hidebound orthodoxy. I
measured life by a book and for every ill that flesh is heir to I had
an "appropriate" text. I had a formula for the salvation of the race.
I divided humanity into two camps--the goats and the sheep. I had a
literal hell for one crowd and a beautiful heaven for the other. The
logical result of this was a caste of good (saved) people for whom I
became a sort of an ecclesiastical attorney. Naturally one outgrows
such obsolescence. Such archaism has an antidote: it is an open-minded
study of the life of Jesus. The result of such a study to me was a
rediscovery of myself, that I think is what Jesus always does for an
inquiring soul. He is the Supreme Individualist, the Master of
Personality.

I did not ask him what to wear or how to vote. I did not even ask him
what was moral or immoral, for these things change with time and place
and circumstance.

I asked him the old eternal questions of life and death and
immortality, of God and my neighbour, of sin and service. The answers
stripped me of fear and gave me a scorn of consequences. The secret of
Jesus is to find God in the soul of humanity. The cause of Jesus is
the righting of world wrongs; the religion of Jesus the binding
together of souls in the solidarity of the race.

* * * * *

Three miles north of Peekskill and two miles east of the Hudson river
lies this farm place that I have named Happy Hollow. It looks to me as
if God had just taken a big handful of earth out from between these
hills of Putnam County and made a shelter here for man and beast.

[Illustration: "Happy Hollow," Mr. Irvine's Present Home Near
Peekskill, New York]

The Hollow is meadow-land through which runs a brook. Across the
meadow in front of the house, rises almost perpendicularly a hill five
hundred feet high. It is clothed now in autumnal glory. On the summit
there are several bare patches of granite rock surrounded by tall dark
green cedars that look like forest monks, from my study window. There
are over two hundred acres, two-thirds of them woodland. Through the
woods there are miles and miles of old lumber roads over which my
predecessors have hauled lumber since the days of the Revolution.

"Is there a view of the Hudson River from any of these hills?" I asked
when buying.

"Somewhere," said the owner, but she was not quite sure.

One day I was exploring the fastnesses and came upon a rock ledge
standing a hundred feet hi