sn ROPER VIG R SRR bpied Barats phettoh ae ‘ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/mygraygullothereOOkell t CaS ee eS Pac He seein a a OTHER BOOKS BY DR. KELLEY The Open Fire Trees and Men Down the Road The Ilumined Face A Pilgrim of the Infinite A Salute to the Valiant The Ripening Experience of Life With the Children: In Lewis Carroll’s Company “My Gray Gull and Other lssays WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI - Copyright, 1926, by WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian. Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE TORR WORD eG iii mtr Rite Man UII Ki ae 9 PRIM GRAY) GUL a ei kee ee dae 11 LG Law LELIGION (OF Uae ica or ae eae 20 III. AN OrcHID IN THE GARDEN OF HUMAN SUN TUMEN TS ade se De et a 49 DV IMAN RTPA ROOK ie de ue hy rece eae 81 V. Tat WATERMARK IN Human NATURE..... 97 VI. A PuysicIaAn IN WONDERLAND............ 122 VII. A Business MAn’s PHILOSOPHY.......... 130 VIII. Re GaLantuomo: KEEPING ONE’s Worp.. 143 1X, Tue Evarcs or RMIcULE:....2.....6.... 151 1. Gold-i-locks and Ribaldry............ 151 AHA HOOdODeWN BOY (ey oor ie ee alee. 191 SE SLAW p terete Hicay gull dry Maa NY a IRE DUS nam eA cap 220 To WILLIAM FAIRFIELD WARREN, ERUDITE SCHOLAR, GREAT TEACHER, UNIVERSITY BUILDER; INSPIRING FRIEND OF MY MATURE YEARS. Anp To My Litt ie SIsTErR, JULIA ISABELLA: PLAYMATE OF MY CHILDHOOD; NOW NEARLY SIXTY YEARS IN HEAVEN. FOREWORD In selecting this volume’s essays from a large amount of material, the aim has been diversity of subject, mood and atmosphere rather than uniformity of quality. The result is a miscel- lany, part of it the product of long study and reflection; other parts in lighter vein, im- promptu, informal, spontaneous, and all alike imbued with sincerity of purpose and pervaded by rational assurance of faith. _ Contemplating the possibility that this may be the author’s final volume, he sees in it, as in his previous books, nothing that demands retrac- tion or apology. My Gray Gull and The Religion of Infe con- tain the matured conclusions and convictions of a long, studious, sedulous, and deliberating life, listening to all voices, hearing all sides, im- pressed most with the purblind crass credulity of unbelief. Weve: ON ALL ACCOUNTS We cannot be too decisive in our faith, Conclusive and exclusive in its terms. What brings out the best of me and bears me fruit In power, peace, pleasantness and length of days? I find that positive belief does this For me, and unbelief no whit of this. Well now, there’s one great form of Christian faith I happened to be born in,—which to teach Was given me as I grew up, on all hands, As best and readiest means of living by; The same on examination being proved The most pronounced, moreover, fixed, precise And absolute form of faith in the whole world— Accordingly, most potent of all forms For working on the world. I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ, Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it, And hath so far advanced thee to be wise. —Robert Browning. I MY GRAY GULL “My gray gull lifts wings against the night- fall and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.’ Many years I have carried that sentence in my mental vest pocket, taking it out often to show it to others. About thirty years ago William James, of Harvard, told of a little-known man whose re- markable philosophical acumen he praised, and exhibited by sample quotations. In one passage the man narrated his experience under ether in two surgical operations, in which he noted with a psychologist’s power of self-observation the behavior of his faculties while passing into and emerging from unconsciousness. By some subtle mental or spiritual process, in- communicable to others, but conclusive to him, that experience wrought in him a clear and firm conviction of his own indestructibility. “And so,” concluded Professor James’ gray-headed rural philosopher, facing the hereafter, confi- dent of personal immortality—“and so my gray gull lifts wings against the nightfall and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.” That sen- tence is a gem of literary artistry. 11 12 MY GRAY GULL AN ARTIST’S STUDIO Looking at the prize-winning pictures of Paul King, well-known New York-Philadelphia artist, in his Philadelphia studio, I said to him, ‘You paint pictures with colors, literary art paints pictures with words. What think you of this as a picture?” Then I repeated slowly the sentence about the gray gull lifting gray wings at gray nightfall for flight over gray sea, under gray sky, taking the dim gray leagues—a color symphony in gray, the tones harmonious with the meaning. Paul King, the artist, agreed with me that the sentence is a perfect work of verbal art, unsur- passed for shading and truthfulness. As to its accuracy and fidelity to fact, I-think I know that, of all adjectives in the dictionary, “fearless” best befits the eye of the sea-gull. Again and again on shipboard, standing at the stern, I watched the bird following close after the ensign-staff in straight, level, effortless flight at unvarying distance, as if tied to the staff by invisible thread. And what I noticed most in that lone sea-bird was the calm, steady, unflinching pair of eyes fixed fearlessly on me. A similarly paintable word-picture of old Cavalier days, a symphony of green and brown, long ago fixed itself in my pictorial memory: “An armed Cavalier at close of day Halting his steed beneath a tavern sign To quaff a beaker of the landlord’s wine, With quip and toast and merry roundelay. MY GRAY GULL 13 “The little bar-maid, with her cheeks aflame, Listening his way side wit the while her feet Stir idle circles in the dust and beat A low refrain, half pleasure and half shame. “High overhead the quivering aspens whirled By evening winds, and over dale and down The highway winding to some happy town Beyond the purple borders of the world.” That too, differing much from the Gray Gull, is a word picture little short of perfection. An artist could easily reproduce it in colors on canvas. The last two lines are consummate in their bright assurance of a happy town on be- yond, just out of sight. From any road-house on life’s highway the cheerful twilight traveler may take the road to Happy Town, beyond the purple borders of the world. Oh, quenchless expecta- tion of the deathless human soul! Assurance of immortality comes variously to different minds. Among the pictures in my men- tal gallery are two little boys, grandsons of Joel Wheeler, in whose hospitable home I was guest for a month in the autumn of 1873 as temporary pastor of Asbury Church, Buffalo. Two very human incidents in that grand-paternal home remain vivid. The little chaps were saving pennies to build a playhouse in the backyard the next spring. Comparing their growing piles, the younger said, with calculation in his eye, “Who- ever gets the lottest money will have the mostest half of the house.” That was the natal day of 14 MY GRAY GULL competitive acquisitiveness, visibly reaching after gain, the instinct for self-aggrandizement, showing itself early. Most memorable of all while I was in that home was the day when the baby emerged from babyhood into his first pair of trousers. His Majesty paraded and pranced through the house with menacing self-importance. The strut of that pompous man-child was awesome. With health and a day he was, like Emerson, making the pomp of emperors ridiculous. One might go far to find a parallel, and recall not unfittingly Macaulay’s lines on “Rome’s proudest day,” when “the splendor of her mighty pomp wound down the sacred way, and past the bellowing forum and through the echoing grove up to the everlasting gates of capitolian Jove.” The absurd little youngster on that epochal transi- tion day was ludicrous, touching, altogether lovely. One would think his mother might have felt her baby beginning to slip away from her into something new and strange but for her pride In his normal growth; and, besides, a mother never loses her babe; on earth or in heaven he is forever her baby. She can still feel her unborn child stirring under her heart in years far on when he is a middle-aged man. When that rugged South-American captain of salvation and apostle of civil and religious liberty in benighted lands, Dr. Thomas B. Wood, my fellow-student at Wesleyan University, came home, a grizzled MY GRAY GULL 15 graybeard, to visit his mother, he was waked in the middle of the night by someone feeling of the bedclothes in the dark. Half awake, he knew whose godlike hands they were, and heard the dearest of earthly voices saying, “My boy, have you covers enough?” The valiant warrior, scarred veteran of many a fight with papal powers of darkness, ignorance and superstition, was still her baby: she must tuck him in. Dear Tom Wood (“Broad West,’ we Easterners called the big fellow at Wesleyan) told me that sweet, tender story, his voice trembling with pathos, in Saint John’s parsonage, Brooklyn, at midnight one Sunday, setting my heart aquiver. I have wandered far. Back now for a moment to Buffalo and the two memorable, immortal laddies in the Wheeler home. When the older boy came to manhood, incipient consumption drove him to the West. When Colorado failed to arrest the disease, he came home to die. In his last days the young man said, “Mother, I know ’m immortal. I can’t tell how I know, but I know it.” He was as positive as Emerson, who said, “I do not know whether you are immortal, but I do know that I shall live forever.” And with that great Browningesque affirmation on his lips the dear boy’s spirit “lifted wings against the nightfall and took the dim leagues with a fearless eye.” Though neither philos- opher nor poet, nor exceptionally bright, he could say, “I know” as positively as they. Humble 16 MY GRAY GULL souls by millions know as much. The other day a plain man dying quickly of pneumonia at fifty- five in his Maplewood, New Jersey, home, said, “Tsn’t it wonderful to be able to face the unseen with a cheer?” echoing Browning’s “Greet the unseen with a cheer.” A SUMMER VACATION During the summer of 1916 I was watching over three sick persons, strangers to each other, hundreds of miles apart, whom Providence com- mitted to my care. One, a homeless woman of sixty, remnant of a family in which I had min- istered to four generations, was dying slowly with painful disease in a small private sani- tarium at Marblehead. Once a fortnight I spent three days in Boston, going daily to Marblehead to comfort the sufferer, spending as long a time at her bedside as her condition permitted. (It was at that bedside that I found again, after years of absence, my marvelous soldier girl, Norman Derr, lieutenant in the French army, furloughed for two months to comfort her saintly aunt and godmother, from whose last days “Mademoiselle Miss” learned far better how to die than her “black pearl-fisher from Guade- loupe,” dying for France in her hospital at the front, could show her. Unutterable joy it was to Llangollen’s half-century friend to recover that adorable child, born at Llangollen, New Brunswick, known to him from her birth. Four MY GRAY GULL 17 years later, sick and alone in a distant city, she cried to me by wire: “I need you desperately. When and where can I find you?” Instantly the wire flashed back, “Come here.” And Le Bon Dieu gave my Norman, broken and ill from scar- let fever, and the awful strain of four years of frightful war, into my care for the saving of life and reason—no more sacred privilege in all my eighty years. Thus through many weeks of nurs- ing the bond was tightened between that bril- liant child of thirty years and the minister to three generations in her family before she was born. Soul of my soul, her mother says she is. A bishop once called himself the son of my soul. Hush! Pull down the curtain. This grows too intimate and holy for publicity. Thus a merci- ful Heaven makes amends to a childless man who prizes proxy-fatherhood. ) One day when I was at that Marblehead bed- side, the longed-for end not far away, the sufferer said to me: “‘I wish I had something of mine to give you, but in my wandering life I have dropped everything. Would you care to have that picture pinned on the wall yonder?’ It was an unframed photo-copy of a noted painting of a gull flying out over the sea. I answered: “Oh, Katie, you do not know what you are doing. That picture is loaded with meaning for me. Nothing you could give me would be valued more.” Then I told her the story of William James’ gray-haired philosopher, to whose preg- 18 MY GRAY GULL nant, picturesque sentence the picture she was giving me might have suggested its figure of speech. I took her gift back home with me from my last visit to her, and for seven years after Norman Derr and her father and I had laid the tortured body in the distant family burying place beyond Llangollen, I kept that gull picture on my study wall, and often, when not equal to writing or reading, I sat in my easy-chair rest- ing my eyes on that fearless, feathered aeronaut and meditating on wings and immortality. The picture was destroyed in the fire which con- sumed my library and endangered my life, December 31, 1922. Conscious of wings, poised for far flight, ex- pectant of spacious destiny the human spirit is, in all sorts and conditions of men. “I thought I was about to sprout my wings,” said Captain Lund, of the Osceola, on Saint John’s River, on his second trip after dangerous pneumonia, Standing on deck and pointing out to his pas- Sengers the eagles’ nests in tall trees along the river. O eagles and sea-gulls, ye are not winged for endless flight as we waddling, toddling pedestrians, immortal mortals, are. At FOURSCORE Dying is as natural as being born, and each is entrance on a larger life. At four score one may say with the master-poet of the nineteenth century: MY GRAY GULL 19 “T go to prove my soul, I see my way as birds their trackless way. God guides me and the birds, I shall arrive.” And with the rural philosopher, “My gray gull lifts its wings against the nightfall and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.” But for supreme assurance we listen to One august, imperial, transcendently Authoritative Voice sounding from Calvary and Olivet and now from the Heaven of heavens: “Because I live ye shall live also. I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there ye may be also.” To that assurance of the divine Truthteller, John Bunyan, with his last breath, responded, “Take me, for I come to thee.” Having pondered long and listened to all voices, I will take His word, “Ye shall live also,” against all the futile folk who set up blatant nescience in denial of Christ’s supreme and infinite certitude. I have not found His equal in knowledge, truthfulness, and wis- dom. “All other ground is sinking sand.” II THE RELIGION OF LIFE “The Christian bell, the cry from off the mosque, and vaguer voices of polytheism, make but one music.” So sang Tennyson, and, so saying, sang amiss. If he had said that these various religions are born of the same needs and cravings in human nature and are manifestations of man’s spiritual capacities, he would have spoken truly. But there is no such equality among religions as his words imply. In no sense do the Christian church bell and the muezzin’s cry and the poly- phonic Babel of polytheism “make the same music” or sound alike to the ear or to the soul. To note only one difference—not to woman’s ears do the Mohammedan muezzin and the Chris- tian-church bell sound alike. The muezzin means the Turkish harem, with its semi-imprisonment, its miscellaneousness, its lack of refinement, edu- cation, and purity. The bell means the Christian home, with its freedom, its dignity, its honor, and the sort of womanhood that could make col- lege boys call the graceful daughters of a cer- tain university professor “the evidences of Christianity.” The cry from off the minaret of 20 THE RELIGION OF LIFE 21 the mosque suggests the difference between a harem and a home, a difference vast and abysmal. And not to woman’s ears do the “voices of poly- theism make the same music” as the Christian bell. In India, that land which is a squirming nest of polytheisms, the zenanas, with their segregated, shut-in and suppressed women, and . the senselessly cruel customs which oppress widows and children, do not remind Rudyard Kipling of the home he was born in and the Christian homes with which he is familiar any more than the harsh conch-shells blowing from the temples their raucous call to come and wor- ship idols which grated in his ears one Christmas Day, reminded him of the holy cheer of London’s Christmas chimes, or than the vile rites of the obscenely hideous temples of Benares resemble the pure and ennobling worship of Westminster. On one of my visits to the famous New Hamp- Shire school, Phillips-Exeter, an oppressive silence befell in the after-service when the boys were expected to question the visiting speaker about anything in his address or in their own minds. Not one question, and this visitor had to break the silence. Knowing that school to be a feeder for Harvard, he began: “At Harvard University [the boys pricked up their ears] there was a professor who had three very beautiful daughters [expectancy on every face]. What do you suppose the students called those girls? [A pause to let the boys wonder.] They called 22 MY GRAY GULL them The Evidences of Christianity. [A long pause to let the boys ponder.] Wasn’t it fine in those university men to think of the girls in that way?” Then the visitor leaned toward his audi- ence, settled to his task and drove the lesson home, saying, “Yes, it was fine, but the best thing about it was that it is trwe, everlastingly and world-widely TRUE. It is perfectly fair to judge any system of thought, morals, or religion by its effects and products in character and life. Earth’s One Infallible Teacher settled that: ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’” And the superiority of Christian womanhood, command- ing honor and deference from men, is one of the chief Evidences of Christianity. “Vaguer” is an apt adjective for Tennyson to apply to “the voices of polytheism,” though their vileness is far from being vague. Even Rabin- dranath Tagore, though at times more Christian than pagan, is vague, dreamy, indefinite, rose- misty. The laureate would have spoken truth if he had said that the ethnic and pagan religions compare with Christianity about as the music of their lands compares with the music of Chris- tian countries. In the Metropolitan Museum of New York city there is the largest and complet- est possible collection of musical instruments from many tribes and nations and lands, ancient and modern. Compare not only rude, primitive instruments of ancient barbarian peoples, but THE RELIGION OF LIFE 23 the gongs and tom-toms of modern pagan na- tions with the perfection achieved in the piano and the violin. What have the Christless nations to show alongside the orchestras and choirs which render the great Christian anthems and chants and oratorios, like Haydn’s “Creation” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Handel’s “Messiah” with its Hallelujah Chorus, in which you can hear the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy? Take the most miraculous of instruments and listen to its incredible capabilities. Imagine a Stradivarius in the hands of Ole Bull. See what Paganini can do with only a single string. To show what can be done, he stands before a great audience and draws his bow across the strings so sharply as to break one string. The audience mutters its surprise. He does the same with every string save one, while the angry audience groans its amazement and disgust. Only one string left, one string and Paganini! A hush falls on the crowded house, until in the painful silence the sound of that one lone, forlorn string is heard. “And now ’twas like all instruments, now like a lonely flute; and now ’twas like an angel’s song that bade the heavens be mute.” He worked miracle on miracle of instrumentation, simply to show how much music is latent in one string, and how easily a master can bring it out; just as the Master, Christ, can take one individual soul, like Charles Wesley’s, or F. W. Faber’s, or 24 MY GRAY GULL Mary A. Lathbury’s, and evoke from it a music which shall ripple like the morning in the farthest horizons of the world, and live through ages, and wake the echoes of the stellar spaces. We think it would not have been unfair to say to Tennyson that the cry of the muezzin from the minaret of the mosque and the polyphonic Babel of polytheism compare with the Christian bell about as their musical instruments and compo- sitions and vocalizations compare with the high and exquisite perfection, the almost divine har- monies, suggestive of the music of the spheres, which genius has achieved under the refining and elevating influence of Christian ideals, the stimulus of the Christian aspiration toward per- fection, and of the joyousness which has been Singing in the world since the angels sang over Bethlehem on the night of the nativity—the joy begotten of the hallowed glory of the Christian faith, and by the knowledge that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, “Christian Perfection,” which is, as Bishop Birney says, the “Great Expectation” in char- acter, is also seen in the superexcellence of Christian music. What non-Christian people have produced anything like “the molded notes of Mendelssohn”? If, as has been said, “music is the solace of the gods for all the ills of life,” then the gods of non-Christian peoples have pro- vided small solace for them. A brilliant anti- Christian critic, speaking of art generally, THE RELIGION OF LIFE 25 whether in music, or painting, or sculpture, or literature, unconsciously offers testimony and tribute to Christianity when he says, “In judg- ing artists of every kind I make use of this one test question, ‘Has the hatred of life or the love of life been at work here?’ Is the artist cynical or enthusiastic toward life, deficient in or exuberant of life?” The critic’s doctrine is that high quality and potency in art are born of “superabundance of life.” By his use of almost the exact words of Christ, even this Christless critic unintentionally brings into view and sets in the foreground Him who said, “I am come that the world may have life more abundant.” Part of the fulfillment of that promise is seen in the primacy and perfection of Christian art in musie and in other realms. “The Christian bell,’ which Tennyson’s care- less words seem to lower to the Moslem’s level, and lower still to the conch-shell’s screech, has never yet been duly celebrated. Its melody and meaning cast a heavenly spell. What a sub- duing, solemnizing, and sanctifying spell fell over Syracuse in the evening half-hours, when, during the month of preparation for the Billy Sunday campaign, the chimes of the city shook down upon streets and homes in the twilight the sacred influence of such tunes as “Sweet Hour of Prayer,’ “Rock of Ages,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,’ and “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow”! 26 MY GRAY GULL Ernest Renan, whenever he revisited the village of his birth, even in his most sceptical years, felt the spell of the church spire with its bells hush- ing his heart with a back-flow of the reverent reli- gion of his childhood, and his soul renewed its obeisance to the church as the abiding emblem and exponent of the highest vocation of man. To a devoted daughter, watching for her sick mother’s final breath, the sweet-toned bell in the tower of the village church at Clifton Springs, calling through the dusk to evening prayers, seemed like the bells of the Celestial City, ring- ing to welcome her saintly mother home to the life eternal. Conch-shell or Christian bell? Can any human being who has heard both and knows their meaning hesitate which of them to choose? CHRISTIANITY’S SUPERIORITY In numerous particulars Christianity is un- duplicated, unparalleled, unapproached. The sum total of those particulars makes the gospel stand alone, gives it a place preeminent, tran- scendent, supreme. (a) It alone has the full, clear revelation of the Fatherhood of God, with its corollary, the brotherhood of man. (b) It alone shows a Saviour who dies, the just for the unjust, to bring men to God. Neither Vyasa, Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha, nor Mo- hammed makes for himself the claim, nor his disciples for him, that he is without sin, and THE RELIGION OF LIFE 27 that as the one Sinless One, he dies an atoning death for the sins of the whole world. For no founder of any pagan or ethnic faith is such a claim made. (c) Because of these and other distinguish- ing contents and elements of the Christian reve- lation, certifying its incomparable divineness, the gospel’s gloriousness is unapproached. (d) But its most singular and separating claim is that a dead and buried Man is the source and ever-living sustainer of the world’s spiritual life. This was Christ’s declaration concerning himself: “I am the resurrection and the life,” “I am the life.’ This, also from the first, was the claim of his disciples and apostles for him: “He is risen from the dead, and is alive forevermore ;” and they sealed that declaration with their blood. The great apostle testified, “It is Christ that liveth in me,” and preached to the early Chris- tians, “Christ is your life.” THE RELIGION OF LIFE “Christianity the Religion of Life” is a claim not difficult to substantiate. No other religion so identifies itself with life, or is so vitalizing and energizing to all man’s nobler powers, as is the religion of Christ. And this is one of the reasons why it will survive and spread and con- quer. Andreyey, the Russian, says: “Life is bound to triumph, and only that which makes for abundance of life can abide. I never believed 28 MY GRAY GULL in the supremacy of life so much as when I read the works of Schopenhauer, the father of pessi- mism. Since a man could think so gloomily and bitterly about life as he did, and yet consent to live, continue to live, and prefer to live, it is evident that life is mighty and unconquerable. Not systems nor views nor theories will conquer. Only that which is united with life will conquer: that which strengthens the roots and motives of life and justifies it. Only that which is useful in life continues and remains; all that is harmful to it will inevitably perish, sooner or later. Even if the harmful thing Stands to-day as an indestructible wall against which the heads of the noblest peoples are break- ing in the struggle, it will fall to-morrow; it will fall because it wanted to impede and restrict life, the fullness and freedom of life.” What the world decides about life it will decide about Christ. Not till it rejects life will it reject him. Nothing short of the universal and final denial of the wish for life and the will to live can bring about the rejection of Chris- tianity. The ultimate supremacy of Jesus over the world rests on the verdict of life, and the love of life is sure to insure the final world-wide acceptance of the gospel of Christ. Only uni- versal pessimism and hatred of life could pre- vent that, however slow and wavering the prog- ress seems to us short-lived creatures of myopic vision, faint courage, and of little faith. THE RELIGION OF LIFE 29 Is it not true that the most central, funda- mental, tenacious, and universal of human instincts is the love of life? Richard Jeffries, in his Story of My Heart, tells us that there was a time when a weary restlessness came upon him. He thirsted for some pure, fresh springs of thought and feeling. An instinctive longing drove him to the sea. To get to the sea at some quiet spot was his one desire. And this is what he did: “The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me, the wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the sea and the glow of the sun filled me. I touched the surge with my hands, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lungs to the wind. I was in love with life. Then I prayed; yes, I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves.” And what was his prayer? This: “Give me fullness of life, like to the sea, and the sun, and the earth, and the air, clean and strong and sweet. And give me also greatness and health and perfection of soul above all things.” That was and is the craving of the normal man. “Fullness of life” is his cry. Not to be less, but to be more. Life, the life which is life indeed. He cannot get enough of it. Insatiable is the lover of life. A few repudiate and reject life; but that is un- natural and insane. The number of suicides does not exceed the number of lunatics. And no one, whether sane or insane, flings life away until it seems no longer life but a living death. 30 MY GRAY GULL It is not life that they hate. Alfred Tennyson’s lines are true: “Whatever crazy sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath Hath ever truly longed for death. *Tis life of which our veins are scant, Oh, life, not death, for which we pant, More life and fuller that we want.” In one widespread religion there is a special inferiority. Buddhism, longing for nonexist- ence, is subvital, a sickly mood, a soul-disabling depression, lacking hope and courage. It is melancholia made into a religion, the morbid, un- wholesome, and unnatural cult of a desire to perish. A dejected lot are the pilgrims of Tibet, marching to Lhassa, but seeking the road to Nowhere and Nothingness, droning their lifeless chant: “Turn the wheel and beat the drum Till we to Nirvana come,” and worshiping by mechanism. Wheel-prayer rimes with wheel-chair and suggests invalidism and disablement. It is inconceivable that the hu- man race can find its home in Mohammedanism or Buddhism. A great All-India Convention of Religions was held at Allahabad. Hinduism, Islamism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and TH eneA ie were all strongly represented. But it was agreed, by general consent, that the only message that “struck warm” was the witness of the Indian Christians to the love and power THE RELIGION OF LIFE 31 of Christ. To that testimony a sympathetic chord of response vibrated in all hearts. And, at the close of the Convention, the Hindu secre- tary exclaimed, “The one thing that we could not have dispensed with was the Christian con- tribution.” Turning my eyes toward heathen- dom this is what happened to me: “Sudden, before my inward open vision, Millions of faces crowded up to view, Sad eyes that said, ‘For us is no provision; Give us your Saviour too.’ ““Give us,’ they cry, ‘your cup of consolation; Never to our outreaching hands ’tis passed; We long for the Desire of every nation, And, oh, we die so fast!’ ” Dr. Camden M. Cobern, discussing the ancient philosophy of Wang Yang Ming, notes the de- vitalizing influence of the deadening delusion called Buddhism on even the modern thought of China and Japan. Give mankind their choice between fullness of life and extinction of life: which will they choose? The Christian duty is to put the choice before them. REAL LIres Man wants a life which is real. “Lay hold on eternal life,” wrote Paul to Timothy. “Lay hold on the life which is life indeed,” one Re- vised Version renders it. The demand for reality is distinctive. The craving is sometimes dormant, sometimes active and insistent, as seen 32 MY GRAY GULL not only in high-browed philosophers searching for the Ultimate Reality, sounding for the Welt- grund, but even sometimes in little children making first acquaintance with the world in which they find themselves. A baby was in his mother’s arms at sunset. The mother tells the story: “The sunset glow was fading. My baby boy with me, Watching the glorious shading of brilliant clouds parading, Looked up; and then as if to ken what older eyes could see, Said, ‘Mamma, is it true? Is it true, all true— The purple and gold and blue?’ “And what could I say to my little boy blue, Except, ‘It is true, Sweetheart, all true’? And the dear head nestling upon my breast, The eyelids drooping to joyful rest, The lips, as if a tryst to keep, Said, ‘Please, mamma, put me up there to sleep, ” Another day when the baby was a bit older he was on his father’s knee hearing the Christ- mas story read from the Great Book. The father says: “The Bible closing slowly, the boy upon my knee, Seeing the manger lowly enfold the Christ-child holy Looked up again as if to ken what older thoughts must be. ‘But, papa, is it true? Is it all, all true ?’ “And what could I say to those eager eyes, blue, Except, ‘It is true, Sweetheart, all true’? And his eyes grew brighter with faith’s keen sight, And his cheeks aglow with Hope’s warm light, THE RELIGION OF LIFE 33 His lips, with Love’s unsullied joy, Said, ‘Papa, tell Jesus Ill be his boy.’ “So, with the old, old story, of unseen things above, That blessed boy story of Jesus and his glory, There came to me, from Galilee, in Jesus’ voice of love His promise, unbeguiled, of heaven, undefiled, If I too become a child.” Thus, mother, father, and child, seeking the true and the real, rested together in Jesus, the Christ, the real-life giver. ABUNDANT LIFE Take him all in all, in superb physique, robust mentality, and affluent red-blooded temperament, Phillips Brooks, with the swift onrush of his im- passioned speech and in the total power of his tremendous appeal, was probably the most majestic figure in the American pulpit in his day. In Philadelphia and the regions round about, in the years when he was rector of Holy Trinity Church and Matthew Simpson was resident bishop, there was mighty apostolic preaching from those two royal ambassadors of Jesus Christ, both of them manifestly in the apostolic succession. Possibly Phillips Brooks knew as well as any man of his generation what Chris- tianity is. The world recognized him as an em- bodiment of it. He was a massive and majestic Christian. Also he probably understood what was the mission of Christ in the world, the 34 MY GRAY GULL errand on which the Son of God came from heaven. He has left his statement. Toward the end of his life he said he had had, in reality, only one text in all his ministry. He had been an incessant and insatiable preacher, eager to preach seven days in the week. Few men have preached as many sermons as he. Hundreds of them are in printed volumes on our shelves. Each sermon is headed with a different text. Yet, essentially, substantially, in reality, one text would cover the whole, the words of Jesus in John 10. 10: “I am come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly.” That was the meaning of the gospel Phillips Brooks preached. It was the gospel of a more abundant life. Bishop William EF. McDowell, being asked what were the subjects of his nine baccalaureate sermons as chancellor of Denver University, said: “I had different texts, but my only subject was Jesus Christ, the Life-giver.”’ CuHrIst Has “Mapp Goop” “T am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” Many centuries have passed since that declara- tion was made by the Man of Galilee. For every- one who lives and thinks there can be no more interesting and important question than whether the expectation raised and the promise implied in that unparalleled announcement by one who THE RELIGION OF LIFE 35 claimed to be divine have been met and ful- filled. Well, it should not be difficult to get an answer to that question. Through long cen- turies countless millions have put Jesus and his gospel to the test, and thus became qualified to report on the result. The truth is easy to find, for the facts are recorded in the most conspicuous _and indubitable pages of history. Who was the Galilean who so long ago gave Phillips Brooks the one all-inclusive theme and text for his life- time? Well, whoever he was, one thing is sure, he has made good on his promise wherever and whenever he has been allowed to try. “Has Christianity succeeded in the world?” asked a Yale student of Professor George P. Fisher, a great church historian, who answered, “The world has not tried it.’ He may have had in mind what Lessing said a century before when looking at the defects of Christians and the church and current, conventional Christianity: “Christianity has failed; the religion of Christ remains to be tried.” Only they who have tried the religion of Christ are competent to testify. Produce the records and call the witnesses, and when you have examined both, fling out this chal- lenge: NEVER ONCE SINCE THAT ANNOUNCE- MENT WAS MADE HAS JESUS CHRIST FAILED to give a fuller and more abundant life to any human being who honestly put him to the test and gave him a free chance by accepting 36 MY GRAY GULL and acknowledging him and cooperating with him. (a) Never in twenty centuries has one home admitted Jesus to its love and worship without having its life made fuller, richer, and more beautiful. (b) Never has any community regarded the wisdom and authority of Christ by applying his moral standards to the regulation of its affairs and customs without its communal life being cleansed, morally and physically. And the one great lesson taught by Christianity through the centuries, and equally in our day by science, is that cleanliness, physical and moral, means health for body and soul, and health means life, life more abundant and vigorous. (c) Never has any state or nation embodied Christian principles in its laws and practiced them in its intercourse with other nations with- out uplifting and ennobling its own life and add- ing to its dignity, prestige, and power. Few names in the roll of American statesmen are so surely illustrious as that of John Hay, who as secretary of state carried truth and honesty and justice and the Golden Rule into diplomacy. He lifted the international dealings of his coun- try to the Christian level. HicHest Moray LIirp Christianity’s superiority is shown in its hold- ing up the noblest ideals of character and incul- THE RELIGION OF LIFE ot cating and enjoining the highest ethics. For example, Christ’s Golden Rule surpasses that of Confucius as active doing good surpasses mere refraining from wrong and cruelty. Li Hung Chang confessed when in America that the urgent and stimulating Christian incitement, “Do unto others as ye would that they should do to you,’ is a nobler and worthier teaching than the mere negative check against cruelty and in- justice imposed by the Confucian “Do not unto others what ye would not wish them to do to you.” Confucius says, “Avoid being moral crimi- nals; be half noble.” In the one the life of right- eousness is too feeble to be efficient ; in the other it is energetic and active, the high tide of moral life flooding the coasts and inlets of human senti- ment and conduct. Listen, all who deny or question. The Life- giver who came to give the world a more abun- dant life has made good wherever he has been given a chance. Nowhere is there a single bit of testimony from individual, family, community, or nation, that Jesus Christ has failed in any instance to keep his promise of a fuller, happier, and stronger life. He who is the promiser is also the giver of the life more abundant. What is the purpose of reli- gion and morality? Their purpose is to strengthen life by cleansing, rectifying, and in- spiriting it. In Professor George H. Palmer’s book on the Field of Ethics, the main proposition 38 MY GRAY GULL is that the clearest statement of the purpose and effect of both morality and religion is found in the announcement made by Jesus, “I am come that men might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” It is not strange that He who is the source of religion and morality—who is the power that makes for righteousness in each soul and in so- ciety—could most clearly state, as the Harvard professor truly says, the purpose and effect of both. And the fact that he best knew and could most clearly state the object and purpose of morality and religion is confirmatory of his claim to be the source and the enabling power of both. That he is that source of power was his an- nouncement concerning himself. It has always been the claim of his disciples and followers for him. It is the testimony of all who have received his gospel and have let him try his power on them unhindered. The source of moral life, like the secret of the tides, is above the earth. Through untold ages the tides of the restless ocean were ebbing and flowing on all the coasts of the world, without the tribes of men knowing or suspecting what power it really was that lifted and swung them to and fro. The natural idea was that the mighty move- ment originated within the ocean itself and was due to some tremendous force deep in the bosom of the sea. But in the course of time a day THE RELIGION OF LIFE 39 arrived when it was perceived that the cause of this great movement was not in the sea itself, and was not of the earth at all, but was up yonder in the heavens. A man pointed to the moon and said: “There is the shining cause of all the tides. The moon reaches down long arms and lays its mighty hands upon the vast waters and lifts and swings them back and forth from shore to shore.” In like manner, the hearts of men from the beginning were moved within them by some mys- terious power ever since men were men and hearts were hearts; but they knew not whence it really came. They thought it originated within themselves. They never dreamed it was from above, or if they dreamed, they did not know. Their restless spirits, stirred by longings, lift- ings, surgings to and fro, knew not that an eternal Spirit moves upon the minds and hearts of men. There was no one to say to them, “It is God that worketh in you.” But the day of full revelation and illumination came. Christ is the source of the world’s moral life. Paul explained to the Romans that the cause of the life divine in the souls of men was that “nower of Jesus Christ which was kept secret since the world began, but is now made mani- fest.” And this is that “power which worketh in you,” concerning which he wrote to the Ephesians. From the infinite Father of spirits proceed the forces which rouse, regenerate, and 40 MY GRAY GULL transform human nature, and these divine influ- ences are mediated to mankind for their salva- tion by Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, through the Holy Spirit. This is Matthew Arnold’s “Power that makes for righteousness” in human char- acter and conduct; which is “the power of an endless life,” and which makes Paul exult in “the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe,” the Power divine, revealed and com- municated from above by Him who came down from above to show us the Father. To whom shall we go? Not to Vyasa or Zoroaster, not to Confucius or Buddha, not to the Greek gods or the Roman or Egyptian, but to Him whom we can worship, Saying, “Thou alone hast the words of eternal life ;’ to Him who says: “TI am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me >” “Be- cause I live ye shall live also;” of whom Paul says, “Christ who is our life,’ and in whom Whittier trusted in the last verses he ever wrote: “Giftless we come to Him who all things gives, And live because He lives.” This is Christianity’s explanation of all the moral and spiritual life of the world. Wherever on the earth there is a bit of life that is holy and happy, it is so because the power of the unseen Christ is at work there. He alone has said, “I am the life,” and only his presence brings “the life that is life indeed.” ‘THE RELIGION OF LIFE AY And looking abroad more widely, outside of the question of the genesis of the religious life, to this complexion will the world’s philosophies come at last: Christianity’s explanation of things, of the entire system of things, of things in general, and of man m particular, will be found to be the most plausible, reasonable, provable, and convincing of all explanations, and even physical science will ultimately have noth- ing to say against it. It was a sturdy master mind, not unaware of any knowledge, but holding in full survey the realm of modern science and philosophy, who made the stout and sweeping affirmation : “T say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ, Accepted by the reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it, And hath so far advanced thee to be wise.” The solution of all human questions is in and from the revelation of God in Christ, and He who is the Light of the World will lead a groping and bewildered race, sadly fumbling all its prob- lems, out of darkness to sure solution. MAKING THis Lire KNOWN The supreme duty and service to men is to make known the “Life which is life indeed,” with its explanation and source. A few years ago the two leading philosophers of the Continent, Bergson of France and Eucken of Germany, came 42 MY GRAY GULL from Europe, not far apart, to lecture in America. Their themes were substantially identical. In an age infatuated with physical Science and mechanical triumphs, and _ over- weighted toward materialism, they lifted high and loud the spiritual note; they made men hear the cry of the spirit which is in man. They asserted the rights and claims of the human soul, the reality and indispensableness of the spiritual life. They illuminated the nature of that life and set forth its rational explanation; they de- clared and argued the divine authenticity, the intelligibility and validity of spiritual experi- ence. With clearness and great intellectual force these two sure-footed master thinkers delivered their message to packed audiences, and made good on their mission, casting the spell of the spirit and making thoughtful minds aware of the things which are unseen and eternal. In their addresses “the intellectual power, through words and things, went sounding,” not on “a dim and perilous way,” but on a clear, straight, well- built highway, firm for the soul’s pilgrimage. Reasoning in a realm where definite intellectual grasp and exact analysis are difficult even for the acutest and ablest minds, and where clear definition and convincing reasoning are achieved by few, a realm in which the main reliance must be on the self-evidencing power of its realities within the individual soul,—reasoning in that Sublimated realm, Bergson and Eucken yet set THE RELIGION OF LIFE 43 forth successfully, with powerful and inspiring cogency, the Religion of Life. Wherever they spoke they clarified and freshened the atmos- phere of thought and feeling. In the great battle always going on everywhere for the rights of the soul, Bergson and Eucken are at one end of the firing line, with Billy Sunday at the other; the philosophers of university halls and the evangelist in his tabernacle crying each in the dialect of his own training and each reaching his own public, “Life, life, eternal life!’ and each rendering incalculable service to the world. Witrn CHRIST IN GLORY “Your life is hid with Christ in God,” there- fore “when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory,” Paul wrote to the Colossians. When we take the message in, when the full force of its wondrous- ness breaks over us, our astonished hearts cry, “What! such creatures as we ‘appear with Him in glory’? Incredible!” “How can it be, thou heavenly King, That thou shouldst us to glory bring, Make slaves the partners of thy throne, Decked with a never-fading crown? “Hence, our hearts melt, our eyes o’erflow, Our words are lost, nor will we know Nor will we think of aught beside My Lord, my Love is crucified.” We look up with adoring gratitude to the 44 MY GRAY GULL God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and say: How thou can’st think so well of us, Yet be the God thou art, Is darkness to my intellect, But sunshine to my heart. We share the well-reasoned confidence of the good old hymn our mothers used to sing: “And when I’m to die, ‘Receive me,’ Ill ery; For Jesus hath loved me, I cannot tell why. “But this I do find, We two are so joined, He'll not stay in glory, And leave me behind.” Love shares everything with the loved one. The reason which rules and the law which works in Christ’s exaltation of those on whom he has set his love are not unfamiliar to us. We see the same law at work in human relationships on all levels of our earthly life. The matter is not hard to understand. Whether on earth or in heaven, love always exalts and enriches to the limit of its power those on whom it bestows it- Self, and shares with them its own best fortune. When King Cophetua loves a beggar maid, the beggar maid is lifted to the level of the king. Her life enters into the splendor of his life now. The poor old beggar life is gone. She leaves her hut for his palace. The king has made life THE RELIGION OF LIFE 45 royal and rich for her. Henceforth he shares with her his glory. In Rome they used to show you the window at which Raphael wooed the Fornarina, the baker’s daughter. It was not a lofty palace window, but a lowly lattice in a humble home on the level of the street. What cared Rome for that baker’s daughter? Nothing. Buta great artist crowned her with the dearest honors of his heart, and because Raphael loved that simple maiden he put her features into the faces of his Madonnas, so that it is her face you see in his great paint- ings; therefore so long as canvas lasts and art endures, so long as men remember Raphael, they must remember her. See, this is the point: he makes her as immortal as himself, he shares with her his glory Down the river Clyde to Greenock go tourists to see there the grave of Burns’ Highland Mary. Little reason have we to suppose her superior to a hundred other lassies in other Scotch towns or countrysides. Then why do tourists care to find her grave? Because Bobbie Burns loved her and sang about her and wedded her; made her name as lasting as the undying poetry of Scotland’s most gifted bard, the poet of the homely human heart. Of fame he had much, and he shared with her his glory. One day a strong man stood on the portico of the Capitol at Washington to be inaugurated President of the United States. It was his 46 MY GRAY GULL day of glory. When the Chief Justice had ad- ministered to him the oath of office, and he had kissed the Bible in token of his reverence for the sacred Word, and of the solemn sanctity of his oath, he lifted his lips from the Holy Book, and turning his back on the applauding crowd, stepped back to a white-haired little woman seated just behind him, and stooping, pressed his lips to hers in a kiss as reverent as he had pressed upon the Bible. She was his mother, a plain and simple woman, humble and unknown to the world, his widowed mother. When James A. Garfield’s hour of glory drew near, his heart said to her, “When I shall appear at the top of human eminence in sight of the whole world, you also shall appear with me in glory.” That is the way human love does, and that, too, is the way divine love does. Christ shares his glory. “Ye shall appear with him in glory.” That is the destiny of the great Saints of the ages, and not less of the obscure and unknown and self-distrusting. When John Wesley was dying, one of his faithful friends, not present with him, knowing that a great soul was passing yonder into the heavens, kept saying, “Lift up your heads, oh ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and this heir of glory Shall come in.” And that is the lawful, war- ranted expectation of all who truly trust in Christ. Of the father of William Hazlitt we are told THE RELIGION OF LIFE AG that when he was nearing the end of life at the age of eighty-four, he “made no complaint, but went on talking of glory, honor, and immortality to the end,” in high and assured reliance on his Master’s Word and the power of Christ to save all who come unto him. Richard Watson Gilder remembered his godly old grandfather on his death bed, murmuring as if in prayer meeting or class meeting phrases of Christian testimony and confidence, with much holy language, colored with the very life-blood of his soul, sanctifying his lips and ineffably dignifying his venerable countenance, as his spirit was entering Christ’s eternal glory. George John Romanes’ wisest, noblest, and most radiant phrase was “the hallowed glory of the Christian faith.” Nothing else so hallows, nothing brings so much glory. It was the bright shining of that glory that lit and lured him back from his dark, devious, distant intellectual vagrancies to kneel at the altar he had forsaken and take again the Holy Sacrament to his com- fort. The Religion of Life is the religion of great expectations; the expectation in this world of perfect love, ‘‘Christian perfection,” as it is called; the expectation in the world beyond of sharing in our Redeemer’s glory. The least and lowliest of those whom he loves and who trust in him may say with boldness and without presump- tion: 48 MY GRAY GULL “Oh, to think, to step ashore, and that shore Heaven: To clasp a hand outstretched, and that God’s hand; To breathe new air, and that celestial air; To feel refreshed, and know it’s immortality. Oh, think, to pass from storm and stress To one unbroken calm; To wake and find it.glory.” “Your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.” Browning sings, in his high fashion, of “that vast realm of glory” of which we are aware even while we may not enter yet; the spiritual life beyond our earthly life, the law of which is known to us as is the law of this; and though our feet stay here, our heart and brain move there and are At home in Glory. So sang the most robustly affirmative poet of the nineteenth cen- tury, the strongest singer since Shakespeare. iif AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN OF HUMAN SENTIMENTS LUTHER BURBANK, godfather and guardian angel of plants and fruits and flowers, says: “The child is the purest, truest thing in the world. Its life is stainless, sensitive, and re- sponsive to all impressions.” Dr. Lynn Harold Hough quotes a saying about James Barrie: “Most men grow up into manhood, but he grows down into a perpetual understanding of child- hood.” The more I know of childhood and motherhood, the more I stand in awe of them; they seem so near to God. In his later years the great Dutch artist Josef Israels turned from the complexi- ties of art which was largely artificial and fol- lowed instead the simplicities, mostly found in childhood. Art became to him, like Zechariah’s Jerusalem, a city of truth and innocence, “full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.” When Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, an admirer of Israels, visited Holland and called upon him, the famous painter touched one of his own pictures of childhood fondly and said, “Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter into the king- dom of heaven.” Whoso is insensitive to the charm of childhood is more to be distrusted than “the man that hath no music in himself and is 49 50 MY GRAY GULL not moved by concord of sweet sounds,” pre- sumably “fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils,” thinks Shakespeare. That a man should take an interest, absorb- ing and intense, in his own children is inevi- table, universal, a matter of course. That men— we mean, especially, childless men—should take an interest, a sort of vicarious, poetic interest, in other people’s children is not unnatural nor un- lawful nor infrequent. In the flower garden of amiable human senti- ments the love for unrelated little children on the part of bachelors and other childless men is a flower not coarse, stiff, and unfragrant like a bachelor’s button, but, rather, like an orchid, air- fed, airy, and sweet, a delicate epiphytic bloom. Such friendships, born not of blood kinship but of spirit, fostered by esthetic sensibilities and fed by ethereal sentiments, are found blossoming even in the heart of such a man as Herbert Spencer, who speaks of one boarding house where, he says, “two little girls became the vicar- ious object of my philoprogenitive instincts.” The best thing in Victor Hugo and especially in Swinburne is their adoration of children. Of George Eliot’s story of “Totty” Swinburne wrote: “She is Totty forever and ever, a chubby immortal little child, set in the lap of our love for the kisses and laughter of all time.” One of many bad things in Gustave Flaubert was that he almost never mentioned or noticed children. AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN OL Swinburne’s cousin, Mrs. Leigh, tells of his veneration for them, his “simple worship of the pure beauty of childhood,” of which he left many exquisite records. The Bishop of London, Dr. Winnington Ingram, says that, not having chil- dren of his own, he seeks other people’s children to make happy and be made happy by: and in another child-loving bachelor of note, La Bruyere, through the whole texture of whose mature years was woven like a thread of gold an early memory of one young girl, with the re- sult, we are told, that ever after his regard for women took on the nature of a sort of noble fatherliness. This early friend of his was the bright little daughter of a book-seller and pub- lisher whose shop he frequented to turn over the new books and to learn what was going on and to play with the child. One day when he offered for publication the manuscript of his greatest work, he said to the publisher: “If you make anything from it, let the profits be given as a marriage portion to my little playmate here when she weds;” which resulted in the pub- lisher’s daughter receiving twenty thousand dollars at her marriage. Not always, however, is such altruistic authorship so profitable to the beneficiary. A gentleman appeared at the re- ceiving window of a Boston savings bank wish- ing to open a new account, and handed in a half dollar as the first deposit. ‘We do not open an account for so small an amount as that,” said the 52 MY GRAY GULL teller. “But you must. I promised my little niece to deposit to her credit all the profits from my new book, and fifty cents is the amount up to date. You’ve got to help me keep my word. Youll surely do a little thing like that for a dear little girl.” And the bank opened the ac- count. Childless men, for their part, have the luxuri- ous advantage of enjoying the children light- heartedly without the burden of being respon- sible for them; while the contented parents, on their part, regard these friendships with amiable indulgence, undispleased, seeing perhaps some- thing a bit pathetic in the yearning fondness and romantic enthusiasm shown toward their children by such honorable susceptibles and usufructuaries. Dr. Joseph Collins, eminent neurologist and literary critic, thinks the soul of a little girl the best thing God has created. The tableau of the Big Man and the Little Girl has been set on many a stage the ages through. Friendship be- tween them, blending contrast and congeniality, is evidently on Nature’s program, divinely or- dained and provided for in the system of things. Notable instances, literally innumerable, embel- lish life and literature with indescribable beauty and irresistible charm. Among things honest, pure and lovely and of good report such pre- adolescent friendships play a delicate part in the forming of character and life. AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN D3 In a photograph of the London city mission- ary, Rev. J. Gregory Mantle, we see him seated in the middle of a group of his mission children, four boys and one girl. He is pictured holding the little girl on his lap, with her arms around his neck. Why not one of the boys? Simply because he is a man and she is a little girl, and between the two Heaven has put a subtle, fra- grant, and everlasting attraction. If the mis- sionary were a woman one of the boys, probably the smallest, might be in her lap. That picture puts us among the primordial elements of life, the primitive forces which make the world go round, and the ground is as holy as the will of God. Under the same mystical spell is the curate in Thackeray’s delightful sketch, who, visiting the tenement region, finds in one small room three fatherless children whose mother is away all day at work. Elizabeth, aged ten, who acts as Hausmutter and takes care of the two younger, is so capable and so fine that the charmed curate says admiringly, “If I, too, were but ten years old and only three feet high, I would marry Elizabeth and we would go and live in a cupboard.” But he, alas, was thirty. Many a busy man can hear in the pauses of his action the horns of Elfland faintly blowing in some far border of his life. The spell of Esmeralda falls alike on Dom Claude, the priest, and on Clopin, King of the Beggars, and on 54 MY GRAY GULL Quasimodo, the hunchback. Newspapers re- ported that General Gouraud, on Broadway, seemed more interested in an eight-year-old child smiling and reaching her hand, whom the Lion of the Argonne stooped to kiss, than in the sky- piercing Woolworth Building which was being shown him. History in many a spot is all aflit and afiutter with butterfly-like little creatures who lit on and were loved by great big men. There was wee Nancy with whom Lord Jeffrey, the terrible oger of the Edinburgh Review, used to romp, and to whom he wrote as ‘“My dear dimpled Pussie.”’ And there was the child, Thralia, whom ponder- ous old Dr. Sam Johnson called “Queenie,” and whom he described as “a bright, papilionaceous creature whom the elephant loves to play with and wave to and fro on his trunk.” It appears that the portentous polysyllabie biped, Doctor Johnson, shared the thick-skinned, and somewhat heavier four-legged elephant’s affection for Queenie, and thus this little human butterfly had the felicity of being played with by two elephantine creatures at once. And there was lovely, demure little Penelope Boothby, whom Sir Joshua Reynolds painted lovingly in her mob cap, and whose spirit went to join the immortals soon after the great artist immortalized her sweet face and slight figure with his brush. And there forever is Sir Walter Scott’s “Pet Marjorie,’ dear to thousands, whose AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 5D affection was aS warm as her genius was preco- cious and her piety genuine, and whose memory blossoms from her dust with undiminished fra- grance after a century. And there was shy little Clara Novello’s happy friendship with Charles Lamb, who was often in her father’s house. Once the child, to avoid being sent off to bed before supper when he was there, hid herself in a cupboard by the piano and fell asleep. Waking and coming out of hid- ing, she was severely reprimanded by her mother in the presence of the visitor; but Lamb pleaded for her and obtained the parental consent that whenever he came to supper the child should be allowed to remain up with the family. So when- ever he was there she had Lamb for supper. He addressed her in his letter as “Saint Clara.” In retaliation she might have Latinized him and called him Saint Agnus. Once when her father made her sing for Lamb, and she was doing her best, her stuttering friend stopped her by cry- ing out with a feigned look of suffering, “O Clara, d-d-don’t make that d-d-dreadful noise any more. For m-m-mercy’s sake, d-d-don’t.” This child, writing of him in years long after, said, “O glory and delight. How I did love dear Charles Lamb!” With similar recollections of George Meredith one woman wrote after his death: “I first saw him when I was seven years old. He and I were great friends in those days. He was a splendid playfellow.” 56 MY GRAY GULL The daughter of a London clergyman has told what a good playfellow she and her sisters had in Sydney Smith. She remembers his frequent coming to her father’s dinners, and says: “He would arrive ten minutes too soon, run up to the nursery at the top of the house, take a small girl on each knee, and delight to expend on a few little children, and the baby crowing for joy of life in a cot in the corner, the inimitable drollery and the stream of irresistible cleverness and: non- sense which only the night before, perhaps, had been the piéce de résistance of the dinner at Hol- land House. One of the little girls still recollects —better even than the sweets in his pocket—the bonhomie and kindness of the shrewd, manly face and knows that Sydney Smith’s wit was not his finest quality.” A talented woman of wide and varied ex- perience, looking back through many eventful years, sees herself a little child riding around Clifton Springs on the big shoulders of that burly Saint Sagacity, Dr. Henry Foster, founder and builder of the place. She remembers that her ambition was to build a house of snow large enough for him to crawl into on hands and knees like a great brown bear. Remembering gratefully these and many other things, this woman in her maturity says, “He certainly was a Sweet friend for a little girl to have.” An English woman tells of the happy play she used to have with Thackeray. Once when he AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN ot was sitting in a large Louis Philippe armchair in Paris, she, a little girl, perched on the arm of his chair and quizzed the great man thus: “Ts you good?” “Not so good as I should like to be,” answered Thackeray. “Is you clever?” “Well, ’'ve written a book or two. Perhaps I am rather clever.” “Is you pretty?” “O, no, no! No, No, No, NO!” roared the big fellow with an explosive burst of laughter. “Well, I think you is good and clever and pretty,” cooed the innocent little diplomat, cutely winding that famous celebrity around her tiny finger with predatory intent, because she re- membered some bonbons he had bought for her on the boulevard yesterday, and because she had visions of more bonbons which her well-tamed and benevolent giant, if wisely managed and kept in a good humor, might buy for her to-mor- row. Even Thackeray’s masterpiece, Henry Esmond, is not quite so precious to this English woman as her memories of her own child-play with him. The Marchesa Perruzzi gives us charming reminiscences of the children in the Barberini Palace in Rome who were visited and played with by Hans Christian Andersen and Robert Browning; the gaunt, ungainly Norwegian poet of childhood romping uproariously over tables 58 MY GRAY GULL and chairs, and cutting out grotesque paper but- terflies and clowns and fairies; and then Robert Browning reading later his “Pied Piper of Hamelin” to those enviable children while Hans Andersen listened to the reading with boyish de- light, his ugly face brimming with fun. Among the powers that be on this much-gov- | erned planet is there any such potentate as the child? The strongest and the greatest bow down at the touch of the scepter of this diminutive despot. Biography and autobiography are full of confession and proof that all through history many who sat in the seats of the mighty were powerless under the all-subduing touch of tiny fingers. Even old Plutarch, in his famous Lives, shows that, amid the eventful and momentous procedures of empire and war and heroism, a child’s hand secretly holds him by the heart. In a crevice of his picturesque pages we find a refer. ence to his own little girl and to her anxiety that her dolls should share the professional atten- tions of the nurse: and from that tender mention we know more of the inmost soul of Plutarch than from any of his great writings, far more than from his pictures of Cesar in the Senate House facing the gleaming steel of murderous conspirators, or from his descriptions of wounded Pyrrhus darting at the foe a look which struck terror, or from his picture of Sylla’s white charger plunging with his rider safely past the thrusting spears. The world over and the ages AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 59 through, many men of might and mastery have known hours when the sweet lips and clinging arms of a warm, trusting, cuddling child meant more to them than all “the boast of heraldry and pomp of power.”’ Mrs. Sellar pictures W. E. Henley, big, rugged-looking, florid, shaggy like a bear, “a strange, tempestuous, robustious fel- low” George Meredith called him, abjectly and blissfully enslaved to the will of his own preco- cious four-year-old, whose mien was so imperial that she was called ‘‘The Empress” by artists who went down from London to see the child again and again in her brief seven years of life, pitiably brief because doomed by the deadly disease which her father had and which he knowingly trans- mitted to her before her birth. What right has a man to do that? How dare he do it? God pity him! We remember that Edwin Booth had a friend- ship with a small daughter of a friend of his. His birthday came on the same date with hers, so the two called themselves twins. On the day when he was fifty and she six, she sent him flowers with this message: “Dear Mr. Booth, we are fifty-six to-day.” Across the gulf of a life time the big man and the little girl hailed each other as comrades, and both found pleasure in it. To him it was freshening and rejuvenating. When to dry or rheumy eyes the world grows dim and darkling, the man says mentally to the little child: 60 MY GRAY GULL “T see the morning of the world in you. I see life upward springing, Light round you clinging. And in your eyes the dew.” I know how Edwin Booth felt, for I too have a Twin: I was born auburn-haired in a Plainfield, N. J., parsonage on February 18, 1843. Exactly sixty years after, on February 13, a baby girl was born auburn-haired in a Plainfield parson- age. On my eighty-third birthday my Girl Twin sent me a message. She might have said, “We are 146 to-day.” We are told that John Ruskin at the age of forty succumbed to the blandishments of a little Irish girl of nine, named Rose La Touche, who is described as looking like “a little sister of Christ.” The first time Ruskin met her she “gave him her hand as a good dog gives its paw.” Later he gave her lessons in art. Quite pretty herself, she candidly told him she considered him very ugly. She christened him “Crumpet,” which, when she discovered his goodness and gentleness, she mitigated into “Saint Crumpet.” This friendship ripened into love on his part, and became the one central and absorbing fact of his inner life, so that in after years he wrote: “Rosie was always in my heart, and everything I did was for her.’ This was the deepest pas- sion of Ruskin’s life, and her final rejection of his love because he was not religious enough was the deepest sorrow that ever devastated his days. AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 61 Few men have been more susceptible to the charm of feminine childhood than Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh. When he was a young physician he wrote in a letter to a friend: “I am going out to Callands to-day to be all alone in the open air on the common road for a full-length think with myself; and to see a three-year bairn, the daughter of a plowman and a perfect image of sweet wildness. I wish you could see her with her long eye-lashes and unfathomable eyes, and her eerie black blink; you would then under- stand my love for her. I have wandered days with her among the hills, leading her by the hand, and every now and then asking her to open wide her eyes that I might stare into their depths. She will kiss nobody in the world but her mother, father, brothers, sisters, and me.” No wonder young Doctor Brown went strutting off, so elate and proud, on the road to Callands. It was the same Doctor Brown who told later the fascinat- ing and touching story of that wonder-child Marjorie Fleming, concerning which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to its author: “I have read and reread and read aloud to my wife that infinitely tearful, smileful, soulful, tender, caressing story of Pet Marjorie. Dear little soul! And the picture of great big hearty Sir Walter Scott wrapping the wee creature in his plaid and striding off with her. If only that fragment of your writings were saved from the wreck of English literature, men and women 62 MY GRAY GULL would cry over it. That surpassingly sweet story is told so lovingly and vividly that blessed little Marjorie becomes our own child, our ‘ownty-downty,’ as New England nursery small- talk has it.” ; Mark Twain, too, succumbed to the story, and joined the procession of Pet Marjorie’s admirers many years after her death. This admiration reached its climax in connection with her detestation of the multiplication table, concern- ing which she said: “I am now going to tell you the horrible and wretched plaege [plague] that my multiplication gives me. You can’t conceive it the most devilish thing is 8 times 8 & 7 times 7 it is what nature itself can’t endure.” “In the presence of that holy verdict,” said Mark Twain with ancient and lifelong grudge, “I stand rev- erently uncovered.” A charming picture has been given us of Ed- ward FitzGerald, translator of the “Rubdiyat” of Omar Khayyam, coming out of his garden gate one day in England, tall and dignified, to inter- cept and make obeisance to an equally dignified Sweet maiden, aged three, who was passing by. She confidently trusted her tiny dimpled hand to the grasp of his long fingers: but when he asked her name she met his inquiry with a gentle but firm taciturnity. “A very discreet young lady,” Said the stately scholar while they faced each other as equals, her nonage and innocence bal- ancing his age and learning, as if his had been AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 63 the Royal Presence and she the fairest débutante of her year. Everywhere feminine childhood appeals to manly men. Chivalry, gallantry and courtesy (words contributed by the French to our Eng- lish language) go to sea on the bridge and in the forecastle. John Masefield and Joseph Con- rad report knighthood in flower on the rolling deep. In the alarming moment when the order is “Man the boats” gallantry is grim: “Women and children first” is the stern command, en- forced if need be with fists or revolvers. In happy moments of “Eight bells and all’s well” gallantry is genial. “What do you do in cloudy weather when you cannot see the sun?” asked a young girl on her first sea voyage, watching the officers take the noonday observation. “QO, then,” answered the bronzed captain, look- ing into the eager young face, “then we take our observations from little girls’ eyes.” Into her bright eyes I first looked when they were three years old—a very long time ago: they are brighter than ever now with the joy of a beau- tiful married life. : One of T. E. Brown’s exquisite poems tells how a man met in a country lane a little child who smiled at him with a look so full of trust and happiness that he blessed her in his heart. The wee creature knew him not, but laughed up into his face out of the natural joy that bubbled in her veins. And her laugh seemed to say: 64 MY GRAY GULL “The heaven is bright above us; And there is God to love us; And I am but a little gleeful maid, And thou art big and old and staid; But the blue hills have made thee mild As is a little child, Wherefore I laugh that thou may’st see, O laugh, O laugh with me.” And the laughter of the little gleeful girl made the country lane a more royal road than the king’s highway. Proof of the preciousness of a child’s favor is found in the fact that parents consider their child’s kiss the most delicate honor they can bestow upon a friend, and the recipient accepts it as a dainty gift. A yet more sacred honor is when they ask a minister to lay his hands in bap- tism on their baby’s head. One summer evening at children’s bedtime a lovely young mother sent little Harold and Madeleine across the parlor of the old Water Gap House above the Delaware River to give “Good night” to the pastor who a few years be- fore had married her to one of his finest young men. The pastor was sensitively aware that in granting him her children’s lips to kiss, she offered an exquisite and reverent token of the family’s affection. The loveliness of those sweet children touched the close of that Sabbath day with tender sanctity, went with him to his pil- low and lingers still. Dr. Francis Thompson says, “I kissed in them the heart of childhood, so AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 65 divine for me. If in Eden as on earth we be, I shall keep younger company.” One winter a frequenter of that choice resort, Albert A. LeRoy’s Pine Tree Inn, Lakehurst, New Jersey, known as the “Winter Mohonk,” was keeping to his room there a few days as a precaution, his caputal affairs being in process of liquidation. Into his soppy seclusion and moist misery, about nine o’clock one evening a young mother, born altruistic in a missionary’s home in Japan, brought her seven-years-old Dorothy to give that lone greyhead a good-night kiss. When he rose from his chair to receive the unexpected honor, it was deplorably evident that he was not kissable. Seeing his uninviting and unhappy predicament, the wise child smiled up at him and said, “I can’t kiss oo ’cause oo got the gwip. I give oo a telegwaph kiss,” and she reached her tiny hand up to the big tall man, while he, understanding her motion and bending down, took hold of her tiny finger-tips with his, Dorothy explaining to his dull comprehension, “The kiss goes up.” Then with rippling laughter the merry little mite flitted out, leaving the sur- prised and shaken man to his convulsions, his explosions and his handkerchiefs, in a saturated solution of solitude, albeit all aquiver with un- wonted ecstasy. In his life such angel visits had been few and far between, and memory still cherishes gratefully through the years a vision of that enchanting, wingless cherub in white se 66 MY GRAY GULL nighties standing atiptoe with upreaching fingers, saying, “I give oo a telegwaph kiss,” she and her mother framed in the refined setting of that homelike Inn in the Jersey Pines; a fine winter health resort to weary guests, At Gettysburg in July, 1918, the survivors held a reunion fifty years after the fight. When Jesse Bowman Young (gallant soldier and brilliant author of a great book on the Battle of Gettys- burg, recognized by West Point as one of the most accurate, competent and complete accounts of that decisive conflict) met on the battlefield the man who had been his closest comrade dur- ing the awful three days fight, he was overcome by his emotions. Unable to express his feelings in any other way, Doctor Young called to his daughter: “Anne, come here. I want you to kiss this man for me’—the most tender and convine- ing token of affection he could give to his old companion in arms. Our acute friends the psychologists have not yet fully explained all the mysterious movements of that curious machine the human mind. In many ways we are fearfully and wonderfully made and curiously wrought in our inward parts, in the secret places of our nature. As inexplic- able as they are unpredictable, for example, are memory’s discriminations and preferences. Who can explain for us that pretty little idyll of the Alps given by an English poet in the London Spectator? AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 67 “In Switzerland one idle day, As on the grass at noon we lay, Came a grave peasant child, and stood Watching us strangers eat our food, And what we offered her she took In silence, with her quiet look, And when we rose to go, content, Without a word of thanks, she went. “Another day in sleet and rain, T chose that meadow path again, And, partly turning, chanced to see My little quest friend watching me With eyes half hidden by her hair, Blowing me kisses, unaware That I had seen, and still she wore The same grave aspect as before. “Now, some recall for heart’s delight A sunrise, some a snowy height, But I a little child who stands And gravely kisses both her hands.” That is the poem simple and sweet; and now, who will tell us why a Swiss peasant child throw- ing coy kisses at a stranger outlasts in his memory all the majesty and sublimity of the Alps, their red sunrises and their snowy heights? A burly and striking figure in our day is Gilbert K. Chesterton, journalist, littérateur, polemic, and elephantine champion of orthodoxy, who buffets and jollies infidels, convicting them of credulity, myopia, and strabismus; whose jovial good-nature is dangerous as a playful lion’s paw; whose encounters with the enemy take on the semblance of a solemn frolic and 68 MY GRAY GULL whose temper toward deniers of the evangelic faith is like that of Kipling’s Tommy Atkins to- ward Fuzzy Wuzzy. So muscular a protagonist would scarcely be expected to lapse. into sentimental memory- freaks, yet his heavy fist writes an entire poem solely to say that if he ever revisits Baltimore, his mind will dwell not on memories of stately occasions or famous men, not on Lord Baltimore who gave his name to the place, nor on Lee and his heroes of the South who called their land by the lovely name of “Dixie” in the unforgotten song. Let him tell what he will do: “Tf ever I cross the sea and stray To that city of Maryland, I will sit on a stone and watch or pray For a stranger’s child that was there one day: And the child will never come back to play, And no one will understand.” But we all do understand. Mr. Chesterton is in the grip of one of nature’s universals, not a weakness but a recrudescence of pure pristine innocence, and his personal confession exposes the rest of us as well. As the Indian chief said to his tribe when Columbus came ashore, “It is all over with us; we are discovered.” Absurd as seems that ponderous Englishman’s picture of himself sitting alone on a stone and watching prayerfully for a remembered child that will never come back to play with him again, he is yet and thereby fit model for a massive me- AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 69 morial of the fondness of the Big Man for the Little Girl. On a winter night many years ago, a man went to spend an evening in one of the best homes in the world. As to the furniture, the pictures on the wall, what was for supper, how many were at table, what the evening’s conversation was, what his sermons were about the Sunday before or the Sunday after, whom he married or buried that week, he does not remember: to try to recall any of these things would be like fish- ing in the river Lethe for forgotten fishes. But that, when he was let in from the wintry street to the glowing warmth and welcome of that lovely home, a little brown-haired sprite, intense with the fervency known only to feminine child- hood, flew to meet him, leaped clear off the floor into his arms, and hit him a bumper kiss square on the mouth—this he has never forgotten. She came like a flying wedge and hit the line hard, and the glad abandon, velocity, onset, and impact of that impetuous child are dented deep in the phonograph record of memory revolving now under his white hairs. Noting the whimsical way in which unthrifty memory drops a multi- tude of momentous things and then treasures seeming trifles, T. B. Aldrich wrote: “My mind lets go a thousand things Like dates of wars and deaths of kings, And yet recalls the very hour— *Twas noon by yonder village tower, 70 MY GRAY GULL And on the last blue noon in May— The wind came briskly up this way, Crisping the brook beside the road ; Then pausing here, set down its load Of pine scents, and shook listlessly Two petals from that wild-rose tree.” But when it comes to memorable precious- ness, what are two wind-plucked wild-rose petals thrown down upon the ground, compared to two rose-petal human lips tossed up against yours on the wild sweet flying impulse of a child’s impetu- ous love? Roses are fine flowers, but tiny two- lips have been reckoned sweeter—as George Meredith was aware when he pictured in his song of “Angelic Love,” | “The sweet little dewy mouth Tenderly uplifted, Like two rose leaves drifted On the warm balmy breath of the sunny South ;” and Aldrich when he said that “to have known a child’s kiss makes existence worth while;” and Mrs. Browning when she wrote, “A child’s kiss on thy lips shall make thee glad.” Doubtless Whittier forgot in later years many a lesson that he‘learned from books at the little schoolhouse amid the New England hills; but one imperishable recollection of school-boy days for him was of a little golden-haired girl who shyly laid her hand on his outside the country schoolhouse door one day, and the poet tells us what she said to him: AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN T1 “T’m sorry that I spelt the word; I hate to go above you, Because”—the brown eyes lower fell— “Because, you see, I love you.” And memory kept showing her sweet child-face and repeating her tender words to the gray- haired bachelor man when the grasses had been growing on her grave forty years. An habitual visitor to Clifton Springs Sani- tarium cannot remember the chapter nor the hymn used in the chapel on a certain morning. All that he remembers is the thin, pure, birdlike voice of little Allegra, who held the other side of his book, piping up in the hymn, her high treble sounding in the heavy volume of older voices like the tinkle of a harp threading its way through the great organ-roll, or the voice of a violin singing like a mounting lark above the swelling orchestra. Will the wise professor of psychology kindly explain how it happens that, out of one long-ago summer spent by a certain man beside the sea, the one thing most vividly and indelibly remem- bered is a child’s laugh—the most musical, indeed, the one perfect laugh ever heard by him? All the words of all the wise men at Doctor Deems’ Summer School of Philosophy, which met near by, with Borden P. Bowne as chief lecturer, are “gone glimmering through the dream of things that were,” lost in “the backward and abysm of time,” but that exquisite incomparable q2 MY GRAY GULL laugh still rings like a silver bell in this man’s memory. It was the one irresistible, superlative charm of the house, as it rang clear through the parlors, and along the porches, and by the tum- bling breakers and the crawling seafoam. The ecstasy of that little three-year-old girl made all the hired orchestras and entertainers of the summer seem cheap and poor as a boy’s jewsharp in comparison with Ole Bull’s Stradivarius. To hear Gracie Kudlich’s laugh in summer morn- ings was to understand something of Charles Kingsley’s feeling in his verse: “The merry, merry lark was up and singing, And the hare was out and feeding on the lea, And the merry, merry bells below were ringing, When my child’s laugh rang through me.” The psychologist has not explained us yet. We are still a mystery to ourselves, and even to him with all his penetration, lore, and insight. As for that unspeakable Freud, he gropes like “a pore, benighted ’eathen” among the sanctities of human nature. When a certain big man confesses a fondness for little girls it is for several valid and respect- able reasons. In the first place he owes his life to a little girl. The way of it was this: Two children, a boy aged three and a girl aged seven, wandered unobserved one summer afternoon out through the back gate and across a field to a mill-race along the margin of which they played AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 73 until the boy fell into the water. The girl, in- stead of losing her head and running off to the house leaving him to drown, coolly followed along the bank, till she could catch hold of his clothes and pull him out of the swift current which was hurrying the baby boy on to be pounded and drowned under the buckets of the big mill-wheel. This is why one man cannot see a mill-race or an old fashioned grist-mill or the big water-wheel at Ponce de Leon Springs, with- out some kindly thoughts toward little girls. A literary critic, commenting on the number of good women in De Morgan’s novels, says that in his books salvation often takes a feminine form. It surely did in that small boy’s case. In the next place, the same man when a child had for close and constant comrade a sister, Julia Isabella, two years younger than himself, to whom he was playmate, guide, protector, may- hap at times tease and tormentor, and to whom he dedicates this book. In the happy hunting- srounds of childhood, the wonderland of preadolescent years, the boy and his little sister, living in the old Woodrow parsonage which stands between the woods on the west and the graveyard on the east, rambled and played in both, hunting nuts and wintergreen and sassafras and birch and penny-royal in the woods, and wild flowers and wild strawberries in the burying-ground. They knew where the best hickory-nut and chestnut trees were in the woods 74 MY GRAY GULL and the most fertile and fruitful spots in the churchyard. A secure little Eden that country parsonage was. Its nearest neighbors were the harmless buried people lying so quiet in God’s acre just over the fence; and the road in front was safe, for it was before the days of tramps and automobiles. Across the road lived Uncle Moses Winant, the sexton and grave-digger, on whose small farm, near the road, was a little pond where his horses and cows were watered, the boy being sometimes permitted to ride a horse to water; and some half-wild apple trees, the spicy fruit of which the boy tastes to this day; and some gentle hill-slopes, fine for the boy to coast down with his little sister on his sled when snow-banks billowed the fields. Toward Uncle Mose’s apple trees the boy has now some such feeling as C. P. Cranch expresses in the lines which describe two middle-aged men pausing under a mulberry tree, and as they plucked and ate, one Says: “Do you know, old friend, I haven’t eaten A mulberry since the ignorant joy Of something sweet in the mouth could sweeten All this bitter world for a boy.” Without rime or reason it happens in these late years that whenever that Woodrow boy recalls Uncle Mose digging graves in the churchyard he remembers Faber’s lines about the old laborer and grave-digger: AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN (6 “Fiver his downcast eye Was laughing silently As if he found some jubilee in thinking. For his one thought was God, In that one thought he abode, Forever in that thought more deeply sinking. “And thus he lived his life, A kind of gentle strife, Upon the God within his soul relying. Men left him all alone Because he was unknown; But he heard the angels sing when he was dying.” The boy and his sister were no more afraid of the green-billowed, white head-stoned burying ground, even at night, than little Celia Laighton on the Isle of Shoals was afraid of the billowy sea, whose waves and coasts were her playground and its creatures of wing and of fin her play- mates. Graves had no sadness for that boy and girl, for they had not reached the age nor even imagined the mood in which people say: “The mossy marbles rest On the lips that I have pressed In their bloom. And the names I loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb.” The Woodrow woods were full of the fascination of ferns and thickets and water-pools, the haunts of birds and squirrels and rabbits and frogs. In the low ground back of the barn where the large black-berries grew on tall bushes, the fearless children often found and fondled prettily marked 76 MY GRAY GULL little snakes, and now and then had the shivery excitement of seeing a big black snake, five or six feet in length, saunter across the path or crawl away to his hole. It was a paradise full of what Marjorie Flem- ing’s diary called “rurel filisity.” With woods and a graveyard to play in, what more could chil- dren want? Out of full memories of those blithe, innocent, and haleyon days this man testifies gratefully that a little sister is a lovely thing for a boy to have. This man can understand Sidney Lanier’s feeling toward his little sister Gertrude, who, Lanier says, represented to him “the serene purity of the Winged Folk up Yonder.” Of his own little sister this man can remember nothing but what is sweet and lovely and dear. But he sometimes wonders timorously whether he was so good a brother to her that she, now more than fifty years in heaven, would say: “But were another childhood world my share, I would be born a little sister there.” Professor Beers, of Yale, looking at a bust of Thackeray, aged fourteen, said, “That boy is a cruel tease; I would not want to be his little sister.” A certain man—not this one—tells us that he cannot be comfortable in the presence of @& moss rose, because it makes him remember a day when his little sister had such a rose and he took it away from her by force of bigger muscles, heedless of her tearful beseechings. And AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN (us then she flung her arms around him and con- sented he should have it, and laughed at her own tears, and wept again when he kissed her, a kiss, one almost thinks, little better than Judas’. The boy behaved like a robber and the girl be- haved like an angel; and he hates himself and the moss rose when it makes him remember his little sister’s tears and her love and her laughter in the morning of life’s day, and the more so when he thinks of the night that fell thereafter when the light of her face was withdrawn forever from the world. That the man who in childhood was saved from drowning by a little girl and whose boyhood was blessed by the comradeship of a little sister, and who writes this monograph, should have, all his life, a good opinion of little girls can surprise nobody. The town of Westfield, New York, holds one unique historic memory which it should pre- serve imperishably. One February day in 1861 the people of that town saw the tall, gaunt figure of Abraham Lincoln, on his way to Washington to be inaugurated President and to take up the heaviest burden ever laid on American shoulders, standing on the rear platform of his train which had paused at Westfield. After he had spoken briefly to the gathered citizens, he asked if little Grace Bedell was there, and when she was brought forward he said: “You see, Grace, I’ve let my beard grow to please you”; and then he reached for the child with his long arms and 78 MY GRAY GULL gave her a kiss as his train moved off. This child, a total stranger, seeing his pictures in the papers, after his nomination and before his elec- tion, had written him a letter, telling him she thought his picture would look better with a beard, and that if he would grow one she would try to persuade her two brothers to vote for him, though they were Democrats. The great Presi- dent, whose purpose a million armed men could not shake and whom plots of assassination could not swerve, had been swayed by the wish of an artless child. Why should not the town of West- field, possessing this unduplicated incident, per- petuate in bronze or marble this tender act of the tallest, ruggedest, and gentlest of America’s great ones, bending to the touch of candid and confiding childhood, the topmost man on earth, uncrowned king of fifty millions, who, in the most solemn, perilous journey of his life, with the gaze of a nation of friends and foes fixed on him, was not above repeating on the stage of history the beautiful oft-repeated spectacle of the Big Man and the Little Girl? Of such a statue Westfield could forever be proud, as New- ark, New Jersey, is of Borglum’s seated bronze Lincoln on ground level, accessible to the crowd before the Courthouse on the low bench around which children love to cluster. On pleasant afternoons the passer-by may see them sitting by Lincoln’s side looking wonderingly into his deep eyes, or nestling against his breast, or standing AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 79 on his huge knees, coiling their arms around his long neck, and stroking the weary face. It is the finest sight in the city. This typical story is told. One Sunday afternoon a dark-skinned alien with his two children was seen standing near the bench, gazing reverently at the rugged figure, while his own Americanized public-school children told their foreign father what they knew of Lincoln. At last, in response to their request, the man drew nearer and lifted up each of the two by turns. The boy stroked the patient face admiringly, his own face glowing as if the liv- ing Lincoln had spoken to him. The little girl put her slender arms around Lincoln’s neck and gently kissed his cheek, a spectacle immensely promotive of patriotism, keeping alive reverence and faith in mankind, educative alike to native and foreign-born in the ideals for which the greatest of republics stands. Westfield, too, should have its bronze Lincoln, on ground-level or near it, for its children to revere, love, and caress through endless generations. By the verdict of twenty centuries the supreme figure in human history is the Man of Galilee; called even by a modern agnostic “the overtower- ing intellectual giant of all the ages” ; recognized with something of awe even by a voluptuary like De Maupassant as “surely the finest intelligence and the most perfect nature ever seen on earth” ; declared by England’s foremost literary neo- pagan to have proved his transcendent goodness 80 MY GRAY GULL and greatness in the unparalleled words, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for to such belongeth the kingdom of God :” who took them up in’ his arms, put his hands upon them and blessed them, perceiving their beauty and*their innocence. In the midst of ambitious men questioning who should be greatest in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus held up a child before them for contrast and reproof, and said: “Except ye turn and become as little chil- dren ye shall not even enter the kingdom of heaven.” Awe-struck evangelists, painters, sculptors, poets, preachers, never cease showing us that all-surpassing and supreme Figure, majestic in his greatness, standing at Caper- naum beside the Galilean lake with a little child in his arms. And the greatest friend little children and their mothers have ever had in the world is that childless Man of Galilee, the holy, beautiful and gracious son of Mary, the Eternal Son of God. IV MINETTA BROOK ROUGHLY speaking, old New York was built upon the back of a petrified alligator, over six- teen miles long, nose at Spuyten Duyvil junc- tion of Harlem and Hudson Rivers, haunches at Battery, Governor’s Island at start of tail, Robbins Reef perhaps at tip. In the glacial period Philadelphia, then as now warmer than New York, was basking in the sun when the rocky isle of Manhattan was under ice a thou- sand feet deep. When glaciers withdrew on their northward way to clear a place for William Osler to be born in a Canadian parsonage and to get Labrador ready for Wilfred Grenfell, numer- ous immortal streamlets were left flowing through gashes which creased the alligator’s back. One of the least of these, springing deep down under Twentieth Street between Theodore Roose- velt’s birthplace and The Methodist Book Con- cern, flows southward under the Fifth Avenue region through and beyond Washington Square, once a marsh, and empties into the Hudson at the foot of Charlton Street. In early maps of New Amsterdam it was a brook twelve feet wide with good fishing at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. 81 82 MY GRAY GULL When Washington Square was a Potter’s Field over a century ago, it washed paupers’ bones long before it watered the roots of great elms and sycamores, which were the glory of later and still remembered years. The original Dutch settlers christened it Mintje Kill. When the British Ad- miral, Sir Peter Warren, came and obtained a grant of two hundred acres including it, its name was changed to Minetta Brook. In those years it was the source of water supply for the dwellers on its banks. This tiny rivulet, its infancy hidden under a great man’s cradle, is itself among the Powers that Be. Buried alive, it is yet as free and irresistible as the Switzer’s tor- rents that leap his rocks and plow his valleys without asking leave. Reigning hierarchies, pontifical or political, or both in one, on Fiftieth or Fourteenth Street, are as the idle wind which it regards not.