were. A thousand ways I pictured to myself the
receipt of the letter: it would at least be something new for them,
something just a little disturbing, and I was curious to see whether
it might open the rift of wonder wide enough to let me slip into their
lives.

I have often wondered why it is that men should be so fearful of new
ventures in social relationships, when I have found them so fertile,
so enjoyable. Most of us fear (actually fear) people who differ from
ourselves, either up or down the scale. Your Edison pries fearlessly
into the intimate secrets of matter; your Marconi employs the mysterious
properties of the "jellied ether," but let a man seek to experiment with
the laws of that singular electricity which connects you and me (though
you be a millionaire and I a ditch-digger), and we think him a wild
visionary, an academic person. I think sometimes that the science of
humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the natural
sciences were when Linneus and Cuvier and Lamarck began groping for the
great laws of natural unity. Most of the human race is still groaning
under the belief that each of us is a special and unrelated creation,
just as men for ages saw no relationships between the fowls of the air,
the beasts of the field, and the fish of the sea. But, thank God, we
are beginning to learn that unity is as much a law of life as selfish
struggle, and love a more vital force than avarice or lust of power or
place. A Wandering Carpenter knew it, and taught it, twenty centuries
ago.

"The next house beyond the ridge," said the toothless old woman,
pointing with a long finger, "is the Clarks'. You can't miss it," and I
thought she looked at me oddly.

I had been walking briskly for some three miles, and it was with keen
expectation that I now mounted the ridge and saw the farm for which I
was looking, lying there in the valley before me. It was altogether a
wild and beautiful bit of country--stunted cedars on the knolls of the
rolling hills, a brook trailing its way among alders and willows down a
long valley, and shaggy old fields smiling in the sun. As I came nearer
I could see that the only disharmony in the valley was the work (or
idleness) of men. A broken mowing-machine stood in the field where
it had been left the summer before, rusty and forlorn, and dead weeds
marked the edges of a field wherein the spring ploughing was now only
half done. The whole farmstead, indeed, looked tired. As f