Or, with neither sea nor boat anywhere in sight, we urged in loud rhythm an invisible sailor in danger of drowning to "pull for the shore." We bade him not mind the rolling waves (though none rolled), but "bend to the oar," though there was not the slightest semblance of oar to bend to. We urged him to leave the "poor old stranded wreck," though none was in sight, advised him not to "cling to self," whatever "self" might be, but rather to give all his efforts wholly and singly, as he loved life and valued safety, to pulling just as hard as he was able for dry land.

As to later experiences,-as to catechism and creed, I mean,-why should I dwell upon these, save that here was new and additional bewilderment?

I partook by inheritance from my mother's and father's people of two denominations. When from stark Presbyterianism I went at times to a more mitigated Episcopalianism; when I confessed strangely, but sonorously, that I was a miserable sinner and had no health in me; when I begged to be spared if I confessed my faults, and restored if I were penitent; the language was certainly far more pleasing, but I cannot see, considering my age and tastes and good health, that there was much improvement as to consistency.

But meanwhile all these things had their inevitable effect. They broke down, as they were well designed to do, your faith in your own reason and in your own reasonable judgment and observations. They overspread life with such dazzling contradictions that, just as in war-days it was often impossible to say whether a war-ship was more like a zebra or a zebra more like a warship, so now by turns you could not have told whether you were the rather stolid little girl you had innocently believed yourself to be, or a broken and empty vessel, a stranded sailor, a Christian soldier, a lost sheep, a jewel to be set in a crown, or a miserable sinner, without health in you.

The confusion at last grew so great that you were obliged to resort to headquarters (as it may be you were expected and intended to do) to find out the real state of your soul and identity from one supposed to be expert in these

matters. Day by day you lost selfconfidence; your complacency leaked away unsuspected, drop by drop. Less and less you thought for yourself, more and more you depended on your spiritual advisers. Uncertainty possessed you, doubt assailed you, fear beset you; you took to getting down on your knees in dark chambers and making passionate confession of the utter blackness of your really quite normal-colored heart; of the miserable unworthiness of your really very reasonably good little soul.

These things are mystifying. Indeed, were it some other little child, not myself, I could weep concerning those paroxysms of penitence that I remember over such innocent, innocent trifles. Children, it seems to me, are generous beyond all computation. The patience and good-natured endurance of them appear to me enormous. Ah, what might not be done with souls so willing, so biddable, I ask, if instead of giving them mystery, we were bent-we ourselves more clarified-on giving them truth!

But mystery continued to have its way with me. If I asked direct questions of the religious about the unknowable, I was told it was a mystery, a fact I already knew all too well. Directness, simplicity, sincerity, were losing ground. By no wish of my own I was being bound over to the majority of these people who it must be, by every assumption of their own and others, were my betters. They did not choose to use plain language. They spoke for the most part in riddles worse even than the bewildering bat. They made it approximately clear that mystery was a virtue.

Naturally enough, I tried to establish some balance between these teachings and my own insatiable desire to know, but the best result I obtained was a sense of shame at asking for explanations.

I wanted to be of this chosen company. Indeed, I believe that was the strongest desire of the whole experience; nor do I believe this desire was less, at bottom, than the instinctive age-old human yearning toward brotherhood. It can

not be, I feel sure, that the mysteriously worded prayer meant so much to my six- or seven-year-old heart; I feel fairly certain it was the fellowship, so flattering to my years. I can give you no

idea how it stirred me and lent me stature to bend my head on a plane of equality with all these grown-ups and to chant with them, after a sonorously read command that prohibited me from committing murder, "Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law." It was the part of the service I loved best, and if children of six kept note-books, I believe I should find many of them agreeing with me.

Conversely, almost the most painful moment of the morning was to me that one just following the tenth commandment, when the well-practised response changed suddenly after the petition for mercy. I could never make out that last wording about the writing of "all these thy laws in our hearts, we beseech thee." I kept my head on my hands like the rest, but was obliged to drop out miserably from the unison.

But if this experience in one church brought me such a sense of exile, what shall I say of that feeling of intolerable alienation produced by the doxology of the other?

Here was the very best moment of those palely stained-glass hours, the solemn united moment that bound you, and yet freed you to go into the living green pastures of the real world once more. It shrived you of weariness. You forgave whatever dull or doctrinary minister had detained you. How I joined with all my heart in the performance, and how other people joined also all the people, all those even who had hitherto had neither voice nor confidence to join in the more particular hymns, with their tricky omitted stanzas and often unsingable tunes! How the organ, like a chained creature freed at last, rolled and surged and went with a roar into the opening thunder! How every one rose at its great bidding, and drew their lungs solemnly full of air! Some stood a little on one foot, some leaned a trifle on the other, most of them placed both hands carefully on the back of the pew ahead. I recall that the chief deacon and wealthiest citizen always stretched his neck a bit and felt of his collar, as though to make sure it was in order and there was room enough for the voice he was about to employ.

Then the organ settled gorgeously at last, with a final great crash, into the melody. You glanced at your mother to make sure she was beginning (ah, how across the years I can hear my mother's fine, sympathetic alto!) then just a fraction behind her first note you joined in, too. How strong and full of praise the first line always was! So was the second; but, oh, the third! Midway of the third!

"Praise Him above, ye Hea—”

That was as far as my knowledge went. From there on I could not make out the words that were being sung. I was obliged either to drop out entirely or sing shamedly, miserably, without words, until the fourth line restored me and united me to the rest once more.

But, oh, that hiatus! Unless you have loved the singing of the doxology, as I did, and have, like me, in your sixth or seventh year, been without the knowledge of the latter half of that third line, how would it be possible to make you understand what its lack meant to me! How make you know the vanishings and fallings from me; the shame and longing, troubled pride, doubt, and uncertainty! It may seem to you I exaggerate, but I can still feel the trouble and hurt and loss and alienation of the unknown latter part of that third line.

Then, too, either I must have deceived my family, or they must have thought me too inconsiderable to have my doxology corrected, and either reading was. hard to bear.

It ended at last, when I was about ten, by my coming across the verse printed somewhere, and, without a word to anybody, appropriating greedily the lacking half of the third line, and incorporating it into the body of my future religious singing; but that was a late remedy of a long-endured mortification.

No, looking back, I think I cannot remember anything that more disconcerted and troubled me in all those early years than my incompetency and befogment as to the praise of God, and the obligation either to deceive or to drop out of the singing. I who so loved directness! I who so delighted in participation! There are many ways of humiliating childhood, but few indeed

so searching as either to shame it before the world or to deny it its fellowship.

Indeed, I find the conditions offered childhood hard. It can hardly be said we leave children any choice. It is true, they may, so to speak, take us or leave us. Ah, yes, but leave us for what? We offer them praise, approval, affection, all that they hold dearest in the world-in a word, fellowship in its fullest sense; but we offer it in the name of obscurity, on the condition of mystification and opacity. Let them renounce their love of exactness, eschew their early devotion to exploration, throw over and abandon the soul's persistent, godlike, ingrained, primordial desire to know, and accept in place of all these the humble willingness to be taught of those who have usurped by ancient apostolic or unapostolic claim the rights and copyrights of wisdom. Let them put off those proud childhood guesses and suspicions of a royal inheritance, and know they are "nothing, nothing!" Let them have done trailing those clouds of glory; put on sackcloth, touch their forehead with ashes, in token of humility and abasement, and learn from their elders how to behave themselves soberly of a Sunday. Let them believe as we do, and they will be welcomed into our communion; and, if that communion happens to be of a certain denomination, a hymn will even be sung by every one, standing, concerning a sheep that was miserably lost and at last safely brought back to the fold; or it may be one whose leading refrain is "Sinner, oh, sinner, come home!"

Yes, if they will believe as we do, and as we recommend, they may break bread with us. If they will give over questioning and capitulate, they shall have our approval. It is trying to settle matters for themselves that will put a ban upon them; it is the repeated effort to think for themselves and independent of us that will ostracize them and bring down on their heads the condemnation of society; it is the persistent desire to deal without ambassadors with divinity, direct, that will, so the legend we have fashioned goes, blast and utterly destroy them. Let them veil themselves thankfully in the mystery that affords us and them protection! Let them

give over hoping to find out questionable truth and, unquestioning, accept instead abstruse, undiscoverable, impenetrable doctrines, and be saved!

Yet alarming as all this must seem to those whose hopes are bound up with the eventual triumph of truth, perhaps we need not take too much thought for the morrow. It would not surprise me to find that nature, when too dangerously threatened, sets up, whether it be in so tiny a creature as the bee or in one of such unlimited powers as the human soul, some desire for selfprotection; and if we were sufficiently informed, it is not improbable we should find her always providing against a danger over-long endured. While the specially downright and logical young of our species undoubtedly suffer much at the hands of our habit of mystification, and the spirits most sensitively endowed with a love of truth, and therefore the most fit for high adventure, are, as a rule, the very ones most utterly lost to the world through this process of opacity, yet there are, to offset these, the better poised, the more normal, the more commonplace, if you like, the happy-go-lucky as well as the downright merry, who manage somehow to elude fairly well the atrophying effects of mystification; who preserve their good nature unspoiled, their interest in life unaffrighted, who manage to keep their balance, maintain their love of their kind, yes, and occasionally, and as a mere easy tour de force, coin such generally useful terms as "I should worry!"

I was speaking of some old childhood experiences lightly one night not long ago with a cousin of mine, from whom I had been separated since early years, but whose childhood I well remember as one of the most good-natured, frank, amusing, and lovable of my recollection. "What did you do, Mary my dear, as to the doxology?"

"What did you do?" She laughed.

"Oh, I just dropped out, and hummed miserably and tried and tried to catch the words of the third line. But I never could. I remember feeling so intolerably lonely and ashamed."

"Oh, I did n't," she said, with much the old happy, good nature; "I just sang it in full voice straight through."

"But what did you do about the 'heavenly host'?"

I've

"Oh, my dear," she managed to speak without the slightest irreverence, "the heavenly host did n't bother me a bit. I just sang as much as I could catch. 'Praise Him above, ye Hea-ye Ho-' I had n't the slightest idea what it meant. But that did n't matter. It was singing together that I liked. always liked it, in or out of church." Ah, that I understood. I found myself suddenly admiring and even reverencing that not too earnest spirit that so easily and in early years, without the egotism of embarrassment, chose the better part. "Ye Hea-ye Ho-" served well enough; the chief part of praise of divinity being still, no doubt, whether in or out of church, the brotherhood.

Yet there is more than the brotherhood that stays in my philosophy. I hope I have not seemed to be too critical of my elders. Though the greater number of their doctrines would seem to me like wilful befogment or worse, nevertheless I have come to years when I must admit that I hold these elders oftenest more pitiful than to blame. Moreover, so many of them, despite their behaviors in unfrankness, have nevertheless successfully and without much effort managed to command my affections and contrived to retain my devotion. Indeed, to speak truth, I have even come to believe that their mystification of children is not an altogether voluntary affair. I cannot get rid of the impression, as I look into the faces of those I know and do not know, of a tired evening, that they themselves are not entirely clear. A bewilderment is often evident in their eyes also. To me so many of them have the air of people who still hopefully await an explanation. I have strongly the impression, too, that some of them have, not in childhood only, desired, yes, and still desire with ineradicable longing, the moon, and have been offered an inadequate substitute through all the later years; have hoped not only once in early, unspoiled days, but persistently, with unconquerable hope, to solve the unsolvable; are indeed still trying, and have not yet been brought to "give up" the riddle of life, though it, like that of

the bat, seems to them equally without solution or syntax. I have the impression that though they, too, have been persistently desirous of knowing, hopeful of finding out, yet they also are much mystified. I have seen not infrequently the same questioning and almost bewildered look in the eyes of the old that I have seen in those of little children, and I am sometimes inclined to think the dear long-held questions of their hearts have hardly received better answers.

As to the religious-minded, though it seems to me they have for the most part been rather more practical, fashioning what they take to be shining virtues out of sometimes dark necessity, trading in mysteries, trying thriftily to exchange new ones for old, and economically assuming a wisdom even when they have it not; yet, as I have watched them, it has seemed to me at times that they do but duplicate in another sphere my old experience of the doxology. I seem to see them, too, like my diminutive self of other years, bent on acknowledging and lauding in concert some truths they cannot iterate and do as little understand; resolved on praising what they take to be some guiding Omnipotence, yet knowing very little accurately what they mean thereby. Sometimes I could swear I hear them all singing bravely, resolvedly, in full voice and together, only in another larger key, "Praise Him above, ye Hea―ye Ho-"

But, above all, among all these bewilderments, absurdities, riddles, contradictions, and incertitudes, I cannot be blind to a certain inviolable honor that abides; something in human nature which yet commands, though it cannot always deserve, our reverence. For it is by no means little children only, though they most obviously, who preserve in perpetuity the dignity of the race. Let be our follies and mistakes; the gentle and memorable fact remains that some dignity incorruptible resides sovereign in man's spirit, and, it would seem, must triumph at last inviolate in his destiny; that, despite the sphinxlike riddle of the gods, the soul itself, at its best, has no desire of its own to deceive, but, rather, stands generally hopeful and still desirous of finding truth.

OUNG Spode was not a snob; he was too intelligent for that, too fundamentally decent. Not a snob; but all the same he could not help feeling very well pleased at the thought that he was dining, alone and intimately, with Lord Badgery. It was a definite event in his life, a step forward, he felt, toward that final success, social, material, and literary, which he had come to London with the fixed intention of making. The conquest of Badgery was an almost essential strategical move in the campaign. Edmund, forty-seventh Baron Badgery, was a lineal descendant of that Edmund, surnamed Le Blayreau, who landed on English soil in the train of William the Conqueror. Ennobled by William Rufus, the Badgerys had been one of the very few baronial families to survive the Wars of the Roses and all the other changes and chances of English history. They were a sensible and philoprogenitive race. No Badgery had ever fought in any war, no Badgery had ever engaged in any kind of politics. They had been content to live and quietly to propagate their species in a huge machicolated Norman castle, surrounded by a triple moat, sallying forth only to cultivate their property and to collect their rents. In the eighteenth century, when life had become relatively secure, the Badgerys began to venture forth into civilized society. From boorish squires they blossomed into grands seigniors, patrons of the arts, virtuosi. Their property was large, they were rich; and with the growth of industrialism their riches also grew. Villages on their estate turned into manufacturing towns, unsuspected coal was discovered beneath the surface of their barren moorlands. By the middle of the nine

teenth century the Badgerys were among the richest of English noble families. The forty-seventh baron disposed of an income of at least two hundred thousand pounds a year. Following the great Badgery tradition, he had refused to have anything to do with politics or war. He occupied himself by collecting pictures; he took an interest in theatrical productions; he was the friend and patron of men of letters, of painters, and of musicians. A personage, in a word, of considerable consequence in that particular world in which young Spode had elected to make his success.

Spode had only recently left the university. Simon Gollamy, the editor of "The World's Review" ("the best of all possible worlds") had got to know him, he was always on the lookout for youthful talent, had seen possibilities in the young man, and appointed him art critic of his paper. Gollamy liked to have young and teachable people about him. The possession of disciples flattered his vanity, and he found it easier, moreover, to run his paper with docile collaborators than with men grown obstinate and case-hardened with age. Spode had not done badly at his new job. At any rate, his articles had been intelligent enough to arouse the interest of Lord Badgery. It was, ultimately, to them that he owed the honor of sitting to-night in the dining-room of Badgery House.

Fortified by several varieties of wine and a glass of aged brandy, Spode felt more confident and at ease than he had done the whole evening. Badgery was rather a disquieting host. He had a habit of changing the subject of any conversation that had lasted for more than two minutes. Spode had found it, for example, particularly mortifying when his host, cutting across what was, he prided himself, a particularly subtle