otted some of the words, as a drop of rain makes a
blurred spot on a dusty pane. And the lover said, "Serving others is
better than serving ourselves;" and the girl's sweet voice answering,
like an echo, "Serving others is better than serving ourselves."

And the sun had set. The glow from the sky was fading, as embers on a
hearth, pale to gray ashes; and an owl called from an elm-tree on the
hillside, while these two arose, with faces like the morning, and,
taking the pictures, walked slowly as lovers will; and so, fading into
the deepening twilight, I heard her saying, "Serving others is life at
its best," and him replying, "Jesus said, 'The poor ye have always with
you;'" and their footsteps and voices died away together in the
gloaming; and a whip-poor-will called often and plaintively from the
woodland across the field.

XI

The Gentleman in Literature

Humor is half pathos and more. This sword has two edges. On the one,
shining like burnished silver, you may see smiles reflected as from a
mirror; on the other, tears stand thick, like dews on flowers at early
morning of the later spring. Humor is a dual faculty, as much
misconceived by those who listen as by those who speak. We do not
always have wit to know the scope of what we do. Thoughts of
childhood, says the poet, are long, long thoughts; but who supposes
childhood knows they are? Nor is this altogether a fault. To feel the
sublime sequence of all we did would burden us as Atlas was burdened by
holding up the sky. Life might easily come to be sober to somberness,
which is a thing unwholesome and undesirable. Sunlight must have its
way. Darkness must not trespass too far; and every morning says to
every night, "Thus far, but no farther."

To many readers, Don Quixote seems fantastic, and Cervantes a
laughter-monger. Cervantes had suffered much. His life reads like a
novelist's tale. He belonged to the era of Spenser and Shakespeare; of
Philip II and William the Silent; of Leicester and Don John of Austria;
of The Great Armada and the Spanish Inquisition; of Lope de Vega and
Cervantes--for he was, in the Hispanian peninsula, his own greatest
contemporary--and to this hour this battle-scarred soldier of fortune
stands the tallest figure of Spanish literature. His was a lettered
rearing, and a young manhood spent as a common soldier. At Lepanto he
lost hand and arm. In five long, weary, and bitter years of slavery
among Algerine pira