'Yes, old miss'nary tell- Christ come. He come day 'fore Christmas; come up river at shade-time in dugout with hombre. He stay all night at Cispatia. They know at Cispatia.'

I sat stunned by the thought. This then was the reason for their reception and their gifts: this the reason for the muchacha's confidence.

It was an idea which made me tremble. How inconceivable their childish faith, how perfect their adoration! And I had taken their homage as a white man's due!

Very, very silent I sat, awed and oppressed by an overburdening sense of impotence. If only the King might have come to receive His Christmas tribute!

The canoe moved on. The tall grasses rustled in the breeze; in the distance I heard music. It was the solemn chant they had sung for me when I came; they were singing it again as I left them. Clear, sometimes shrill, ever tuneless, and yet motivated by a strangely recurring theme of joy, it came to me on the morning air. Fainter and fainter it grew, as the recessional fades in the anteroom of the cathedral; then the hushed pause, silence, and that sense of unutterable loneliness, of loss, even as when a star falls from the heavens and the light of the world seems dimmed.

Pedro leaned toward me.

'It is true, no es verdad? You are, - He?' you are

I HAVE seen:

The Irish famine of 1848. The rise of Fenianism. Gladstone and Home. Rule defeated. Parnell and defeat. The Great War and delay.

Then, result of all: the Irish Free State, and the Irish Free State represented at Washington.

The European Revolutions of 1848. France from a Republic to an Empire, passing through the Commune to the Republic.

The rise and fall of Prussia.

The birth of a new Germany and a new Russia.

A United Italy.

Emancipation of the Russian serf. The Indian Mutiny and the consequent taking-over of India from

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'John Company' (the East India Company) by the British Government.

The legislation of Lord Ripon. The later Montagu Act. The beginning of the modern process of India toward a self-governing community. The entrance of the Indian Princes into the World War as voluntary contribution and their publicly expressed reasons for so doing.

England, from a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, becoming under Disraeli an Empire; now, 'A Commonwealth of Free Nations.'

A peasant's son, MacDonald, Prime Minister.

The great series of Factory Acts; the protection of women and children in industry and mining.

Women as factory inspectors, with all it means for decency and security. The work of Octavia Hill and all that has grown from it.

The beginnings of tenement-house and sanitary-housing legislation.

Mr. Charles Brace's work in New York. Formation of the Children's Aid Society.

The Charity Organization Society; the first coördinated attempt to deal intelligently with pauperism and poverty.

The end of Negro slavery in America. The work of Booker Washington, of Hampton, Calhoun, and so forth.

The devoted work of Josephine Butler, wife of an Anglican clergyman, in connection with the Contagious Diseases Act. Beginning of the battle for the protection of woman and of the unborn child.

The pamphlet by Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant. Forbidden. To-day the advertisement of Dr. Marie Stopes's books on the same subject, on the open front page of The Nation and the Athenæum, and she herself among the latest presentations at Court! (Shades of Queen Victoria!)

The Einstein theory of relativity. Colleges for women. All trades and professions open to women.

From the ox at the plough to the tractor.

Applied electricity, probably at the beginning of its possibilities.

Striving toward prison and criminal reform. Toward wiser, saner, curative sentences for the criminal.

The X-ray. Preventive medicine and inoculation against disease.

Radium with its immense potentialities.

Darwinism with all it implies of revolution in thought.

Modern psychology with its unlimited possibilities in every sphere of man's life and work.

Changed attitude toward divorce and illegitimacy. More humane.

I have seen twelve wars. Mexican War. Crimean War. War for Italian independence. Indian Mutiny. Our Civil War. Prussia against Denmark, Prussia annexing Schleswig-Holstein. Prussia against Austria. Prussia

The dawning idea of the conservation of natural resources, forests, water power, and so forth.

The building of the great railways that have connected the two oceans, making possible the building-up of the Great West.

Practical discovery of mineral oil and its general and expanding use. The motor engine and car. The airplane.

General use in medicine and surgery of anaesthetics.

The Atlantic cable.

The changed status of women as regards property-holding and guardianship of children.

Woman suffrage.

sace-Lorraine. Russo-Turkish. United States and Spain. Russo-Japanese. The World War.

The renewed questioning and life in the churches; a new consciousness of social responsibility.

A new feeling, growing steadily, concerning war and peace.

Education toward the idea of internationalism.

A deepening and strengthening interest in Christ and the implications of his moral and spiritual thought. 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren.'

The thrilling development in archæology and Biblical criticism, from the child's reading of Layard's Nineveh and Stephens's Central America, to the

The growth of trade-unionism from small insignificant groups to the power that can stop the wheels of industry and touch directly every home in the land. Trade-unionism, through threatened strike, can force the Adamson Bill, which freed them from trust restrictions by which the trusts, corporations, and so forth, are bound. Frees them from much social responsibility and is a temptation.

Labor buying into the industries where employed. Formation of labor banks.

The startling growth of capital and organized capitalism with the terrible temptation to the abuse of power. These two groups of organized power face each other.

We have passed from the day of small things; the world is big and round, there are no antipodes! What we make and what we are is needed everywhere. Much of the work can be done only by great groups, wholesale methods, international relations, great capital of brains, money, skill, and of high morality.

Regulation of corporations, a great and delicate responsibility, till great lessons of honesty and moral and generous responsibility are learned.

There seems to me to be an underlying purpose running through all these enormous activities and accumulations -the gaining a world surplus to be used in the next inevitable step of coöperation and expansion.

We must have a surplus of mind and heart from which to fructify the world, to lend on a grand scale where that way is better, to give greatly when that is best of all.

Another great step I have seen: the man of great wealth feels himself neither safe nor happy unless he gives largely and publicly to found or to carry on great good things for humanity. Money flows like water for great and noble objects, for great purposes, for objects of beauty open to the study and happiness of the poorest.

And now comes the greatest gain of all I have seen in my eighty-one years of pilgrimage - a steadily increasing idea of the beauty of service, a deepening consecration to the service of the individual and to the world.

The modernist says, with reason, that the strong have taken more than their right; the spiritual indictment is that we are unworthy citizens of the City of God and of the Kingdom of Heaven.

It happened, it happened occasionally, and whenever it happened it was unforgettable. I speak of days gone, long years old by this time; and I speak of a school, what we call a 'private' school, that flourished once in a big white house among lawns and trees, facing the North Sea from the coast of Kent; and I speak of the good man who ruled the school, and of his attendant ushers, and how they tried to quicken the mind of a small, and not very soaring, human boy. And what happened occasionally was that they succeeded, not often, I think, but now and then, and always does n't it seem? - at times when they forgot to try. For so it is; the imagination that will not bestir itself for any word of command or instruction is aroused unfailingly by the sight of the preacher or teacher who forgets-forgets where he is, forgets the small boy, forgets himself, lost in the contemplation of something of his own, an emotion apart, a secret. I remember the sight forever when I have seen it; and here it is now, a pretty possession, as good as new after many years.

It may seem hopeless to exhort and to preach to us, bidding us use our eyes and our wits; and in general it is hopeless, for whatever we are told by the old man and his ushers will have an inherent weakness and taint. It is what they would tell us, it is what we should expect of them. Their teaching has always to reckon with the shrewd and skeptical spirit in which I meet it. They may be right—I am not concerned to deny it; but there is this to

remember from the first about their doctrine, that right or wrong it is the regular thing and the natural order. Everybody knows that when we sit in school for the daily task, or when we are lectured and found fault with, or when we are addressed with kindly and paternal suasion - everybody knows from the beginning that it could n't be otherwise, that this is the appointed style; it is to be counted on with confidence, for it is simply the way of the world. I don't disbelieve absolutely in what I am told and taught; I often find it curious and entertaining; but I meet it inevitably with a doubt and a shade of reserve. Our teachers are part of the great established scheme and they voice its ordinances; and for this reason it is difficult to take them as seriously as perhaps they deserve to be taken.

But it does happen now and then that they forget themselves. In these moments there is no mistaking the new tone of the old man's voice, the absent stare of his eye or the suddenly thoughtful tilt of his head; we know his ordinary ways so well that the least departure from them catches our attention in a flash. This is a glimpse of the real thing, a sight of the old man as he is when no one is looking. Sometimes he thus betrays himself in the middle of a lesson in school, lapsing away into his private mind, dropping the familiar mask; at such a moment I instantly begin to notice and to wonder. I am not thinking of the common and wellknown occasions when we start one of our pastors off on some ridiculous topic

that he never can resist, some foolish fancy that he can always be made to chatter about with a little encouragement; this is a simple game he babbles contentedly, the strain is relaxed, we take our ease. No, the real glimpse of him off his guard is a quite different matter. It is rare and unexpected and accidental; its virtue is in the fact that it is incalculable. Years afterward I remember it, a luminous point in the gray desert of routine; and I begin to see how potently it wrought upon the shooting of a very young idea.

Look at this, for example — look at the little scene. The old man on this occasion was standing in front of the big blackboard, facing his class for a lesson in the Odes of Horace; and we sat at our desks before him, waiting for the proceedings to begin in the timehonored style. A lesson of Horace is 'construing,' and somebody is 'put on to construe’· - which means that he stands up in his place and opens the ball by reading a stanza aloud in Latin. Then he pauses and looks back, picks out a likely word, it should be something we term a 'nom'ative,' repeats it, translates it into English; and that accounts for the 'nom'ative,' and the first step is accomplished. He casts about again and finds a 'verb,' and so far it is n't really difficult; but doubts begin to gather very quickly, the track is lost, the featureless words stare from the page without a sign. The pauses lengthen, the old man grows impatient, till the construer desperately plunges, is pulled back, is shoved forward; and gradually word after word is dealt with and put behind him, a meaning has been provided for each of them, and the construing of the stanza is achieved.

Now we look up, waiting to learn who is to tackle the next lines; and when he is named the rest of us feel reprieved, and we sit patient while he settles the business of the second stanza;

and I discover with a jump that he has finished it, and that I myself am being called upon for the third. Well, one does what one can. There is peace for the construer when he resumes his seat, peace until the end of the hour; and at last the entire lesson is disposed of and the old man satisfied on the whole. We have construed an ode of Horace. That is the time-honored everyday style. But one morning the old man, standing before the blackboard, his hands clutching his coat, picture him with a mild and venerable and kindly face, spectacled, his big domed head scholastically bald above a fringe of close gray curls; clerically dressed in black, low-collared, white-tied; his eyes rather dim and vague behind his glasses, gazing peacefully: there he is! - one morning he stood in front of us at the beginning of the lesson, and instead of putting somebody on to construe he waited, he stared over our heads; and then he broke out in a gentle mournful chant upon the opening words of our ode. He seemed to be saying them to himself - he knew them by heart. Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume he had a tuneful and flexible voice, and he threw into it a pensive lament as he dwelt upon the repeated name. Postume Postume - oh, how time flies, how helplessly we see it vanish, how soon we are faced by the assault of age! He chanted the words very musically and appealingly — yet not quite seriously either, not sentimentally, but rather as if he liked to join company with an old friend, old popular Horace, in a plaintive strain that he did n't mean very seriously; for these regrets and laments, they belong to the smooth philosophy of an honest poet, comfortable enough in his worldly wisdom and a companionable old poet, so life-seasoned, so familiar to a scholar who has known him by heart for fifty years. There is a touch of