ings august and everlasting. At another time I might
have flung myself into busy fancies, imagined a community living an
orderly and peaceful life, full of serene activities, in that still
place; but for once I was content to have seen a dwelling-place,
devised by some busy human brain, that had failed of its purpose, lost
its ancient lords, sunk into a calm decay; to have seen it all caressed
and comforted and embraced by nature, its scars hidden, its grace
replenished, its harshness smoothed away.

Such gentle hours are few; and fewer still the moments of anxiety and
vexation when so direct a message is flashed straight from the Mind of
God into the unquiet human heart; I never doubted that I was led there
by a subtle, delicate, and fatherly tenderness, and shown a thing which
should at once touch my sense of beauty, and then rising, as it were,
and putting the superficial aspect aside, speak with no uncertain voice
of the deep hopes, the everlasting peace on which for a few years the
little restless world of ours is rocked and carried to and fro. . .
.--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
Nov. 29, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--To-day the world is shrouded in a thick, white, dripping
mist. Glancing up in the warm room where I sit, I see nothing but grey
window spaces. "How melancholy, how depressing," says my generally
cheerful friend, Randall, staring sadly out into the blank air. But I
myself do not agree. I am conscious of a vague, pleasurable excitement;
a sense, too, of repose. This half light is grateful and cooling alike
to eye and brain. Then, too, it is a change from ordinary conditions,
and a change has always something invigorating about it. I steal about
with an obscure sense that something mysterious is happening. And yet
imagine some bright spirit of air and sunshine, like Ariel, flitting
hither and thither above the mist, dipping his feet in the vapour, as a
sea-bird flies low across the sea. Think of the pity he would feel for
the poor human creatures, buried in darkness below, creeping hither and
thither in the gloom.

It is pleasurable enough within the house, but still more pleasurable
to walk abroad; the little circle of dim vision passes with you, just
revealing the road, the field, the pasture in which you walk.

There is a delightful surprise about the way in which a familiar object
looms up suddenly, a dim remote shape, and then as swiftly reveals the
well-known outline. My path takes me past th