han for the greater sin of spiritual selfishness, or
indifference, or the betrayal of innocent blood? That is what I saw
Artaban do. That is what I heard him say. All through his life he was
trying to do the best that he could. It was not perfect. But there are
some kinds of failure that are better than success.

Though the story of the Fourth Wise Man came to me suddenly and without
labor, there was a great deal of study and toil to be done before it
could be written down. An idea arrives without effort; a form can only
be wrought out by patient labor. If your story is worth telling, you
ought to love it enough to be willing to work over it until it is
true,--true not only to the ideal, but true also to the real. The light
is a gift; but the local color can only be seen by one who looks for it
long and steadily. Artaban went with me while I toiled through a score
of volumes of ancient history and travel. I saw his figure while I
journeyed on the motionless sea of the desert and in the strange cities
of the East.

And now that his story is told, what does it mean?

How can I tell? What does life mean? If the meaning could be put into a
sentence there would be no need of telling the story.

HENRY VAN DYKE.

You know the story of the Three Wise Men of the East, and how they
traveled from far away to offer their gifts at the manger-cradle in
Bethlehem. But have you ever heard the story of the Other Wise Man, who
also saw the star in its rising, and set out to follow it, yet did not
arrive with his brethren in the presence of the young child Jesus? Of
the great desire of this fourth pilgrim, and how it was denied, yet
accomplished in the denial; of his many wanderings and the probations
of his soul; of the long way of his seeking, and the strange way of his
finding, the One whom he sought--I would tell the tale as I have heard
fragments of it in the Hall of Dreams, in the palace of the Heart of
Man.

THE SIGN IN THE SKY

In the days when Augustus Caesar was master of many kings and Herod
reigned in Jerusalem, there lived in the city of Ecbatana, among the
mountains of Persia, a certain man named Artaban, the Median. His house
stood close to the outermost of the seven walls which encircled the
royal treasury. From his roof he could look over the rising battlements
of black and white and crimson and blue and red and silver and gold, to
the hill where the summer palace of the Parth