hilosophers
up from the water front or fresh from box cars, everyone with a story
that Stevenson would have got from them.

"Above all on the same grim conditions to keep friends with himself." On
the bench an enormous woman with a hat that looks like a schooner atop
of a great pompadour wave and on the very same bench a mummied old
Chinese as thin as a wafer. An aeroplane hums above and Stevenson's
little boat looks envious. Where did Captain Montgomery of the sloop
Portsmouth stand when he planted the flag in 1848? The Mission bell, so
many miles to Dolores, so many miles to Rafael. Ring, Mission bell, ring
and show us where the El Camino Real will lead us all by and by. We who
pass all day, show us the way, Mission bell.--"here is a task for all
that a man has of fortitude and delicacy."

Miracles

"Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As for me, I know of nothing else but miracles.
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car."
--Walt Whitman.

If man or woman be at all sensitive to life, he must react to the
commonplace much as Whitman did. Such a person may be hurrying along
about his business with perhaps no time for reflection and yet in a
flash, the miracle of life will come to him through the slightest
happening.

A little girl on the ferry sitting with her mother takes from her small
prim bag a set of doll clothes, and fondles them and smoothes them much
like a pullet with her first chickens. The sight of those square,
little, gingham dresses, trimmed with scraps of lace and silk and with
awkward sleeves standing straight out, brought to me, on that Oakland
ferry, all my childhood again, and I was cuddled close between the
surface roots of a great elm and from the nearby lane came the sight and
scent of Bouncing Bet, Joe Pye Weed, Tansy, Yarrow, Golden Rod, Boneset,
and over in the meadow the sight of cows and the smell of peppermint and
water cress, beside a little stream.

The moment I write it down in physical words it becomes somehow less
miraculous. The mind is so infinite and the human being so essentially
mental, that the spoken or written word may never express them.

The sight of electric lights flashing at night,