an opera house before; and the painted light through the roof of
windows high overhead, the strains of the orchestra from far below me,
the banks of broad-leaved palms, the colors, the odors, the confusion
of flowers and white frocks, were strangely thrilling. Nothing had
ever happened to me in the woods like this: the exaltation, the
depression, the thrill of joy, the throb of pain, the awakening, the
wonder, the purpose, and the longing! It was all a dream--all but the
form and the face of one girl graduate, and the title of her essay,
"The Real and the Ideal."

I do not know what large and lofty sentiments she uttered; I only
remember the way she looked them. I did not hear the words she read;
but I still feel the absolute fitness of her theme--how real her simple
white frock, her radiant face, her dark hair! And how ideal!

I had seen perfection. Here was the absolute, the final, the ideal,
the indispensable! And I was fourteen! Now I am past forty; and upon
the kitchen clothes-dryer hangs the Dustless-Duster.

No, I have not lost the vision. The daughter of that girl, the image
of her mother, slipped into my classroom the other day. Nor have I
faltered in the quest. The search goes on, and must go on; for however
often I get it, only to cast it aside, the indispensable, the ultimate,
must continue to be indispensable and ultimate, until, some day--

What matters how many times I have had it, to discover every time that
it is only a piece of cheesecloth, ordinary cheesecloth, dyed black and
stamped with red letters? The search must go on, notwithstanding the
clutter in the kitchen closet. The cellar is crowded with
Dustless-Dusters, too; the garret is stuffed with them. There is
little else besides them anywhere in the house. And this was an empty
house when I moved into it, a few years ago.

As I moved in, an old man moved out, back to the city whence a few
years before he had come; and he took back with him twelve two-horse
wagon-loads of Dustless-Dusters. He had spent a long life collecting
them, and now, having gathered all there were in the country, he was
going back to the city, in a last pathetic, a last heroic, effort to
find the one Dustless-Duster more.

It was the old man's twelve two-horse loads that were pathetic. There
were many sorts of things in those twelve loads, of many lands, of many
dates, but all of one stamp. The mark was sometimes hard to find,
corroded sometimes nearly