and give you a book to
read."

So often her own progress has given me a cue like this for the future
work. I put The Abbot on this travel-work for a few days, starting him
with Peru. He found a monastery there. In India he found monasteries,
even in the northern woods of Ontario. He would shut his eyes; the
setting would form, and after his period of imaginative wandering, the
monastery would be the reward. I will not attempt to suggest the
psychology of this, but to many there may be a link in it. In any event,
the imagination is developed, and its products expressed.

The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent
along the Shore. She sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her
lap--and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:

"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and
now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so
good."

"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write
until you begin to dream as you write--until you forget hand and paper
and place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain
interpret the dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."

In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will
get a glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an
idea, more clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy
back of the work here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who
come express themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these
papers from the nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a
ray in everything she does, at least one in a paper. What is more
cheerfully disclosed than anything else, from my viewpoint, is the
quickening imagination. Apparently she did not title this one:

Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build
his civilisation. Of course, she is everywhere--in Germany,
in Canada and California, but the Father is more to be seen
with her in the wild places.

In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the
Mother. Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted
to, without being placed in all kinds of star and round and
square shapes. Some of their leaves could be longer than
others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great trees,
such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve
their branches