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your right angles. Weathering. Get it straight, and go back to America.' The archæologist was moving off. 'Go to the British Museum,' he said in a miserable voice. 'Tell 'em you want to write about the tors of Dartmoor. They'll let you in; and they'll find you the books. Then you take one of their quill-pens and draw a picture of a donkey.'

My grip upon the thong-bound flint tightened.

'We know you now,' said Porthos, transfigured with rage. "There's not a solitary thing that you or anybody else can say in your defense. You've read Schopenhauer. You hate yourself. You hate yourself. You're the sort of chap that would go paddling around Plymouth Bay in a canoe, making soundings to prove that our forefathers could n't have stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock. You're the fellow who smashed that charming myth of the Charter Oak of Connecticut. You were a member of the city council that refused to spray arsenic on the Washington Elm. And let me tell you something. In this world everything's conjectural; and of two conjectures the prettiest is the truest, and the truest stands. If I say a servant threw a bucket of water over Sir Walter Raleigh's head when he was smoking, where's the use in your saying that he was too poor to keep a servant? Which is the statement that will stand? If you say the wind spun this hole here in the rock, and I say a maiden was chained here, and her tears fell one by one until they fashioned it, which one of us will the Lord Mayor of London have out to lunch? Which of us will appear under the heading "Interesting Personalities," with a picture of the basin underneath? Answer me that.'

The archæologist had stopped. 'Oh, I say,' he countered, disgruntled, 'there's no need of raving on that way. I'm willing to agree that Thomas à Becket was slain in the crypt under Canterbury Cathedral, and that the stain is genuine. I'll even grant you that Sir Walter got his ducking, for the truth is he ordered mass to be said at Sherborne Abbas, after the fellow's death; and then he was taken to the tower, and it's on the books in the Abbey that twenty shillings is still owing for the service. It's when you come to Dartmoor

'We'll not begin on that,' said Porthos loftily. 'I think we may say that we have made Dartmoor our peculiar field. I think we may say that.'

The archaeologist turned and began to stumble blindly down the hill, among the ruins of hut-circles.

'At least,' said Porthos, 'you might tell us where your highly important scientific investigations are going on."

'I'm going to Dorchester,' said the archæologist sulkily.

'Going to dig up another gladiator,' bellowed my companion.

The archæologist, in his shining coat, was almost out of hearing.

"They were right enough,' he said. 'All but the bicuspids. And if you want to know it, I'm going to have a try at the bicuspids. They can't be far.'

Nothing showed of him now but his sparkling hat, bobbing about among shark-like menhirs, and overturned cistvaens. We crowded back into our stone angle. And suddenly, opposed to the stern and tearing fact of these bicuspids, our quest of palæoliths sank, dwindled like a flame in a dry lamp, and was become as nothing.

THE STILL SMALL VOICE

BY JOHN BURROUGHS

ONE summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me, the effect was quite startling. The question at once arose in my mind as to just what happened to that bit of stone wall at that particular moment to cause it to fall. Maybe the slight vibration imparted to the ground by my tread caused the minute shifting of forces that brought it down. But the time was ripe; a long, slow, silent process of decay and disintegration, or a shifting of the points of bearing amid the fragments of stone by the action of the weather, culminated at that instant, and the wall fell. It was the sudden summing-up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest. It was as when the keystone of an arch crumbles or weakens to the last particle, and the arch suddenly collapses.

The same thing happened in the case of the large spruce tree that fell as our steamer passed near the shore in Alaskan waters, or when the campers in the forest heard a tree fall in the stillness of the night. In both cases the tree's hour had come; the balance of forces was suddenly broken by the yielding of some small particle in the woody tissues of the tree, and down it came. In all such cases there must be a moment

of time when the upholding and downpulling forces are just balanced; then the yielding of one grain more gives the victory to gravity. The slow minute changes in the tree, and in the stone wall, that precede their downfall, we do not see or hear; the sudden culmination and collapse alone arrest our attention. An earthquake is doubtless the result of the sudden release of forces that have been in stress and strain for years or ages; some point at last gives way, and the earth trembles or the mountains fall.

It is the slow insensible changes in the equipoise of the elements about us which, in the course of long periods of time, put a new face upon the aspect of the earth. Rapid and noisy changes over large areas, which may have occurred during the geologic ages, we do not now see except in the case of an earthquake. It is the ceaseless activity, both chemical and physical, in the bodies about us, of which we take no note, that transforms the world. Atom by atom the face of the immobile rocks changes. The terrible demonstrative forces, such as electric discharges during a storm, which seem competent to level mountains or blot out landscapes, usually make but slight impression on the fields and hills.

In the ordinary course of nature the great beneficent changes come slowly and silently. The noisy changes, for the most part, mean violence and disruption. The roar of storms and tornadoes, the explosions of volcanoes, the crash of the thunder, are the result of a

sudden break in the equipoise of the elements; from a condition of comparative repose and silence they become fearfully swift and audible. The still small voice is the voice of life and growth and perpetuity. In the stillness of a bright summer day what work is being accomplished what processes are being consummated! When the tornado comes, how quickly much of it may be brought to naught! In the history of a nation it is the same. The terrible war that is now devastating Europe is the tornado that comes in the peace and fruitful repose of a summer's day. As living nature in time recovers from the destructive effects of the mad warring of the inorganic elements, so the nations will eventually recover from the blight and waste of this war. But the gains and the benefits can never offset the losses and the agony. The discipline and agony of war only fit a people for more war. If war is to be the business of mankind, then the more of it we have the better-if there is no true growth or expansion for a people, save through blood and fire, then let the blood and fire come to all of us, the more the better. The German gospel of war, so assiduously preached and so heroically practiced in our day, is based upon the conviction that there is no true growth for a nation except by the sword, that the still small voice of love and good-will must give place to the brazen trumpet that sounds the onset of hostile and destroying legions.

Is the gospel of love and altruism of the New Testament outworn, and must we go back to the vindictive and bloodthirsty spirit of the Old Testament? Are the arts of peace seductive, and do they hasten the mortal ripening of a people's character? Must the ploughshares now be forged into swords and the swords used to spill our neighbors' blood? The current gospel of war is the

gospel of hate and reprisal, of broken treaties and burned cities, of murdered women and children, and devastated homes.

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What a noise politics makes in the world, our politics especially; but some silent thinker in his study, or some inventor in his laboratory, is starting currents that will make or unmake politics for generations to come. How noiseless is the light, yet what power dwells in the sunbeams-mechanical power at one end of the spectrum, in the red and infra-red rays, and chemical power at the other or violet and ultra-violet end! It is the mechanical forces-the winds, the rains, the movements of ponderable bodies that fill the world with noise; the chemical changes that disintegrate the rocks and set the currents of life going are silent. The great loom in which are woven all the living textures that clothe the world with verdure and people it with animated forms makes no sound. Think of the still small voice of radioactivity so still and small that only molecular science is aware of it, yet physicists believe it to be the mainspring of the universe.

The vast ice-engine that we call a glacier is almost as silent as the slumbering rocks, and, to all but the eye of science, nearly as immobile, save where it discharges into the sea. It is noisy in its dying, but in the height of its power it is as still as the falling snow of which it is made. Yet give it time enough, and it scoops out the valleys and grinds down the mountains and turns the courses of rivers, or makes new ones.

We split the rocks and level the hills with our powder and dynamite, and fill the world with noise; but behold the vast cleavage of the rocks which the slow, noiseless forces of sun and frost bring about! In the Shawamgunk mountains one may see enormous masses of conglomerate that have been

split down from the main range, showing as clean a cleavage over vast surfaces as the quarryman can produce on small blocks with his drills and wedges. One has to pause and speculate on the character of the forces that achieved such results and left no mark of sudden violence behind. The forces that cleft them asunder were the noiseless sunbeams. The unequal stress and strain imparted by varying temperatures clove the mountains from top to bottom as with the stroke of the earthquake's hammer. In and around Yosemite Valley one sees granite blocks the size of houses and churches split in two where they lie in their beds, as if it had been done in their sleep and without awaking them. This silent quarrying and reducing of the rocks never ceases to surprise one. Amid the petrified forests of Arizona one marvels to see the stone trunks of the huge trees lying about in yard-lengths, as squarely and cleanly severed as if done with a saw. Assault them with sledge and bar and you may reduce them to irregular fragments, but you cannot divide the blocks neatly and regularly as time has done it.

The unknown, the inaudible forces that make for good in every state and community, the gentle word, the kind act, the forgiving look, the quiet demeanor, the silent thinkers and workers, the cheerful and unwearied toilers, the scholar in his study, the scientist in his laboratory, - how much more we owe to these forces than to the clamorous and discordant voices of the world of politics and the newspaper! Art, literature, philosophy, all speak

with the still small voice. How much more potent the voice that speaks out of a great solitude and reverence than the noisy, acrimonious, and disputatious voice! Strong conviction and firm resolution are usually chary of words. Depth of feeling and parsimony of expression go well together.

The mills of the gods upon the earth's surface grind exceeding slow, and exceeding still. They are grinding up the rocks everywhere - pulverizing the granite, the limestone, the sandstone, the basalt, between the upper and nether millstones of air and water, to make the soil, but we hear no sound and mark no change; only in geologic time are the results recorded. In still waters we get the rich deposits that add to the fat of the land, and in peaceful, untroubled times is humanity enriched, and the foundations laid upon which the permanent institutions of a nation are built.

We all know what can be said in favor of turmoil, agitation, war; we all know, as Goethe said, that a man comes to know himself, not in thought, but in action; and the same is true of a nation. Equally do we know the value of repose, and the slow, silent activities both in the soul of man and in the processes of nature. The most potent and beneficent forces are stillest. The strength of a sentence lies not in its adjectives, but in its verbs and nouns, and the strength of men and of nations lies in their calm, sane, meditative moments. In a time of noise and hurry and materialism like ours, the gospel of the still small voice is always seasonable.

THE GATES OF THE EAST

BY C. WILLIAM BEEBE

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It was about twelve o'clock one hot tropical night when I took a blanket from my stateroom and went up on the deck of the Lady McCallum to sleep. The Lady McCallum, a small, compact, untidy coast steamer, was bound for Hambantotta, Ceylon. She was true to her type and appeared to take no pride in her work, moving along at a negligible rate amid a generous creaking that arose from some mysterious depths amidships. Her engine must have been a devastated and haphazard affair, with no remnant of self-respect; while her berths, her superior berths provided for first-class passengers, were intolerably, inhumanly hot, despite the noisy electric fan directly overhead.

Not that there was anything extraordinary about these facts. The only remarkable fact was that, as I walked out upon her narrow, forsaken deck, and saw above me a cluster of low stars appearing and disappearing behind her rolling funnel, I became suddenly aware that at last, at this particular moment, I had come to the real beginning of my trip after pheasants. There was something incomprehensible about this sudden conviction, and also something a little absurd, since I had already covered some thousands of miles of my journey. But these appeared preliminary when I knew that just ahead, somewhere in that promising expanse of black water, was the little harbor of Hambantotta, the eastern gateway the eastern gateway to the jungle beyond. It was undeni

ably true that some months before I had set out from America, and that this departure marked the lawful beginning of the expedition. However, when viewed from the deck of the Lady McCallum, that distant episode appeared somewhat fictitious. I was convinced that now, for the first time, I had come to the threshold of the real beginning.

It might have been that the light breeze brought with it some subtle evidence of land close ahead, some familiar Eastern fragrance which heralded the presence of a native village, with its palm trees rising dark and splendid above a row of thatched huts, and its fishing canoes drawn up like a black battalion along the water's edge. For, in the early morning a blue mist that lay close to the horizon took form and contour, becoming a white shore behind which distant trees showed in an opaque emerald border against the sky. This had the quality and unreality of a mirage, and the appearance of each successive detail seemed only to bring new elements of fiction into the illusion.

Even when the Lady McCallum stood in slowly toward the coast, and straight before her nose the native boats, made very small by distance, rode on the bright surface of the water like a colored toy fleet, the illusion persisted. Then, a young Cinghalese appeared from some fastness below deck and put his modest baggage well forward by the rail. The spell was broken. There was no longer an opalescent mirage against the skyline, but land ahead.

One by one the miniature boats as

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