le child, looking to my earthly senses for life. But
the sky had stretched for me, the earth had expanded; a greater life
had dawned in me.

We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first and the
spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are
attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful.
Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we
ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth. Our souls
are scarred with the struggles of successive births, and the process
is recorded also by the wrinkles in our brains, by the lines in our
faces. Look at me and you will see that I have been born many times.
And my first self-birth happened, as I have told, that spring day of
my early springs. Therefore would I plant a rose on the green bank of
the Polota, there to bloom in token of eternal life.

Eternal, divine life. This is a tale of immortal life. Should I be
sitting here, chattering of my infantile adventures, if I did not know
that I was speaking for thousands? Should you be sitting there,
attending to my chatter, while the world's work waits, if you did not
know that I spoke also for you? I might say "you" or "he" instead of
"I." Or I might be silent, while you spoke for me and the rest, but
for the accident that I was born with a pen in my hand, and you
without. We love to read the lives of the great, yet what a broken
history of mankind they give, unless supplemented by the lives of the
humble. But while the great can speak for themselves, or by the
tongues of their admirers, the humble are apt to live inarticulate and
die unheard. It is well that now and then one is born among the simple
with a taste for self-revelation. The man or woman thus endowed must
speak, will speak, though there are only the grasses in the field to
hear, and none but the wind to carry the tale.

* * * * *

It is fun to run over the bridge, with a clatter of stout little shoes
on resounding timbers. We pass a walled orchard on the right, and
remind each other of the fruit we enjoyed here last summer. Our next
stopping-place is farther on, beyond the wayside inn where lives the
idiot boy who gave me such a scare last time. It is a poor enough
place, where we stop, but there is an ice house, the only one I know.
We are allowed to go in and see the greenish masses of ice gleaming in
the half-light, and bring out jars of sweet, black "lag