dland festivals, the turning of comets back to the
sun--such are but symbols. In the distance loom the mountains--and
beyond them is the ocean of time and space.

22

MIRACLES

From within and without for many months, promptings have come to me on
the subject of Order, which mystics denote as the most excellent thing
in the Universe.... I remember once emerging from a zone of war in Asia
to enter a city untouched by it. The order in that city was to me like
the subsiding of a fever. The most terrible picture of disorder that the
world can show is a battlefield of human beings.

Order has to do with peace of mind; disorder everywhere is a waste of
force. In a purely mental sense, the cultivation of Order begins to
appear essential to the worker, as he approaches the height of his
powers and realises that there is so much to do, and that life here is
both brief and precarious. Order, however, is larger than a mere mental
matter. Its abiding-place is in the lasting fabric of man and nature.
Evolution in its largest sense is the bringing of Order out of Chaos.
The word _Cosmos_ means order, as stated once before.

One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in
building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on
this bit of Lake-front three years ago--the frog-hollows, tiling, the
wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded
perversely--the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still
sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this
book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a
house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I
sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the
approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a
hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and
possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came
for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part.
With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer
him to the dream which the architect had drawn.... When the different
contractors came a last time with bills, I would take the accounts and
look studiously into a little book, holding it severely to the light.
After much conning, I would announce that my accounts tallied with
theirs in the main. And when they had departed, finished and pa