or childish, but I believe maybe this
life with its queer tasks and happenings is just the great, typical
Fairy Story, with Heaven at the last. They're true--that's why
unspoiled children love fairy stories. They begin, they march with
incident, best of all, one finds always at the end that "'They' lived
happily ever afterward." "They," is you, and I hope it's me. The
trouble with people mainly is that they're too grown up. Who knows
what children see and hear in the summer twilights, on the way home
from play? There's the big, round moon, tangled in the tree-tops--one
remembers that--and there's the night wind, idling down the dusty
street. Surely, though, more than that, but we've forgotten. Isn't
growing up largely a process of forgetting, rather than of getting,
knowledge? Of course there's cube-root and partial payments and fear
and pain and love--one does acquire that sort of thing--but doesn't it
maybe cost the losing of the right point of view? And that's too
expensive. Naturally, or, perhaps, unnaturally, we can't afford to be
caught sailing wash-tub boats across the troubled seas of orchard
grass, or watching for fairies in the moonlight, but can't we somehow
continue to want to give ourselves to similar adventure? There's a
good deal of difference, first and last, between childishness and
childlikeness--enough to make the one plain foolishness, and the other
the qualification for entrance into the Kingdom of God. I'd rather
have let cube-root go and have kept more of my imagination. The other
day, in the middle of a catechism I was holding in the parish school, a
small youngster rose to his feet and solemnly assured the company
present that "the pickshers of God in the church" were "all wrong."
Naturally we argued, which was a mistake. He got me. "God," said he,
"is a Spirit, and spirits don't look like those colored pickshers in
the windows." You see, he knew. He still remembers. But the higher
mathematics and a few brisk sins will assist him to forget. Too bad.
Still, when we get back home again surely it will all "come back" like
a forgotten language.

Meantime there are two hundred dollar frocks to consider, as well as
miracles in gardens. And that's all right, so long as the frocks are
worthy the background, which I venture to suppose, of course, they are.
The subject of clothes interests me a good deal just now, as I'm
engaged in living on my salary. It's all a question of what one