I was sure she knew was drawing close, she did it lightly, with that humor which was a part of her sanity. The doctors had just left her room after consulting about some new form of her sickness, and she turned to me with a smile and said, 'Don't repair me too often! I shall never get free if I don't get worse.' But she told a friend of her own age that nobody could imagine how eager she was to be gone. 'I can hardly wait,' she said, 'to find out about it all. The only thing that troubles me is that the others will be sorry.' I am not sorry. Since she wanted eternity without my grief, she shall have it.

In the last few months Nature did us one of her not uncommon services. Much of my mother's physical strength came back to her, as if at the end the body was determined to be a fit mate for the soul it had so long accompanied. She could move about once more in her little _polis_. During my last visit at home I was enchanted by a sweet and bubbling gayety which seemed to flow from some hidden spring of contentment. A week later she died swiftly, before I could reach her. All our friends talked to me of the light in her face during that week, and an old bedridden Irish servant, telling me of a visit from her, exclaimed, 'I kept thinking that she was just like a bride, dressed so beautifully and looking so happy.' The Christian figure of the soul and God! The old Celtic eyes had seen the truth. Of such substance was my mother's faith in a future life. It was, indeed, the _evidence of things unseen_! I perceived the fresh heart of Christianity in a belief so aged that it had built the pyramids centuries before it set up the temples at Eleusis. Never again shall I be found chattering while the great trumpet blasts for immortality echo down the ages.

But before my mother's death another veil had been lifted for me. Behind it I found the meaning of the cross. The experience will hardly bear words. It was very simple, the issue of intimate daily living, but it transformed one human mind as Bible and church, history and art had never done. On the day it happened to me I was open to no impressions from without. The weather was severe in our northern town whose normal beauty is not un-Greek in its austerity and lucidity. A stormy east wind drove dark clouds across the sky, and our firs and pine trees loomed black and forbidding. I turned from the window to the soft loveliness of my mother's room. There my heart and mind were closed to all abstract thought and large emotions, for the nurse was away and I was absorbed in the details of thermometer and medicines. My whole being was centred in the hope that I might make my mother comfortable during those hours. With inexpressible tenderness I began to bathe her, doing for her in her frailty at the end of life what she had so often done for me in mine at the beginning. Then it was that my eyes were opened. You know what a Greek would have seen in a body worn with age, emaciated by sickness, bearing many marks of suffering. But I beheld in it the central beauty of the world. If the noblest of the marble Aphrodites had stood in the room I should have recoiled from her in horror. I knew that my mother's sickness was due to her prodigal waste, for us, of her natural strength. Her flesh had been spent for us--_for me_. In a sudden supreme moment I was at one with the disciples, passionately loving the friend who had given his body to be broken for them; at one with the mad Christian iconoclasts, shattering heathen statues; at one with the mediaeval artists, painting and carving the crucified Christ.

Later I came to see that only in that hour had I grasped the significance of my mother's life. At first I had thought of her suffering as subordinate to her love, an incident among her sacrifices. Now I know it to be a sacramental reality, preexistent in all her earlier beneficence and at the end the earnest of her immortality.

Later still I realized what had happened. In an obscure individual hour had been reenacted an experience which once befell the world. The antique order was swept away by a tidal wave of emotion, and in its place was left a new life and thought and art. Mediaevalism, which had offended me in history, issued from the feeling of men and women as unknown as myself, married to the expression of thinkers, poets and artists. In understanding, at last, the feeling, I came to understand the way in which it was expressed.

When the Christian world, recovering its balance by means of the Renaissance, once more accepted the worth of antiquity, it refused to surrender the new treasure which it had gained in its temporary recoil from humanism. Popes on the throne retained the symbol which had comforted slaves in the Catacombs. The same cross survived the Reformation and persists, plastically and verbally, as the sign of modern Christianity. Until lately this paradox was as strange, in its way, as that of a Borgian posing as Vicar of the Crucified. Last year I saw all kinds of people trying to obliterate suffering: the intellectualists were denying its efficacy, the humanitarians its necessity, the Christian Scientists its reality. In our various modern forms of speech we were addressing prayers to Hygeia, enshrined on the Acropolis.

Then, with terrible suddenness, the roar of guns interrupted us.

Clouds and darkness
Closed upon Camelot.

Some one light in the encircling gloom we must have, if we are to work our way out into a renewal of civilization. Are we to discover it by still another paradox, in the very mystery of suffering which we have been denying? If one of your sons (which God forbid!) should be brought home mutilated, you would not choose to remember him in his young strength and beauty, because he would seem more beautiful to you stretched upon his cross. You would not rest in your agony, or in your fierce anger that such things are possible in the world. You would pass from these to the conviction that his suffering for France made his humanity divine. I do not pretend to understand the matter. I only know it to be true. Even the Greeks presaged it at Eleusis, but they forgot it as they turned homeward. For us it still lies beyond reason, but is beginning to be clearer than the axioms of reason. The mystery of suffering is more lucid than the fact of well-being.

My friend, may we not look upon this as the answer of Golgotha to the Acropolis?

Faithfully yours.

The Baptizing of the Baby

By Elizabeth Taylor

The Baby arrived in a howling nor'easter. The _fjelds_ were white with driving snow, the sea was white with the spindrift of gale-lashed waves, when the little procession filed into the parsonage courtyard. There were a father, five godfathers, two godmothers, and a few non-official friends. No baby was visible, but a muffled gurgle betrayed her presence. One of the godfathers, a fine young Viking of a lad, had a woman's dress-skirt buttoned around his neck and hanging down in front. Within its warm folds was the Baby.

The Baby's age was but four weeks, and this her first journey into the outside world. Custom has decreed that a Faroe Island baby must not pass its parents' threshold until it goes to the Pastor to be received into the Church, and so made secure from the Powers of Darkness. Having once left its home, it cannot return with the sacred rite unperformed.

Imagine, then, the dismay that fell upon the Baby's escorts when they learned that the Pastor had gone to the capital, several days before, on important church business. _To Thorshavn!_ Only seven miles away, by sea, to be sure, but, with that gale, it might as well be seventy. What to do now? The Baby could not be taken back unbaptized. And there was the baptismal feast all arranged: sweet soup, hung mutton, potatoes, coffee, little cakes, with card-playing in the afternoon, and rice-porridge and sandwiches in the evening. The Baby's mother was putting the sweet soup over the fire when they left that morning. Five miles by fjord they had come; then, as the gale increased, and they neared the open sea, they had 'set up' on land, and trudged the remaining three miles through deep snow.

'Oh, well,' sighed the father, 'we may as well "take it with quiet." The women-folk are too weary, anyhow, to go through those drifts again. We had better send one man home to explain matters, while the rest of us visit our friends. The storm may lessen at any time, so we can go to Thorshavn and bring home the Pastor.'

But--_the Baby_--And here the 'Pastorinde' was called upon to advise. Yes the Pastorinde _did_ know of a newly-arrived baby in the village, and she doubted not that its mother would kindly permit the stranger-baby to share and share alike with her own.

I, too, was 'weather-fast.' From Thorshavn I had come, twelve days before, to 'hold Jule' at the parsonage, intending to return two days after Christmas. Then came this long storm. There was no going to Thorshavn by sea; but in a roundabout way, by fjord and fjeld, it might be done in a case of necessity, such as this church-meeting that the Pastor must attend.

The foreman of the eight-man boat, however, flatly refused to take _me_. 'The Herr Pastor,' he explained patiently, 'has strong legs. He can jump and stand fast in surf, climb cliffs, and go through deep snow. But it is no journey for women-folk in high winter-time.'

So I was left behind when the Pastor went to Thorshavn.

One must start before daylight these short winter days to enable the boats to return before dark. For eight days I had been living as much packed up as possible, sleeping lightly, waking in the blackness of morning at the sound of voices in the kitchen below. Groping to the head of the stairway, I could hear the decision of the foreman: 'Not possible to-day, Fru Pastorinde. There is _ribbingur i sjonum_ (dangerous sea) outside.'--And back I would creep shivering, sure of one day more in the parsonage.

'What is the Baby's name to be?' I asked one of the godfathers, as we chanced to meet the next day. An embarrassed silence was followed by an abrupt change of subject, and I felt that I had made a _faux pas_. Later, I was told that a baby's name must never be asked, never be told, before baptism. I knew, already, some bits of babylore. For instance, if a child cries while it is being baptized, it will have a good voice and sing well at the ballad dances. The water must never be allowed to run down into the baby's eyes, or it will have 'second sight.' This is not a happy gift, and I notice that the godmother holding the child, _tilts_ it at the right moment so that the water flows back over the forehead. I know, too, that the man who carries a baby-boy to and from the church goes as fast as possible, so that the boy will be strong at the oar, sure-footed on the fjelds.

All this, you observe, for the _boy_ baby. No such trouble is taken for a mere girl. But, for both alike, there is this precaution: never leave a child alone before it is baptized. Until then it falls easily into the power of evil spirits, and is in danger of being carried away by Hulderfolk. These underground creatures are not 'the little people,' or the Brownies. In size and appearance they resemble human beings. They have boats and go to the fishery; they have cows, sheep (that are always gray), dogs (large black hounds that often have a light on the end of their tails); but one thing the Hulderfolk lack and that is _souls_. If, however, they can take away a Faroe baby and substitute one of their own, and it is baptized, then that child will have a soul.

I know a peasant woman whose daughter died in childbirth not long ago, leaving her baby to her mother's care. The father of the baby was fishing in Iceland, and the old woman lived alone in her little cottage. I went to see her, and during my visit, she wished to show me some articles in another part of the house. Wherever we went she took the cradle with her. I understood the reason and said to her,--

'But, Sanna, living by yourself as you do, are you not obliged sometimes to leave the baby alone?'

'Yes, Froken,' she replied sadly, 'several times I have had to leave him just for a few minutes. But I put the Psalm-book under his pillow, I mark him with the sign of the Cross, and _I run my best!_'

Another story I have heard lately is about a Hulderchild on Videro. A peasant and his wife had a baby-boy, a good happy healthy child, who never cried or made trouble. One day the mother had to leave him alone a little while. When she returned she found the baby crying and fretting. Its face seemed changed, somehow, and yet she could not say that it was _not_ their child. From that time it cried night and day until the parents were worn out, and they took it to the Pastor to ask his advice. Now the Pastor 'knew more than his Paternoster,' as the saying is; that is, he had studied Black Art. He examined the child and said he feared it _was a bytte_ (changeling). 'Now,' said he, 'go home and build a great brewing fire in the fire-place. In each of the four corners put a limpet-shell filled with milk. Then hide yourselves, so you can see and hear the child, but it will not know you are there. If it says or does anything that shows it is a Hulderchild, then you may hope to get your own baby back again.'

The parents followed carefully the Pastor's instructions, and, trembling with anxiety, awaited the result. As the fire roared and crackled, the child stirred uneasily and stopped crying. Then it raised itself on its elbow and watched the fire and the four limpet-shells that were sizzling away in the corners. Then they heard the child laugh scornfully, and saw it point at the limpets. 'Huh!' it exclaimed, 'how can a child be expected to thrive in a house where they have such things for kettles! They should just see the great kettles--the great brewing-pots--in the house of my father, Buin!'

The Hulderchild had betrayed itself! That night there was no crying, the parents slept in peace and woke to find their own good happy baby in the cradle.

What are the cradle-songs this Baby will hear in the cabin where she first saw the gray light of December? Verses from the old Kingos Psalm-book, ballads of the Long Serpent and King Olaf, of Queen Dagmar's death, the Whale Song, stories from the Iceland Sagas and the Nibelungenlied. Little verses, too, Mother Goosey jingles; one that is sung in Norwegian to babies in all the Scandinavian lands:--

Row, row to the fishing ground,
How many fishes have you found?
One for Father,
One for Mother,
One for Sister,
One for Brother,
One for him that drew the nets,
One for my little Baby.

Here is a little Faroe verse:--

Down comes the Puffin to the sea,
With his head carried high.
'Little Gray-titlark, lend me thy boat?'
'Small is my boat, short are my legs--
But come thee on board';
And the oars rattle in the oarlocks.

When the Baby grows a little bigger, she will not be taught that 'the Bossy-cow says, "Mo-o-o," the Pussy-cat says, "Me-ow."' No, she will learn what the _birds_ say:--

The Puffin says, _'Ur-r! UR-R! UR-R!'_
The Raven says, _'Kronk! KRONK! KRONK!'_
The Crow says, _'Kra! KRA! KRA!'_
The Eider-duck says, _'Ah-oo! AH-OO! AH-OO!'_
The Wheatear says, _'Tck! TCK! TCK! None so pretty as I!'_

and so on through a long list of the birds of fjeld and sea.

Summer and winter the birds will be the Baby's neighbors. From her father's cabin she can hear the eider-ducks cooing softly as they rise and fall just beyond the white crest of the breakers. Starlings bubble and chortle on the grassy house-roof; from the dark cliffs sounds the raven's clarion cry, and there are always sea-gulls near. With spring come all the sea-fowl to the bird-cliffs, and curlew, golden plover, and Arctic jaegers, 'plaintive creatures that pity themselves on moorlands.' All through the long dark winter the wren and titlark sing cheerfully. The 'mouse's brother' the Baby will call the Faroe wren, and she will know one fact of which grave scientists are ignorant, that the 'mouse's brother' and the titlark sing a bird-translation of a verse from the old Kingos Psalm-book. She will know, too, how the eider-duck won her down, the story of the naughty shag and the Apostle Peter, why the cormorant has no tongue, and that the great black-backed gull once struck our Lord upon the Cross and thenceforth bore a blood-red spot on his bill. Well can the Baby say in the words of the Kalevala, 'The birds of Heaven, the waves of the sea, have spoken and sung to me; the music of many waters has been my master.'

Few will the Baby's pleasures be. She will never have a Christmas tree, nor hang up her stocking, nor have other presents than a pair of mittens or a woolen kerchief for her head. The day before Christmas she will help her mother to scrub everything that can be scrubbed, indoors and out, working far into 'Jola-Natt,' so that all shall be sweet and clean for the birthday of our Lord. And next morning, in the sod-roofed church where never was a fire made, she will sit with her mother on the women's side, waiting meekly after service until the last man and the last boy have left their seats. She will dance lightly on the sea-rocks, her fair hair blowing in the wind, retreating as the big waves crash down, and singing something which sounds like '_Ala kan eje taka mej!_' (The wave cannot catch me!) She sings it to the same little tune I sang as a child when dancing back and forth across the danger-line of Taffy's land, mocking the rushes of an agile Taffy.

From seven to fourteen years she will go to school two weeks out of every six (the schoolmaster must be shared between three hamlets), and when fourteen years old, she will be confirmed, if she has learned enough Danish to pass the examinations and to say the prayers and creed. On that morning of confirmation she will turn up her hair, and wear a dress skirt that will flap about her little heels. And that afternoon there will be chocolate and cakes in her father's cabin, with friends coming and going.

She will know suspense and fear and sickening dread when 'the boats are out,' and the great gales burst without warning. From every hamlet the sea has taken many; not one home has been spared. She cannot escape the common lot; of grief she shall have her share.

* * * * *

Three days of storm passed and the Baby was not thriving. She needed her mother, and a consultation was held, the old sea-dogs of the hamlet advising. The gale was surely lessening, and with nine picked men, eight to row and one to steer, it could and should be done. The passage was to be made to Thorshavn to bring the Pastor home. So off they went in the early morning.

I was in my room, upstairs, about eleven o'clock, when I noticed that the roar of the wind and the creaking and groaning of the timbers overhead had ceased. I went to the window in time to see a great mass of snow gathered up from the ground and hurled against the house. In that short pause the wind had changed, and now blew from the west with redoubled fury. I hurried downstairs, and one glance at the Pastorinde's face confirmed my fears. She knew only too well where the returning boat was at that hour: far out, off the worst place on the coast, in fierce sea-currents, and in the full sweep of this new off-shore gale. The men were in dire peril. Many boats the Pastorinde had known to 'go away' in such a storm, after hours of desperate struggle to hold the boat in place and make some headway toward land. Then, as strength failed, there would be a slipping seaward, faster and faster, till men and boat went under, overwhelmed by a mighty cross-sea--'the drowning wave.'

Hour after hour went by; the Pastorinde paced the rooms, pale and silent. Under the shelter of walls and boat-houses were groups of men looking seaward. At last a shout, and men pointing; out in a smother of flying foam a dark spot had been seen, then lost, then seen again far away under the cliffs of distant Stromoe. The boat was slowly making its way to a point due west, where it could blow in with the gale. All the men and boys who could stand on their legs were down in the surf to meet it, and with a rush the boat was borne up on land.

All was ready in the parsonage. The rug in the dining-room rolled up, hot coffee made, food on the table; and the Pastorinde was standing in the doorway as the men toiled feebly up, their clothes streaming with sea-water. _Nine_ men only! Where was the _tenth_--where was the Pastor? And, all together, the tale was told. The Pastor, they had found, was _not_ in Thorshavn; two days ago the Danish gun-boat had carried him off to Trangisvaag on some church affair, and nothing had been seen of him since. Higher and higher rose the voices, trembling with the irritation and unreasoning anger of utter exhaustion. The storm had struck them at the worst place; for four hours they had struggled just to hold their own, and were drifting seaward, when a short lull came, and with hope renewed they fought again and at last reached the sheltering cliffs of Stromoe. Their eyes were wild and glassy, their hair matted, their hands swollen and bleeding from straining at the oars. The Pastorinde--wise woman--wasted no words of sympathy: she poured coffee, hot fragrant coffee with plenty of cream in it. The men drank and the talking quieted to grateful mumbles, and the cups were filled again, while their clothes dripped sea-water and the floor was all afloat.

Two mornings later, before dawn, I heard a knock on my door, and the Pastorinde's voice calling, 'The storm has ceased and they are going to take the Baby to Thorshavn, to be baptized by the Thorshavn pastor. They will take you, too, if you can be ready in half an hour.'

We were ready, all the baptismal party, plus myself and the borrowed 'maternal font.' One of the men came for me with a lantern, and I clutched his strong hand and slipped and slid over the icy rocks. Lights flared here and there, and land, sea, and sky were all one blackness; only a faint gray line showed where the sea was breaking. The surf was still high, covering the usual landing-place. One by one, we women were carried to a group of rocks that rose above the surf. Beyond, the boat was pitching and tossing, two men in the rowing-seats keeping the high sharp prow pointing toward the land. It was no easy matter to get on board, but we stood not upon the order of our going but jumped at once. At one moment I was on top of two godmothers, the next moment five godfathers scrambled over me to their places at the oars. Muffled shrieks arose and ejaculations: '_Ak Gud bevare os!_' '_Ak Herre Jesu!_' The boat swept out into the darkness, and we women-folk picked ourselves up and sorted ourselves out.

It was bitterly cold, and it rained--oh, how it rained! But we didn't care, we were going to Thorshavn at last, and there was a good sea. The change of wind, the down-pour, had flattened the broken surges. Only the great ground-swells swept landward, rank on rank, crashing along the coast. We mounted slowly to their summits and glided down the outer slopes with the motion of a bird in flight. Gayly rose the talk in the boat, and there was a lighting of little pipes, one at a time, so that the rowing need not be hindered. Now a faint yellow gleam on the southern horizon beyond the down-dropping veils of mist; then, dimly seen, the snow-crowned heights of Naalsoe rising eighteen hundred feet from the sea. The danger-point on Stromoe passed, and then in the distance twinkling lights, and a breath from shore bearing the fragrance of peat-smoke.--'So he bringeth them to their desired haven.'

Out on the fjord the Danish gun-boat rose and fell, and on the wet shore-rocks was a lonely figure gazing out to sea, like the pictures of Napoleon on Elba. It had a familiar look--it was--yes, it was the Pastor!

They laid hands on the Pastor, as though they expected him to vanish from their sight. The Baby would be baptized then and there. Scant time was given to the godmothers to change their shoes, skirts, and stockings, and to prink.

_Clang, Clang! Clang!_ rang the church-bell in treble staccato notes. There was a clattering of pattens in the stony lanes as children hurried to the Baptism. The Pastor, a dignified priestly figure in his long black robes and Elizabethan ruff, left the Thorshavn parsonage, passed through the side gate to the church-portal, and the bell-ringing died away.

* * * * *

I was down at the landing an hour later to say 'farvel' to the Pastor and the baptismal party. And as the boat left shore I turned away to my little cabin-home with a sigh of relief. The Baby--_Karin Marin Malene Elsebet Jakobina Jakobson_--was baptized.

THE END

Biographical Notes

=Henry C. Merwin= has practiced law in Boston for a generation. A tireless and enthusiastic worker in the cause of kindness to dumb animals, he organized, many years ago, and still largely manages, the Decoration-Day Workhorse Parade--an institution which has been extraordinarily beneficent in its results.

=William Beebe= is Curator of Ornithology at the New York Zoological Park, and has traveled far and wide, especially in tropical countries, in study or search of every bird that flies.

=Jane Addams=, a pioneer among those Americans who have spent their lives in ameliorating the conditions which breed poverty in our great cities, has been for nearly thirty years the head of Hull-House, Chicago, which she founded in 1889.

=Reverend Samuel McChord Crothers= is the minister of the First Church (Unitarian) at Cambridge, Massachusetts. The most individual among our essayists, he is known wherever the essay is read.

=Professor Robert M. Gay= fills the chair of English at Goucher College for Women in Baltimore.

=Jean Kenyon Mackenzie= is an American missionary to Southwest Africa, where she has long lived with the black folk on terms of sympathy and understanding.

=Edgar J. Goodspeed= is a professor of Chicago University, where he teaches biblical and patristic lore.

=William T. Foster= has been, since its establishment, President of Reed College, Oregon, where his policy of opposition to intercollegiate athletics is creating a new tradition of college sport.

=Lida F. Baldwin= is a teacher of Youngstown, Ohio, and a lover and observer of all natural things.

=Fannie Stearns Gifford= is a frequent contributor of both prose and verse to the _Atlantic Monthly_ from her home in Pittsfield, Mass.

=John Jay Chapman= is an essayist of uncompromising vigor and independence of thought. The author of many books, including a memoir of William Lloyd Garrison, he has also published, with a notable introduction, the letters of his son Victor, who was killed in the flying service on the Western Front.

=Lucy M. Donnelly= is a lecturer in English in Bryn Mawr College.

=Sharlot Mabridth Hall= is a writer and traveler, with a very considerable and specialized knowledge of Southwestern America.

=Richard Rowland Kimball=, a resident of Adamsville, R. I., is a pleasant essayist, and a true lover of dogs.

=Laura Spencer Portor=, one of the editors of a well-known woman's paper in New York, is a writer of versatile and temperamental charm.

=Mrs. Anne C. E. Allinson=, wife of a professor at Brown University, is an enthusiastic and informed devotee of Greek history, art, and literature. Before her marriage Mrs. Allinson was Dean of Women in the University of Wisconsin.

=Elizabeth Taylor= still lives in the Faroe Islands, with whose customs and mode of life she has the familiarity of a native, with more than a native's appreciation.