nces our planet is still subject. The shapes
in that valley were more than coloured; they were rare jets of light,
emerald, orange, blue, and scarlet. Life burned with an original force,
a steady virtue. What is "good news"? It depends on the sort of
evidence for which we look.

Just showing in the drift on the seaward side of the valley were some
worked stones and a little brickwork. When the sandhill paused, it had
almost covered a building where man once worshipped. I could find
nobody afterwards who remembered the church, or had even heard of it.
Yet the doom of this temple, prolonged in its approach but inevitable,
to those to whom the altar once had seemed as indestructible as hope,
must on a day have struck the men who saw at last their temple's end
was near as a hint, vague but glacial, of the transience of all their
affairs.

But what were their affairs? We should have to know them before we
could regret the dry sand which buried them. The valley looked very
well as it was. It showed no sign of failure. Over one of the stones of
the forgotten altar was a casual weed which stood like a sign of
success and continuance. It was as indecipherable as the stone, but the
blue of its flowers, still and deep as rapture, surprising and
satisfying as an unexpected revelation of good, would have been better
worth reading for a knowledge of the heart from which could be drawn
the temper and intensity of that faith.

_August 1917._

XVII. Binding a Spell

You may never have addressed a meeting of the public, but you have long
cherished a vision of a figure (well known to your private mirror)
standing where it overlooks an intent and silent multitude to which it
communicates with apt and fluent words those things not seen by mortal
eyes, the dream of a world not ours.... You know what I mean. (Loud and
prolonged applause.)

"I should be glad," wrote one who is still unashamed to call himself my
friend, "if you could run down here one evening and address a meeting
on your experiences. Just conversationally, you know."

A casual sort of letter. Designedly so. But I could see through it. It
was an invitation which did not wish to scare me from accepting it. I
smiled with serene amusement at its concluding sentence.
Conversationally! Why, that would be merely talking; tongue-work;
keeping on and on after one usually, if merciful to a friend, lets him
off. I felt instantly that for once it might be even more pleasa