acquaintance with personal love) I had been ready, in my
impatience, to credit an injustice. Unknown to me, thus, there had
been need of guidance, of assistance. Beauty, having cleared the way,
had worked upon me its amazing alchemy.

There, in fewest possible words, is what had happened.

I remember that for a long time, then, I waited in the hush of my
childhood's garden, listening, as it were, with every pore, and
conscious that some one who was pleased interpreted the beauty to my
soul. It seemed, as I said, a message of a personal kind. It was
regenerative, moveover, in so far that life was enlarged and lifted
upon a nobler scale; new sources of power were open to me; I saw a
better way. Irresistibly it came to me again that beauty, far from
being wasted, was purposive, that this purpose was of a redeeming
kind, and that some one who was pleased co-operated with it for my
personal benefit. No figure, thank God, was visible, no voice was
audible, but a presence there indubitably was, and, whether I
responded or otherwise, would be always there.

And the power was such that I felt as though the desire of the planet
itself yearned through it for expression.

X

I WATCHED the little bird against the paling sky, and my thoughts,
following the happy singing, went slowly backwards into the
half-forgotten past.... They led me again through the maze of
gorgeous and mysterious hopes, un-remembered now so many years, that
had marked my childhood. Few of these, if any, it seemed, had known
fulfilment.... I stole back with them, past the long exile in great
Africa, into the region of my youth and early boyhood....

And, as though a hand uncovered it deliberately, I recalled an
earliest dream--strangest, perhaps, of all the mysterious dreams of
that far time. It had, I thought, remained unrealized, as, certainly,
till this moment, it had lain forgotten--a boyish dream that behind
the veils of the Future some one waited for me with the patience of a
perfect love that was my due.

The dream reached forward towards some one who must one day appear,
and whose coming would make life sweet and wonderful, fulfilling,
even explaining, the purpose of my being. This dream which I had
thought peculiarly my own, belongs, I learned later, to many, if not
to the race in general, and, with a smile at my own incurable vanity
(and probably a grimace at being neatly duped), I had laid it on one
side. At any rate, I forgot it, for no