come starry-eyed as they listen. I think if we could all shake
ourselves clear of the temporal and the unseemly, we should find deep in
our hearts, a strange expectancy. A woman said, as we talked of these
things:

"I seem to have been expectant for centuries."

When such ideals are held in mind, an adjustment of conduct follows at
once. To be ready (I am not talking religiously) for a revered Guest,
one immediately begins to put one's house in order. Indeed, there's a
reproach in finding the need of rushed preparation, in the hastening to
clear corners and hide unseemly objects; and yet, this is well if the
reorganisation is more than a passing thought. To make the ordering of
one's house a life-habit is a very valid beginning in morality.

We talk continually of the greatest of men; sometimes our voices falter,
and sentences are not finished. We have found many things alike about
the Great Ones. First they had mothers who dreamed, and then they had
poverty to acquaint them with sorrow. They came up hard, and they were
always different from other children. They suffered more than the others
about them, because they were more sensitive.

They met invariably the stiffest foe of a fine child--misunderstanding;
often by that time, even the Mother had lost her vision. Because they
could not find understanding in men and women and children, they drew
apart. Such youths are always forced into the silence.... I often think
of the education of Hiawatha by old Nokomis, the endless and perfect
analogies of the forest and stream and field, by which a child with
vision can gain the story of life. Repeatedly we have discussed the
maiden who sustained France--her girlhood in the forests of Domremy. It
was a forest eighteen miles deep to the centre, and so full of fairies
that the priests had to come to the edge and give mass every little
while to keep them in any kind of subjection. That incomparable maiden
did not want the fairies in subjection. She was listening. From the
centres of the forest came to her the messages of power.... Once when
the Chapel group had left, I sat thinking about this maiden; and queerly
enough, my mind turned presently to something in St. Luke, about the
road to Emmaus--the Stranger who had walked with the disciples, and
finally made himself known. And they asked one to the other after He
had vanished: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us
by the way, and while He opened to us the S