he pathos, the mystery of the world, as
life goes on, fall far oftener and with far more of a magical spell
upon the heart.

We walked for a while by a bridge, where the stream out of the moat ran
hoarsely, choked with drift, in its narrow walls. That melancholy and
sobbing sound seemed only to bring out more forcibly the utter silence
of the tall trees and the sky above them; light wreaths of mist lay
over the moat, and we could see far across the rough pasture, with a
few scattered oaks of immemorial age standing bluff and gnarled among
the grass. The time of fresh spring showers, of sailing clouds, of
basking summer heat, was over--so said the grey, gentle sky--what was
left but to let the sap run backward to its secret home, to rest, to
die? With such sober and stately acquiescence would I await the end,
not grudgingly, not impatiently, but in a kind of solemn glory, with
gratitude and love and trust.

My companion of that day was Vane, one of my colleagues, and we had
discussed a dozen of the small interests and problems that make up our
busy life at this restless place; but a silence fell upon us now. The
curtain of life was for a moment drawn aside, the hangings that wrap us
round, and we looked for an instant into the vast and starlit silences,
the formless, ancient dark, where a thousand years are but as
yesterday, and into which the countless generations of men have
marched, one after another. That is a solemn, but hardly a despairing
thought; for something is being wrought out in the silence, something
of which we may not be conscious, but which is surely there. Could we
but lay that cool and mighty thought closer to our spirits! That
impenetrable mystery ought to give us courage, to let us rest, as it
were, within a mighty arm. Behind and beyond the precisest creed that
great mystery lies; the bewildering question as to how it is possible
for our own atomic life to be so sharply defined and bounded from the
life of the world--why the frail tabernacle in which we move should be
thus intensely our own, and all outside it apart from us.

Yet in days like this calm autumn day one seems to draw a little closer
to the mystery, to take a nearer share in the great and wide
inheritance, to be less of ourselves and more of God.--Ever yours,

T. B.

MONK'S ORCHARD,
UPTON,
Oct. 12, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have nothing but local gossip to tell you. We have
been having a series of Committee meetings l