ust the same old human life that has always been going on.

The rain was pouring heavily and I took shelter. I felt calmer; I had
unpacked myself of words. Rather mournfully I now looked out into the
night, and, as it were, ceased to speak to it, and became a listener.
A song of sorrow came from the city, the wailing of mothers
uncomforted, of children orphaned, uncared for, of forsaken ones. I
heard again the old reproach of the children sitting in the market.
"Here surely," I said, "where so many are gathered together, there
is more solitude and lonely grief than in all the wide places of the
earth!" Voices came up to me from thousands in a city where thousands
of hands were uplifted to take a cup of comfort that cannot be
vouchsafed.

Is there a way out for _her_? Is there a way out for them? "For her
perhaps, for them not," something whispered within me inexorably. "And
Death?" The wind caught up the whisper "death" caressingly and took
it away from me over the city, and wove it in and out through all the
streets and all the dark lanes, and about the little chimneys, and the
windows.

Is there a way out for her?--Perhaps. There are some beings so full of
life that even the glutton Death must disgorge them.

III

THE LITTLE DEAD CHILD

In the little town of Gagri on the Caucasian shore of the Black Sea
there is a beautiful and wonderful church surviving from the sixth
century, a work of pristine Christianity. It is but the size of a
cottage, and just the shape of a child's Noah's Ark, but made of
great rough-hewn blocks of grey stone. One comes upon the building
unexpectedly. After looking at Gagri's ancient ruins, her fortresses,
her wall built by Mithridates, one sees suddenly in a shadowy close
six sorrowful little cypresses standing absolutely still--like heavily
dressed guardsmen--and behind the cypresses and their dark green
brooms, the grey wall of the church, solid, eternal. One's eyes rest
upon it as upon a perfect resting-place. If Gagri has an organic life,
this church must be its beating heart.

I came to Gagri one Saturday afternoon after the first two hundred and
fifty miles tramping of my pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and at this little
church I witnessed a strange sight. I had hardly admired the grey
interior, the bare walls growing into the roof in unbroken curves, the
massive stone rood-screen, the sorrowful faces in the holy pictures,
when a little procession filed into the church; four