Part 2 CHAPTER VIII. The Menace of the Sunlit Hill. I am writing on the 650th anniversary of the birth of Dante. The poet was born in 1265. I am writing in 1915. 650 years represent a tremendous slice of history, and these 650 years span a chasm between two specially notable crises in the annals of this little world. Dante was born in a year of battle and of tumult, of fierce dissension and of bitter strife. It was a year that decided the destinies of empires and changed the face of Europe. Such a year, too, is this in which I write, and writing look down the long, long avenue of the centuries that intervene. This morning, however, I am not concerned with the story of revolution and of conflict, of political convulsions and of nations at war. Such a study would have fascinations of its own, but I deliberately leave it that I may contemplate the secret history of a great, a noble and a tender soul. Edward Fitzgerald tells us that he and Tennyson were one day looking in a shop window in Regent Street. They saw a long row of busts, among which were those of Goethe and Dante. The poet and his friends studied them closely and in silence. At last Fitzgerald spoke. What is it, he said, which is present in Dante's face and absent from Goethe's? The poet answered, the divine. Now how did that divine element come into Dante's life? He has himself told us. Has the spiritual autobiography of Dante, as revealed to us in the introductory lines of his Inferno, ever taken that place among our devotional classics to which it is justly entitled? Surely the pathos, the insight, and the exquisite simplicity of that first page are worthy of comparison with the choicest treasures of Bunyan or of Wesley, of Brainerd or of Fox. Let us glance at it. One. I have heard many evangelists preach on such texts as, The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which is lost. It was necessary, of course, that they should explain to their audiences what they meant by this lost condition. Wisely enough, they have usually had recourse to illustration. The child lost in a London crowd, the ship lost on a trackless sea, the sheep lost among the lonely hills, the traveller lost in the endless bush. All these have been exploited again and again. From literature, one of the best illustrations is the moving story of Enoch Arden. When poor Enoch returns from his long sojourn on the desolate island, he finds that his wife, giving him up for dead, has married Philip, and that his children worship their new father. It is the garrulous old woman at the inn who tells him, never dreaming that she is speaking to Enoch. Says she, Enoch, poor man, was cast away and lost. He, shaking his grey head pathetically, repeated, muttering, cast away and lost. Again in deeper inward whispers, lost. But none of these illustrations are as good as Dante's. He opens by describing the emotions with which, at the age of thirty-five, his soul awoke. He was lost. In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray, gone from the path direct, and in to tell, it were no easy task how savage wild, that forest, how robust and rough its growth, which to remember only, might as may, renews in bitterness not far from death. Neither Bunyan's pilgrim in his city of destruction, nor his city of mansoul beleaguered by fierce foes, is quite so human or quite so convincing as this weird scene in the forest. The gloom, the loneliness, the silence, and the absence of all hints as to away out of his misery. These make up a scene that combines all the elements of adventure with all the elements of reality. Dante was lost and knew it. 2. The poet cannot tell us by what processes he became entangled in this jungle. How first I entered it I scarce can say. But it does not very much matter. The way by which he escaped is the thing that concerns us, and to this theme he bravely addresses himself. In his description of his earliest sensations in the dark forest, several things are significant. He clearly regarded it as a very great gain, for example, to have discovered that he was lost. I found me, he says. I found me in a gloomy wood, astray. Those three words, I found me, remind us of nothing so much as the record of the prodigal, and he came to himself. I am pleased to notice that it is of the incomparable story of the prodigal that Dante's opening confession reminds most of his expositors. Thus Mr. A. G. Ferris Howell, in his valuable little monograph on Dante, observes that this finding of himself shows that he has got to the point reached by the prodigal's son when he said, I will arise and go to my father. He found, that is to say, that he had altogether missed the true object of life. The wild and trackless wood, Mr. Howell goes on to observe, represents the world as it was in thirteen hundred. Why was it wild and trackless? Because the guides appointed to lead men on to temporal felicity in accordance with the teachings of philosophy and to eternal felicity in accordance with the teachings of revelation, the emperor and the pope, were both of them false to their trust. So here was poor Dante, only knowing that he was hopelessly lost, and unable to discover among the undergrowth about him any suggestion of a way to safety. 3. Suddenly the vision-beautiful breaks upon him. He stumbles blindly through the forest until he arrives at the base of a sunlit mountain. A mountain's foot I reached where closed the valley that had pierced my heart with dread. I looked aloft and saw his shoulders broad, already vested with that planet's beam, who leads all wanderers safe through every way. The hill is, of course, the life he feigned would live, steep and difficult, but free from the mists of the valley and the entanglements of the wood. And is it not illumined by the sun of righteousness, who leads all wanderers safe through every way? He stepped out from the valley and cheerfully commenced the ascent. And then his troubles began. One after the other, wild beasts barred his way and dared him to persist. His path was beset with the most terrible difficulties. Now here, if anywhere, the poet betrays that spiritual insight, that flash of genuine mysticism that entitles him to rank with the great masters. For whilst he wandered in the murky wood, no ravenous beasts sailed him. Their life, however unsatisfying, was at least free from conflict. But as soon as he assayed to climb the sunlit hill, his way was challenged. It is a very ancient problem.  John Bunyan was arrested by the same inscrutable mystery. Why should he and his pilgrim progress be so storm-beaten and persecuted, whilst the people who abandoned themselves to folly enjoyed unbroken ease? I have often thought of the problem when out shooting. The dog invariably ignores the dead birds and devotes all his energy to the fluttering things that are struggling to escape. In the stress of the experience itself, however, such comfortable thoughts do not occur to us, and it seems passing strange that whilst our days in the wood were undisturbed by hungry eyes or gleaming fangs, our attempt to climb the sunlit hill should bring about us a host of unexpected enemies. Many a young and eager convert, fancying that the Christian life meant nothing but rapture, has been startled by the discovery of the beasts of prey awaiting him. Four. And such beasts. Trouble seemed to succeed trouble. Difficulty followed on the heels of difficulty. Peril came hard upon Peril. Scarce the ascent began when low, a panther nimble, light, and covered with a speckled skin appeared. Nor when it saw me vanished, rather strove, to check my onward going, that off-times, with purpose to retrace my steps, I turned. He had scarcely recovered from the shock, and driven this Peril from his path, when— A new dread succeeded, for in view a lion came against me as it appeared, with his head held loft and hunger mad, that in the air was fear struck, a she-wolf was at his heels, who in her leanness seemed, full of all wants, and many a land hath made, disconsolate ere now. She with such fear, or whelmed me, at the sight of her appalled, that of the height all hope I lost. The panther, the lion, and the wolf. That is very suggestive, and we must look into this striking symbolism a little more closely. Five. The three fierce creatures that challenge Dante's ascent of the sunlit hill, represent evils of various kinds and characters. If a man cannot be deterred by one form of temptation, another will speedily present itself. It is, as the old prophet said, as if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him, or went into the house and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him. If one form of evil is unsuccessful, another instantly replaces it. If the panther is driven off, the lion appears, and if the lion is vanquished, the lean wolf takes its place. But there is more than this hidden in the poet's parable. Did Dante intend to set forth no subtle secret by placing the three beasts in that order? Most of his expositors agree that he meant the panther to represent lust, the lion to represent pride, and the wolf to represent avarice. Lust is the besetting temptation of youth, and therefore the panther comes first. Pride is the sin to which we succumb most easily in the full vigor of life. We have won our spurs, made away for ourselves in the world, and the glamour of our triumph is too much for us. And avarice comes, not exactly in age, but just after the zenith has been passed. The beasts were not equidistant. The lion came sometime after the panther had vanished, but the wolf crept at the lion's heels.  Assuming that this interpretation be sound, two other suggestions immediately confront us, and we must lend an ear to each of them in turn. 6. The three creatures differed in character. The panther was beautiful. The lion was terrible. The wolf was horrible. Although the poet knew full well the cruelty and deadliness of the crouching panther's spring, he was compelled to admire the creature's exquisite beauty. The hour, he says. The hour was morning's prime, and on his way, aloft the sun ascended with those stars, that with him rose, when love divine first moved, those its fair works, so that with joyous hope, all things conspired to fill me, the gay skin, of that swift animal, the mat and dawn, and the sweet season. The lion, on the other hand, is the symbol of majesty and terror. But the lean she-wolf was positively horrible. Her hungry eyes, her gleaming fangs, her panting sides, filled the beholder with loathing. Her leanness seemed full of all wants. The poet says that the very sight of her or whelmed and appalled him. Dante himself confessed that, of the three, he regarded the last as by far the worst of these brutal foes. Now I fancy that, in the temptations that respectively assail youth, maturity and decline, I have noticed these same characteristics. As a rule, the sins of youth are beautiful sins. The appeals to youthful vice are invariably defended on aesthetic grounds. The boundary line that divides high art from indecency is a very difficult one to define. And it is so difficult to define, because the blandishments to which youth succumbs are, for the most part, the blandishments of beauty. Like the panther, vice is cruel and pitiless, yet the glamour of it is so fair that it blends with the mat and dawn and the sweet season. The sins that bring down the strong man, on the other hand, are not so much beautiful as terrible. The man in his prime goes down before those terrific onslaughts that the forces of evil know so well how to organize and muster. They are not lovely. They are Leonine. And is it not true that the temptations that work havoc in later life are, as a rule, unalluring, hideous and difficult to understand? The world is thunderstruck. It seems so incomprehensible that, after having survived his struggle with the beauteous panther and the terrible lion, a man of such metal should yield to a lean and ugly wolf. 7. The other thing is this. There is a distinction in method, a difference in approach, distinguishing these three beasts. The panther crouches, springs suddenly upon its unsuspecting prey, and relies on the advantage of surprise. Such are the sins of youth. Alas, as George McDonald so tersely says. Alas how easily things go wrong, a sigh too deep or a kiss too long, there follows a mist and a weeping rain, and life is never the same again. The lion meets you in the open and relies upon his strength. The wolf simply persists. He follows your trail day after day. You see his wicked eyes, like fireflies, stabbing the darkness of the night. He relies not upon surprise or strength, but on wearing you down at the last. Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth, having beaten off the panther, beware of the lion and the wolf. And still more imperatively, let him that thinketh he standeth, having vanquished both the panther and the lion, take heed lest he fall at last to the grim and frightful persistence of the lean she-wolf. It is just six hundred and fifty years today since Dante was born, but as my pen has been whispering these things to me, the centuries have fallen away like a curtain that is drawn. I have saluted across the ages a man of like passions with myself, and his brave spirit has called upon mine to climb the sunlit hill in spite of everything. Chapter 9 Among the Ice-Bergs Not so very long ago, and not so very far from this Tasmanian home of mine, I beheld a spectacle that took me completely by surprise, and even now baffles my best endeavors to describe it. I was on board a fine steamship four days out from Hobart, in the early afternoon, as I was rising from a brief siesta, I was startled by a voice exclaiming excitedly, Oh, do come, and see what a splendid iceberg! I confessed that at first I entertained to the notion with a liberal allowance of caution. I was afflicted with very grave suspicions. At sea folk are apt to forgive the calendar, and every day in the year has an awkward way of getting itself mistaken for the first of April. But the manifest earnestness of my informant bore down before it all based doubts, and I was sufficiently convinced to hurry up to the promenade deck. I looked eagerly far out to port, and then to starboard, but nothing was to be singing. It was the old story of water, water, everywhere. My suspicions returned in an aggravated form. Indignantly I sought out my informant and preemptorily demanded production of the promised iceberg. It's dead ahead, he replied calmly, and can therefore only be seen as yet from the bowels. To the bowels I accordingly hastened, and there I found a crowd comprising both passengers and crew already congregated. And surely enough I then and there beheld the most magnificent and awe inspiring natural phenomenon upon which these eyes ever rested. Right ahead of the ship there loomed up on the far horizon what appeared, under an overcast, bled-in-sky, to be a fair-sized island with a high and rocky coast. In the distance stood a tall rugged peak, as of a mountain towering up like a monarch coldly proud of his desolate island realm. The whole stood out strikingly gloomy and forbidding against the distant eastern skyline. But hey, presto! Even as we watched it, in less time than it takes to tell, a wonderful transformation scene was enacted before our eyes. Suddenly from over the stern the sun shone out, flinging all its radiant splendors on the colossal object of our undivided attention. In the twinkling of an eye, as if by magic, that which but a second ago might have passed for a barren rocky island, was transformed into a brilliant mass of dazzling whiteness. Everything seemed to have been transfigured. A fairyland of pearly palaces, flashy with diamonds and emeralds, could not have eclipsed its glories now. There it still stood, indescribably terrible and grand, right in our track, as though daring as to approach any near to its gleaming purities. And as the sunlight refracted about it, all the colors of the rainbow seemed to play around its brow. Moreover, the genial warmth produced another wonder. Four, under its benign influence, the glittering peaks gave off columns of vapor. They seemed to smoke like volcanoes. In the mellow summer sun, the icebergs won by one. Caught a spark of quickening fire, every turret smoked a censor, every pinnacle a pyre. The wonder grew upon us as we watched, and yet, straight on, our good ship held her way, her course unaltered and her speed unabated, as if fascinated by the majestic beauty before her. She was eager to dash herself to pieces at the feet of such pure and awful loveliness. Ever greater and ever more splendid it appeared as the distance lessened between us and it, until we really seemed to be approaching an almost perilous proximity. Then, of a sudden, the ship swerved to the northward, and we ran by within a few hundred yards of the icy monster, who could help recalling the adventure of Colorida's ancient mariner. And now there came both mist and snow, and it grew wondrous cold. And ice, massed high, came floating by, as green as emerald. And through the drifts the snow and cliffs did send a dismal sheen. Nor shapes of men nor beasts we can, the ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around. They cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a swine. Or Tennyson's lovely simile, wherein he says that we ourselves are like. Floating lonely icebergs are crisps above the ocean, with deeply submerged portions united by the sea. Then once again the fickle sun veiled his face. And that which had appeared at first as a rocky island in mid-ocean, and afterwards as a flashing palace of crystals, now seemed a dull whiteness, as of one huge mass of purest chalk. The heavy southern seas were dashing angrily against it, seeming jealously to resent its escape from their own frozen dominions. And the great clouds of spray which, as a consequence, were hurled into mid-air gave an added grandeur to a spectacle that seemed to need no supplementary charms. For miles around the sea was strewn with enormous masses of floating ice, some as large as an ordinary two-story house, and all of the most fantastic shapes, which had apparently swarmed off from the main bird. One long row of these, stretching out from the monster-right across the ship's course, looked for a moment not unlike a great ice reef connected with the bird, and caused no little anxiety, until the line of apparent peril had been safely negotiated. When we were clean abreast a gun was fired from the bridge of the steamer in order, I understand, to ascertain from the rapidity and volume of the echo the approximate distance, and, by deduction, the size of our polar acquaintance. Nor were there wanting those who were saying guine enough to expect that the atmospheric vibration set in operation by the explosion might finish the work of dislocation, which any cracks or fissures had already begun, and bring down at least some tottering peaks or pinnacles. Sir John Franklin, in one of his northern voyages, saw this feat accomplished. But, if any of my companions expected to witness a similar phenomenon, they had reckoned without their host, the unaffected dignity of the soul and monster mocked our puny effort to bring about his downfall. Berkeley scorned the ridiculous weapons of the pygmies. The dull booming of the gun started a thousand weird echoes on the desolate ice. They snarled out their remonstrance at our intrusion upon their wanton solitude, and then again lapsed soquely into silence. The temperature dropped instantly, and I recall the famous saying of Dr. Thomas Guthrie, whose life I had just been reading. In one of his speeches before the sonnade of Angus and Mirrens, he said, I know of churches that would be all the better of some little heat. An iceberg of a minister has been floated in among them, and they have cooled down to something below zero. An iceberg of a minister, I think of the nipping air on board when our ship was in the midst of the ice, and the memory of it makes me shiver. An iceberg of a minister!  The long-sustained excitement to which these events had given rise had scarcely began to subside when the cry arose. An iceberg on the starboard bow! This, in its turn, was speedily succeeded by another. Then an iceberg on the port bow! And yet once more another, till we were literally surrounded by icebergs. At tea-time we could peep through the saloon portholes at no fewer than five of these polar giants. Although most of them were larger than our first acquaintance, at least one of them being about three miles in length, none of these later appearances succeeded in arousing the same degree of enthusiasm as that with which we hailed the advent of the first. For one thing the charm of novelty had, of course, begun to wear off. And for another they were of a less romantic shape, most of them being perfectly flat, as though sun-grey polar plain were being broken up, and we were being favored with the superfluous territory in casual installments. And, by the way, speaking of the shape of icebergs, I am told that the icebergs of the two hemispheres are quite different in shape. The arctic bergs being irregular in outline with lofty pinnacles and glittering domes, while the Antarctic bergs are generally speaking, flat-topped, and of less fantastic form. The delicate traceries of the far north do not reflect themselves in the sturdier and more matter-of-fact monsters of the south. The appearance of icebergs in such numbers of such dimensions in these latitudes, and at this time of the year, constitutes, I am credibly informed, a very unusual, if not, indeed, a quite unique experience. The theory was for the advance that some volcanic disturbance had visited the polar regions and had dislodged these massive fragments. However, that may be, we were not at all sorry that I had fallen to our happy lot to behold a spectacle of such sublimity, and when we reflected that less than one-tenth of each mass was visible above the waterline, we were able to form a more adequate appreciation of the stupendous proportions of our gigantic neighbors. Reflecting upon this aspect of the matter, I remembered to have heard, in my college days, a popular London preacher make excellent use of this phenomenon. When, he said impressively, when you are tempted to judge sin from its superficial appearance and to judge it leniently, remember that sins are like icebergs, the greater part of them is out of sight. A certain amount of anxiety was felt, I confess, by most of us, as night cast her sable mantle over sea and ice. A certain amount of anxiety was felt, I confess, by most of us, as night cast her sable mantle over sea and ice. To admire an iceberg in broad daylight is one thing. To be racing on amidst a crowd of them, by night, is quite another. Ice, however, casts around it a weird warning light of its own, which makes its presence perceptible even in the darkest night. So all night long the good ship sped bravely on her ocean track, and all night long the captain himself kept cold and sleepless vigil on the bridge. When morning broke three fresh icebergs were to be seen away over the stern, but we had now shaped a more northerly course, and we therefore waved adieu to these magnificent monsters, which we were so delighted to have seen, and scarcely less pleased to have left. They will doubtless have melted from existence long before they will have melted from our memories. Yes, they will have melted, and that reminds me of another famous saying of the great Thomas Guthrie, a saying which is peculiarly to the point to just now. The existence, he said, of the Mohammedan power in Turkey is just a question of time. Its foundations are year by year wearing away, like that of an iceberg which has floated into warm seas. And, as happens with that creation of a cold climate, it will by and by become top-heavy. The center of gravity being changed, and it will topple over.  Ah, what a commotion to be sure! They will have melted. Silly things! They grew weary of that realm of white and stainless purity, to which they once belonged. They broke away from their old connections and set out upon their long, long drift. They drifted on and on towards the mile or north, on and on towards warmer seas, on and on towards the balmy breath and ceaseless sunshine of the tropics, and in return the sunshine destroyed them. Yes, the sun's shine destroyed them. I've seen something very much like it in the church and in the world. Therefore, says a great writer, who had himself felt the fatal lure of too much sunshine. Therefore let us take the more steadfast hold of the things which we have heard. Lest at any time we drift away from them, it is a tragedy, of no small magnitude when, like the iceberg, a man is lured by sparkling summer seas to his own undoing. End of Part 2, Chapter 1 Part 3, Chapter 1 of Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies by Frank W. Borum Part 3, Chapter 1, A Box of Tin Soldiers No philosophy is worth its salt, unless it can make a boy forget that he has the toothache. And the philosophy which I am about to introduce has triumphantly survived that exacting ordeal. That Jack had the toothache everybody knew. The expression of his anguish resounded dismally through the neighborhood. The evidence of it was visible in his swollen and distorted countenance. Poor Jack! All the standard cures, old-fashioned and new-fangled, had been tried in vain. All but one. It was that one that at last relieved the pain, and it is of that one that I now write. It happened that Jack was within a week of his birthday. His parents, who were busy people, might easily have overlooked that interesting circumstance had not Jack's chance to allude to it every opportune and inopportune moment during the previous month or so. Indeed, to guard against accidents, Jack had enlivened the conversation at the breakfast table morning by morning with really ingenious conjectures as to the presence by which his personal friends might conceivably accompany their congratulations. His expressions of disappointment in certain superstitious cases, and of unbounded delight in others, was quite affecting. Now Jack's father is afflicted by a wholesale dread of shopping. If a purchase must need to be made, Jack's mother has to make it. But Jack's mother labors under one severe disability. As Jack himself often tells her, and certainly he ought to know, she doesn't understand boys. The difficulty is therefore surmounted on this wise. Jack's mother visits the Emporium, carefully avoids all those goods and chattels of which she has heard her son speak with such withering disdain, selects eight or ten of the articles that he has chance to mention in tones of undisguised approval, orders these to be sent on approval at an hour at which Jack will be sure to be at school, and leaves to her husband the responsibility of making the final decision. Now this unwieldy parcel was still lying under the bed in the spare room on that faithful morning when Jack became smitten with toothache. Every other nostrum having failed, the mind of Jack's mother strangely turned to the toys under the bed. A woman's mind is an odd piece of mechanism and works in strange ways. No doctor under the sun would dream of prescribing a box of tin soldiers as a remedy for toothache, yet the mind of Jack's mother fastened upon that box of tin soldiers. It was just as cheap as some of the other remedies to which they had so desperately resorted, and it could not possibly be less efficacious. And there would still be plenty of toys to choose from for the birthday present. Out came the box of soldiers, and off went Jack in greatest glee. Half an hour later his mother found him in the back garden. He had dug a trench two inches deep, piling up the earth and protective heaps in front of it. All along the trench stood the little tin soldiers, heroically defying the armies of the universe. And the toothache was ancient history. Jack managed to get his little tin soldiers into a tiny two-inch trench. But, as a matter of serious fact, these diminutive warriors have occupied a really great place in the story of this little world.  Let one of these unfortunates bend his unconsecrated energies to the writing of a book on the influence of toys in the making of men. Only the other day an antiquarian, digging away in the neighborhood of the pyramids, came upon an old toy chest. Here were dolls, and soldiers, and wooden animals, and indeed all the play things that make up the stock and trade of a modern nursery. It is pleasant to think of those small Egyptians in the days of the Pharaohs amusing themselves with the self-same toys that beguile our own childhood. It is pleasant to think of the place of the toy chest in the history of the world from that remote time down to our own. But I must not be deflected into a discussion of the whole tremendous subject of toys. I must stick to these little tin soldiers. And these small metallic warriors cut a really brave figure in our history. Some of the happiest days in Robert Louis Stevens's happy life were the days that he spent as a boy in his grandfather's manse at Cullington. That was my golden age, he used to say. He never forgot the rickety old fayton that drove into Edinburgh to fetch him. The lovely scenery on either side of the winding country road, or the excited welcome that always awaited him when he drove up to the man's door. But most vividly of all he remembered the box of toy soldiers, the marshalling of huge armies on the great mahogany table, the play of strategy, the furious combat, and the final glorious victory. The old gentleman sat back in his spacious armchair, cracking his nuts and sipping his wine, whilst his imaginative little grandson in his velvet suit controlled the movements of armies in the fates of empires. The love of those little tin soldiers never foresaw him. Later on, at Davos, an exile from home, fighting bravely against that terrible melody that had marked him as its prey, it was to the little tin soldiers that he turned for comfort. The tin soldiers most took his fancy, says Mr. Lloyd Osborne, and the war game was constantly improved and elaborated until, from a few hours, a war took weeks to play, and the critical operations in the attic monopolized half our thoughts. On the floor a map was roughly drawn in chalk of different colors, with mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, and roads in two colors. The mimic battalions marched and counter-marched, changed by measured evolutions from column formation to line, with cavalry screens in front and mass supports behind in the most approved military fashion of today. It was war in miniature, even to the making and destruction of bridges, the entrenching of camps, good and bad weather, with corresponding influence on the roads, siege and horse artillery proportionally slow as compared with the speed of unimpeded feet and proportionally expensive in the upkeep, and an exacting commissariat added the last touch of verisimilitude.  They were with him in boyhood at Cullington, they were with him in maturity at Davos, and they were in at the death. For in the familiar house at Valima, the house on the top of the hill, the house from which his gentle spirit passed away, there was one room dedicated to the little tin soldiers. The great colored map monopolized the floor, and the tiny regiments marched or halted at their frail commander's will. One could multiply examples almost endlessly. We'd need not have followed Robert Louis Stevenson halfway around the world. We might have visited Ireland and seen Mr. Parnell's box of toys.  Fanny commanded one division of tin soldiers on the nursery floor. Charles led the opposing force. Each general was possessed of a pop gun, and swept the serried lines of the enemy with this terrible weapon. For several days the war continued without apparent advantage being gained by either side. But one day everything was changed. Strange as it may seem, Fanny's soldiers fell by the score and by the hundred, while those commanded by her brother refused to waver even when pepably hit. This went on until Fanny's army was utterly annihilated. But Charles confessed, an hour later, to before opening fire that morning, he had taken the precaution to glue the feet of his soldiers to the nursery floor. Did somebody discover in those war games at Cullington, Davos, and Veldima a reflection, as in a mirror, of the adventurous spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson? Or even more clearly, did somebody see in that famous fight on the nursery floor at Avondale a forecast of the great Irish leader's passionate fondness for outwitting his antagonists and overwhelming his bewildered foe? Let us glance at one other picture, and we shall see what we shall see. We are in Russia now. It is at the close of the 17th century. Yonder is a boy of whom the world will one day talk till its tongue is tired. They will call him Peter the Great. See, he gathers together all the boys of the neighborhood and plays with them. Plays? But at what? He plays soldiers, of course, says Veilouski, and naturally he was in command. Behold him then, at the head of a regiment. Out of this childish play rose that mighty creation, the Russian army. Yes, our Russian author goes on to explain. Yes, this double point of departure, the pseudo-navil games on the Lake of Paraslavie and the pseudo-military games on the pre-Ovirginskovi drill ground led to the double goal, the conquest of the Baltic, and the battle of Poltava. Yes, to these, and to how much else? When Jack cures his toothache with a box of soldiers, who knows what world-shaking evolutions are afoot. And now the time has come to make a serious investigation. Why is Jack, taking Jack now as the federal head and natural representative of Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Stuart Farnel, Peter the Great, and all the boys who ever were, are, or will be? Why is Jack so inordinately fond of a box of soldiers? By what magic have those tiny tin campaigners the power to exercise the agonies of toothache? Now look, the answer is simple, and it is twofold. The small metallic warriors appeal to the innate love of conquest, and to the innate love of command. And in that innate love of conquest is summed up all Jack's future relationship to his foes. And in that innate love of command is summed up all his future relationship to his friends. For long long ago, in the babyhood of the world, God spoke to man for the first time, and in that first sentence, God said, subdue the earth and have dominion. Subdue, that is conquest, have dominion, that is command. And since the first man heard those martial words, subdue and have dominion, the passions of the conqueror and the commander have tingled in the blood of the race. They have been awakened in Jack by the box of soldiers. He feels that he is born to fight, born to struggle, born to overcome, born to triumph, born to command. And that fighting instinct will never really desert him. It will follow him, as it followed Stevenson, from infancy to death. He may put it to evil uses, he may fight the wrong people, or fight the wrong things. But that only shows how vital a business is his training. A naval officer has to spend half his time familiarizing himself with the appearance of all our British battleships, in all lights and at all angles, so that he may never be misled amidst the confusion of battle into opening fire upon his comrades. As Jack looks up to us from his little two-inch trenches, his innocent eyes seem to appeal eloquently for a similar tuition. Teach me what those forces are that I have to conquer, he seems to say. Then teach me what forces I have to command, and I will spend all my days in the Holy War. And depend upon it. If we can show Jack how to bend to his will all the mysterious forces at his disposal, and to recognize at a glance all the alien forces that are ranged against him, we shall see him one day among the conquerors, who, with songs of victory on their lips and with palms in their hands, share the rapture of the world's last triumph. End of Part 3, Chapter 1, Recording by Todd Part 3, Chapter 2 of Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies. This is a LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, Recording by Campbell Shelp. Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies by Frank W. Boham. Part 3, Chapter 2, Love, Music, and Salad It seems an odd mixture at first glance, but it isn't mine. Mr. Wilkie Collins is responsible for the amazing hot potch. What do you say? he asks in the Moonstone. What do you say when our county member, growing hot, at cheese and salad time, about the spread of democracy in England, burst out as follows? If we once lose our ancient safeguards, Mr. Blake, I beg to ask you, what have we got left? And what do you say to Mr. Franklin answering, from the Italian point of view? We have got three things left, sir, love, music, and salad. I confess that, when I first came upon this curious conglomeration, I thought that Mr. Franklin meant love, music, and salad to stand for a mere incomprehensible confusion, a meaningless jumble. I examined the sentence a second time, however, and began to suspect that there was at least some method in his madness, and now that I scrutinize it still more closely, I feel ashamed of my first hasty judgment. I can see that love, music, and salad are the fundamental elements of the solar system, and, as Mr. Franklin suggests, so long as they are left to us, we can afford to smile at any political convulsions that may chance to overtake us. Love, music, and salad are the three biggest things in life. Mr. Franklin has not only outlined the situation with extraordinary precision, but he has placed these three basic factors in their exact scientific order. Love comes first. Indeed, we only come because love calls for us. We find it waiting with outstretched arms on arrival. It smothers our babyhood with kisses, and hedges our infancy about with its ceaseless ministry of doting affection. Love is the beginning of everything. I need not labor that point. Where there is no love there is neither music nor salad nor anything else worth writing about. Mr. Franklin was indisputably right in putting love first, and immediately adding music. You cannot imagine love without music. I am hoping that, one of these days, one of our philosophers will give us a book on the language that does not need learning. There is room for a really fine volume on that captivating theme. Henry Drummond has a most fascinating and characteristic essay on the evolution of language, but from my present standpoint, it is sadly disappointing. From first to last, Drummond works on the assumption that human language is the thing of imitation and acquisition. The foundation of it all, he tells us, is in the forest. Man heard the howl of the dog, the neigh of the horse, the bleach of the lamb, the stamp of the goat, and he deliberately copied these sounds. He noticed, too, that each animal has sounds specially adapted for particular occasions. One monkey, we are told, utters at least six different sounds to express its feelings, and Darwin discovered four or five modulations in the bark of the dog. There is the bark of eagerness, as in the chase, that of anger as well as growling, the yelp or howl of despair, as when shut up, the baying at night, the bark of joy, as when starting on a walk with his master, and the very distinct one of demand or supplication, as when wishing for a door or window to be opened. Drummond appears to assume that primitive man listened to these sounds and copied them, much as a child speaks of the bow-wow, the moo-moo, the quack-quack, the tick-tick, and the puff-puff, but in all this we leave out of our reckoning one vital factor. The most expressive language that we ever speak is the language that we never learned. As Darwin himself points out, there are certain simple and vivid feelings which we express and express with the utmost clearness, but without any kind of reference to our higher intelligence.  Is not this a confession of the fact that the soul, in its greatest moments, speaks a language not of imitation or of acquisition, but one that is brought with it, a language of its own? The language that we learn varies according to nationality. The speech of a Chinaman is an incomprehensible jargon to a Briton. The utterance of a Frenchman is a mere riot of sound to a Hindu. The language that we learn is affected even by dialects, so that a man in one English county finds it by no means easy to interpret the speech of a visitor from another. It is even affected by rink and position. The speech of the plow boy is one thing, the speech of the courtier is quite another. So confusing is the language that we learn, but let a man speak in the language that needs no learning, and all the world will understand him. The cry of a child in pain is the same in Iceland as in India, in Hobart as in Timbuktu. The soft and wordless crooning of a mother as she lolls her babe to rest. The scream of a man in mortal English, the sudden outburst of uncontrollable laughter, the sigh of regret, the titter of amusement, and the piteous cry of a broken heart. These know neither nationality nor rink nor station. They are the same in castle as in cottage, and Tasmania as in Tibet. And the world's first morning is in the world's last night. The most expressive language, the only language in which the soul itself ever really speaks, is a language without alphabet or grammar. It needs neither to be learned nor taught, for all men speak it, and all men understand. Was that, consciously or subconsciously, at the back of Mr. Franklin's mind when he put music next to love? Certain it is that, in that unwritten language which is greater than all speech, music is the natural expression of love. Why is there music in the grove and the forests? It is because love is there. The birds never sing so sweetly as during the mating season. For a while the male bird hovers about the person of his desired bride, and pours out an incessant torrent of song in the fond hope of one day winning her, and when his purpose is achieved, he goes on singing for very joy that she is his. And afterwards he gallantly perches near the little home, pouring forth his joy and pride, sweetly singing to his mate as she sits within the nest, patiently hatching her brood. Both in men and women, it is at the approach of the love making age that the voice suddenly develops, and it is when the deepest chords in the soul are first struck that the richest and fullest notes can be sung. Music then, concomitant of love. That is why most of our songs are love songs. If a man is in love he can know more help singing than a bird can help flying. You cannot love anything without singing about it. Men love God. That is why we have hymn books. Men love women. That is why we have ballads. Men love their country. That is why we have national anthems and patriotic heirs. But the stroke of genius in Mr. Franklin lay in the edition of the salad. If he had contented himself with love and music, he would have uttered a truth, and a great truth, but it would have been a commonplace truth. As it is, he lifts the whole thing into the realm of brilliance and reality. For, after all, of what earthly use are love and music unless they lead to salad. When to love and music Mr. Franklin shrewdly added salad, he put himself in line with the greatest philosophers of all time. Bishop Butler told us years ago that if we allow emotions which are designed to lead to action to become excited and no action follows, the very excitation of that emotion without its appropriate response leaves the heart much harder than it was before. And, more recently, our brilliant Harvard professor, Dr. William James, has warned us that it is a very damaging thing for the mind to receive an impression without giving that impression an adequate and commensurate expression. If you go to a concert, he says, and hear a lovely song that deeply moves you. You ought to pay some poor person's tramp fare on the way home. It is the natural as well as the psychological law. The earth, for example, receives the impression represented by the fall of autumn leaves, the descent of sap from the bow, and the widespread decay of wintry desolation. But she hastens to give expression to this impression by all the wealth and plentitude of her glorious spring array. The New Testament gives us a great story which exactly illustrates my point. It is a very graceful and tender record, full of love and music, but containing also something more than love and music. For when Dorcas died, all the widows stood weeping in the chamber of death, showing the coats that Dorcas had made while she was yet with them. Dorcas was a Jewess. At one time she had been taught to regard the name of Jesus as a thing to be abhorred and accursed, but later on a wonderful experience befell her. Could she ever forget the day on which, amidst a whirl of spiritual bewilderment and a tempest of spiritual emotion, she had discovered in the very Messiah whom once she had despised, her Saviour and her Lord? It was a day never to be forgotten, a day full of love and music. How could she produce an expression adequate to that wonderful impression? Not in words, for she was not gifted with speech. Yet an expression must be found. It would have been a fatal thing for the delicate soul of Dorcas if so target a flood of feeling had found no apt and natural outlet. And in that crisis she thought of her needle. She expressed her love for the Lord and the occupation most familiar to her. It was a kind of storage of energy. Dorcas wove her love for her Lord into every stitch, and a tender thought into every stitch, and a fervent prayer into every stitch, and that spiritual storage escaped through warm coats and neat garments into the hearts and homes of these widows and poor folk along the coast, and they learned the depth and tenderness of the divine love from the deft fingertips of Dorcas. Salad is the natural and fitting outcome of love and music. I have already confessed that when first I came upon the triune conjunction, I thought it rather an incongruous medley, a strange hodgepodge, an ill assorted company. That is the worst of judging things in a hurry. The eye does the work of the brain and does it badly. It is a common failing of ours. Look at the torrent of toothless jokes that have been directed at the contrast between the romance of courtship and the domestic realities that follow. The former, according to the traditional estimate, consists of billing and cooing, of fervent protestations, and radiant dreams of romantic loveliness and honeyed phases. The latter, according to the same traditional view, consists of struggle and anxiety, of drudgery and menial toil, of broken knights with tiresome children, of nerve-wracking anxiety, and an endless sequence of troubles. He who looked at life in this way makes precisely the same mistake that I myself made when I first saw Mr. Franklin's love, music, and salad, and thought it a higlidy, piglidy hodgepodge. It is nothing of the kind. Love naturally leads to music and love and music naturally lead to salad. Courtship leads to the cradle and the kitchen. It is true, but both cradle and kitchen are glorified and concentrated by the courtship that has gone before. Our English homes, take them for all in all, are the loveliest things in the world. The merry homes of England, around their hearths by night, what gladsome looks of household love meet in the ruddy light. Their woman's voice flows forth in song or childhood's tale is told, or lips move tunefully along some glorious page of old. Here is a picture of love, music, and salad in perfect combination, and what a secret lies behind it. The fact is that the heathen world has nothing at all corresponding to our English sweet-heartening. Men and women are thrown into each other's arms by barter, by compact, by conquest, and in a thousand ways. In one land a man bites his bride, in another he fights as the brute stew for the mate of his fancy, in yet another he takes her without seeing her, it was so ordained. Only in a land that has felt the spell of the influence of Jesus would sweet-heartening, as we know it, be possible. The pure and charming freedom of social intercourse, the liberty to yield to the mystic magnetism that draws the one to the other, and the other to the one. The coy approach, the shy exchanges, the arm-in-arm walks, and the heart-to-heart talks, the growing admiration, the deepening passion, culminating at last in the fond formality of the engagement into the rapture of ultimate union, in what land, unsweetened by the power of the gospel, would such a procedure be possible. And the consequences that our homes stand in such striking contrast to the homes of heathen peoples. There are no homes in Asia. Mr. W. H. Seward, the American statesman, exclaimed sadly fifty years ago. It is scarcely true now, for Christ is gaining on Asia every day, and the missionaries confess that the greatest propagating power that the gospel possesses is the gracious, though silent, witness of the Christian homes. Human life is robbed of all animalism and baseness when true love enters, and there is no true love apart from the highest love of all. Salad may seem a prosaic thing to follow on the heels of love and music, but the salad that has been prepared by fingers that one thinks it heaven to kiss is tinged in tinctured with the flavor of romance. All through life, love makes life's music. All through life, love and music lead to salad, and all through life, love and music glorify the salad to which they lead. They transmute it by this magic into such a dish as many a king has sighed for all his days, but sighed in vain. End of Part 3, Chapter 2, Recording by Campbell Shelp Part 3, Chapter 3, Of Faces in the Fire, and Other Fancies This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by April 6090, California, United States of America Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies by Frank W. Borum Part 3, Chapter 3, The Felling of the Tree I was strolling with some friends up a lovely avenue in the bush this afternoon, when a quite unexpected experience befell us. On either side of the narrow track, the tall trees jostled each other at such close quarters that when we looked up, only a ribbon of sky could be seen above our heads. The treetops almost arched over us. Straight before us was a hill, surrounded by a number of gigantic blue gums, only one or two of which were visible in the limited section of the landscape, which the foliage about us permitted us to survey. As we sauntered leisurely along the leafy path, thinking of anything but the objects immediately surrounding us, we were suddenly startled by a loud and ominous creaking and straining. Looking hastily up, we saw one of the giant trees falling, and describing in its fall an enormous arc against the clear sky ahead of us. What a crash as the toppling monster strikes the treetops among which it falls! What a thud as the huge thing hits the ground! What a roar as it rolls over the hill, bearing down on all lesser growths before it! Our first impression was that the tree had been reduced by natural horses, but we soon discovered that it had been deliberately destroyed. The men were already at work upon a second magnificent fellow, and we waited until he too was prostate. Nothing in the solar system suggests such a mixture of emotion as the felling of a great tree. Anyway it is pleasant and exhilarating, or why was Mr. Gladstone so fond of the exercise? And why were we so eager to stay until the second tree was down? Richard Jeffries, who hated to destroy things and often could not bring himself to pull the trigger of his gun, nevertheless felt the fascination of the axe. Much as I admired the timber about the chaise, he says, I could not help sometimes wishing to have a chop at it. The pleasure of felling trees is never lost, in youth, in manhood. So long as the arm can wield the axe, the enjoyment is equally keen. As the heavy tool passes over the shoulder, the impetus of the swinging motion lightens the weight, and something like a thrill passes through the sinews. Why is it so pleasant to strike? What secret instinct is it that makes the delivery of a blow with axe or hammer so exhilarating? What indeed? For certainly a wild delight makes the heart beat faster, and sends the blood bounding through the veins as one sees the axe's flash. The chips fly, the gash grow deeper and notices at last the first slow movement of the glorious tree. And yet I confess that, mixed with this pungent sense of pleasure, there was a still deeper emotion. The thing seems so irreparable. It is easy enough to destroy these monarchs of the bush, but who can restore them to their former grandeur? It must have been this sense of sadness that led Beaconsfield, Gladstone's famous protagonist, to ordain in his will that none of his beloved trees at Hewingdon should ever be cut down. How long had these trees stood there? These two giants that have been in a few moments reduced to humiliating horizontally. I cannot tell. They must have been here when all these heels and valleys were peopled only by the aboriginals. They saw the black men prowl about the bush, from the hill here overlooking the bay. They must have seen Captain Cook's ships cast anchor down the stream. They watched the coming of the white men. They saw the convict's ships arrive with their dismal freight of human wretchedness. They witnessed the swift and tragic extermination of the native race. They beheld a nation spring into being at their feet. Did the great trees know that as the white men exterminated the black men, so the white men could exterminate them? Did they feel that the coming of those strange vessels up the bay sealed their own doom? Before the newcomers could build their homes or lay out their farms or plant their orchards, they must make war on the trees with fire and axe. Homes and nations can only be built by sacrifice, and the trees are the innocent victims. I suppose the sadness arises partly from the fact that the forest is man's oldest and most faithful friend, and one towards whom he is inclined to to turn with ever-increasing reverence and affection as the years go by. With the advance of the years we all turn wistfully back to the things that termed our infancy, and the race obeys that self-same primal law. Almost every nation on the face of the earth traces its history back to the forest primeval. From the forest we sprang, and by the forest we were originally sustained, and even when at length the primitive race issued from those leafy recesses and devoted itself to agriculture and to commerce. Men still regarded their ancient fastnesses as the storehouse from which they drew everything that was essential to their progress and development. Man found the forest his warehouse, his factory, his armory, his all. With logs that he felled in the bush he built his first primitive home, out of branches that he tore from the trees he fashioned his first implements and tools. And when the tranquility that brooded over his pastoral simplicity was broken by the shout of discord and the noise of tumult it was to those self-same woods that he rushed for his first crude weapons of defense. Architecture, agriculture, invention, and military ingenuity have each of them made enormous strides since then. But it was in the bush that each of these potent makers of our destiny was born, and did not John Smeaton confess that he borrowed from the graceful curve of the oak as it rises from the ground the main idea that characterized the construction of the eddy stone lighthouse? Whenever the architect, the farmer, the inventor, or the soldier desires to visit the scene's admits which his craft spent its earliest infancy, it will be to the forest permeable that he will turn his steps. Of medicine too, the same may be said, for in those long and leisure days of Sylvan quiet, men learned of the secrets of the bark and discovered the healing virtues that slept in the swaying leaves, and straight away the forest became a pharmacy. When exhausted by his labor or innervated by unaccustomed conditions, his health failed him. Man resorted for his first drugs and tonics to his ancient home among the trees. Indeed, he still returns to the forest to be nursed and tended in his hour of sickness. Those who have read Jean Stratton Porter's Harvester know what wonders lurk in the woods. The harvester lived away in the forest, and from bark and gum and sap and leaf, he collected the tonics and anodines and stimulants which he sold to the chemists in the great cities. And after a while every tree that he felled seemed to him such a wealthy store of healing virtue that when he began to think of his dream girl and his future home, he could scarcely bring himself to build his cabin out of logs that were so overflowing with medicinal properties. He was in love, and all the tumultuous emotions awakened by that great experience were surging through his veins, and yet it seemed to him an act of sacrilege to cut chairs and tables out of such sacred things as trees. He apologetically explained the delicacy of the situation to each oak and ash before lifting his axe against it. You know how I hate to kill you, he said to the first one he felled, but it must be legitimate, you know, for a man to take enough trees to build a home, and no other house is possible for a creature of the woods but a cabin is it. The birds use the material they find here, and surely I have a right to do the same. Nothing else would serve, at least for me. I was born and reared here, and I've always loved you, but for all that he felt as the fragrant chips flew in all directions, just as a man might feel who killed a pet lamb for the table. And the harvester could scarcely reconcile himself to his iconoclastic work. In Medicine Woods he had learned the apple sanctity of the forest, the forest that was the home and nurse and mother of us all, and it seemed to him a dreadful thing to slay a tree. Razor tells us in his golden bow that the Odibwa Indians very rarely cut down green or living trees. They fancy that it puts the poor things to such pain, and some of their medicine men avare that with their mysterious powers of hearing. They have heard the wailing and the screaming of the trees beneath the axe. Mr. Adams, too, in his Israel's ideal, has reminded us that, in eastern Africa, the destruction of the coconut trees regarded as a form of matricide, since that tree gives men life and nourishment as a mother does her child. The early Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plutart, watching the wrestling of the leaves and the swaying of the graceful branches, came to the conclusion that trees are sentient things possessed of living souls. And in his tales for children, Tolstoy makes as pathetic a scene out of the death of a great tree as many a novelist makes out of the death of a gallant hero. Now it must have been out of this strange feeling, this dim consciousness, of a sacredness that haunted the leafy solitudes, that man came to regard the forest with a superstitious gratitude and veneration. The bush represented to him the source of all his supplies, the reservoir, that met all his demands. The means of all healing and the very fountain of life. And so he plunged into the depths of the forest and erected his temples there. In its shady groves he reared his solemn altars. In its leafy glades he built his shrines, and the imagery of the forest wove itself into the vocabulary of his devotion. The representation of a sacred tree occurs repeatedly, carved upon the stony ruins of Egyptian, Asrian, and Phoenician temples. And Herodotus more than once remarks upon their frequency of tree worship among the ancient peoples. Pliny too marveled at the reverence which the druids felt for the oak. And in a scarcely less degree, for the holly, the ash, and of the birch, and what stirring passages those are in which George borough describes the weird rites and dark symbolism of the gypsies as they worshipped at dead of night in the fearsome recesses of the pine forests of Spain. It is not really surprising that this haunting sense of sanctity in the woods should lead man to worship there. Even Emerson felt that. The gods talk in the breath of the woods. They talk in the shaken pine. And the harvester himself found the forest to be instinct with moral and spiritual potencies. You not only discover miracles and marvels in the woods, he said, but you get the greatest lessons taught in all the world, ground into you early and alone. Courage, caution, and patience. Here, then, we have the trees as teachers and preachers, and many a man has learned the deepest lessons of his life at the feet of those shrewd and silent philosophers. But what about Brother Lawrence, whose practice of the presence of God has become one of the church's classics? The first time I saw Brother Lawrence, writes his friend, was upon August 3rd, 1666. He told me that God had done him a singular favor in his conversion at the age of 18. It happened in this way. One winter morning, seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed, and that after that the flowers and fruit would appear, he received a high view of the providence and power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul. What God could do for the leafless tree, he thought, he could also do for him. Milton tells us that the forest, which has played so large a part in the development of this world, will flourish also in the next. In heaven the trees, of life ambrosial, fruited bear, and vines yield nectar. And having all this in mind, is it not pleasant to notice that the very last chapter of the Bible tells of the tree that waves by the side of the river of life? There's something sacramental about trees. George Gissing says that Odessus, cutting down the olive tree in order to build for himself a home, is a picture of a man performing a supreme act of piety. Through all the ages, he says, that picture must retain its profound significance. The trees of medicine woods yielded up their life to the harvester's axe, that he and his dream girl might dwell in security and bliss. And on a green hill far away without a city wall, another tree was cut down years ago, that it might represent to all men everywhere the means of grace and the hope of glory. And even more than all other trees, the leaves of that tree are for the healing of the nations. End of Part 3, Chapter 3. Part 3, Chapter 4 of Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Campbell Shelp. Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies by Frank W. Boham. Part 3, Chapter 4. Spoil.  I went to the door, bought a paper, and settled down again to read it. All at once the word siege caught my eye, and after glancing over the cablegram to which to referred, I lay back in the chair and allowed my mind to roam among the romantic recollections that the great world had suggested. I thought of the siege of Lucknow in the east, of the siege of Mexico in the west, and of the siege of London Dairy midway between. Who that has once read the thrilling narratives of these famous exploits can resist the temptation occasionally to set his fancy free to revisit the scenes of those tremendous struggles? My reverie was rudely interrupted. Run along, Roxy dear, it's past bedtime. A maternal voice from the opposite chair suddenly expostulated. But, mother, I must do my scripture lesson, and I've nearly finished. What have you to do, Roxy? I inquired, appointing myself arbitrator on the instant. I have to learn these eight verses of the 119th Psalm.  She read, I am afraid I had no ears for any of the later verses. For among the very first words that she read were these. I rejoice that thy word as one that findeth great spoil. I had read those familiar words hundreds of times, but it was like passing a closed door. But tonight my memories of the great historic sieges supplied me with the key. As one that findeth great spoil, findeth great spoil, great spoil. That one word spoil supplied me with the magic key. I applied it, the door flew open, and I saw that in the text which I had never seen before. The lesson came to an end, the girlish tones subsided, the reader kissed me good night, and scampered off to bed, her mother leaving the room in her company, and I was left once more to my own imaginings. But my fancy flew in quite a fresh direction. The text had done for my imprisoned mind what Noah did for the imprisoned dove. It had opened a window of escape, and I was at liberty to go where I had never been before. Spoil! At the sound of that magic word the doors of truth swung open as the great door of the robber's dungeon in the forty thieves yielded to the sound of open sesame. A landscape may be mirrored in a dewdrop, and here in this arresting phase I suddenly discovered all the picturesque color and stirring movement of a great siege. I saw the bastions and the drawbridges, the fortified walls and the frowning ramparts, the lofty parapets, and the stately towers. I watched the fierce assault of the besiegers, and the tumultuous sally of the garrison. I heard the clash and din of strife. I marked the long grim struggle against impending starvation, and then at last I saw the white flag flown. The proud city has fallen, the garrison has surrendered, the gates are thrown open to the investing forces, and the conqueror rides triumphantly in to seize his funded prize. His followers fall eagerly upon their booty, and grasp with greedy hands at every glint of treasure that presents itself to their rapacious eyes. Spoil, spoil, spoil! I rejoice at thy word as one that findeth great spoil. One. Now the most notable point about this metaphor is that the city only yields up its treasure after long resistance. The besieger does not find the city waiting with open gates to welcome him. It slams those gates in his face, bars, bolts, and barricades them, and settles down to keep him at bay as long as possible. The stubbornness of its brave resistance lends an added sweetness to the final triumph of its conqueror, but whilst it lasts, that resistance is very baffling and vexatious. All the best things in life follow the same strange law. See how the soil resists the farmer. It stiffens itself against his approach, so that only in the sweat of his brow can he plow and harrow it. It garrisons itself with swarms of insect pests, so that his attempts to subjugate it shall be rendered as ineffective and unfruitful as possible. It extends eager hospitality to every noxious seed that falls upon its surface. It encourages all the farmer's enemies and fights against all his allies. Labour makes the harvest sweeter, it is true, but whilst it is in progress, it is none the less exhausting. It is only by breaking down the obstinate resistance of the unwilling soil that the farmer achieves the golden triumph of harvest time. The miner passes through the same trying experience. The earth has nothing to gain by holding her gold and her diamonds, her copper and her coal, and such a tight clutch. Yet she makes the work of the miner a desperate and dangerous business. He takes his life in his hand as he descends the shaft. The peril and the toil add a greater value to the booty, I confess, but the work of the dark mine is none the less trying on that account. He who would grasp the treasures that lie buried in the bowels of the earth must first break down the most determined and dogged resistance. And the treasures of the mine also follows this curious law. There is no royal road to learning. Knowledge resists the intruder. It presents an exterior that is altogether revolting, and only the brave persist in the attack. The textbooks of the schools are rarely set to music. They do not tingle with romance. They look as dry as dust, and they are often even more arid than they look. I remember that, in my college days, the student who sat next to me on the old familiar benches suddenly died. He was brilliant, I was not. And when I heard that he had gone, the first thought that occurred to me was a peculiar one. Had all his knowledge perished with him, I asked myself. I thought of the problems that he had mastered, but with which I was still grappling. Could he not have bequeathed to me the fruits of his patient and hard-won victories? No, it could not be. The city must be patiently besieged and gallantly stormed before it will surrender. The coveted diploma may be all the sweeter afterwards as a result of so long and persistent a struggle, but that fact does not at the time relieve the tedium or lessen the intolerable judgery. Knowledge seems so good and so desirable a thing. Yet it resists the aspiring student with such pitiless and unsympathetic pertinacity. Even love behaves in the same way. The lady keeps her lover at arm's length. She would rather die than not be his, but she must guard her modesty at all hazards. She must not make herself too cheap. She assumes a frigidity that is in hopeless conflict with the warmth of her real sentiments. Her apparent indifference and repeated rebuffs nearly drive her poor wooer to distraction. Her kisses are all the sweeter later on when she is delightfully and avowedly his own, but whilst the siege of her affections lasts, the torment almost wrecks his reason. It is really no hypocrisy on her part. It is the recognition of a true instinct. All the best things resist us, and their resistance has to be overcome. And the psalmist declares that even the divine word treated him in the self-same way. It did not entice, allure, fascinate. That is usually the policy of evil things. No, it repelled, resisted, dared him. And it was not until he had conquered that hostility that he entered into his triumph. It was in the carcass of the fierce lion he had previously destroyed that Samson found the honey that was so sweet to his taste. We generally find our spoil in the cities that slammed their great gates in our faces. Two. But the city capitulates for all that. It may hold out stubbornly and for long, but it always yields at the last. It was so ordained. The soil was meant to resist the farmer, but it was also meant to yield to the farmer at length, and to furnish him with his proud and delightful prize. The minerals are hidden so cleverly and buried so deeply, not that they may successfully elude the vigilance and skill of the heroic minor, but in order that he may justly prize the precious metals when they fall at last into his hands. The student's tedious struggle after knowledge is made so painful a process, not to deter or defeat him, but so that, side by side with the acquisition of learning, he may develop those faculties of brain and intellect which can alone qualify him to wield with wisdom the erudition that he is now so laboriously amassing. The lady treats her poor lover with such seeming disdain, not by any means to desertion him, but that she may make quite sure that his ardour is no mere passing whim, but a deep and enduring attachment. In each case capitulation is agreed upon if only the procedure is sufficiently gallant and persistent. The best things, and even the holiest things, hold us off that they may draw us on, to use Tennyson's expressive phase. To cite a single example, what a wonder story is that of the Syrophoenician woman. The master conceals himself from her, treats her anguish with apparent indifference, preserves a frigid silence in face of her passionate entreaty, and offers exasperating rebuffs and reply to her desperate arguments. But did he design to destroy her faith? Let us see. Like a gallant procedure, she sat down before the city with indomitable courage and patience. Beaten back at one gate, she instantly stormed another. Resisted at one redoubt, she mustered all her forces in the effort to reduce a second. And at last, Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith, be it unto thee even as thou wilt. The capitulation was a predetermined policy, but the courage and pertinacity of the besieger must be tested to the utmost before the gates can be finely thrown open. Three, and then the victors fly upon the spoil. The repelling word yields, and is found to contain wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. I rejoice at thy word as one that findeth great spoil. Spoil! We have all felt the thrill of those tremendous pages in which Given describes the sack of Rome by the all-victorious Goths. We seem to have witnessed, with our own eyes, the glittering wealth of the queenly city poured at the feet of the rapacious conqueror. Or, in Prescott's stately stories, we have watched the fabulous hordes of Montezuma, and the heaped-up gold of Atahualpa, piled at the feet of Cortes and Pizarro. Or, if, forsaking the shining spoils of the Goths in Europe and the gleaming Argueses which the Spaniards brought from the west, we turn to a later date in an eastern climb. We instinctively recall the glowing periods of maculee in his story of the conquests of Clive. After his amazing victory at Placie, the treasury of Bengal was thrown open to him. There were piled up, after the usage of Indian princes, immense masses of coin. Clive walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself. He accepted between two and three hundred thousand pounds. He was afterwards accused of greed. He replied by describing the countless wealth by which he was that day surrounded. Vaults piled with gold and with jewels were at his mercy. To this day, he exclaimed, I stand astonished at my own moderation. Here, then, is the magic key that opens to us the secret in the psalmist's mind. I rejoice at thy word as one that findeth great spoil. The besiegers pour into the city. Every house is ransacked. In the most unlikely places the citizens have concealed their treasures, and in the most unlikely places, therefore, the invaders come upon their spoils. Out from queer old drawers and cupboards, out of strange old cracks and crannies, the precious horde is torn. As the besiegers rush from house to house, you hear the shout and the laughter with which another and yet another find is greeted. So was it with his conquest of the word the psalmist tell us. So was it with his conquest of the word the psalmist tells us. At first, it resisted and repelled him. But afterwards its gates were opened to his challenge. He entered the city and began his search for spoil. And, lo, from out of every promise and precept, out of every innocent looking clause or insignificant phrase, the treasures of truth came pouring until he found himself possessed at length of a wealth compared with which the pomp of princess is the badge of beggary. And of Part 3, Chapter 4, Recording by Campbell Shelp. in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libervox.org. Recording by Alisha Messiah. Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies by Frank W. Borum. Part 3, Chapter 5, A Philosophy of Fancy Work. What course of lectures are you attending now, ma'am? said Martin Chuzzlewitt's friend, turning again to Mrs. Jefferson Brick. The philosophy of the soul on Wednesdays, replied Mrs. Brick. And on Mondays? The philosophy of crime. On Fridays? The philosophy of vegetables. You have forgotten Thursdays. The philosophy of government, my dear, observed the third lady. No, said Mrs. Brick. That's Tuesdays. So it is, cried the lady. The philosophy of matter on Thursdays, of course. You see, Mr. Chuzzlewitt, our ladies are fully employed, observed his friend. They were indeed, but for the time of me I cannot understand why, amidst so many philosophies, the philosophy of fancy work was so cruelly ignored. I should have thought it quite as suitable and profitable a study for Mrs. Jefferson Brick and her lady friends as some of the subjects to which they paid their attention. Whatever are you making now, dear? asked the devoted husband of his spouse the other evening. Why, an antimicassar, George, to be sure. Can't you see? And what on earth is the good of an antimicassar, I should like to know? Stupid man.  But there it is. And for the crass stupidity of their husbands, Mrs. Jefferson Brick and her philosophical friends have only themselves to blame. If they had included the philosophy of fancy work in their syllabus of lectures, they might have acquired such a grasp of a great and vital subject that they would have been able to convince their husbands that there is nothing in the house quite so useful as an antimicassar. The pots in the pans, the chairs and the tables are nowhere in comparison. The antimicassar is the one indispensable article in the establishment. Let no man attempt to deride or belittle it. As it is, however, Mrs. Jefferson Brick and her friends have never really studied the philosophy of fancy work and then never therefore been in a position to enlighten the darkened minds of their benighted husbands. As an inevitable consequence, those husbands continue to regard the busy needles as an amiable frailty pertaining to the sex of their better halves. In writing thus, I am thinking of the better tempered husbands, husbands of the other variety regard fancy work as an unmitigated nuisance. Mark Rutherford has familiarized us with a husband who so regarded his wife's delicate traceries and ornamentations. I refer, of course, to Catherine Firz. We all remember Mrs. Firz's parlor at Easter. There was a sofa in the room, but it was horse hair with high ends both alike, not comfortable, which were covered with curious complications called antimicassars. The slipped off directly they were touched so that anybody who leaned upon them was engaged continually in warfare with them, picking them up from the floor or spreading them out again. There was also an easy chair, but it was not easy, for it matched the sofa in horse hair and was so ingeniously contrived that directly a person placed himself in it, it gently shot him forwards. Furthermore, it had special antimicassars, which were a work of art, and Mrs. Firz had worn Mr. Firz off them. He would ruin them, she said, if he put his head upon them. So a Windsor chair with a high back was always carried by Mr. Firz into the parlor after dinner, together with a common kitchen chair, and all these he took his Sunday nap. The reader is made to feel that, on these interesting occasions, Mr. Firz wished his wife and her antimicassars at the bottom of the deep blue sea, and one rather admires his self-restraint in not explicitly saying so. Mr. Firz is the natural representative of all those husbands who see no rhyme or reason in fancy work. If only Mrs. Jefferson Brick had included that phase of philosophy on her program and had passed on the illumination to some member of the sternor sex. But let us indulge in no futile regrets. That there is a philosophy of fancy work goes without saying. To begin with, think of the relief to the overstrung nerves and the overwrought emotions at the close of a trying day in being able to sit down in a cozy chair and, when the eyes are too tired for reading, to finger away at the needles and get on with the antimicassar. Our grandmothers went in for antimicassars instead of neurostenia. It is astonishing, exclaimed the lady of the decoration, how much bad temper one can knit into a garment. An earlier generation of wonderfully wise women made that discovery, and worked all their discontents and all their evil tempers and all these quivering nervousness into antimicassars. On the whole, it is cheaper than working them into drugs and doctors bills, and drugs and doctors bills are certainly no more ornamental. In his essay on tedium, Claudius Clear deals with that particular form of tedium that arises from leaden hours. Any things that in this respect women have an immense advantage over men. Men have to wait for things, and they find the experience intolerable, but a woman turns to her fancy work, and is amused by her husband's uncontrollable impatience. The antimicassar, he believes, gives just enough occupation to the fingers to make absolute tedium impossible. The war has led to a remarkable revival of knitting and of fancy work. My present theme was suggested to me on Saturday. I took my wife for a little excursion. She took her knitting, and we saw ladies working everywhere. Two were busy in the tram. We came upon one sitting in a secluded spot in the bush, her deaf needles chasing each other merrily. And on the river streamer, eleven ladies out of fifteen had their fancy work with them. I cannot help thinking that, in not a few of these cases, the workers must derive as much comfort from the occupation as the wearers will eventually derive from the garments. Many a woman has woven all her worries into her fancy work, and has felt the greatest relief in consequence. One such worker has borne witness to the consolation afforded her by her needles. Silent is the house. I sit in the firelight and knit. At my ball of soft gray wool, two gray kittens gently pull, pulling back my thoughts as well from that distant red-rimmed hell, and hot tears the stitches blur as I knit a comforter. Comforter, they call it, yes, such it is for my distress. For it gives my restless hands, blessed work, God understands, how we women yearn to be, doing something ceaselessly, anything but just to wait idly for a clicking gait. We must, however, be perfectly honest, and to deal honestly with our subject, we must not ignore the classical example, even though that example may not prove particularly attractive. The classical example is, of course, Madame Defarge. Madame Defarge was the wife of Jacques Defarge, who kept the famous wine shop in a tale of two cities. When first we are introduced to the wine shopkeeper and his wife, three customers are entering the shop. They pull off their hats to Madame Defarge. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head and giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the wine shop, took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose of spirit and became absorbed in it. Everybody who is familiar with the story knows that here we have the stroke of the artist. Madame Defarge, be it noted, took up her knitting with apparent calmness and repose of spirit and became absorbed in it. As a matter of fact, Madame Defarge was absorbed, not in the knitting, but in the conversation. And all that she heard with her ears was knitted into the garment in her hands. The knitting was a tell-tale register. Are you sure, ask one of the wine shopkeepers accomplices one day, are you sure that no embarrassment can arise from our manner of keeping the register? Without doubt it is safe, for no one beyond ourselves can decipher it. But shall we always be able to decipher it? Or, I ought to say, will she? Man, returned Defarge, drawing himself up. If Madame, my wife, undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose a word of it, not a syllable of it. Knitted in her own stitches and her own symbols, it will always be as plain to her as the sun. Confide in Madame Defarge, it would be easier for the weakest paltrune that lives to erase himself from existence than to erase one letter of his name or crimes from the knitted register of Madame Defarge. Oh, those tell-tale needles, up and down, to and fro, in and out they flashed and darted, Madame seeming all the time so preoccupied and inattentive. Yet into those innocent stitches there went the guilty secrets, and when the secrets were revealed, the lives and deaths of men hung in balance. Here, then, is a philosophy of fancy work that will carry us in a very long way. The stitches are always a matter of life and of death, however innocent or trivial they may seem. Whether I do a row of stitches or drive a row on nails or write a row of words, I am a little older when I fasten the last stitch or drive the last nail or write the last word than I was when I began. And what does that mean? It means that I had deliberately taken a fragment of my life and have woven it into my work. That is the terrific sanctity of the commonest toil. It is instinct with life. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend, and whenever I drive a nail or write a syllable or weave a stitch for another, I have laid down just so much of my life for his sake. But when we begin to exploit the possibilities of a philosophy of fancy work, we shall find our feet wandering into some very green pastures and beside some very still waters. Fancy work will lead us to think about friendship than which few themes are more attractive, for the loveliest idol of friendship is told in the phraseology of fancy work. And it came to pass that the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David. Knitting, knitting, knitting, up and down, to and fro, in and out, see the needles flash and dart. Every moment that I spend with my friend is a weaving of his life into mine, and of my life into his. And pity me, men and angels, if I entangle the strands of my life with the fabric that marrs the pattern of my own. And pity me, still more, if the inferior texture of my life impairs the perfection and beauty of my friends into the sacred domain of our secret friendships, therefore, has this unpromising matter of fancy work conveyed us. But it must take us higher still, for there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. And the web of my life will look strangely incomplete at the last unless the fabric of my soul be found knit and interwoven with the fair and radiant colors of his. End of Part 3, Chapter 5, Recording by Alicia Messiah Part 3, Chapter 6 of Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Campbell Shelp. Faces in the Fire and Other Fancies, by Frank W. Bohem. Part 3, Chapter 6, A Pair of Boots There seems to be very little in a pair of boots, except perhaps a pair of feet, until a great crisis arises, and in a great crisis all things assume new values. When the war broke out, and empires found themselves face to face with destiny, the nations asked themselves anxiously how they were off for boots. When millions of men began to march, boots seemed to be the only thing that mattered. The manhood of the world rose in its wrath, reached for its boots, buckled on its sword, and set out for the front. And at the front, if Mr. Kipling is to be believed, it is all a matter of boots. Don't, don't, don't, don't, look at what's in front of you. Boots, boots, boots, boots, moving up and down again.  Try, try, try, try to think of something different. Oh my God, keep me from going lunatic. Boots, boots, boots, boots, moving up and down again, and there's no discharge in the war. We can stick out hunger, thirst and weariness, but not, not, not, not the chronic side of them. Boots, boots, boots, boots, moving up and down again, and there's no discharge in the war. Taint so bad by day because a company, but night brings long strings of 40,000 million. Boots, boots, boots, boots, moving up and down again, and there's no discharge in the war.  Yet, after all, are not these the most amiable things beneath the stars, the things that we treat with derision and contempt in days of calm, but for which we grope with feverish anxiety when the storm breaks upon us? They go on year after year, bearing the apache of our toothless little jests. They go on year after year, serving us nonetheless faithfully because we deem them almost too mundane for mention. And then, when they suddenly turn out to be a matter of life and death to us, they serve us still, with never a word of reproach for our past and gratitude. If the world has a spark of chivalry left in it, it will offer a most object apology to its boots. It would do a man a world of good before putting on his boots to have a good look at them. Let him set them in the middle of the hearth rug, the shining toes turned carefully towards him, and then let him lean forward in his armchair, elbows on knees and head on hands, and let him fasten on those boots of his a contrite and respectful gaze. And looking at his boots thus attentively and carefully, he will see what he has never seen before. He will see that a pair of boots is one of the master achievements of civilization. A pair of boots is one of the wonders of the world, a most cunning and ingenious contrivance. Dan Crawford, in Thinking Black, tells us that nothing about Livingstone's equipment impressed the African mind so profoundly as the boots he wore. Even to this remote day, Mr. Crawford says, all around Lake Meru they sing a Livingstone song to commemorate that great path borer, the good doctor being such a federal head of his race that he is known far and near as Ingressa, or the Englishman, and this is his memorial song. Ingressa, who slept on the waves, welcomed him for he hath no toes. That is to say, reveling in paradox as the negro does, he seized on the fictitious fact that this wandering Livingstone, albeit he travelled so far, had no toes, that is to say, had boots, if you please. Later on Mr. Crawford remarks again that the bare-footed native never ceases to wander at the white man's boots. To him they are a marvel and a portent, for instead of thinking of the boot as merely covering the foot that wears it, his idea is that those few inches of shoe carpet the whole forest with leather. He puts on his boots, and by doing so he spreads a gigantic runner of linoleum across the whole continent of Africa. Here is a philosophical way of looking at a pair of boots. It has made my own boots look differently ever since I read it. Why, these boots on the hearth rug, looking so reproachfully up at me, are millions of times bigger than they seem. They look to my poor distorted vision, like a few inches of leather, but as a matter of fact they represent hundreds of miles of leather matting. They make a runner paving the path for my quiet study to the front doors of all my people's homes. They render comfortable and attractive all the highways and byways along which duty calls me. Looked at through a pair of African eyes, these British boots assume marvelous proportions. They are touched by magic and are wondrously transformed. From being contemptible they now appear positively continental. I am surprised that the subject has never appealed to me before. Now this African way of looking at a pair of boots promises us a key to a phrase in the New Testament that has always seemed to me like a locked casket. John Bonien tells us that when the sisters of the palace beautiful led Christian to the armory, he saw such a bewildering abundance of boots as surely no other man had ever beheld before or since. They were shoes that would never wear out, and there were enough of them, he says, to harness out as many men for the service of their Lord as there be stars in the heaven for multitude. Bonien's prodigious stock of shoes is, of course, an allusion to Paul's exhortation to the Ephesian Christians concerning the armor with which he would have them to be clad. Take unto you the whole armor of God, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Whenever we get into difficulties concerning this heavenly penoply, we turn to good old William Gernel. Master Gernel beat out these six verses of Paul's into a ponderous work of fourteen hundred pages bound in two massive volumes. One hundred and fifty of these pages deal with the footgear recommended by the apostle, and Master Gernel gives us, among other treasures, six directions for the helping on of this spiritual shoe. But we must not be betrayed into a digression on the matter of shoe horns and kindred contrivances. Shoemaker, stick to thy last. Let us keep to this matter of boots. Can good Master Gernel, with all his hundred and fifty closely printed pages on the subject, help us to understand what Paul and Bonien meant? What is it to have your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace? What are the shoes that never wear out? Now the striking thing is that Master Gernel looks at the matter very much as the Africans do. He turns upon himself a perfect fusillade of questions. What is meant by the gospel? What is meant by peace? Why is peace attributed to the gospel? What do the feet here mentioned import? What grace is intended by that preparation of the gospel of peace which is here compared to a shoe and fitted to these feet? And so on. And in answering his own questions, and especially this last one, good Master Gernel comes to the conclusion that the spiritual shoe, which he would feign help us to put on, is a gracious heavenly and excellent spirit. And his hundred and fifty crowded pages on the matter of footwear give us clearly to understand that the man who puts on this beautiful spirit will be able to walk without weariness the stoniest roads to climb without exhaustion the steepest hills. He shall tread upon the lion and adder, the young lion and the dragon shall he trample under feet. In slimy bogs and on slippery paths his foot shall never slide, and in the day when he wrestles with principalities and powers, and with the rulers of the darkness of this world, his foothold shall be firm and secure. Thy shoes shall be iron and brass, and as thy days so shall thy strength be. Master Gernel's teaching is therefore perfectly plain. He looks at this divine footwear, much as the Africans looked at Livingstone's boots. The man whose feet are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace has carpeted for himself all the rough roads that lie before him. The man who knows how to wear this gracious heavenly and excellent spirit has done for himself what Sir Walter Rayleigh did for Queen Elizabeth. He has already protected his feet against all the myery places of the path ahead of him. If good Master Gernel's six directions for the helping on of this spiritual shoe will really assist us to be thus securely shod, then his hundred and fifty pages will yet prove more precious than gold leaf. Bunyan speaks of the amazing exhibition of foot gear that Christian beheld in the armory, as shoes that will not wear out. I wish I could be quite sure that Christian was not mistaken. John Bunyan has so often been my teacher and counselor on all the highest and wadiest matters that it is painful to have to doubt him at any point. The boots may have looked as though they would never wear out, but as all mothers know, that is a way that boots have. In the shoemaker's hands they always look as though they would stand the wear and tear of ages, but put them on a boy's feet and see what they will look like in a month's time. I am really afraid that Christian was deceived in this particular. Paul says nothing about the everlasting wear of which the shoes are capable, and the sisters of the palace beautiful seem to have said nothing about it. I fancy Christian jumped too hastily to this conclusion, misled by the excellent appearance and sturdy make of the boots before him. My experience is that the shoes do wear out. The most gracious, heavenly, and excellent spirit must be kept in repair. I know of no virtue, however attractive, and of no grace, however beautiful, that will not wear thin unless it is constantly attended to. My good friend, Master Gurnal, for all his hundred and fifty pages does not touch upon this point, but I venture to advise my readers that they will be wise to accept Christians so confident declaration with a certain amount of caution. The statement that these shoes will not wear out savours rather too much of the spirit of advertisement, and we have learned from painful experience that the language of an advertisement is not always to be interpreted literally. One other thing these boots of mine seem to say to me as they look mutely up at me from the centre of the hearth rug. Have they no history, these shoes of mine? Once came they, and at this point we suddenly invade the realm of tragedy. The voice of Abel's blood cried to God from the ground, and the voice of blood calls to me from my very boots. Was it to seal cruelly done to death upon a northern ice flow, or a kangaroo shot down in the very flesh of life as it bounded through the Australian bush, or a kid looking up at its slaughterer with terrified pitiful eyes? What was it that gave up the life so dear to it that I might be softly and comfortably shot? And so every step that I take is a step that has been made possible to me by the shedding of innocent blood. All the highways and byways that I tread have been sanctified by sacrifice. The very boots on the hearth rug are whispering something about redemption, and most certainly this is true of the shoes of which the apostle wrote. The shoes that the pilgrims saw at the palace beautiful, the shoes that trudged their weary way through Master Gernel's 150 packed pages. These shoes could never have been placed at our disposal apart from the shedding of most sacred blood. My feet may be shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, but if so it is only because the sacrifice unspeakable has already been made. End of Part 3 Chapter 6. Recording by Campbell Shelpe.