UNDER-RUNDER was in jail. He

was there for having talked too much, for saying things which the owners of the jail did not at all like, and which those who did not own the jail liked only too well.

The people of the country did not own the jail; that you must quite understand. It was owned by those of another country; the natives only paid for it. That was Bunder-Runder's complaint, or one of them. He did not yet know how good it was for a people not to own jails at all, and how much better it was to be in a jail than to own one. Would he ever find that out, do you think? What can a jail teach one?

In this jail Bunder-Runder was to remain for ten years. He was a young man, strong, rather beautiful. Women loved to look at him. They laughed when they saw him put forth his strength easily to do them a service; they laughed more when they put their children into his arms for him to play with. He had not yet any children of his own. That was soon to have been-love, marriage, and home. The vision he had long had of them was then to become a dear, kind, foolish reality, a little world of his own to shape and cherish and make grow, sweeter and more beautiful than all the bigger world around him. But now, no. That little world, on the making of which his mind had been bent, had fallen from his hand, shattered. Ten years!

"When I come out," Bunder-Runder said to himself, "I shall be old. Every one will have forgotten me. It will be like another world; my thoughts will not have gone into it, or anything I have done;

I shall not belong to it. I shall be old, but I shall have made nothing." And as he thought thus, his very blood seemed to be weeping-the warm, swift blood which ran strenuously through him, touching as with tears the heart and head and feet and hands, which henceforth were to be useless.

Every time he began thinking, grief took hold of his thoughts and drew them to the same end.

"I am shut up in walls," he cried. "It were better that I were dead." Just as his blood went weeping through his body, so through his brain his thoughts went weeping from place to place; round and round wearily they went, beating a highroad for grief to travel by.

After he had been in prison for a while, food was brought to him, and he ate; but he did not know why he ate.

"I am eating only to become old," he said to himself. "What good is that to me?" He left off eating.

But presently he grew so hungry that food seemed good to him again, and time not so long or so vain a thing as dying without having learned all that there was to learn.

So when food was again brought to him he ate, sitting to it in seemly fashion, with thoughts turned aside from grief for a while to the strange beauty and brotherhood of things which grew and were serviceable to man.

Then his mind went out to the ricefields, green and waving and changing color toward ripeness from day to day; changing, too, as the light fell on them, morning or evening, from east or west; and at night, under moon and stars, more

wonderfully changed still, and always different, yet always inwardly the same.

But as soon as he had finished eating, his thoughts came back to him with a shock, and he remembered that he was a prisoner.

"I shall see the rice-fields shining no more," he said, "till I am old. Then they will have ceased to shine, for then with my old eyes I shall no longer see them." And turning his face to the wall, he wept. It was always the same wall his thoughts came back to.

The same wall! wall been there?

How long had that How had it come? Who were the men that had built it? He began to look at and to examine it. It was strong, but it was not very old; not so old, he thought, as his own father. Yet it seemed older, for already within its narrow space many young lives had pined and faded and grown old waiting for freedom.

Then, as he bethought him, he knew how it had come, and what men had had the building of it. They were his own brothers, his countrymen; and they, not gladly or willingly, but being ordered to it and for payment, had built this wall to be a prison for themselves and others. They had drawn clay from the beds of dried rivers, they had made bricks, they had hewn stone and timber, they had mixed plaster and mortar, they had reared up beam and roof, cutting off light and air from the space below, dividing it into cells; and now into this space below he, their brother, had come to be kept, wasted and useless, to bury bit by bit, one day at a time, with nothing of change to make one seem different from another, the ten most beautiful years of his life, with all their gladness taken out of them.

"Oh, Brothers, why have you done this. to me?" he cried.

And suddenly his own thoughts answered for them.

"Because we could not help ourselves; because we are all broken parts of that which was meant to be one whole. All over the world men are building walls, dividing themselves each themselves each from each,

through ignorance and cruelty and fear. Because they don't know, that is why people are afraid of one another; and being afraid, they become cruel. That is why they build walls, not here only. All over the world it is the same-walls, walls. As walls grow rotten and old, as long as fear lasts, they will make us build others. in place of them."

Bunder-Runder laid his hand on his prison-wall; he felt the strength and the depth of it, how well it was built, what a lot of brick and stone lay there, imprisoned like himself, but for much longer a time. Of that imprisonment not ten or twenty or fifty years would see the end. "Brothers," said Bunder-Runder, "I am sorry for you. For your setting free is further away than mine; before you even begin to be old I shall be dead. Old age is good, is it not? But it is so far away."

it.

Thus to his prison-wall he spoke, pitying

Suddenly he had a thought: it stood up and looked at him. It seemed to be standing only on one foot, on the very point of a toe, as if to show, even without motion, how light and quick and alert it could be. Then it seemed as though it lifted a hand and beckoned to him.

"Let us go out!" it said.

"How can one go out through this wall?" said Bunder-Runder. "We are in prison."

"There is no wall that I cannot get through," said his thought. It gave a flick of its foot, and was gone. A moment later, and it was back again. "Outside there is sunshine," it said. "Yes," said Bunder-Runder, very attentive.

on.

"There has been rain," his thought went "The wells are all full, the streams are running down from the hills; the frogs are singing in the marshes, and the ricefields are beginning to look green." "I know," said Bunder-Runder. Other thoughts began cropping up thick and fast; in and out they went. It was quite true that there was no wall they could not get through.