s and fields
of light, and with the help of this partial vision, I trust for the
rest. The only and the greatest thing man is capable of is Trust in
God.'

'What then is a man to do for the poor? How is he to work with God?' I
asked.

'He must be a man amongst them--a man breathing the air of a higher
life, and therefore in all natural ways fulfilling his endless human
relations to them. Whatever you do for them, let your own being, that
is you in relation to them, be the background, that so you may be a
link between them and God, or rather I should say, between them and the
knowledge of God.'

While Falconer spoke, his face grew grander and grander, till at last
it absolutely shone. I felt that I walked with a man whose faith was his
genius.

'Of one thing I am pretty sure,' he resumed, 'that the same recipe
Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work: "Do
the thing that lies next you." That is all our business. Hurried results
are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be partakers of the
divine patience. How long it took to make the cradle! and we fret that
the baby Humanity is not reading Euclid and Plato, even that it is not
understanding the Gospel of St. John! If there is one thing evident in
the world's history, it is that God hasteneth not. All haste implies
weakness. Time is as cheap as space and matter. What they call the
church militant is only at drill yet, and a good many of the officers
too not out of the awkward squad. I am sure I, for a private, am not.
In the drill a man has to conquer himself, and move with the rest by
individual attention to his own duty: to what mighty battlefields the
recruit may yet be led, he does not know. Meantime he has nearly enough
to do with his goose-step, while there is plenty of single combat,
skirmish, and light cavalry work generally, to get him ready for
whatever is to follow. I beg your pardon: I am preaching.'

'Eloquently,' I answered.

Of some of the places into which Falconer led me that night I will
attempt no description--places blazing with lights and mirrors, crowded
with dancers, billowing with music, close and hot, and full of the
saddest of all sights, the uninteresting faces of commonplace women.

'There is a passion,' I said, as we came out of one of these dreadful
places, 'that lingers about the heart like the odour of violets, like a
glimmering twilight on the borders of moonrise; and there is a passion
that wraps