l beacon, by whose ray
The voyager of time should shape his needful way."_

These

_"Constellations of the early night
That sparkled brighter as the twilight died
And made the darkness glorious"_

were mysteries to Ptolemy and to Plato, as well as to Job. All ages of
mankind must have watched and wondered, pondering over the unsolved
problems. When the First Great Cause projected all these whirling
fire-mists into illimitable space with all the laws of physics,
chemistry, evolution in perfect working order, did he choose this
earth as humanity's only home? Is this the only planet with a plan of
salvation? Is this mere speck among all the myriads of worlds in the
solar system, and the other systems, the only creation of His hand
which has known a Garden of Eden, a Bethlehem, and a Calvary? When the
sun has lost his heat and the cold crystals of the earth have fought
their last fight with cellular structures, and won; when all the fairy
forms of field and forest are only fossils in the grim, gray rocks;
when the music of bee and bird and breeze shall have waned into
everlasting silence; when "all the pomp of yesterday is one with
Nineveh and Tyre;" when man with all his achievements and triumphs,
his love and laughter, his songs and sighs, is forgotten even more
completely than his Paleolithic ancestors; then, shall some portion of
the nebula which now bejewels Andromeda's girdle become evolutionized
into a flora and a fauna, a civilization and a spirituality unto which
the visions of the wisest seers have never attained? Shall this
subtle, evanescent mystery which we call life, which glorifies so many
varied forms, be wholly lost, or shall it pass joyfully through the
ether to some brighter and better world? Is it true

_"That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That no one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete?"_

We are scarce a step ahead of our forefathers. We do not know.

_"Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last--far off--at last to all,
And every winter change to spring."_

II. FEBRUARY IN STORM AND SHINE.

February often opens with a season of cold gray days when stratus
clouds, dark and unrelenting as iron, hang across the sky and bitter
winds from the northwest blow down the Iowa valleys and over the
frost-cracked ridges. In the city the wheels c