e nearly all have indulged
in. We weave little stories in our minds, expending love and pity upon
the imaginary beings we have created, and I have been led to think that
many of these are not imaginary, that somewhere in the world beings are
living just in that way, and we merely reform and live over again in
our life the story of another life. Sometimes these far-away intimates
assume so vivid a shape, they come so near with their appeal for
sympathy that the pictures are unforgettable; and the more I ponder over
them the more it seems to me that they often convey the actual need of
some soul whose cry for comfort has gone out into the vast, perhaps
to meet with an answer, perhaps to hear only silence. I will supply an
instance. I see a child, a curious, delicate little thing, seated on the
doorstep of a house. It is an alley in some great city, and there is a
gloom of evening and vapor over the sky. I see the child is bending over
the path; he is picking cinders and arranging them, and as I ponder
I become aware that he is laying down in gritty lines the walls of a
house, the mansion of his dream. Here spread along the pavement are
large rooms, these for his friends, and a tiny room in the centre, that
is his own. So his thought plays. Just then I catch a glimpse of the
corduroy trousers of a passing workman, and a heavy boot crushes through
the cinders. I feel the pain in the child's heart as he shrinks back,
his little lovelit house of dreams all rudely shattered. Ah, poor child,
building the City Beautiful out of a few cinders, yet nigher, truer in
intent than many a stately, gold-rich palace reared by princes, thou
wert not forgotten by that mighty spirit who lives through the falling
of empires, whose home has been in many a ruined heart. Surely it was
to bring comfort to hearts like thine that that most noble of all
meditations was ordained by the Buddha. "He lets his mind pervade one
quarter of the world with thoughts of Love, and so the second, and so
the third, and so the fourth. And thus the whole wide world, above,
below, around, and everywhere does he continue to pervade with heart of
Love far-reaching, grown great and beyond measure."

That love, though the very faery breath of life, should by itself, and
so imparted have a sustaining power some may question, not those who
have felt the sunlight fall from distant friends who think of them; but,
to make clearer how it seems to me to act, I say that love, Er