"God help the attainers!"--forsooth! Why, the ideas which I have
quoted, if they were carried to logical lengths, would make heaven a
farcical kill-joy, a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable morgue of
disappointed hopes, with Ennui for janitor. I admit that the old
heaven of the Semitic poets was constructed somewhat along these
lines. But that was no real heaven. The real heaven is a quiet,
harpless, beautiful place where every one is a heaven-born creator
and is engaged--not caring in the least for food or sleep--in turning
out, one after another, the greatest of masterpieces, and enjoying
them to the quick, both while they are being done and when they are
quite achieved.

I would not, however, fall into the opposite error and disparage the
joy of traveling hopefully. It is doubtless easy to amuse one's self
in a wayside air-castle of an hundred suites, equipped with
self-starting servants, a Congressional Library, a National Gallery of
pictures, a Vatican-ful of sculpture, with Hoppe for billiard-marker,
Paderewski to keep things going in the music-room, Wright as grand
hereditary master of the hangar, and Miss Annette Kellerman in charge
of the swimming-pool. I am not denying that such a castle is easier to
enjoy before the air has been squeezed out of it by the horny clutch
of reality, which moves it to the journey's end and sets it down with
a jar in its fifty-foot lot, complete with seven rooms and bath, and
only half an hour from the depot. But this is not for one moment
admitting the contention of the lords of literature that the
air-castle has a monopoly of joy, while the seven rooms and bath have
a monopoly of disillusionized boredom and anguish of mind. If your
before-mentioned apparatus is only in working order, you can have no
end of joy out of the cottage. And any morning before breakfast you
can build another, and vastly superior, air-castle on the vacant land
behind the woodshed.

"What is all this," I heard the reader ask, "about a joy-digesting
apparatus?"

It consists of four parts. Physical exuberance is the first. To a
considerable extent joy depends on an overplus of health. The joy of
artistic creation, for instance, lies not so intensely and
intoxicatingly in what you may some time accomplish as in what has
actually just started into life under your pencil or clayey thumb,
your bow or brush. For what you are about to receive, the Lord, as a
rule, makes you duly thankful. But with the thankful