Chapter V: Part III: Which shows how the editor (5)

Indeed, since your departure I have found a sort of occult companionship with you in reading once more some of the old Latin poets. Father is gratified, for he thinks that after all I may sober into a Christian scholarship with the old Roman monks, and to this end he will tolerate even Catullus. But really the wisdom of love has given me a keener appreciation of these sweet classics. Did you ever think how wonderful is the youth, the simplicity, the morning freshness of all their thoughts. It is we moderns who have grown old, pedantic; and when some lyrical experience, such as love, suddenly rejuvenates us, drawing us back into the primal poetic consciousness, then we turn instinctively to these ancients for an interpretation of our hearts,--also because their definition of beauty, which is always the garment Love wears, is better than we can make now. With us "The Beautiful" is often mere cant, or a form of sentimentality, but with them it was a principle, a spirtual faculty that determined all proportions. Thus their very philosophies show a beautiful formality, a Parthenon entrance to life. And from first to last they never left the gay amorous gods of nature out of their thoughts. This is a relief, a tender companionship, that we have lost from our prosaic world. You see Jessica grows "pedantic" also! The poem you sent has awakened in me these reflections. The words of it slipped into my heart as warm as kisses.

But I have anxieties to tell you of. I fear trouble is brewing for us in father's prayer-closet. You remember the little volume you gave me, _The Forest Philosophers of India_? Well, he found it last night in the library, where I had inadvertently left it; and recognising the author as the same dragon who threatens the peace and piety of his household, he settled himself vindictively to reading it. The result exceeded my worst fears. If his daughter were about to become the hypnotised victim of an Indian juggler he would not be more alarmed. He holds that all truth is based upon the God idea. And he vows that you have attempted to dissolve truth by detaching it from this divine origin. You speak the truth in other words, but you are accused of blasphemously ignoring its sublime authorship. Nor is that all. Your philosophy must have gripped him hard, for he declares that you have an abnormally clairvoyant mind, and that "no female intelligence" can long withstand the diabolical influence of your heathen suggestions. Really it made my flesh creep! You might have thought he was warning me against a snake charmer. And when I declined to be alarmed, he locked himself up in his closet to fast and pray. This is the worst possible symptom in his case, for he will work himself into a frenzy, and before ever he eats or drinks he will get "called" to take some radical stand against us.

Meanwhile, besides a growing affection for Jack, I take a factitious interest in him because he was your daily companion for several months. I am tempted to ask him many questions that are neither fair nor modest, particularly as he is devoted to you, and quite willing to talk of "Misther Towers."

"Does he ever sing, Jack?" I began last evening, as we sat alone before the library fire.

"Nope,"--Jack is laconic, but wise far beyond his years in silent sympathy.

"Did he often talk to you?"

"Yes, when we went for a walk."

"Tell me what about, Jackie."

"I don't know!" was the ungrateful revelation.

"You mean you have forgotten!" I insinuated.

"Never did know. He talks queer!"--I tittered and Jack wrinkled up his face into a funny little grimace. We both knew the joke was on you.

"Did he ever mention any of his friends," I persevered.

"Nope. Once he give me your love and some things you sent,"--the little scamp knew the direction of my curiosity!

"But did he never tell you anything about me, Jackie?"

"Never did!"--I was wounded.

"What does he like best?"--for I had made up my mind to know the worst.

"His pipe," he affirmed without hesitation.

"And when he smoked he'd lay back in his chair and stare at the rings he made like they was somebody, and once I saw him look jolly and kiss his hand to 'em."

"Oh! did you, Jack? then what did he do?"

"Caught me looking at him, and told me to go to bed."

"Mean thing!" I comforted. "But run along now and put the puppy to bed; Mr. Towers was very rude to you!"

I was so happy I wished to be alone, for no man, I am persuaded, ever smiled and kissed his hand to Brahma. Dear Philip, if you only knew how jealous I am sometimes of your Indian reveries, you would understand how I could consider Jack's treacherous little revelation almost as an answer to a prayer.

XLI

PHILIP TO JESSICA

Dear Jessica, you must not let the sins of my youth find me out now and cast me from Paradise. You alarm me for what your father may think of that book of mine on Oriental philosophy; I would not have him take it with him into his prayer-closet and there in that Star Chamber use it against us in his determination of our suit. Tell him, my Love, that I too have come to see the folly of what I there wrote. Not that anything in the book is false or that I have discarded my opinion of the spiritual supremacy of those old forest philosophers of India, but I have come to see how unsuited their principles of life must be for our western world. They beheld a great gap between the body and the spirit, and their remedy was, not to construct a bridge between the two, but by some tremendous and dizzy leap to pass over the yawning gulf. We, to whom the life of the body is so real, we who have devoted the whole ingenuity of our mechanical civilisation to the building up of a comfortable home for that body, turn away from such spiritual legerdemain with distrust, almost with terror. A man among us to-day who would take the religion of India as his guide is in danger of losing this world without gaining the other. No, our salvation, if it comes, must come from Greece rather than from India. Some day I shall write my recantation and point out the way of salvation according to the Gospel of Plato. Indeed, since love has become a reality to me, I have learned to read a new meaning in this philosophy of reconciliation instead of renunciation. Tell your father all this. Some way we must bring this uncertainty to an end. I must know that you are to be my wife.

And so Jack thinks a fuliginous pipe holds the first place in my affections. The little rascal! And why don't you make that precocious imp write to me? Do I not stand to him _in loco parentis_? But, joking aside, he does not know and you can scarcely guess the full companionship of my pipe these days. As the grey smoke curls up about me in my abandonment, (for I never even read during this sacramental act,) there arises before my eyes in that marvellous cloudland the image of many wind-tossed trees down whose murmuring avenue treads the vision of a dryad, a woman; and as she moves the waving boughs bend down and whisper: "Jessica, sweet Jessica, he loves you; and when our leaves appear and all things awake into life, he will come to gather your sweetness unto himself."

.la begin XLII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

It seems unnatural for me to address you in this manner--as if I had cast off the dearer part of myself by the formality. But no other course is open to me after what has happened.

After praying and fasting till I really feared for his reason, father thinks he received a direct answer from Heaven concerning his duty toward us. He declares it has been made absolutely clear to him that if he deliberately gives his daughter in marriage to one who will corrupt and destroy her soul with "heathen mysticism," his own must pay the forfeit, and not only is his personal damnation imminent, but his ministry will become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of insincerity. He is entirely convinced of the divine inspiration of this revelation, and I am sure madness would follow any resistance I might make. I have therefore been obliged to promise him that I will break our engagement and end this correspondence, and I beg that you will not make it harder for me by any protest, either in person or letter. No appeal can ever be made against a fanatic's decision, because it is based not upon reason, but upon superstition, a sort of spiritual insanity that becomes violent when opposed.

And father insists upon keeping Jack for the same reason he preserves me from your corrupting influence. He thinks the boy is another little brand he has snatched from your burning. And I hope you will consent to his remaining with us, for he is a great comfort now to my sad heart. He will write to you, of course, for father cannot but recognise that you have in a way a prior authority over him.

Nothing more is to be said now that I have the right to say. I have tried to take refuge in the biologist's definition of love,--that it is essentially a fleeting emotion, a phantom experience. It is like the blossoms in May; to-day they are all about us, making the whole earth an epic in colours, to-morrow they are scattered in the dust, lost in the gale. Just so I try to wish that I may lose some memories, some tenderness out of my heart. But I have not the strength yet to take leave of all my glory and happiness, nor can I say that I wish you to forget,--only that it is best for us both to forget now if we can.

XLIII

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR JESSICA:

My first impulse on reading your letter was to come immediately to Morningtown and carry you away by storm; but second thoughts have prevailed and I am writing merely to bid you good-bye. For, after all, if I came, what could I do? I would not see you clandestinely and so mingle deceit with our love, and I could not see you in your father's house while he feels as he does. It would be fruitless too; you have come to the meeting of ways and have chosen. I think you have chosen wrong, for the world belongs to the young and not to the old. Life is ours with all the prophecy and hopes of the future. Ah, what mockery lurked in those words we read together in the shadow of your beloved trees, while your heart lay in my hands fluttering like a captive bird:

So let us live and love till life be out,
And let the greybeards wag and flout.

And now dear Love, only one phrase of all that poem shall ring in my ears,--that solemn _nox perpetua_, that long unending night, for every joy you promised. Ah, would you have thrust me away so easily if I had not seemed to you wrapt up in a strange shadow life into which no reality of passion could enter? And was your love, too, only a shadow? God help me then! Yet I would not reproach you, for, after all, the choice must have cost you a weary pain. I have brought only misery to you, and you have brought only misery to me--and this is the fruit of love's battle with religion. Do you remember the story of Iphigenia in Lucretius and that resounding line, "So much of ill religion could persuade"? Do you know Landor's telling of that story, "O father! I am young and very happy"? And so, our story has been made one with the long tragedy of life and of the poets; and the bitterness of all this evil wrought by religion has troubled my brain till I know not what to say. Only this, sweet girl, that no tears of separation and long waiting can wash away the love I bear you. And, yes, I will not believe that you can forget me. Come to me when you will, now or many years hence, and the chamber of my heart shall be garnished and ready to receive you, the latch hanging from the door, and within, on the hearth, the fire burning unquenched and unquenchable. Will you remember this? There is no woman in the whole earth to me, but Jessica. It will be so easy for me to shut myself off from all the world, and wait--wait, I say, and work. No, I think you will not forget. There has grown within me with love a mystic power to which I can give no name. But I know that in the long silences of the night while I sit reflecting after the day's toil is done--that something shall go forth from me to you, and you shall turn restlessly in your sleep and remember my kisses. And now good-bye. Do not interpret anything I have said as a rebuke. You are altogether fair in my eyes, without spot or blemish, and I would not exchange the pain you have given me for the joys of a thousand fleeting loves. And once again, good-bye.

(Enclosed with the foregoing)

DEAR SIR:

My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it to you, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me assure you, sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to step in where my daughter's happiness was concerned and have commanded her to cease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect and esteem.

Faithfully yours,
EZRA DOANE.

XLIV

EXTRACT FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in the bitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note of anxiety in them from the first, "some consequence yet hanging in the stars," which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myself that they were anything more than some broken memory of "old, unhappy, far-off things," a single, sobbing note of love's tragic song that has been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself why love, the one sweet reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of sorrows--for out of it, in one way or another, whether through gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some jealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternal deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion?

And thus from a brief dream of love I slip back into encircling shadows. I move among men once more with no certainty that I am not absolutely alone. Even the passion I have felt becomes unreal as if enacted in the dim past. And that is the torture of it,--the torture of a man in a wide sea who beholds the one spar that was to rescue him drifting beyond his reach, beyond his vision. Ah, sweet Jessica, if only I could understand your grief so that in sympathy I might forget my own! But it all seems to me so unnecessary--that we should be sacrificed for the religious caprice of a frantic old man. From the first there was a foreboding of evil in my heart, but I did not look to see it from this source. I feared always that the remoteness of my character, which seemed to terrify you with a sense of unapproachable strangeness, might keep you from responding to my passion. But that passed away. Then came your opposition to my crusade against the sentimentalism of the day. That I knew was merely a new phase of the earlier antipathy, a feeling that there was no room in my breast for the ordinary affections and familiarities of life, a suspicion that my true interests were set apart from human intercourse. This, too, passed away, and in its place came love. And now love is shut out by the religious caprice of one who dwells in an intellectual atmosphere which I supposed had vanished from the world twenty years ago. I had not imagined that the institutes of Calvin were still a serious matter. I have at least learned something; and while writing against the lack of faith in the present religion of humanity, I shall at least remember that my own calamity has come from one inured in the old dogma. It is the irony of Fate that warns us to be humble.

And so it is ended. I fold away the little packet of letters with their foolish outcry of emotion, and on their wrapper inscribe the words that have been oftenest on my lips since I grew up to years of reflection: _Dabit deus his quoque finem_--God will give an end to these things also.

XLV

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

May the Weird Sisters preserve me from another such experience! I was walking in the Park in the evening, and the first warm odours of spring floating up from the earth troubled me with a feeling of vague unrest. Some jarring dissonance between the death in my heart and the new promise of life all about me ran along my nerves and set them palpitating harshly. Then I came upon a pair of lovers lingering in the shadow of a tree, holding to each other with outstretched hands. As I approached them I saw the woman was weeping quietly. There was no outcry; no kiss even passed between them; only a long gaze, a quivering of the hands, and he was gone. I saw the woman stand a moment looking hungrily after him and then walk away still weeping. And the sight stung me with madness. What is the meaning of these endless meetings and partings--meeting and parting till the last great separation comes and then no more? Are our lives no better than glinting pebbles that are tossed on the beach and never rest? Suddenly the blood surged up into my head. It was as if all the forces of my physical being had concentrated into one frenzied desire to possess the thing I loved. For a moment I reeled as if smitten with a stroke, and then without reasoning, scarcely knowing what I did, started into a stumbling run. Only the evident amazement of the strollers on the Avenue when I left the Park brought me back partially to my senses, yet the madness still surged through my veins. All my philosophy was gone, all my remoteness from life; I was stung by that fury that comes to beast and man alike; I was bewildered by the feeling that my emotions were no longer my own, but were shared by the mob of strangers in the street. It was the passion of love, pure and simple, unsophisticated by questioning; and it had turned my brain. Withal there ran through me an insane desire to commit some atrocious crime, to waylay and strike, to speak words of outrageous insult. I do verily believe that only the opportunity was wanting, some chance conflict of the street or temptation of solitude, to have changed these demoniac impulses to action--I whose most violent physical achievement has been to cross over Broadway. It is good that I am home and the blood has left my brain. What shall I think of this if I read it ten years hence?

XLVI

JACK TO PHILIP

DEAR SIR:

I have not wrote you before. This is a beautiful place. I like it, especially the young lady. The old man have been acting wild, like a cop when he can't find out who done it. The difference is that it is the bible in the old man and the devil in the cop. He says you have hoodooed the young lady, and he says let you be enathermered. This is a religious cuss word. The young lady don't cry. She is dead game, and have lost her colour.

So good by,

Yours trewly,

JACK O'MEARA.

P.S.--The young lady have quit the family prayers, but me and the old man have to say ours just the same, only more so.

XLVII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

A wise man of the sect of Simon Magus has replied to an assault of mine on humanitarianism by trying to show that in this one faith of modern days are summed up all the varying ideals of past ages,--renunciation, self-development, religion, chivalry, humanism, pantheistic return to nature, liberty. Ah, my dear sir, I envy you your easy, kindly vision. Indeed, all these do persist in a dim groping way, empty echoes of great words that have been, bare shadows without substance. What made them something more than graceful acts of materialism was that each and all ended not in themselves or in worldly accommodation, but in some purpose outside of human nature as our humanitarians comprehend that nature. Renunciation was practised, not that my neighbour might have a morsel more of bread, but that one hungry soul might turn from the desires of the flesh to its own purer longings. Self-development looked to the purging and making perfect of the bodily faculties, that within the chamber of a man's own breast might dwell in sweet serenity the eternal spirit of beauty and joy. Even humanism, which by its name would seem to be brother to its present-day parody, perceived an ideal far above the vicious circle in which humanitarianism gyrates. My dear foe might read Castiglione's book of _The Courtier_ and learn how high the Platonic ideal of the better humanists floated above the charitable mockery of its name to-day. As for religion--go to almost any church in the land and hear what exhortations flow from the pulpit. The intellectual contention of dogmas is forgotten--and better so, possibly. But more than that: for one word on the spirit or on the way and necessity of the soul's individual growth, you will hear a thousand on the means of bettering the condition of the poor; for one word on the personal relation of man to his God, you will hear a thousand on the duties of man to man. Woe unto you, preachers of a base creed, hypocrites! These things ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone! You have betrayed the faith and forgotten your high charge; you have made of religion a mingling for this world's use of materialism and altruism, while the spirit hungers and is not fed. Like your father of old, that Simon Magus, you have sought to buy the gift of God with a price; like Judas Iscariot you have betrayed the Lord with a kiss of brotherhood! Now might the Keeper of the Keys cry out to-day with other meaning:

"How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,
Enow of such, as for their bellies' sake
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold!
Of other care they little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearer's feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest.
Blind mouths!"

XLVIII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

Reading a foolish book on the Literature of Indiana (!) and find this sentence on the first page: "It is not of so great importance that a few individuals within a State shall, from time to time, show talent or genius, as that the general level of cultivation in the community shall be continually raised." Whereupon the author proceeds to glorify the "general level" through a whole volume. Now the noteworthy thing about this particular sentence is the fact that it was set down as a mere truism needing no proof, and that it was no doubt so accepted by most readers of the book. In reality the sentiment is so far from a truism that it would have excited ridicule in any previous age; it might almost be said to contain the fundamental error which is responsible for the low state of culture in the country. Unfortunately the point cannot be profitably argued out, for it resolves itself at last into a question of taste. There are those who are chiefly interested in the life of the intellect and the imagination. They measure the value of a civilisation by the kind of imaginative and intellectual energy it displays, by its top growth in other words. They crave to see life express itself thus, _sub specie oeernitatis_, and apart from this conversion of human energy and emotion into enduring forms they perceive in the weltering procession of transient human lives no more significance or value than in the endless fluctuation of the waves of the sea. For them, therefore, the creation of one masterpiece of genius has more meaning than the physical or mental welfare of a whole generation; they can, indeed, discern no genuine intellectual welfare of a people except in so far as the people look up reverently to the products of the higher imagination. There are others for whom this life of the imagination has only a lukewarm interest, for the reason that their own faculties are weak and stunted. Naturally they think it a slight matter whether genius appear to create what they and their kind can only dimly enjoy; on the contrary, they hold it of prime importance that material welfare and the form of mental cunning which subdues material forces should be widely diffused among the people.

Now no one would say a word against raising "the general level of cultivation"; the higher it is raised the better. Only the cherishing of this ideal becomes pernicious when it is made more sacred than the appearance of individual genius. Nor is it proper to say that the appearance of genius is itself contingent on the level of cultivation. There is much confusion of thought here. The influence of the people on literature is invariably attended with danger. It has its element of good, for the people cherish those instinctive passions and notions of morality which keep art from falling into artificiality. But refinement, distinction, form, spirituality--all that makes of art a transcript of life _sub specie oeernitatis_--are commonly opposed to the popular interest and are even distrusted by the people. The attitude of the Elizabethan playwrights toward their audiences gives food for reflection on this head. Just so sure as the ideal of general cultivation is made paramount, just so sure will the higher culture become degraded to this consideration, and with its degradation the general cultivation itself will grow base and material.

XLIX

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I lead a strange dual existence, the intensity of whose contrast is almost uncanny. After sitting for hours at my desk working on my History of Humanitarianism, I throw myself wearily on the sofa and smoke. And as the grey fumes float above my face, slowly they lay a spell upon me like the waving of mesmeric hands. I lose consciousness of the objects about me, the very walls dissolve away in a mist, and I am lifted as it were on softly beating pinions and borne swift and far like a bird. The sensation is curiously familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, yet it never causes me surprise. Sometimes I am carried out into the wide sky and soar as it seems for hours without ever alighting, until I am brought to myself with a sense of rapid falling. At other times I am borne to the blessed forest where my love walks, and always then the same thing happens. I know not whether it is my spirit or some emanation of my body, but, however it is, I am there always pursuing her as once I did in reality, until at last I lay hold of her and draw her into my arms beneath that ancient oak. I kiss her once and twice and a third time, gazing the while into her startled eyes. Then an inexpressible sweetness takes possession of me, a shudder runs through my veins, and of a sudden all is dark; I am sinking down, down, in unfathomable abysses, until abruptly I awake. No words can convey the mingled reality and remoteness of these sensations. Jessica, Jessica, you have troubled the very sources of my being; you have abandoned me to contend with shadows and the fear of shadows.

L

JACK TO PHILIP

DEAR MR. TOWERS:

You have not wrote to me yet. The weather is fine and things come up here and bloom out doors. But the old gentleman says we are out of the ark of safety. He have made up his mind to be damned any how. He says the Lord have turned his face against us. But I guess really it is the young lady that is showing off. She stands on her hind legs 'most all the time now. She have back slid out of nearly everything and have quit going to church. She does the same kind of meanness I do now, and don't care. She is jolly all the time, but she aint really glad none. She have got a familiar spirit in the forest that you can't see with your eyes. But she meets him under a big tree, and sometimes she cries. She don't let me come, but I creep after her and hide, so as to be there if he changes her into something else. The old gentleman have quit his religious cussing now and have took to fussing. But he can do either one according to the bible. He knows all the abusing scripture by heart. But the young lady have hardened her heart. She is dead game, and she aint skert of him, nor of the bible, nor nothing. And she aint sweet to nobody now but me. If you answer this, I will show it to her.

Your trew friend,

JACK O'MEARA.

P.S.--She wore your letter all one day inside her things before she give it to the old man.

LI

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

Humanitarians are divided into two classes--those who have no imagination, and those who have a perverted imagination. The first are the sentimentalists; their brains are flaccid, lumpish like dough, and without grip on reality. They are haunted by the vague pathos of humanity, and, being unable to visualise human life as it is actually or ideally, they surrender themselves to indiscriminate pity, doing a little good thereby and a vast deal of harm. The second class includes the theoretical socialists and other regenerators of society whose imagination has been perverted by crude vapours and false visions. They are ignorant of the real springs of human action; they have wilfully turned their faces away from the truth as it exists, and their punishment is to dwell in a fantastic dream of their own creating which works a madness in the brain. They are to-day what the religious fanatics were in the Middle Ages, having merely substituted a paradise on this earth for the old paradise in the heavens. They are as cruel and intolerant as the inquisitors, though they mask themselves in formulae of universal brotherhood.

LII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I have been reading too much in this tattered old note-book of O'Meara's. It is my constant companion these widowed days, and the mystic vapour that exhales from his thought has gone to my head like opium. I must get rid of the obsession by publishing the book as a psychological document or by destroying it once for all. With its quotations and original reflections it alternates from page to page between the sullen despair of a man who has hoped too often in vain and a rare form of inverted exaltation. As with me, it was apparently his custom, when the loneliness of fate oppressed him, to go out and wander up and down Broadway, seeking the regions by night or day where the people thronged most busily and steeping his fancy in the turmoil of its illusion. I can see his ill-clad figure with bowed head moving slowly amid the jostling multitude, and I smile to think how surprised the brave folk would be, who passed him as he shuffled along and who no doubt drew their skirts away lest they should be polluted by rubbing against him, if they could hear some of the meditations in his book and learn the pride of this despised tramp. Many times he repeats the proverb: _Rem carendo non fruendo cognoscimus_--By losing not by enjoying the world we make it ours. Out of the utter ruin and abandonment of his life he seems to have won for himself a spiritual possession akin to that of the saints, only inverted as it were. The impersonal detachment they gained by rising above human affairs, he found by sinking below them. He looked upon the world as one absolutely set apart from it, and through that isolation attained a strange insight into its significance, and even a kind of intoxicating joy. On me in my state of bewildered loneliness his mood exerts an alarming fascination. It is dangerous to surrender one's self too submissively to this perception of universal illusion unless a strong will is present or some master passion as a guide; for without these the brain is dizzied, and barely does a man escape the temptation to throw away all effort and sink gradually into the stupor of indifference or something worse. I have felt the madness creep upon me too often of late and I am afraid. Ah, Jessica, in withdrawing the hope of your blessing from me you know not into what perils of blank indifference you have cast my soul. Shall I drift away into the hideous nightmare that pursued O'Meara? I will seal up his book, and make strong my determination to work and in work achieve my own destiny.

LIII

PHILIP TO JACK

It seems very lonesome in the big city without you, little Jack, and often I wish that some of this pile of books around me were carried away and you were brought back to me in their place. But it is better for you where you are.

You must listen to everything Miss Jessica tells you about the trees and birds, and learn to love all the beautiful things growing around you. I remember there were four or five great trees in my father's garden when I was a boy living in the country, and I loved them, each in a different way, and had names for them and talked to them. One was an oak tree that grew up almost to the clouds, and its boughs stood out stiff and square as if nothing could bend them. That was the tree I went to when I had some hard task to do and wanted strength. Another was an elm that always whispered comfort to me when I was in trouble. I used to go to it as some boys run to their mother, for I grew up like you without a mother's love, and I did not even have any sweet lady like Miss Jessica to be fond of me. You must ask Miss Jessica to teach you all she knows about the trees in Morningtown, and you must listen to what she says to them. Perhaps she will tell you about the famous oaks that grew in a place called Dodona, and were wiser than any man or woman in the world. People used to talk with them as Miss Jessica does with her favourite tree.

And now, dear Jack, I am going to tell you a story which I have made up just for you. It isn't about trees exactly, but it all took place in a deep forest that spread around a wonderful city. From the high white walls of the town one could look out over the green tops of the trees as you look down on the grass, and that was a marvellous sight. There was a single road that ran through the forest right up to the gate of the city; but it was a hard road to travel, dark most of the time because the sun could not shine through the leaves, and very lonely, and so still that you could hear your heart beat except when the winds blew, and then sometimes the boughs clashed together overhead and roared and moaned until you longed for the silence again. It was a long road too, and the men who walked through the forest to the city all had great packs on their shoulders. And what do you suppose was in their packs? Why, every traveller carried with him a gorgeous suit of clothes heavy with velvet and gold and silver; for so the people dressed in the beautiful city, and no one could enter the gate unless he too bore with him the royal robes. But you see, while they were walking in the rough forest, they wore their old clothes of course.

Now in one place a wonderful woman sat by the roadside. She was a maga, or witch, named Simona. She was beautiful if you did not see her too close, with large round eyes that looked very gentle and kind. And when any traveller came by, the big tears would begin to roll down her cheeks and she would cry out to him as if she pitied him and wanted to help him.

"Dear traveller," she would say, "why do you trudge along this gloomy road, and why do you carry that bundle which bends your shoulders and tires your back? Don't you know that it is all a lie about the city you are seeking? There is no city of palaces at your journey's end. Indeed, you will never get to the end of the woods, but will walk on and on, stumbling and falling, and growing weaker and weaker, until at last you fall and never rise. And the wild beasts that you hear at night howling in the bushes will rend and gnaw your body until only your bones are left."

At this the travellers would stop and say: "But what shall we do, wise witch, and whither shall we go?"

Then she would say to them: "Turn aside by this pleasant path, and in a little while you will come to my beautiful garden which is named Philanthropia. There you will find many others whom I have wept for and saved as I do you; and there amid the open glades you may live with them in everlasting peace and love. Houses are there which you need only to enter and call your own. And when you are hungry you have only to speak, and immediately all that you desire to eat will appear on the tables. And when you are tired, soft beds will rise up to receive you. And clothes will be spread before you--not stiff and uncomfortable robes like those you carry in your pack, but soft garments suited to that land of comfort."

Most of the travellers believed the witch and turned into the by-path. But, alas! it was soon worse for them than it had been on the road; for they were led, not to a garden, but into a great sandy desert, where nothing grew and no rain or dew ever fell. And somehow they could find no way out of the desert, but wandered to and fro in the endless fields of dust, while the hot sun beat upon their heads and their hearts failed them for hunger and thirst.

But now and then a wary traveller did not believe the witch and laughed at her tears and soft voice. And then, unless he got away very quick, something dreadful happened to him. The witch suddenly changed into a huge monster with a hundred flaming eyes, and a hundred mouths with which she raved and bellowed, and a hundred long arms that coiled about like serpents. She was so terrible that most men who saw her in her true form fell down fainting at her feet; and these she lifted up and threw into deep dark holes, hidden from the road, where the poor wretches soon died of sheer loneliness.

And now comes the heart of the story, dear Jack, if you are not too tired to read to the end.

One day a knight and a lady came riding up the road. The knight was not very strong, nor was his armour much to look at,--just an ordinary knight, but he was brave, and there was a mighty determination in his heart to slay the false, wicked witch whose deeds he had heard of. And as he rode he turned often to look into his lady's eyes, and always he seemed to drink new courage from those clear pools, as a thirsty man drinks refreshment from a well of cool water, for the lady was young and passing fair--as fair as Miss Jessica, and she, you know, is the loveliest woman in all the world. And so at last they came to where the witch was sitting and weeping. Without a word the knight drew his sword and rushed upon her. Of course she changed instantly to the monster with the hundred eyes and mouths and arms. The air was filled with the fire from her eyes and with the dreadful bellowing from her mouths, and her arms swung frantically about on every side to seize the knight and crush him. But this was the strange thing about the battle: as often as the knight looked at the lady, who stood near him, he gained new strength and the witch could not harm him.

He was cutting off her arms one by one and victory was almost his, when down the road came an old man wagging his grey beard dolefully and muttering into his breast. And when he reached the three there at the roadside, he stood for a moment watching the battle and still muttering in his beard. Then without a word he beckoned to the lady. She hesitated, sighed, and turned away, leaving the poor knight to struggle alone without the blessing of her eyes. And immediately his strength seemed to abandon him and his sword dropped at his side. You may be sure the witch shouted with triumph at this, and the noise of her bellowing sounded like the clanging of a hundred discordant bells. It was almost over with the knight. But suddenly he too uttered a great cry. Despair came to give him strength where hope had been before. "For love and the world!" he cried out and drove at the monster once again with his uplifted sword.

And, dear Jack, do you wish to know how the battle ended? I am very, very sorry, but I can't tell you, for when I came through the forest the knight and the witch were still fighting. There was a look of desperate determination in the knight's eyes, but, to tell you the truth, I think his heart was with the lady who had left him, and it is not easy to fight without a heart in this world, you know.

Write to me soon, a long, long letter and tell me about the trees of Morningtown. Some day when you are grown up and live with men, you will be glad to remember the friendship and the wise conversation of those brothers of the forest. Good-bye for a time, my boy.

Affectionately, PHILIP TOWERS.

LIV

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

A wan beggar, seated on the coping that surrounds St. Paul's and exploiting his misery before the world. A strange scene calculated to give one pause,--the poor waif crying his distress on the curb, within the iron fence the ancient sleeping dead, and along the thoroughfare of Broadway the ceaseless unheeding stream of humanity. As I walked up the street with this image in my mind, the lines of an old Oriental poem kept time with my steps until I had converted them into English:

I heard a poor man in the grave-yard cry:
"Arise, oh friend! a little hour assume
My weight of cares, whilst I,
Long weary, learn thy respite in the tomb."
I listened that the corpse should make reply;
Who, knowing sweeter death than penury,
Broke not his silent doom.

I am reminded of that joke, rather grim forsooth, which Lowell thought the best ever made. It is in _The Frogs_ of Aristophanes. The god Dionysus and his slave Xanthias are travelling the road to Hades, the slave as a matter of course carrying the pack for the two. They meet a procession bearing a corpse to the tomb. Xanthias begs the dead man to take the pack with him as he is borne so comfortably on the same road to the nether world. Whereupon they dicker over the portage. "Two shillings for the job," says the corpse, sitting up on his bier. "Too much," says Xanthias. "Two shillings," insists the corpse. "One and sixpence," cries Xanthias. "_I'd see myself alive first_!" says the corpse, sinking down on the bier.

LV

JACK TO PHILIP

DEAR MR. TOWERS:

The young lady have the letter you wrote me and I cant get it. But you needent bother about writing any more tales. I guess you done the best you could, but we dont neither one like what you told about the witch and them young people in the forest. Why do the knight stand there fighting the witch when the old man have run off with his girl? Why dont he take out after them and leave the witch to bleed to death? And the young lady thinks of it worse than I do. She went on awful when she read it, and cried. I guess she was sorry about the way the knight kept on cutting off that woman's legs and arms even if she was bad. She don't say nothing else nice about you now, nor let me. But she says you are the crewelest man she have known. And she cries a heap when there aint nothing the matter, and blames at every thing. The old gentleman feels bad about it but he dont know what to do. I guess now he wishes he hadent fooled with the young lady's salvation none. Because she have told him one day when he was trying to talk pious at her, not to say nothing, that she dident believe in nothing now but damnation. And he say "Dont talk that way before the child." But I aint come to neither one of them things yet.

Your trew Frend,

JACK O'MEARA.

P.S.--She goes to see her tree spirit every day. But she dont talk to him no more. She just lays down on her face and cries.

LVI

PHILIP TO JACK

I am afraid, little Jack, that my long story about the lady and the knight in the woods did not interest you very much; and that is a pity, for, if I cannot amuse you, how shall I do when I come to write stories for grown-up folk? Well, anyway, I am going to tell you what happened after the lady and the old man went away into the forest.

For awhile they walked side by side in silence. But the road was long and it was already late, and by and by the night fell and wrapped all the trees in solemn shadows. It was not easy to keep the path in the darkness, and pretty soon they were quite lost and found themselves wandering helplessly in the black tangled aisles of the forest. That was bad, for the lady was tired in body and discomforted in heart. But worse happened when the old man left her to seek out the path alone, for he only lost himself more completely in the treacherous shadows and could not get back to her. Ah, Jack, if the lady was beautiful when the sunlight shone upon her, how lovely do you suppose she was here in the night with the white beams of the moon sifting down through the swaying boughs upon her blanched face? But her beauty merely frightened her the more in her terrible loneliness, where the only sound she heard was the stealthy whisperings of the breeze among the leaves, as if all the shadows up yonder were weaving some plot against her, while at times a low inarticulate moan or some sudden crackling of dry twigs floated to her out of the impenetrable gloom of the forest. At last she threw herself on her face under a great tree, and wept and wept for very terror and loneliness.

Now wonderful things may happen in the night, dear Jack. The trees then have a life of their own, and sometimes when the sun, which belongs to man only, is gone they have power to do what they please to foolish people who come into their circle. And so this tree that stood leaning over the prostrate lady whispered and whispered to itself in a strange language. Then out of the boughs there came creeping a dark cold shadow. It dropped down noiselessly to the ground and covered the lady all about. It moved and swayed in the faint moonlight like a column of wind-blown smoke. You will hardly believe the rest, but it seemed slowly to take the very shape of the lady herself, as if it were her own shadow that had found her; and so it began to creep into her body. And as it melted into her flesh, she grew cold and ever colder as if her blood were turning to ice. Pretty soon it would have reached her heart and then--I shudder to think what would have become of her. But when the first chill touched her heart, she uttered a loud cry of fear: "Dear knight, dear knight," she called out, "where are you? Save me! save me!"

Then another wonderful thing happened in the darkness, for at such times our spoken words may take on a life of their own just as the trees and shadows do. And so these words of the lady, instead of scattering in the air, were changed into a marvellous little fairy elf that went stealing away through the forest. And as the elf ran swiftly under the trees and over the long grass, so lightly indeed that the flowers and weeds only bowed under his feet as when a gentle breeze passes over them,--as the elf sped on, I say, everywhere the earth sent up a lisping whisper, "Save me, dear knight! save me!"

Now the knight was far away, resting from his battle with the old witch. He had wounded her in many places, and might perhaps have killed her, had not the sly wicked creature suddenly slipt away from him into some hiding place of hers in the desert. And so, as he could not reach her, he was resting, very tired and very sad. Then suddenly, as he sat with his head hanging down, the little elf came tripping over the grass and plucked him by the arm, and the faint whisper stole into his ear, "Save me, dear knight! save me!"

Do you suppose he was long in rising and following the clever little elf back to their mistress? Ah, Jack, there was a happy hour and a happy year and a blissful life for the lady and her knight then, was there not?

And now, Jack, I will not bother you with any more stories after this. Write to me and tell me all you are doing. Be good, little Jack, and listen to the wise words of the trees and other growing things; and, above all, love that sweet lady, Miss Jessica.

Affectionately,

PHILIP TOWERS.

LVII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY