ntaneously
reversed. To hate people is the most dangerous luxury that one can
indulge in, and the most that one is justified in doing is to avoid the
society of entirely uncongenial people. It is not a duty to force
yourself to try to admire and like everyone who repels you. The truth
is that life is not long enough for such experiments. But one can
resolutely abstain from condemning them and from dwelling in thought
and speech upon their offensive qualities. _Nous sommes tous
condamnes_, says the sad proverb, and we have most of us enough to do
in rooting up the tares in our own field, without pointing out other
people's tares exultantly to passers-by.

XXIII

The great fen to-day was full, far and wide, of little smouldering
fires. On fallow after fallow, there lay small burning heaps of roots
and fibres, carefully collected, kindled, tended. I tried to learn from
an old labourer what it was that he was burning, but I could not
understand his explanation, and I am not sure that he knew himself.
Perhaps it was the tares, as in the parable, that were at length
gathered into heaps and burned! Anyhow, it was a pretty sight to see
the white smoke, all at one delicate angle, rising into the clear,
cloudless sky on the soft September breeze. The village on the wooded
ridge, with the pale, irregular houses rising among the orchards,
gained a gentle richness of outline from the drifting smoke. It
reminded me, too, of the Isle of Voices, and the little magic fires
that rose and were extinguished again, while the phantom voices rang in
the sea-breeze.

It made for me, as I passed slowly across the great flat, a soft
parable of the seasons of the soul, when gratefully and joyfully it
burns its gathered failures when the harvest time is over. Failures in
aim, indolence, morbid glooms, doubts of capacity, unwise words,
irritable interferences--what a vista of mistakes as one looks back!
But there come days when, with a grateful, sober joy--the joy of
feeling thankful that things have not been worse, that one has somehow
emerged, and that there is after all a little good grain in the
garner--one gathers one's faults and misdeeds into heaps for the
burning.

The difficulty is to believe that they are burned; one thinks of the
old fault, with evil fertility, ever ripening and seeding, ever
increasing its circle. Well, it is so in a sense, however diligently we
gather and burn. But there is enough hopefulness left for us