ession of his very
select little school.

* * * * *

More than six months had elapsed since Jose first set foot upon the
hot shales of Simiti. In that time his mentality had been turned over
like a fallow field beneath the plowshare. After peace had been
established in the country he had often thought to consecrate himself
to the task of collecting the fragmentary ideas which had been evolved
in his mind during these past weeks of strange and almost weird
experience, and trying to formulate them into definite statements of
truth. Then he would enter upon the task of establishing them by
actual demonstration, regardless of the years that might be required
to do so. He realized now that the explorer had done a great work in
clearing his mind of many of its darker shadows. But it was to
Carmen's purer, more spiritual influence that he knew his debt was
heaviest.

Let it not seem strange that mature manhood and extensive travel had
never before brought to this man's mind the truths, many of which have
been current almost since the curtain first arose on the melodrama
of mundane existence. Well nigh impassable limitations had been
set to them by his own natal characteristics; by his acutely morbid
sense of filial love which bound him, at whatever cost, to observe
the bigoted, selfish wishes of his parents; and by the strictness
with which his mind had been hedged about both in the seminary and
in the ecclesiastical office where he subsequently labored. The
first rays of mental freedom did not dawn upon his darkened thought
until he was sent as an outcast to the New World. Then, when his
greater latitude in Cartagena, and his still more expanded sense of
freedom in Simiti, had lowered the bars, there had rushed into his
mentality such a flood of ideas that he was all but swept away in the
swirling current.

It is not strange that he rose and fell, to-day strong in the
conviction of the immanence of infinite good, to-morrow sunken in
mortal despair of ever demonstrating the truth of the ideas which were
swelling his shrunken mind. His line of progress in truth was an
undulating curve, slowly advancing toward the distant goal to which
Carmen seemed to move in a straight, undeviating line. What though
Emerson had said that Mind was "the only reality of which men and all
other natures are better or worse reflectors"? Jose was unaware of the
sage's mighty deduction. What though Plato