n addition to introducing such an
institution, would have a field for their labours in raising their
clients and customers to the standard of Japanese civilisation in the
enjoyment of it. I present the idea gratis to any enterprising people
who are troubled with the question. What to do with our girls!

But Orientals would have little to teach us in what the Chinese call
"make face," which enters into many of the actions of our daily life
quite as much as it does into theirs. How thankful we should be that
it does not also enter into our religious life! How thoroughly the
Chinese must be impressed with this by their recent experiences of our
Latest Crusaders! I was listening the other day to a gentleman
descanting "on the darkness that enveloped those Pagan barbarians,"
and I was thinking of another darkness or blindness which prevented
the speaker, and many like him, from seeing the least gleam of light
in the East. Yet it does not require much hand-shading of our
intellectual eyes to see EX ORIENTE LUX.

XI

NIGHT IN THE CITY OF UNREST

"How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air;
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain
Breaks the serene of heaven:
In full-orbed glory, yonder moon divine
Rolls through the dark-blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray
The desert-circle spreads
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!"

Night really unrobes her beauty only in silence, the silence of the
desert. Never can I forget nights spent in Western Australia, far
beyond Kalgoorlie, away back in the Never-Never Land, where no rain
falls. That is the land of great thirst, where for hundreds of miles
one sees no living thing, where no birds sing, not even the mournful
call of the jackal echoes across the waste, and not even the chirping
ticking of an insect is to be heard to break the utter stillness. Gum
trees, whose roots strike down a hundred feet for water, lift up their
sparsely-covered branches into the motionless air above, their
tongue-like leaves silently saying "I thirst." In that stagnant air
they remind one of the giant seaweeds that grow in the depths of the
great oceans where the water never moves; and the silence there is the
silence of ocean depths, and so has been from the beginning. To-day my
horse's tracks made five years ago are probably as fresh as were those
which I followed that had been made two years before that time