denying that; and it is a fact, too,
that almost every life seems a wasted failure, compared with what it
might have been. Such hard, grimy problems there are in life! They
weaken the eyes that look long at them: stories hard to understand, like
that of this old machinist, Joe Starke.

But over yonder, how cool and shady it is on that sweep of green! that
rests one so thoroughly, in eyes and brain! The quiet shadows ebb and
flow over the uncut grass; every hazy form or color is beyond art, true
and beautiful, being fresh from God; there are countless purpled vines
creeping out from the earth under that grass; the air trembles with the
pure spring healing and light; the gray-barked old elms wrestle, and
knot their roots underground, clutching down at the very thews and
sinews of the earth, and overhead unfold their shivering delicate leaves
fresh in the sunlight to catch the patter of the summer rain when it
comes. It is sure to come. Winter and summer, spring and autumn, shall
not fail. God always stays there, in the great Fatherland of Nature. One
knows now why Jesus went back there when these hard riddles of the world
made his soul sorrowful even unto death, and he needed a word from Home
to refresh him.

Do you know the meaning to-day of the beds of rock and pregnant loam, of
the woods, and water-courses, and live growths and colors on these
thousand hills near us? Is it that God has room for all things in this
Life of His? for all these problems, all Evil as it seems to us? that
nothing in any man's life is wasted? every hunger, loss, effort, held
underneath and above in some infinite Order, suffered to live out its
purpose, give up its uttermost uses? If, after all, the end of science,
of fact and fiction, of watching those raspberry-bushes growing, or of
watching the phases of these terrible years in which we live, were only
to give us glimpses of that eternal Order, so that we could lie down in
it, grow out of it, like that ground-ivy in the earth and sunshine
yonder, sure, as it is, that there is no chance nor waste in our own
lives? It would be something to know that sentence in which all the
world's words are ordered, and to find that the war, and the Devil, and
even your own life's pain, had its use, and was an accord there,--would
it not? Thinking of that, even this bit of a history of Joe Starke might
have its meaning, the more if there should be trouble and a cold wind
blowing in it; because any idiot can