e to taste in this life. But all creation was
remodelled on a grander scale by the utterances of my teachers; and my
problems, though they deepened with the expansion of all nameable
phenomena, were carried up to the heights of the impersonal, and
ceased to torment me. Seeing how life and death, beginning and end,
were all parts of the process of being, it mattered less in what
particular ripple of the flux of existence I found myself. If past
time was a trooping of similar yesterdays, back over the unbroken
millenniums, to the first moment, it was simple to think of future
time as a trooping of knowable to-days, on and on, to infinity.
Possibly, also, the spark of life that had persisted through the
geological ages, under a million million disguises, was vital enough
to continue for another earth-age, in some shape as potent as the
first or last. Thinking in aeons and in races, instead of in years and
individuals, somehow lightened the burden of intelligence, and filled
me anew with a sense of youth and well-being, that I had almost lost
in the pit of my narrow personal doubts.

No one who understands the nature of youth will be misled, by this
summary of my intellectual history, into thinking that I actually
arranged my newly acquired scientific knowledge into any such orderly
philosophy as, for the sake of clearness, I have outlined above. I had
long passed my teens, and had seen something of life that is not
revealed to poetizing girls, before I could give any logical account
of what I read in the book of cosmogony. But the high peaks of the
promised land of evolution did flash on my vision in the earlier days,
and with these to guide me I rebuilt the world, and found it much
nobler than it had ever been before, and took great comfort in it.

I did not become a finished philosopher from hearing a couple of
hundred lectures on scientific subjects. I did not even become a
finished woman. If anything, I grew rather more girlish. I remember
myself as very merry in the midst of my serious scientific friends,
and I can think of no time when I was more inclined to play the tomboy
than when off for a day in the woods, in quest of botanical and
zoological specimens. The freedom of outdoors, the society of
congenial friends, the delight of my occupation--all acted as a strong
wine on my mood, and sent my spirits soaring to immoderate heights I
am very much afraid I made myself a nuisance, at times, to some of the
more sedat