PART III

I

WHEN THE COWS COME HOME

I can see them now as they come, very slowly and in single file, down

the winding old lane. The declining sun is shining through the tops of

the poplars, the zest of daytime begins to soften into the hush and

cool of evening, when they come leisurely sauntering through the grass

that grows luxuriously beside the road. One after another they come

quietly along--Cherry and Brindle, Blossom and Darkie, Beauty and

Crinkle, Daisy and Pearl. A stranger watching them as they appear

round the bend of the pretty old lane fancies each of them to be the

last, and has just abandoned all hope of seeing another, when the next

pair of horns makes its unexpected appearance. They never hurry home;

they just come. A particularly tempting wisp in the long sweet grass

under the hedge will induce an instant halt. The least thing passing

along the road stops the whole procession; and they stare fixedly at

the intruder till he is well on his way. And then, with no attempt to

make up for lost time, they jog along at the same old pace once more.

It is good to watch them. When the whirl of life is too much for me;

when my brain reels and my temples throb; when the hurry around me

distracts my spirit and disturbs my peace; when I get caught in the

tumult and the bustle and the rush--then I like to throw myself back in

my chair for a moment and close my eyes. I am back once more in the

dear old lane among the haws and the filberts. I catch once more the

smell of the brier. I see again the squirrel up there in the oak and

the rabbit under the hedge. I listen as of old to the chirp of the

grasshopper in the stubble, to the hum of the bees among the foxgloves,

to the song of the blackbird on the hawthorn, and, best of all--yes,

best of all for brain unsteadied and nerve unstrung--I see the cows

coming home.

It is a great thing to be able to believe the whole day long that, when

evening comes, the cows will all come home. That is the faith of the

milkmaid. As the day drags on she looks through the lattice window and

catches occasional glimpses of Cherry and Brindle, Blossom and Darkie,

Beauty and Crinkle, Daisy and Pearl. They are always wandering farther

and farther away across the fields; but she keeps a quiet heart. In

her deepest soul she cherishes a lovely secret. She knows that, when

the sunbeams slant through the tall poplar spires, the cows will all

come home. She does not pretend to understand the mysterious instinct

that will later on turn the faces of Cherry and Brindle towards her.

She cannot explain the wondrous force that will direct Blossom and

Darkie into the old lane, and guide them along its folds to the white

gate down by the byre. But where she cannot trace she trusts. And all

day long she clings to her sunny faith without wavering. She never

doubts for a moment that the cows will all come home.

Is there anything in the wide world more beautiful than the confidence

of a good woman in the salvation of her children? For years they

cluster round her knee; she reads with them; prays with them; welcomes

their childish confidences. Then, one by one, away they go! The heat

of the day may bring waywardness, and even shame; but, like the

milkmaid watching the cows through the lattice, she is sure they will

all come home. Think of Susanna Wesley with her great family of

nineteen children around her. What a wonderful story it is, the tale

of her personal care and individual solicitude for the spiritual

welfare of each of them! And what a picture it is that Sir A. T.

Quiller-Couch has painted of the holy woman's deathbed! John arrives

and is welcomed at the door by poor Hetty, the prodigal daughter.

'"The end is very near--a few hours perhaps!" Hetty tells him.

'"And she is happy?"

'"Ah, so happy!" Hetty's eyes brimmed with tears and she turned away.

'"Sister, that happiness is for you, too. Why have you, alone of us,

so far rejected it?"

'Hetty stepped to the door with a feeble gesture of the hands. She

knew that, worn as he was with his journey, if she gave him the chance

he would grasp it and pause, even while his mother panted her last, to

wrestle for and win a soul--not because she, Hetty, was his sister, but

simply because hers was a soul to be saved. Yes, and she foresaw that

sooner or later he would win; that she would be swept into the flame of

his conquest. She craved only to be let alone; she feared all new

experience; she distrusted even the joy of salvation. Life had been

too hard for Hetty.' And on another page we have an extract from

Charles's journal. 'I prayed by my sister, a gracious, tender,

trembling soul; a bruised reed which the Lord will not break.'

The cows had all come home. The milkmaid's faith had not failed.

The happiest people in the world, and the best, are the people who go

through life as the milkmaid goes through the day, believing that

before night the cows will all come home. It is a faith that does not

lend itself to apologetics, but, like the coming of the cows, it seems

to work out with amazing regularity. It is what Myrtle Reed would call

'a woman's reasoning.' It is _because_ it is. The cows will all come

home _because_ the cows will all come home.

'Good wife, what are you singing for? you know we've lost

the hay,

And what we'll do with horse and kye is more than I can say;

While, like as not, with storm and rain, we'll lose both corn

and wheat.'

She looked up with a pleasant face, and answered low and sweet,

There is a Heart, there is a Hand, we feel but cannot see;

We've always been provided for, and we shall always be.'

'That's like a woman's reasoning, we must because we must!'

She softly said, 'I reason not, I only work and trust;

The harvest may redeem the hay, keep heart whate'er betide;

When one door's shut I've always found another open wide.

There is a Heart, there is a Hand, we feel but cannot see

We've always been provided for, and we shall always be.'

The fact is that the milkmaid has a kind of understanding with

Providence. She is in league with the Eternal. And Providence has a

way of its own of keeping faith with trustful hearts like hers. I was

reading the other day Commander J. W. Gambier's _Links in my Life_, and

was amused at the curious inconsistency which led the author first to

sneer at Providence and then to bear striking witness to its fidelity.

As a young fellow the Commander came to Australia and worked on a

way-back station, but he had soon had enough. 'I was to try what

fortune could do for a poor man; but I believed in personal endeavour

and the recognition of it by Providence. _I did not know Providence_.'

'I did not know Providence!' sneers our young bushman.

'The cows will all come home,' says the happy milkmaid.

But on the very same page that contains the sneer Commander Gambier

tells this story. When he was leaving England the old cabman who drove

him to the station said to him, 'If you see my son Tom in Australia,

ask him to write home and tell us how he's getting on.' 'I explained,'

the Commander tells us, 'that Australia was a big country, and asked

him if he had any idea of the name of the place his son had gone to.

He had not.' As soon as Commander Gambier arrived at Newcastle, in New

South Wales, he met an exceptionally ragged ostler. As the ostler

handed him his horse, Mr. Gambier felt an irresistible though

inexplicable conviction that this was the old cabman's son. He felt

absolutely sure of it; so he said:

'Your name is Fowles, isn't it?'

He looked amazed, and seemed to think that his questioner had some

special reason for asking him, and was at first disinclined to answer.

But Mr. Gambier pressed him and said, 'Your father, the Cheltenham

cab-driver, asked me to look you up.'

He then admitted that he was the man, and Mr. Gambier urged him to

write to his father. All this on the selfsame page as the ugly sneer

about Providence!

And a dozen pages farther on I came upon a still more striking story.

Commander Gambier was very unfortunate, very homesick, and very

miserable in Australia. He could not make up his mind whether to stay

here or return to England. 'At last,' he says, 'I resolved to _leave

it to fate_.' The only difference that I can discover between the

'_Providence_' whom Commander Gambier could not trust, and the '_fate_'

to which he was prepared to submit all his fortunes, is that the former

is spelt with a capital letter and the latter with a small one! But to

the story. 'On the road where I stood was a small bush grog-shop, and

the coaches pulled up here to refresh the ever-thirsty bush traveller.

At this spot the up-country and down-country coaches met, and I

resolved that I would get into whichever came in first, _leaving it to

destiny_ to settle. Looking down the long, straight track over which

the up-country coach must come, I saw a cloud of dust, and well can I

remember the curious sensation I had that I was about to turn my back

upon England for ever! But in the other direction a belt of scrub hid

the view, the road making a sharp turn. And then, almost

simultaneously, I heard a loud crack of a whip, and round this corner,

at full gallop, came the down coach, pulling up at the shanty not three

minutes before the other! I felt like a man reprieved, for my heart

was really set on going home; and I jumped up into the down coach with

a great sense of relief!' And thus Mr. Gambier returned to England,

became a Commander in the British Navy, and one of the most

distinguished ornaments of the service. He sneers at '_Providence_,'

yet trusts to '_fate_,' and leaves everything to '_destiny_'! The

milkmaid's may be an inexplicable confidence; but this is an

inexplicable confusion. Both are being guided by the same Hand--the

Hand that leads the cows home. She sees it and sings. He scouts it

and sneers. That is the only difference.

Carlyle spent the early years of his literary life, until he was nearly

forty, among the mosshags and isolation of Craigenputtock. It was,

Froude says, the dreariest spot in all the British dominions. The

house was gaunt and hungry-looking, standing like an island in a sea of

morass. When he felt the lure of London, and determined to fling

himself into its tumult, he took 'one of the biggest plunges that a man

might take.' But in that hour of crisis he built his faith on one

great golden word. 'All things work together for good to them that

love God,' he wrote to his brother. And, later on, when his mother was

in great distress at the departure of her son, Alick, for America,

Carlyle sent her the same text. 'You have had much to suffer, dear

mother,' he wrote, 'and are grown old in this Valley of Tears; but you

say always, as all of us should say, "Have we not many mercies too?"

Is there not above all, and in all, a Father watching over us, through

whom all sorrows shall yet work together for good? Yes, it is even so.

Let us try to hold by _that_ as an anchor both sure and steadfast.'

Which is another way of saying, 'It is all right, mother mine. Let

them wander as they will whilst the sun is high; when it slants through

the poplars the cows will all come home!'

The homeward movement of the cows is part of the harmony of the

universe. Man himself goeth forth, the psalmist says, unto his work

and to his labour until the evening. Until the evening--and then, like

the cows, he comes home. It is this sense of harmony between the

coming of the cows on the one hand, and all their environment on the

other, that gave Gray the opening thought for his 'Elegy in a Country

Churchyard':

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Here are two pictures--the tired ploughman and the lowing herd both

coming home; and the two together make up a perfect harmony. It is a

stroke of poetic genius. We are made to feel the weariness of the

tired ploughman in order that we may be able to appreciate the

restfulness of the evening, the solitude of the quiet churchyard, and

the cows coming slowly home. I blamed myself at the beginning for

sometimes getting caught in the fever and tumult of life; but then, if

I never knew such exhausting experiences, I should never be able to

enjoy the delicious stillness of the evening, I should never be able to

see the beauty of the herd winding so slowly o'er the lea. It is just

because the ploughman has toiled so hard, and done his work so well,

that his weariness blends so perfectly with the restfulness of the

dusk. For it is only those who have bravely borne the burden and heat

of the day who can relish the sweetness and peace of the twilight. It

is a man's duty to keep things in their right place. I do not mean

merely that he should keep his hat in the hall, and his book on the

shelf. I mean that, as far as possible, a man ought to keep his toil

to the daylight, and his rest to the dusk.

Dr. Chalmers held that our three-score years and ten are really seven

decades corresponding with the seven days of the week. Six of them, he

said, should be spent in strenuous endeavour. But the seventh is the

Sabbath of the Lord thy God, and should be spent in Sabbatic quiet.

That ideal is not always capable of realization. For the matter of

that, it is not always possible to abstain from work on the Lord's Day.

But it is good to keep it before us as an ideal. We may at least

determine that, on the Sunday, we will perform only deeds of necessity

and mercy. And, in the same way, we may resolve that we will leave as

little work as possible to be done in the twilight of life. It was one

of the chiefest of the prophets who told us that 'it is good for a man

to bear the yoke in his youth.' If I were the director of a life

insurance company, I should have that great word blazoned over the

portal of the office. If, by straining an extra nerve in the heyday of

his powers, a man may ensure to himself some immunity from care in the

evening, he is under a solemn obligation to do so. The weary ploughman

has no right to labour after the cows come home.

For, in some respects, the sweetest part of the day follows the coming

of the cows. I have a notion that most of the old folk would say so.

During the day they fancied that the cows had gone, to return no more.

But they all came home. 'And now,' says old Margaret Ogilvy, 'and now

it has all come true like a dream. I can call to mind not one little

thing I ettled for in my lusty days that hasna' been put into my hands

in my auld age. I sit here useless, surrounded by the gratification of

all my wishes and all my ambitions; and at times I'm near terrified,

for it's as if God had mista'en me for some other woman.' They

wandered long, that is to say, and they wandered far. But they all

came home--Cherry and Brindle, Blossom and Darkie, Beauty and Crinkle,

Daisy and Pearl--they all came home. Happy are all they who sing in

their souls the milkmaid's song, and never, never doubt that, when the

twilight gathers round them, the cows will all come home!

II

MUSHROOMS ON THE MOOR

Mr. G. K. Chesterton does not like mushrooms. That is the most

arresting fact that I have gleaned from reading, carefully and with

delight, his _Victorian Age in Literature_. In his treatment of

Dickens, he writes very contemptuously of 'that Little Bethel to which

Kit's mother went,' and he likens it to '_a monstrous mushroom_ that

grows in the moonshine and dies in the dawn.' Now no man who was

really fond of the esculent and homely fungus would have employed such

a metaphor by way of disparagement. I can only infer that Mr.

Chesterton thinks mushrooms very nasty. His opinion of Little Bethel

does not concern me. It is neither here nor there. But Mr. Chesterton

does not like _mushrooms_! I cannot get over that!

I feel very sorry for Mr. Chesterton. It is not merely a matter of

taste. I would not presume to set my opinion in a matter of this kind

over against his. But the authorities are with me. I have looked up

the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and its opening sentence on the subject

affirms that 'there are few more delicious members of the vegetable

kingdom than the common mushroom.' I suppose that in these matters

association has a lot to do with it. I cannot forget those delicious

summer mornings in England when we boys, rising with the lark, stole

out of the house like so many burglars, and scampered with our baskets

across the fragrant meadows to gather the white buttons that dotted the

sparkling, dew-drenched grass. It was, as I have said in the

introduction to this book, a large part of childhood's radiant romance!

What tales our fancy wove into the fairy-rings under the elm-trees! We

lifted each moist fungus half expecting to see the brownies and the

elves fly from beneath it! And what fearsome care we took to include

no single hypocritical toadstool among our treasures! I am really

afraid that Mr. Chesterton would have been less conscientious.

Mushrooms and toadstools are all alike to him. He can never have had

such frolics in the fields as we enjoyed in those ecstatic summer

mornings. And he never, therefore, knew the fierce joy of the

breakfast that followed when, hungry as hunters, we returned with

flushed faces to feast upon the spoils of our boisterous foray. Over

such brave memories Mr. Chesterton cannot fondly linger. For Mr.

Chesterton does not like mushrooms.

What would the Harvester have said to Mr. Chesterton? For, to Gene

Stratton Porter's hero, mushrooms were half-way to destiny. 'In the

morning, brilliant sunshine awoke him, and he arose to find the earth

steaming.

'"If ever there was a perfect mushroom morning!" he said to his dog.

"We must hurry and feed the stock and ourselves, and gather some!" The

Harvester breakfasted, fed the stock, hitched Betsy to the spring

wagon, and went into the dripping, steamy woods. If any one had asked

him that morning concerning his idea of heaven, he would never have

dreamed of describing gold-paved streets, crystal pillars, jewelled

gates, and thrones of ivory. He would have told you that the woods on

a damp sunny May morning was heaven. He only opened his soul to

beauty, and steadily climbed the hill to the crest, and then down the

other side to the rich, half-shaded, half-open spaces, where big, rough

mushrooms sprang in a night.'

Yes, a mushroom morning was heaven to the Harvester. And it was the

mushrooms that led him the first step of the way towards the discovery

of his dream-girl. The mushrooms represented the first of those golden

stairs by which he climbed to his paradise. And Mr. Chesterton does

not like mushrooms! What would the Harvester have said to Mr.

Chesterton?

One faint, struggling glimmer of hope I am delighted to discover. Mr.

Chesterton likens _Little_ Bethel to a _monstrous_ mushroom. There can

be only one reason for this inartistic mixture of analogy and

antithesis. Mr. Chesterton evidently knows that a large mushroom is

not so sweet or so toothsome as a small one. A 'monstrous mushroom,'

even to those who like mushrooms, is coarse and less tasty. Now the

gleam of hope lies in the circumstance that Mr. Chesterton knows the

fine gradations of niceness (or nastiness) that distinguish mushrooms

of one size from mushrooms of another. As a rule, if you get to know a

thing, you get to like it. Mr. Chesterton is coming to know mushrooms.

He will soon be ordering them for breakfast. He may even come, like

certain tribes mentioned in the _Encyclopaedia_, to eat nothing else!

And by that time he may have come to know Little Bethel. And if he

comes to know it, he may come to like it. He will still liken it to a

mushroom. But we shall be able to tell, by the way he says it, that he

means that it is very good. We shall see at once that Mr. Chesterton

likes mushrooms. At present, however, the stern fact remains. Mr.

Chesterton does _not_ like mushrooms. Richard Jefferies, in his

_Amateur Poacher_, says that mushrooms are good either raw or cooked.

The great naturalist is therefore altogether on the side of the

_Encyclopaedia_. 'Some eat mushrooms raw, fresh as taken from the

ground, with a little salt; but to me the taste is then too strong.'

Perhaps that is how Mr. Chesterton has taken his mushrooms--_and Little

Bethel_!' Of the many ways of cooking mushrooms,' Richard Jefferies

goes on, 'the simplest is the best; that is, on a gridiron.' Mr.

Chesterton gives the impression that that is precisely how he would

prefer his mushrooms--_and Little Bethel_! For Mr. Chesterton does not

like mushrooms.

The really extraordinary feature of the whole thing is that I like

mushrooms all the better for the very reason that leads Mr. Chesterton

to pour upon them his most withering and pitiless contempt. He hates

them because they spring up in the night. Little Bethel is a

'monstrous mushroom that grows in the moonshine.' It is perfectly true

that Little Bethel, like the mushrooms, flourished in the darkness.

Like Mark Tapley, she was at her brightest when her surroundings were

most dreary. In this respect both the meeting-house and the mushrooms

are in excellent company. Many fine things grow in the night. Indeed,

Sir James Crichton-Browne, the great doctor, in his lecture on 'Sleep,'

argues that all things that grow at all grow in the night. Night is

Nature's growing-time. Now Michael Fairless shared Richard Jefferies'

fondness for mushrooms. Every reader of _The Roadmender_ will recall

the night in the woods. 'Through the still night I heard the

nightingales calling, calling, calling, until I could bear it no

longer, and went softly out into the luminous dark. The wood was

manifold with sound. I heard my little brothers who move by night

rustling in grass and tree; and above and through it all the

nightingales sang and sang and sang! The night wind bent the listening

trees, and the stars yearned earthwards to hear the song of deathless

love. Louder and louder the wonderful notes rose and fell in a passion

of melody, and then sank to rest on that low thrilling call which it is

said Death once heard and stayed his hand. At last there was silence.

The grey dawn awoke and stole with trailing robes across earth's floor.

Gathering a pile of mushrooms--_children of the night_--I hasten home.'

The nightingales--the _singers_ of the night!

The mushrooms--the _children_ of the night!

These _singers_ of the night, and these '_children_ of the night,'

almost remind me of Faber:

Angels of Jesus, angels of light,

Singing to welcome the pilgrims of the night!

But Mr. Chesterton does not like 'the _children_ of the night.'

Now we must really learn better manners. It will not do to treat

things contemptuously either because they spring up suddenly, or

because they spring up in the night. In this matter we Australians

live in glass houses and must not throw stones. Mr. Chesterton is

treading on our pet corns. For Australia and America are the two most

'monstrous mushrooms' on the face of the earth! Like the nations of

which the prophet wrote, they were 'born in a day.' Think of what

happened in America in the ten short years between 1830 and 1840! No

nation in the history of the world can produce so astounding a record!

In 1830 America had 23 miles of railway; in 1840 she had 800. In 1830

the country presented all the wilder characteristics of early colonial

settlement; in 1840 it was a great and populous nation. In 1830

Chicago was a frontier fort; in 1840 Chicago was a city. In 1830 the

population of Michigan was 32,000; in 1840 it was 212,000. It was

during this sensational decade, too, that the first steamships crossed

the Atlantic. And the spirit of the age reflected itself in the

literary wealth of which America became possessed at that extraordinary

time. Whittier and Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nathaniel

Hawthorne, Emerson and Bancroft, Poe and Prescott, all arose during

that eventful period, and made for themselves names that have become

classical and immortal. Here is a monstrous mushroom for you! Or, to

pass from the things of yesterday to the things of to-day, see how,

under the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, Canadian cities are in our own

time shooting up with positively incredible swiftness. No, no; Mr.

Chesterton must not speak disparagingly of mushrooms!

And look at the rapidity at which these young nations beneath the

Southern Cross sprang into existence! I remember standing on the

sea-shore in New Zealand talking to a couple of old whalers, who told

me of the times they spent before the first emigrant ships arrived,

when they were the only white men for hundreds of miles around. And

now! Why, in their own lifetime these men had seen a great nation

spring into being! Here, I say again, are mushrooms for you!

But do mushrooms really spring up as suddenly as they appear to do?

Dan Crawford tells us that, in Central Africa, if a young missionary

attempts to prove the existence of God, the natives laugh, and,

pointing to the wonders of Nature around, exclaim, '_No rain, no

mushrooms!_' In effect they mean to say, without some adequate cause.

If there were no God, whence came the forest and the fauna? Now that

African proverb is very suggestive. 'No rain, no mushrooms.' The

mushroom, that is to say, has its roots away back in old rainstorms, in

fallen forests, and in ancient climatic experiences too subtle to

trace. I have been reading Dr. Cooke's text-book, and he and Mr.

Cuthill have convinced me that it takes about a million years to grow a

mushroom. The conditions out of which the fungus suddenly springs are

as old as the world itself. And that same consideration saves America

and Australia from contempt. For both America and Australia--these

mushroom nations--are very, very old. Dr. Stanley Hall, the President

of the Clark University, was speaking on this aspect of things the

other day. 'In a very pregnant psychological sense,' he said, 'ours is

an unhistoric land. Our very constitution had a Minerva birth.' (That

is a classical way of saying that it had a mushroom birth.) 'Our

literature, customs, fashions, institutions, and legislation were

inherited or copied, and our religion was not a gradual indigenous

growth, but both its spirit and its forms were imported ready-made from

Holland, Rome, England, and Palestine. No country is so precociously

old for its years.' It follows, therefore, that Australia is as old as

the Empire. And the Empire has its roots away back where the first man

delved. We must not allow ourselves to be duped by the trickery of

appearances. These new things are very ancient. 'How long did it take

you to paint that picture?' somebody asked Sir Joshua Reynolds. '_All

my life!_' he replied.

Anybody can grow fine flowers in the daytime. But what can you grow in

the dark? That is the challenge of the mushrooms--_what can you grow

in the dark_? 'The nights are the test!' as Charlotte Brontë used to

say. When things were as black as black could be, poor Charlotte

wrote: 'The days pass in a slow, dark march; the nights are the test;

the sudden wakings from restless sleep, the revived knowledge that one

sister lies in her grave, and another not at my side, but in a separate

and sick-bed. _The nights are the test_.' They are indeed. Tell me:

Can you grow faith, and restfulness, and patience, and a quiet heart in

the darkness? If so, you will never speak contemptuously of mushrooms

again.

Why, dear me, some of the very finest things in this world of ours

spring up suddenly, like the mushroom, and spring up in the dark! Dean

Hole used to tell how he became a preacher. For years he could not

lift his eyes from his manuscript. Then, one Sunday evening, the light

suddenly failed. His manuscript was useless, and he found himself

speaking heart to heart to his people. The eloquence for which he was

afterwards famed appeared in a moment, and appeared in the dark! And I

am very fond of that story of the old American soldier. He was stone

blind, but very happy, and always wore his medal on his breast.

'What do you do in these days of darkness?' somebody asked him.

'Do?' he replied almost scornfully. 'Why, I thank God that for fifty

years I had the gift of sight. I saw Abraham Lincoln, and heard the

bugles call for the victory of Truth and Righteousness. I go back to

those scenes now, and realize them anew. I have lost my sight, but

_memory has been born again in the dark_.'

If, therefore, we allow mushrooms to be treated with contempt, simply

because they spring up suddenly, and spring up in the night, we shall

soon find other beautiful things, much more precious, brought under the

same cruel condemnation. And what of a sudden conversion? Think of

_Down in Water Street_, and _Broken Earthenware_, and _Varieties of

Religious Experience_! What of that tremendous happening on the road

to Damascus? The Philippian jailer, too! See him, with a grim smile

of satisfaction, locking the apostles in their terrible dungeon; yet

before the night is through, he is tenderly bathing their stripes and

ministering to them with all the gentle graces of Christian courtesy

and compassion!' A monstrous mushroom that grew in the night,' would

you call it? At any rate, it did not die with the dawn. 'Minerva

births' these, with a vengeance. As for me, I have nothing but

reverence for the mushrooms. They are among the wonders of a very

wondrous world.

III

ONIONS

Just along the old rut-riddled road that winds through the bush on its

way to Bulman's Gully there lives a poor old man who fancies that he is

of no use in the world. I am going to send him an onion. I am

convinced that it will cure him of his most distressing malady. I

shall wrap it up in tissue paper, pack it in a dainty box, tie it with

silk ribbons, and post it without delay. No gift could be more

appropriate. The good man's argument is very plausible, but an onion

will draw out all its defects. He thinks, because he never hears any

voice trumpeting his fame or chanting his praise, that he is therefore

without any real worth or value to his fellow men. Could anything be

more preposterous? Who ever heard a panegyric in praise of onions? At

what concert was the song of the onion sung? Roses and violets,

daisies and daffodils, are the theme of every warbler; but when does

the onion come in for adulation? Run through your great poets and show

me the epic, or even the sonnet, addressed to the onion! Are we,

therefore, to assume that onions have no value in a world like this?

What a wealth of appetizing piquancy would vanish from our tables if

the onion were to come no more! As a relish, as a food, and as a

medicine, the onion is simply invaluable; yet no orator ever loses

himself in rhetorical transports in honour of onions! It is clearly

not safe to assume that because we are not much praised, we are

therefore of not much profit. And so I repeat my suggestion that if

any man is known to be depressed over his apparent uselessness, it

would be a service to humanity in general, and to that member of the

race in particular, to post him an onion.

'I always bless God for making anything so strong as an onion!'

exclaimed William Morris, in a fine and characteristic burst of

fervour. That is the point: an onion is so strong. The very strength

of a thing often militates against applause. If a strong man lifted a

bag of potatoes we should think no more about it; but if a schoolboy

picked it up and ran off with it we should be speechless with

amazement. We take the strength of the strong for granted; it is the

strength of the weak that we applaud. If a man is known to be good or

useful or great, we treat his goodness or usefulness or greatness as

one of the given factors of life's intricate problem, and straightway

dismiss it from our minds. It is when goodness or usefulness or

greatness breaks out in unexpected places or in unexpected people that

we vociferously shout our praise. We applaud the singers at a concert

because it appeals to us as such an amazing and delightful incongruity

that so practical and prosaic a creature as Man should suddenly burst

into melody; but when the angels sang at Bethlehem the shepherds never

thought of clapping. The onion is therefore in company with the

angels. I am not surprised that the Egyptians accorded the onion

divine honours and carved its image on their monuments. I am prepared

to admit that onions do not move in the atmosphere of sentiment and of

poetry. Tears have been shed over onions, as every housewife knows.

Shakespeare speaks of the tears that live in an onion. But, as

Shakespeare implies, they are crocodile tears--without tenderness and

without emotion. Old John Wolcott, the satirist, tells how

. . . . . . Master Broadbrim

Pored o'er his father's will and dropped the onioned tear.

And Bernard Shaw writes of 'the undertaker's handkerchief, duly onioned

with some pathetic phrase.' No, onions do not lend themselves to

passion or to pathos. You would scarcely decorate the church with

onions for your sister's wedding, or plant a row of onions on a hero's

grave. And yet I scarcely know why. For, in a suitable setting, a

touch of warm romance may light up even so apparently prosaic a theme.

The coming of the swallows in the spring is scarcely a more delightful

event in Cornwall than the annual arrival of the onion-sellers from

Brittany. What a picturesque world we invade when we get among those

dreamy old fishing-villages that dot the Cornish coast!

Gold mists upon the sea and sky,

The hills are wrapped in silver veils,

The fishing-boats at anchor lie,

Nor flap their idle orange sails.

The wild and rugged sea-front is itself suggestive of rich romance and

reminiscent of bold adventure. The smugglers, the pirates, the

wreckers, and the Spanish mariners knew every bluff and headland

perfectly. And, however the world beyond may have changed, these tiny

hamlets have triumphantly defied the teeth of time. They know no

alteration. The brogue of the people is strange but rhythmic, and,

though pleasant to hear, very hard for ordinary mortals to understand.

The fisherfolk, with their strapping and stalwart forms, their bronzed

and weather-beaten features, their dark, idyllic eyes, their tanned and

swarthy skins, their odd and old-world garb, together with their

general air of being the daughters of the ocean and the sons of the

storm, seem to be a race by themselves. And he who tarries long enough

among them to become infected by the charm of their secluded and

well-ordered lives knows that one of the events of their uneventful

year is the coming of the onion-sellers from over the sea. The

historic connexion between Cornwall and Brittany is very ancient, and

is a romance in itself. The English and French coasts, as they face

each other there, are very much alike--broken, precipitous, and grand.

The peoples live pretty much the same kind of lives on either side of

the Channel. And when the onion-sellers come from France they are

greeted with enthusiasm by the Cornish people, and although they speak

their own tongue, they are perfectly understood. See! there is one of

the Breton onion-sellers lounging among a knot of fishermen near the

door of yonder picturesque old Cornish cottage, whilst the wife stands

in the open doorway, arms a-kimbo, listening as the foreigner tells of

the things that he has seen across the Channel since last he visited

this coast. And up the hill there, on the rickety old settle, beneath

the creaking signboard of the village inn, is another such group. As I

gaze upon these masculine but kindly faces I am half inclined to

withdraw my too hasty admission that onions have nothing about them of

sentiment, poetry, or romance.

It always strikes me as a funny thing about onions that, however fond a

man may be of the onions themselves, he detests things that are

_oniony_. Give him onions, and he will devour them with magnificent

relish. But, through some slip in the kitchen, let his porridge or his

tea taste of onions, and his wry face is a sight worth seeing! A

friend of mine keeps a large apiary. One summer he was in great glee

at the immense stores of honey that his bees were collecting. Then,

one dreadful day, he tasted it. The dainty little square of comb,

oozing with the exuding fluid, was passed round the table. Horror sat

upon every face! It turned out that the bees had discovered a large

onion plantation some distance away, and had gathered their heavy

stores from that odorous and tainted source! What could be more

abominable, even to a lover of onions, than oniony honey? We remember

Thackeray and his oniony sandwiches. Now why is it possible for me to

love onions and to hate all things oniony? The fact is that the world

has a few vigorous, decided, elementary things that absolutely decline

to be modified or watered down. 'Onions is onions!' as a well-known

character in fiction remarked on a memorable occasion, and there is a

world of significance in the bald assertion. There are some things

that are as old as the world, and as universal as man, and that are too

vivid and pronounced to humble their pride or compromise their own

distinctive glory. The exquisite shock of the bather as his naked body

plunges into the flowing tide; the instinctive recoil on seeing for the

first time a dead human body; the delicious thrill with which the lover

presses for the first time his lady's lips; the terrifying roar of a

lion, the flaunting scarlet of a poppy, and the inimitable flavour of

an onion--these are among the world's most familiar quantities, the

things that decline to be modified or changed. You might as well ask

for an ice-cream with the chill off as ask for a diluted edition of any

of these vivid and primitive things. Onions may be regarded by a man

as simply delicious, but oniony honey or oniony tea! The bather's

plunge is a rapture to every stinging and startled nerve in his body,

but to stand ankle-deep in the surf, shivering with folded arms in the

breeze that scatters the spray! Life is full of delightful things that

are a transport to the soul if we take them as they are, but that

become a torment and an abomination if we water them down. And it is

just because Christianity itself is so distinctive, so outstanding, so

boldly pronounced a thing, that we insist on its being unadulterated.

Even a worldling feels that a Christian, to be tolerable, must be out

and out. The man who waters down his religion is like the shivering

bather who, feeling the cold, cold waters tickling his toes, cannot

muster up the courage to plunge; he is like the man who wants an

ice-cream with the chill off; he is like oniony honey or oniony tea!

A man cannot, of course, live upon onions. Onions have their place and

their purpose, and, as I have said, are simply invaluable. But they

must be kept to that place and to that purpose. The modern tendency is

to eat nothing but onions. We are fast becoming the victims of a

perfect passion for piquancy. Time was when we expected our newspapers

to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We

don't care a rap about the truth now, so long as they'll give us a

thrill. We must have onions. We used to demand of the novelist a

love-story; now he must be morbidly sexual and grimly sensational. Our

grandfathers went to a magic lantern entertainment and thought it a

furious frolic. And on Sundays they prayed. 'From lightning and

tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder,

and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us!' Their grandchildren

pray, 'From all churches and chapels, Good Lord, deliver us!' And,

during the week, they like to see all the blood-curdling horrors of

lightning and tempest; of plague, pestilence, and famine; of battle,

murder, and of sudden death, enacted before their starting eyes with

never a flicker to remind them that the film is only a film. The

dramas, the dances, and the dresses of the period fortify my

contention. The cry is for onions, and the stronger the better. It is

not a healthy sign. Mr. H. G. Wells, in his graphic description of the

changes that overcame Bromstead, and turned it from green fields into

filthy slums, says that he noticed that 'there seemed to be more boards

by the railway every time I passed, advertising pills and pickles,

tonics and condiments, and such-like solicitudes of a people with no

natural health or appetite left in them.' The pills, that is to say,

kept pace with the pickles. The more pickles Bromstead ate, the more

pills Bromstead wanted. That is the worst of the passion for piquancy.

The soul grows sick if fed on sensations. Onions are splendid things,

but you cannot live upon onions. Pickles inevitably lead to pills.

But that is not all. For the trouble is that, if I develop an

inordinate appetite for onions, I lose all relish for more delicately

flavoured foods. The most impressive instance of such a dietary

tragedy is recorded in my Bible. 'The children of Israel wept and

said, "We remember the _onions_, but now there is nothing except _this

manna_ before our eyes!"' Onions seem to have a special connexion with

Egypt. Herodotus tells us that the men who built the Pyramids fed upon

onions, although the priests were forbidden to touch them. 'We

remember the onions!' cried the children of Israel, looking wistfully

back at Egypt, 'but now we have nothing but this manna!' The onions

actually destroyed their appetite for angels' food! That, I repeat, is

the most mournful aspect of our modern and insatiable passion for

piquancy. If I let my soul absorb itself in the sensational novel, the

hair-raising drama, and the blood-curdling film, I find myself losing

appreciation for the finer and gentler things in life. I no longer

glory, as I used to do, in the sweetness of the morning air and the

glitter of the dew-drenched grass; in the purling stream and the

fern-draped hills; in the curling waves and the twinkling stars. The

bound of the hare and the flight of the sea-bird lose their charm for

me. The world is robbed of its wonder and its witchery when my eyes

grow accustomed to the gaudy blinding glare. Jenny Lind was asked why

she renounced the stage. She was sitting at the moment on the sands by

the seaside, with her Bible on her knee. She pointed her questioner to

the setting sun, transforming the ocean into a sea of glory. 'I

found,' she said, 'that I was losing my taste for that, and'--holding

up her Bible--'my taste for this; so I gave it up!' She was a wise

woman. Onions are fine things in their own way. God has undoubtedly

left a place in His world for the strong, vivid, elemental things. But

they must be kept to that place. God has strewn the ground around me

with the food that angels eat, and I must allow nothing on earth to

destroy my taste for such sublime and wondrous fare.

IV

ON GETTING OVER THINGS

We get over things. It is the most amazing faculty that we possess.

War or pestilence; drought or famine; fire or flood; it does not

matter. However devastating the catastrophe, however frightful the

slaughter, however total the eclipse, we surmount our sorrows and find

ourselves still smiling when the storm is overpast. I remember once

penetrating into the wild and desolate interior of New Zealand. From a

jagged and lonely eminence I surveyed a landscape that almost

frightened one. Not a house was in sight, nor a road, nor one living

creature, nor any sign of civilization. I looked in every direction at

what seemed to have been the work of angry Titans. Far as the eye

could see, the earth around me appeared to have been a battle-field on

which an army of giants had pelted each other with mountains. The

whole country was broken, weird, precipitous, and grand. In every

direction huge cliffs towered perpendicularly about you; bottomless

abysses yawned at your feet; and every scarped pinnacle and beetling

crag scowled menacingly at your littleness and scowled defiance at your

approach. One wondered by what titanic forces the country had been so

ruthlessly crushed and crumbled and torn to shreds. Did any startled

eye witness this volcanic frolic? What a sight it must have been to

have watched these towering ranges split and scattered; to have seen

the placid snowclad heights shivered, like fragile vases, to fragments;

to have beheld the mountains tossed about like pebbles; to have seen

the valleys torn and rent and twisted; and the rivers flung back in

terror to make for themselves new channels as best they could! It must

have been a fearsome and wondrous spectacle to have observed the

slumbering forces of the universe in such a burst of passion! Nature

must have despaired of her quiet and sylvan landscape. 'It is ruined,'

she sobbed; 'it can never be the same again!' No, it can never be the

same again. The bright colours of the kaleidoscope do not form the

same mosaic a second time. But Nature has got over her grief, for all

that. For see! All up these tortured and angular valleys the great

evergreen bush is growing in luxurious profusion. Every slope is

densely clothed with a glorious tangle of magnificent forestry. From

the branches that wave triumphantly from the dizzy heights above, to

those that mingle with the delicate mosses in the valley, the verdure

nowhere knows a break. Even on the steep rocky faces the persistent

vegetation somehow finds for itself a precarious foothold; and where

the trees fear to venture the lichen atones for their absence. Up

through every crack and cranny the ferns are pushing their graceful

fronds. It is a marvellous recovery. Indeed, the landscape is really

better worth seeing to-day than in those tranquil days, centuries ago,

before the Titans lost their temper, and began to splinter the summits.

Travellers in South America frequently comment upon the same

phenomenon. Prescott tells us how Cortes, on his historic march to

Mexico, passed through regions that had once gleamed with volcanic

fires. The whole country had been swept by the flames, and torn by the

fury of these frightful eruptions. As the traveller presses on, his

road passes along vast tracts of lava, bristling in the innumerable

fantastic forms into which the fiery torrent has been thrown by the

obstacles in its career. But as he casts his eye down some steep

slope, or almost unfathomable ravine, on the margin of the road, he

sees their depths glowing with the rich blooms and enamelled vegetation

of the tropics. His vision sweeps across plains of exuberant

fertility, almost impervious from thickets of aromatic shrubs and wild

flowers, in the midst of which tower up trees of that magnificent

growth which is found only in these latitudes. It is an intoxicating

panorama of brilliant colour and sweetest perfume. Kingsley and

Wallace, too, remark upon these great volcanic rents and gashes that

have been healed by verdure of rare magnificence and orchids of

surpassing loveliness. 'Even the gardens of England were a desert in

comparison! All around them were orange- and lemon-trees, the fruit of

which, in that strange coloured light of the fireflies, flashed in

their eyes like balls of burnished gold and emerald; while great white

tassels, swinging from every tree in the breeze which swept the glade,

tossed in their faces a fragrant snow of blossoms and glittering drops

of perfumed dew.' It is thus that, like the oyster that conceals its

scar beneath a pearl, Nature heals her wounds with loveliness. She

gets over things.

And so do we. For, after all, the world about us is but a shadow, a

transitory and flickering shadow, of the actual and greater world

within us. Yes, the incomparably greater world within us; for what is

a world of grass and granite compared with a world of blood and tears?

What is the cleaving of an Alp compared with the breaking of a heart?

What is the sweep of a tornado, the roar of a prairie-fire, or the

booming thunder of an avalanche, compared with the cry of a child in

pain?' All visible things,' as Carlyle has taught us, 'are emblems.

What thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly speaking is

not there at all. Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent

some idea and body it forth.' The soul is liable to great volcanic

processes. There come to it tragic and tremendous hours when all its

depths are broken up, all its landmarks shattered, and all its streams

turned rudely back. For weal or for woe everything is suddenly and

strangely changed. Amidst the crash of ruin and the loss of all, the

soul sobs out its pitiful lament. 'Everything has gone!' it cries. 'I

can never be the same again! I can never get over it!' But Time is a

great healer. His touch is so gentle that the poor patient is not

conscious of its pressure. The days pass, and the weeks, and the

months, and the years. Like the trees that start from the rocky faces,

and the ferns that creep out of every cranny in the ruined horizon, new

interests steal imperceptibly into life. There come new faces, new

loves, new thoughts, and new sympathies. The heart responds to fresh

influences and bravely declines to die. And whilst the days that are

dead are embalmed in costliest spices, and lie in the most holy place

of the temple of memory, the soul discovers with surprise that it has

surmounted the cruel shock of earlier shipwreck, and can once more

greet the sea.

I am writing in days of war. The situation is without precedent. A

dozen nations are in death-grips with each other. Twenty million men

are in the field. Every hour brings us news of ships that have been

sunk, regiments that have been annihilated, thousands of brave men who

have been slaughtered. Never since the world began were so many men

writhing in mortal anguish, so many women weeping, so many children

fatherless. And whilst a hundred thousand women know that they will

see no more the face that was all the world to them, millions of others

are sleepless with haunting fear and terrible anxiety. And every day I

hear good men moan that the world can never be the same again. 'We

shall never get over it!' they tell me. It is the old mistake, the

mistake that we always make in the hour of our sad and bitter grief.

'We shall never get over it!' Of course we shall! And as the fields

are sweeter, and the flowers exhale a richer perfume, after the

thunder-clouds have broken and the storm has spent its strength, so we

shall find ourselves living in a kindlier world when the anguish of

to-day is over-past. Much of our old civilization, with its veneer of

politeness and its heart of barbarism, will have been riven as the

ranges were riven by the earthquake. But out of the wreckage shall

come the healthier day. The wounds will heal as they always heal, and

the scars will stay as they always stay; but they will stay to warn us

against perpetuating our ancient follies. Empires will never again

regard their militarism as their pride.

Surely this torrent of blood that is streaming through the trenches and

crimsoning the seas is sacrificial blood! It is an ancient principle,

and of loftiest sanction, that it is sometimes good for one man to die

that many may be saved from destruction. If, out of its present agony,

the world emerges into the peace and sunshine of a holier day, every

man who laid down his life in the awful struggle will have died in that

sacred and vicarious way. This generation will have wept and bled and

suffered that unborn generations may go scatheless. It is the old

story:

No mortal born without the dew

Of solemn pain on mother's brow;

No harvest's golden yield save through

The toil and tearing of the plough.

It was only through the Cross that the Saviour of men found a way into

the joy that was set before Him, and the world therefore cannot expect

to come to its own along a bloodless road.

The recuperative forces that lurk within us are the divinest things

about us. I cut my hand; and, before the knife is well out of the

gash, a million invisible agents are at work to repair the damage. It

is our irrepressible faculty for getting over things. No minister can

have failed, at some time or other, to stand in amazement before it.

We have all known men who were not only wicked, but who bore in their

body the marks of their vice. It was stamped upon the face; it was

evident in the stoop of the frame; it betrayed itself in the shuffle

that should have been a stride. We have known such men, I say, and

heard their pitiful confessions. And the most heartrending thing about

them was their despair. They could believe that the love of God was

vast enough to find room for them; but just look! 'Look at me!' a man

said to me one night, remembering what he once was and surveying the

wreckage that remained, 'look at me!' And truly it was a sight to make

angels weep. 'I can never be the same again,' he said in effect, 'I

can never get over it!' But he did; and there is as much difference

between the man that I saw that night and the man who greets me to-day

as there was between the man whom he remembered and the man he then

surveyed. It is wonderful how the old light returns to the eye, the

old grace to the form, the old buoyancy to the step, and how, with

these, a new softness creeps into the countenance and a new gentleness

into the voice when the things that wound are thrown away and the

healing powers get their chance. It is only then that we really

discover the marvel of getting over things.

Indeed, unless we are on our guard this magical faculty will be our

undoing. The tendency is, as we have seen, to return to our earlier

state, to recover from the change. And the forces that work in that

direction do not pause to ask if the change that has come about is a

change for the better or a change for the worse. They only know that a

cataclysmic change has been effected, and that it is their business to

help us back to our first and natural condition. But there are changes

that sometimes overtake us from which we do not wish to recover; and we

must be on ceaseless vigil against the well-meaning forces that only

live to abolish all signs of alteration. No man ever yet threw on his

old self and entered into new life without being conscious that

millions of invisible toilers were at work to undo the change that had

been effected. They are helping him to get over it, and he must firmly

decline their misdirected offices.

'"Father!" said young Dr. Ralph Dexter to the old doctor in _The

Spinner in the Sun_, "father! it may be because I'm young, but I hold

before me, very strongly, the ideals of our profession. It seems to me

a very beautiful and wonderful life that is opening up before me,

always to help, to give, to heal. I feel as though I had been

dedicated to some sacred calling, some lifelong service. And service

means brotherhood."

'"_You'll get over that!_" returned the old doctor curtly, yet not

without a certain secret admiration. "_You'll get over that_ when

you've had to engage a lawyer to collect your modest wages for your

uplifting work, the healed not being sufficiently grateful to pay the

healer. When you've gone ten miles in the dead of winter, at midnight,

to take a pin out of a squalling baby's back, why, you may change your

mind!"'

And later on in the same story Myrtle Reed gives us another dialogue

between the two doctors.

'"I may be wrong," remarked Ralph, "but I've always believed that

nothing is so bad that it can't be made better."

'"The unfailing earmark of youth," the old man replies; "_you'll get

over that!_"'

Old Dr. Dexter is quite right. Good or bad, the tendency is to get

over things. Many a man has entered his business or profession with

the highest and most roseate ideals, and the tragedy of his life lay in

the fact that he recovered from them.

Yes, there is nothing that we cannot get over. Our recuperative

faculties know no limit. None of our diseases are incurable. I knew

an old lady who really thought that her malady was fatal. She fancied

that she could never recover. She even told me that the doctor had

informed her that her case was hopeless. She lay back upon her pillow,

and her snowy hair shamed the whiteness about her. 'I shall never get

over it,' she sighed, '_I shall never get over it!_' But she did. We

sang 'Rock of Ages' beside her sunlit grave this afternoon.

V

NAMING THE BABY

Wild horses shall not drag from me the wonderful secret that suggested

my theme. Suffice it to say that it had to do with the naming of a

baby. And the naming of a baby is really one of the most momentous

events upon which the sentinel stars look down. There is more in it

than a cursory observer would suppose. Tennyson recognized this when

his first son was born, the son who was destined to become the

biographer of his distinguished sire and the Governor-General of our

Australian Commonwealth. Whilst revelling in the proud ecstasies of

early fatherhood, he sought the companionship of his intimate friend,

Henry Hallam, the historian. They were strolling together one day in a

beautiful English churchyard.

'What name do you mean to give him?' asked Hallam.

'Well, we thought of calling him Hallam,' replied the poet.

'Oh! had you not better call him Alfred, after yourself?' suggested the

historian.

'Aye!' replied the naïve bard, '_but what if he should turn out to be a

fool?_'

Ah, there's the rub. It turned out all right, as it happened. The boy

was no fool, as the world very well knows; but if you examine the story

under a microscope you will discover that it is encrusted with a golden

wealth of philosophy. For the point is that the baby's name sets

before the baby a certain standard of achievement. The baby's name

commits the baby to something. Names, even in the ordinary life of the

home and the street, are infinitely more than mere tags attached to us

for purposes of convenience and identification.

In describing the striking experiences through which he passed on being

made a freeman, Booker T. Washington, the slave who carved his way to

statesmanship, tells us that his greatest difficulty lay in regard to a

name. Slaves have no names; no authentic genealogy; no family history;

no ancestral traditions. They have, therefore, nothing to live up to.

Mr. Booker Washington himself invented his own name. 'More than once,'

he says 'I tried to picture myself in the position of a boy or man with

an honoured and distinguished ancestry. As it is, I have no idea who

my grandmother was. The very fact that the white boy is conscious

that, if he fails, he will disgrace the whole family record is of

tremendous value in helping him to resist temptations. And the fact

that the individual has behind him a proud family history serves as a

stimulus to help him to overcome obstacles when striving for success.'

Every student of biography knows how frequently men have been

restrained from doing evil, or inspired to lofty achievement, by the

honour in which a cherished memory has compelled them to hold the names

they are allowed to bear. Every schoolboy knows the story of the

Grecian coward whose name was Alexander. His cowardice seemed the more

contemptible because of his distinguished name; and his commander,

Alexander the Great, ordered him either to change his name or to prove

himself brave.

I notice that the American people have lately been rudely awakened to a

recognition of the fact that a nation that can boast of a splendid

galaxy of illustrious names stands involved, not only in a great and

priceless heritage, but also in a weighty national responsibility.

Three citizens of the United States, bearing three of the most

distinguished names in American history, have recently figured with

painful prominence before the criminal courts of that country. 'It is

not rarely,' as a leading American journal remarks, 'that a man who has

acquired credit and reputation ruins his own good name by some act of

fraud or passion. It is much rarer that the case appears of one who

soils the good name of a distinguished father. But it is without

parallel that three names, borne by men the most famous in our annals,

should all have been so foully soiled by their sons.' And the pitiable

element in the case is not relieved by the circumstance that these

unhappy men have clearly inherited, with their fathers' names,

something of their fathers' genius. The fact is that American soil has

proved singularly congenial to the growth of greatness. The length of

America's scroll of fame is altogether out of proportion to the brevity

of her history. The stirring epochs of her short career have developed

a phenomenal wealth of leaders in all the arts and crafts of national

life. In statesmanship, in arms, in letters, and in inventive science,

she can produce a record of which many nations, very much older, might

be pardonably proud. And she therefore displays a perfectly natural

and honourable solicitude when she looks with serious concern on the

untoward happenings that have recently smudged some of those fair names

which she so justly regards as the shining hoard and cherished legacy

which have been bequeathed to her by a singularly eventful past.

'Names!' exclaims Carlyle's Teufelsdrockh. 'Could I unfold the

influence of names, I were a second greater Trismegistus!' Names

occupy a place in literature peculiarly their own. From Homer

downwards, all great writers have recognized their magical value. The

most superficial readers of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ must have

noticed how liberally every page is sprinkled with capital letters.

The name of a god or of a hero blazes like an oriflamme in almost every

line. And Macaulay, in accounting for the peculiar charm of Milton,

says that none of his poems are more generally known or more frequently

repeated than those that are little more than muster-rolls of names.

'They are not always more appropriate,' he says, 'or more melodious

than other names. But they are charmed names. Every one of them is

the first link in a long chain of associated ideas. Like the

dwelling-place of our infancy revisited in manhood, like the song of

our country heard in a strange land, these names produce upon us an

effect wholly independent of their intrinsic value. One transports us

back to a remote period of history. Another places us among the novel

scenes and manners of a distant region. A third evokes all the dear,

classical recollections of childhood--the schoolroom, the dog-eared

Virgil, the holiday, and the prize. A fourth brings before us the

splendid phantoms of chivalrous romance--the trophied lists, the

embroidered housings, the quaint devices, the haunted forests, the

enchanted gardens, the achievements of enamoured knights, and the

smiles of rescued princesses.'

To tell the whole truth, I rather suspect that Macaulay appreciated

this subtle art so highly in Milton because he himself had mastered the

trick so thoroughly. He knew what magic slumbered in that wondrous

wand. His own dexterity in conjuring with heroic names is at least as

marvellous as Milton's. In his _Victorian Age in Literature_, Mr. G.

K. Chesterton says that Macaulay felt and used names like trumpets.

'The reader's greatest joy is in the writer's own joy,' he says, 'when

he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on some resounding names,

such as Hildebrand or Charlemagne, the eagles of Rome or the pillars of

Hercules. As with Sir Walter Scott, some of the best things in his

prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. That is

exactly where Macaulay is great. He is almost Homeric. The whole

triumph turns upon mere names.' We have all wondered at the uncanny

ingenuity that Bunyan and Dickens displayed in the manufacture of names

to suit their droll and striking characters; but we are compelled to

confess that Homer and Milton and Macaulay reveal a still higher phase

of genius, for they succeed in marshalling with rhythmic and dramatic

effect the actual names that living men have borne, and in weaving

those names into glorious pageants of extraordinary impressiveness and

splendour.

It is very odd, the way in which history and prophecy meet and mingle

in the naming of the baby. A friend of mine has just named his child

after John Wesley. He has clearly done so in the fond hope that the

august virtues of the great Methodist may be duplicated and revived in

a generation that is coming. It is an ingenious device for

transferring the moral excellences of the remote past to the dim and

distant regions of an unborn future. The phenomenon sometimes becomes

positively pathetic. I remember reading, in the stirring annals of the

Melanesian Mission, of a native boy whom Bishop John Selwyn had in

training at Norfolk Island. He had been brought from one of the most

barbarous of the South Sea peoples, and did not promise particularly

well. One day Bishop Selwyn had occasion to rebuke him for his

stubborn and refractory behaviour. The boy instantly flew into a

passion and struck the Bishop a cruel blow in the face. It was an

unheard-of incident, and all who saw it stood aghast. The Bishop said

nothing, but turned and walked quietly away. The conduct of the lad

continued to be most recalcitrant, and he was at last returned to his

own island as incorrigible. There he soon relapsed into all the

debasements of a savage and cannibal people. Many years afterwards a

missionary on that island was summoned post-haste to visit a sick man.

It proved to be Dr. Selwyn's old student. He was dying, and desired

Christian baptism. The missionary asked him by what name he would like

to be known. 'Call me John Selwyn,' the dying man replied, 'because

_he taught me what Christ was like_ that day when I struck him.'

We have a wonderful way of associating certain qualities with certain

names. The name becomes fragrant, not as the rose is fragrant, but as

the clay is fragrant that has long lain with the rose. I see that two

European newspapers have recently taken a vote as to the most popular

name for a boy and the most popular name for a girl. And in the result

the names of John and Mary hopelessly outdistanced all competitors.

But why? There is nothing in the name of John or in that of Mary to

account for such general attachment. Some names, like Lily, or Rose,

or Violet, suggest beautiful images, and are loved on that account.

But the name of John and the name of Mary suggest nothing but the

memory of certain wearers. How, then, are we to account for it? The

riddle is easily read. Long, long ago, on a green hill far away, there

stood by the cross of Jesus His mother, and the disciple whom Jesus

loved. And, when Mary left that awful and tragic scene, she left it,

as Jesus Himself desired that she should leave it, leaning on the arm

of John. And because those two were first in the human love of Jesus,

their names have occupied a place of special fondness in the hearts of

all men ever since. Like the fly held in the amber, the memory of

great and sterling qualities is encased and perpetuated in the very

names we bear.

I like to dwell on that memorable scene that took place at the burial

of Longfellow. A notable company gathered at the poet's funeral; and,

among them, Emerson came up from Concord. His brilliant and majestic

powers were in ruins. He stood for a long, long time looking down into

the quiet, dead face of Longfellow, but said nothing. At last he

turned sadly away, and, as he did so, he remarked to those who stood

reverently by, 'The gentleman we are burying to-day was a sweet and

beautiful soul, _but I forget his name!_' Yes, that is the beauty of

it all. The name perpetuates and celebrates the memory of the

goodness; but the memory of the goodness lingers after the memory of

the name is lost. I shall enjoy the fragrance of the roses over my

lattice when I can no longer recall the names by which they are

distinguished.

Mrs. Booth used to love to tell a beautiful story of a man whose

saintly life left its permanent and gracious impress upon her own. He

seemed to grow in grace and charm and in all nobleness with every day

he lived. At the last he could speak of nothing but the glories of his

Saviour, and his face was radiant with awe and affection whenever he

mentioned that holy name. It chanced that, as he was dying, a document

was discovered that imperatively required his signature. He held the

pen for one brief moment, wrote, and fell back upon the pillows, dead.

And on the paper he had written, not his own name, but the Name that is

above every name. Within sight of the things within the veil, that

seemed to be the only name that mattered.

VI

THE MISTRESS OF THE MARGIN

I love a margin. There is something delicious, luxurious, glorious in

the spacious field of creamy paper bounded by the black letterpress on

the one side and the gilt edges on the other. Could anything be more

abominable than a book that is printed to the uttermost extremities of

every page? It is an outrage, I aver, on human nature. Indeed, it is

an outrage upon Nature herself, for Nature loves her margins even more

than I do. She goes in for margins on a truly stupendous scale. She

wants a bird, so a dozen are hatched. She knows perfectly well that

eleven out of the twelve are merely margin. She will throw them to the

cats, and the foxes, and the weasels, and the snakes, and only keep the

best of the batch. She wants a tree, so she plants a hundred. She

knows that ninety and nine are margin, to be browsed down by cattle,

but she means to make sure of her one. 'The roe of a cod,' Grant Alien

tells me, 'contains nearly ten million eggs; but, if each of those eggs

produced a young fish which arrived at maturity, the whole sea would

immediately become a solid mass of closely packed cod-fish.' But

Nature has no intention of turning her bright blue ocean into a

gigantic box of sardines; she is simply providing herself with a

margin. Linnaeus says that a fly may multiply itself ten thousandfold

in a fortnight. If this increase continued during the three summer

months, he says, one fly at the beginning of summer would produce one

hundred millions of millions of millions before the three months were

over, and the air would be black with the horror. The probability,

however, is that there are never one hundred millions of millions of

millions of flies in the whole world. Nature is not arranging for a

repetition of the plague of Egypt; she is simply gratifying her

appetite for a margin. As Tennyson sings in 'In Memoriam,'

of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear.

So I suppose I learned my love of margins from her. At any rate, if

anybody thinks me extravagant, they must quarrel with her and not with

me.

I fancy there's a good deal in it. It is the margin that makes all the

difference. If the work that absolutely must be done occupies every

waking moment of my time, I am a slave; but if it leaves a margin of a

single hour, I am in clover. If my receipts will only just balance my

expenditure, I am living a mere hand-to-mouth existence; but if they

leave me a margin, I jingle the odd coins in my pocket with the pride

of a prince. Mr. Micawber's philosophy comes back to us. 'Annual

income--twenty pounds; annual expenditure--nineteen nineteen six;

result--_happiness_. Annual income--twenty pounds; annual

expenditure--twenty pounds ought and six; result--_misery_.' I believe

that one of the supreme aims of a man's life should be to secure a

margin. Nature does it, and we must copy her. A good life, like a

good book, should have a good margin. I hate books whose pages are so

crowded that you cannot handle them without putting your thumbs on the

type. And, in exactly the same way, there are very few things more

repelling than the feeling that a man has no time for you. It may be a

most excellent book; but if it has no margin, I shall never grow fond

of it. He may be a most excellent man; but if he lacks leisure,

restfulness, poise, I shall never be able to love him.

It is difficult to account for it; but the fact most certainly is that

the most winsome people in the world are the people who make you feel

that they are never in a hurry. The man whom you trust most readily is

the man with a little time to spare, or who makes you think that he

has. When my life gets tangled and twisted, and I want a minister to

help me, I shall be too timid to approach the man who is always in a

fluster. I feel instinctively that he is far too busy for poor me. He

tears through life like a superannuated whirlwind. If I meet him on

the street, his coat tails are always flying out behind him; his eyes

wear a hunted look; and a sense of feverish haste is stamped upon his

countenance. He reminds me of poor John Gilpin, for it is always neck

or nothing with him. He seems to be everlastingly consulting his

watch, and is always muttering something about his next engagement. He

gets through an amazing number of odd jobs in the course of a day, and

his diary will be a wonder to posterity. But he would be much better

off in the long run if he cultivated a margin. He makes people feel at

present that he is too busy for them. A poor woman, who is in great

trouble about her son, heard him preach last Sunday, and felt that she

would give anything to have a quiet talk with him about her sorrow, and

kneel with him as he commended both her and her wayward boy to the

Throne of the heavenly grace. But she dreads to be caught in the whirl

of his week-a-day flurry, and stays away, her grief eating her heart

out the while. A shrinking young girl is in perplexity about her love

affairs, and she feels sure, from some things he said in his sermon a

few weeks ago, that he could help her. But she remembers that in his

study he keeps a motto to remind her that his time is precious. If the

words 'Beware of the dog!' were painted on his study door, they could

not be more terrifying. She fears that, before she has half unfolded

the tender tale that she scarcely likes to tell, his hand will be upon

the doorknob. The tendency of the time is indisputably towards

flurry--the flurry of business or the flurry of pleasure. I feel very

sorry for these busy folk. Their energy is prodigious. But, for all

that, they are losing life's best. Surely William Cowper had a secret

in his soul when he told us that, in his mad career, John Gilpin lost

the wine!

'And now, as he went bowing down,

His reeking head full low,

The bottles twain behind his back

Were shattered at a blow

Down ran the wine into the road,

Most piteous to be seen,

Which made his horses' flanks to smoke

As they had basted been.

It is very easy to go too fast. In his _Forest_, Mr. Stewart White

gives us some lessons in bushmanship. 'As long as you restrain

yourself,' he says, 'to a certain leisurely plodding, you get along

without extraordinary effort; but even a slight increase of speed drags

fiercely at your feet. One good step is worth six stumbling steps; go

only fast enough to assure that good one. An expert woods-walker is

never in a hurry.' I was chatting the other day with the captain of a

great steamship. The vessel is capable of steaming at the rate of

seventeen knots an hour; but I noticed from the log that she never

exceeds fifteen. I asked the reason. 'It is too expensive!' the

captain answered. And then he told me the difference in the

consumption of coal between steaming at fifteen and steaming at

seventeen knots an hour. It was astounding. I recognized at once his

wisdom in keeping the margin. When I next meet my busy brother, I

shall tell him the story--if he can spare the time to listen. For,

apart from the expense to himself of driving the engines at that high

pressure, and apart from the loss of the wine, I feel sure that the

folk who most need him love the ministry of a man with a margin. Even

as I write, there rush back upon my mind the memories of the great

doctors and eminent lawyers whose biographies I have read. How careful

these busy men were to convey a certain impression of leisureliness!

It will never do for a doctor to burst in upon his poor feverish

patient, and throw everything into commotion. And see how composedly

the lawyer listens to his client's tale! Wise men these; and I must

not be too proud to learn from them.

Great souls have ever been leisurely souls. I have no right to allow

the rush and throb and tear of life to rob me of my restfulness. I

must keep a quiet heart. I must be jealous of my margins. I must find

time to climb the hills, to scour the valleys, to explore the bush, to

row on the river, to stroll along the sands, to poke among the rocks,

and to fish in the stream. I must cultivate the friendship of the

fields and the ferns and the flowers. I must lie back in my easy

chair, with my feet on the fender, and laugh with my friends. And pity

me, men and angels, if I am too busy to romp with the children and to

tell them a tale if they want it! There are many things in a man's

life that he can give up, just as there are many things in a book that

can be skipped, but the last thing to go must be the margin.

Now, rising from my desk for a moment, just to stretch my legs a

little, I glance out of my study window at the busy world outside. I

see men making bargains, reading newspapers, and talking politics. And

really, when you come to analyse the thing, this matter of the margin

touches that bustling world at every point. To begin with, the

essential difference between life here in Australia and life in the old

world is mainly a difference in the breadth of the margin. Here life

is not so hemmed in and cramped up as it must of necessity be there.

Then, too, the whole tendency of modern legislation is in the direction

of widening the margin. Everything tends to increase the leisure of

the people. Early closing has come into its own. Shopkeepers put up

their shutters quite early in the evening; the hours of the labourer

have been considerably curtailed; and in other ways the leisure of the

people has been greatly increased. Now in this broadening of life's

margin there lie both tremendous possibilities and tremendous perils.

The idleness of an entire community during a considerable proportion of

its waking hours may become a huge national asset or a serious menace

to the general wellbeing. People are too apt to suppose that character

is determined by the main business of life. It is a fallacy. It is,

as I have said, the margin that really matters. There is a section of

time that remains to a man after the main business of life has been

dealt with. It is the use to which that margin is put that reveals the

true propensities of the individual and that, in the long run,

determines the destiny of the nation.

Here, for example, are two bricklayers. They walk down the street side

by side on their way to their work. From the time that the hour

strikes for them to commence operations until the time comes to lay

aside their trowels for the day, they are pretty much alike. The one

may be a philosopher and the other a scoundrel; but these traits will

have small opportunity of betraying themselves as they chip away at the

bricks in their hands, and ply their busy tasks. The intellectual

proclivities of the one, and the vicious propensities of the other,

will be held in the severest restraint as they labour side by side.

The inexorable laws of industrial competition will keep their work up

to a certain standard of excellence. But the moment that the tools are

thrown aside the character of each man stands revealed. He is his own

master. He is like a hound unleashed, and will now follow his bent

without let or hindrance. And the more the State restricts the hours

of toil, and multiplies the hours of leisure, the more does it increase

the possibilities of good in the one case and the perils of evil-doing

in the other. It is during that lengthened leisure that the one will

apply himself to self-improvement, and, by developing himself, will

increase the value of his citizenship to the State; and it is during

that prolonged immunity from restraint that the other will compass his

own deterioration and exert his influence for the general

impoverishment.

Precisely the same law holds good in relation to the expenditure of

money. The way in which a people spends its money represents the most

crucial test of national character. If a man spends his money wisely,

he is a wise man; if he spends his money foolishly, he is a foolish

man. But it is not along the main line of expenditure that the

revelation is made. The principal items of expenditure are inevitable,

and beyond the control of the individual, whoever or whatever he may

be. A man must eat and wear clothes, whether he be a burglar or a

bishop. The butcher, the baker, the grocer, and the milkman will call

at every door; and you cannot argue as to the morals of a man from the

fact that he eats bread, that he is fond of beef, or that he takes

sugar with his porridge. There are certain main lines of expenditure

along which each man, whatever his characteristics and idiosyncrasies,

is resistlessly driven. But after he has submitted to this stern

compulsion, and has paid his butcher, his baker, his grocer, and his

milkman, then comes the test. What about the margin? Is there a

margin? For upon the margin everything depends. We will suppose that,

after paying for the things that he eats and the things that he wears,

he still jingles in his pocket a dozen coins, with which he may do

exactly as he likes. Now it is in the expenditure of that margin of

money--as, in the other case, it was in the expenditure of that margin

of leisure--that the real man will reveal himself. It is the use to

which he puts that margin that declares his true character and

determines the contribution that he, as an individual citizen, will

make to the national weal or woe.

Now, if this broadening margin means anything at all, it means that the

responsibilities of the Church are increasing. For the Church is

essentially the Mistress of the Margin. Concerning the expenditure of

the hours occupied with labour, and concerning the money spent in the

actual requisites of life, the statesman may have something to say.

Legislation may deal with the hours of labour and the rate of wages.

It may even influence the precise amount of the butcher's or the

baker's bills. But when it comes to the hours that follow toil, and to

the cash that remains after the principal accounts have been paid, the

legislator finds himself in difficulties. He has come to the end of

his tether. He cannot direct the people as to how to spend their spare

cash. And, as we have seen, it is just this spare time and spare cash

that determine everything. It is the dominating and deciding factor in

the whole situation. It is manifest, therefore, that, important as are

the functions of statesmanship, the really fundamental factors of

individual conduct and of national life elude the most searching

enactments of the most vigilant legislators. As the hours of labour

shorten, and the margin of spare cash increases, the authority of the

legislator becomes less and less; and the need for some force that

shall shape the moral tone of the people becomes greater and greater.

If the Church cannot supply that force, and become the Mistress of the

Margin, the outlook is by no means reassuring. On one phase of this

matter of the margin the Church holds a wonderful secret. She knows

that there are people who, through no fault of their own, are

marginless. They have neither a moment nor a penny to spare.

Sickness, trouble, and the war of the world have been too much for

them. They are right up against the wall; and they know it. But the

matter does not end there. I remember once entering a dingy little

dwelling in the slums of London. In the squalid room a cripple girl

sat sewing, and as she sewed she sang:

My Father is rich in houses and lands,

He holdeth the wealth of the world in His hands!

Of rubies and diamonds, of silver and gold,

His coffers are full--He has riches untold.

I'm the child of a King! the child of a King!

With Jesus my Saviour, I'm the child of a King!

What did this mean but that she had discovered that her cramped and

narrow life had a spacious white margin after all? In a recent speech

at Glasgow, Mr. Lloyd George told a fine story of a quaint old Welsh

preacher who was conducting the funeral service of a poor old fellow, a

member of his church, who, through no fault of his own, had had a very

bad time of it. They could hardly find a space in the churchyard for

his tomb. At last they got enough to make a brickless grave amidst

towering monuments that pressed upon it, and the old minister, standing

above it, said, 'Well, Davie, vach, you have had a narrow time right

through life, and you have a very narrow place in death; but never you

mind, old friend, I can see a day dawning for you when you will rise

out of your narrow bed, and find plenty of room at the last. Ah!' he

cried in a burst of natural eloquence, 'I can see it coming! I can see

the day of the resurrection! I can see the dawn of immortality! There

will be room, room, room, even for the poor! The light of that morning

already gilds the hilltops!' What did he mean, that old Welsh

minister, as he shaded his eyes with his hands and looked towards the

East? He was pointing away from life's black and crowded letterpress

to the white and spacious margin--the margin with the gilt edge--that

was all.

VII

LILY

I was once advised to write a novel. I scouted the suggestion at the

time; I scout it still. If you write a novel, you run a great risk.

One of these days somebody may read it--you never know what queer

things people may do nowadays. And if somebody should read it, your

secret is out, and the paucity of your imagination stands grimly

exposed. No, I shall not write a novel, although this article will be

something in the nature of a novelette. For I have found a heroine,

and many a full-blown novelist, having found a heroine, would consider

that he had come upon a novel ready made. My heroine is Lily; and

Lily--to break the news gently--was a pig. I say _was_ advisedly, for

Lily is dead, and therein lies the pathos of my story. And so I have

my heroine, and I have my story, and I have my strong suffusion of

sentiment all ready to my hand; and really, I feel half inclined to

write my novel after all. But let me state the facts--for which I am

prepared to vouch--and then it will be time enough to see if we can

weave them into a great and classical romance.

Away on the top of a hill, in a rural district of Tasmania, there

stands a quaint little cottage. Down the slopes around, and away along

the distant valleys, are great belts of virgin bush. But here on the

hill is our quaint little cottage, and in or about the cottage you will

find a quaint little couple. They may not be able to discuss the

latest aspects of the Balkan question, or the Irish crisis, or the

Mexican embroglio; but they can discuss questions that are very much

older and that are likely to last very much longer. For they can

discuss fowls and sheep and pigs; and, depend upon it, fowls and sheep

and pigs were discussed long before the Balkan question was dreamed of,

and fowls and sheep and pigs will be discussed long after the Balkan

question is forgotten. And so the old couple make you feel ashamed of

your simpering superficiality; you are amazed that you can have grown

so excited about the things of a moment; and you blush for your own

ignorance of the things that were and are and shall be. Yes, John and

Mary can discuss fowls, for they have a dozen of them, and they call

each bird by name. Whilst poor Mary's back was turned for a moment the

rooster flew on to the table.

'Really, Tom, you naughty boy!' she cried, on discovering the outrage.

'I am ashamed of you!' And to impress the whole feathered community

with the enormity of the offence, she proceeded to drive them all out

of the kitchen.

'Go on, Lucie,' she cried, a note of sadness betraying itself in her

voice in spite of her assumed severity. 'Go on, Lucie,' and she

flapped her apron to show that she meant it, much as an advancing army

might defiantly flutter its flag. 'Go on; and you too, Minnie; and

Nellie, and Kate, and Nancie; you must all go! It was a dreadful thing

to do; I don't know what you were thinking of, Tom!' I said that John

and Mary could discuss sheep; but their flock was a very limited one,

for it consisted entirely of Birdie, the pet lamb. I cannot

tell--probably through some defect in my imagination--why they called

him 'Birdie,' nor, for the matter of that, why they called him a lamb.

I can imagine that he may have been a lamb once; but of feathers I

could discover no trace at all. Yes, after all, these are prosaic

details, and only show how incompetent a novelist I should prove to be.

I grovel when I ought to soar. John and Mary were very fond of Birdie,

and Birdie was very fond of them. He came trotting up when he was

called, wagging his long tail as though it were proof positive that he

was still a lamb. It was scarcely a triumph of logic on Birdie's part,

and yet it was just about as good as the artistic subterfuges by which

lots of us try to convince the world and his wife that we are still in

the charming stage of lamb-like simplicity. And then there was Lily.

The old couple were very fond of Lily. How carefully they made her bed

on cold nights! How considerately they fed her on boiled potatoes,

skim milk, and other wondrous delicacies! She, too, came shambling up

whenever she heard her name, and, with a grunt, acknowledged their

bounty. 'Dear old Lily,' poor Mary exclaimed fervently, as Lily lifted

her snout to be rubbed, and looked with queer, piggish eyes into those

of her doting mistress.

Yes, Lily was a pig, but she was none the worse for that; and if any

ridiculous person objects to my taking a pig for my heroine, I shall

take offence and write no more novels. Lily, I repeat, was none the

worse for being a pig. And I am sure that John and Mary were none the

worse for loving her. It is always safe to love, for if you love that

which cannot profit by your love, your love comes back to you, like

Noah's dove, and you yourself are none the poorer. But I am not at all

sure that affection was wasted on Lily. Why should it be? There is no

disgrace in being born a pig. It did not even show bad taste on Lily's

part, for Lily was not asked. She came; and found, on arrival, that

she was what men called a pig; and as a pig she performed her part so

well that those who knew her grew very fond of her. What more can the

best of us do? And, after all, why this squeamishness? Why this

revulsion of feeling when I announce that my heroine is a pig? I aver

that it is a species of snobbery--a very contemptible species of

snobbery. Booker Washington used to declare that a high-grade

Berkshire boar, or a Poland China sow, is one of the finest sights on

this planet. And one of our own philosophers has gone into rhapsodies

over the pig. 'Pigs,' he says, 'always seem to me like a fallen race

that has seen better days. They are able, intellectual, inquisitive

creatures. When they are driven from place to place, they are not

gentle or meek, like cows and sheep, who follow the line of least

resistance. The pig is suspicious and cautious; he is sure that there

is some uncomfortable plot on foot, not wholly for his good, which he

must try to thwart if he can. Then, too, he never seems quite at home

in his deplorably filthy surroundings; he looks at you, up to the knees

in ooze, out of his little eyes as if he would live in a more cleanly

way if he were permitted. Pigs always remind me of the mariners of

Homer, who were transformed by Circe; there is a dreadful humanity

about them, as if they were trying to endure their base conditions

philosophically, waiting for their release.' All this I entreat my

critic to lay well to heart before he judges me too severely for

selecting Lily as my heroine.

I suppose the truth is, if only my supercilious critics could be

trusted to tell the whole truth, that Lily is not good-looking enough

for them. But that, again, is all a question of taste. Beauty is

relative and not absolute. My critics may themselves be at fault. The

real trouble may be, not want of comeliness in Lily, but a sad lack of

appreciation in themselves. I notice that the champion Yorkshire sow

at the Sydney Show this year was Mr. E. Jenkins' 'Queen of Beauty'; and

as I gazed upon her photograph and noted her alluring name, I thought

once more of Lily and laughed in my sleeve at my critics. I once spent

a week with an old Lincolnshire gentleman at Kirwee, in New Zealand;

and almost before I had been able to bolt the meal that awaited my

arrival, he begged me to come and see the pigs. And at the very first

animal to which we came my happy host rubbed his hands in an ecstasy of

pride, whilst his eyes fairly sparkled. 'Bean't he a beauty?' he asked

me excitedly. And I answered confidently that he was. I could see at

a glance that the pig was a beauty _to him_; and if he was a beauty to

him, he _was_ a beauty, and there remained no more to be said. I

remember reading a story of two ministers who met beneath the

hospitable roof of an old-fashioned English farm-house. One of them no

sooner approached the table than he uttered an exclamation of delight.

Picking up one of the cups, he spoke of the wonderful beauty of the

china. He held the plates up to the light and asked the others to see

how thin they were, and went into ecstasies over the wondrous old china

that had been in the farm-house for many generations. The other took

little interest in his talk, and could not be aroused to enthusiasm

over the china; but when the farmer took out of his cupboard some old

books, one of which was a black-letter commentary, he became excited.

He turned the pages over lovingly, and pointed to the quaint initials,

and became eloquent over their beauties. The farmer thought both men

silly. Neither the china nor the books seemed precious to him. 'What

a heap o' nonsense ye be talking surely,' he said. 'Now if ye want to

see something worth seeing, come along o' me, and I'll show you the

finest litter o' pigs in the country.'

I know, of course, that, beaten at every other point, my critics will

take their stand on dietetic grounds. 'How can you have a pig for your

heroine?' they will ask, with their noses turned up in disgust. 'See

what a pig _eats_!' Now I confess that this objection did appear to me

to be serious until I went into the matter a little more carefully.

Before abandoning poor Lily, and consigning her to everlasting

obscurity, it seemed to me that I owed it to her, as a matter of common

gallantry, to investigate this charge. An author has no more right

than any other man to toy with feminine affections; and having pledged

myself to Lily as my heroine, I dared not commit a breach of promise,

save on most serious grounds. Into this matter of Lily's diet I

therefore plunged, with results that have surprised myself. I find

that Lily is the most fastidious of eaters. Experiments made in Sweden

show that, out of 575 plants, the goat eats 449, and refuses 126; the

sheep, out of 528 plants, eats 387, and refuses 141; the cow, out of

494 plants, eats 276, and refuses 218; the horse, out of 474 plants,

eats 262, and refuses 212; whilst the pig, out of 243 plants, eats 72,

and refuses 171. From all these fiery ordeals my heroine, therefore,

emerges triumphant, and her critics cut a sorry figure. Theirs is the

melancholy fate of all those who will insist on judging from

appearances. It is the oldest mistake in the world, and it is

certainly the saddest. Many, like Lily, have been judged hastily and

falsely, and, as in Lily's case, the evil thought has clung to them as

though it were a charge established, and under that dark cloud they

have lived shadowed and embittered lives. Half the pathos of the

universe lies just there.

One thing affords me unbounded pleasure. If I take Lily for my heroine

after all, I shall be following a noble precedent--Michael Fairless, in

_The Roadmender_, did something very much like it. 'In early spring,'

she says, 'I took a long tramp. Towards afternoon, tired and thirsty,

I sought water at a little lonely cottage. Bees worked and sang over

the thyme and marjoram in the garden; and in a homely sty lived a

solemn black pig, a pig with a history. It was no common utilitarian

pig, but the honoured guest of the old couple who lived there; and the

pig knew it. A year before, their youngest and only surviving child,

then a man of five-and-twenty, had brought his mother the result of his

savings in the shape of a fine young pig. A week later he lay dead of

the typhoid. Hence the pig was sacred, cared for, and loved by this

Darby and Joan.

'"'E be mos' like a child to me and the mother, an' mos' as sensible as

a Christian, 'e be," the old man said.'

What a world of illusion this is, to be sure! It takes a good pair of

eyes to see through its good-humoured trickery. You see a pig turning

this way and that way as he wanders aimlessly about the yard, and you

never dream of romance. And yet that pig is none other than Lily! You

see another pig in a commonplace sty, and you never dream of pathos;

but old Joan wipes a tear from her eye with her apron when she

remembers how that pig came into her possession. There is a world of

poetry in pig-sties. Yes, and pathos, too, of its kind. For, as I

said, Lily is dead. It was this way.

John and Mary are not rich; and a pig is a pig.

'What about Lily, Mary?' John asked awkwardly one day. 'You see, Mary,

she's got to die. If we keep her, she'll die. And if we sell her,

she'll only die. If we keep her, Mary, she may die of some disease,

and we shall see her in pain. If we sell her, she will die suddenly,

and feel no pain. And then, Mary,' he continued slowly, as though

afraid to introduce so prosaic an aspect of so pathetic a theme, 'and

then, Mary, if she dies here, look at the loss, for Lily's a pig, you

know! And if we sell her, look at the gain! And with part of the

money we can get another pet, and be just as fond of it.'

There were protests and there were tears, but Lily went to market.

Awhile afterwards John came home from the city with a parcel. 'Mary,'

he said hesitatingly, 'I've brought ye home a bit o' Lily! I thought

I'd like to see how she'd eat.'

Next morning at breakfast they neither of them ate heartily, but they

both tasted. There is food that is too sacred for a glut of appetite.

'Ah, well,' said John, at last, 'those who eat Lily will none of them

say anything but good of her, that's _one_ comfort.'

And Mary went silently off to see if she could find _another_.