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there were elements of absurdity in the whole affair, but absurdity and great danger sometimes go hand in hand. And these beasts are the greatest danger of the jungle country.

However, that night, when the packing was done and my notes were finished for the day, I was out on the porch for a while going over the details of the trip, and I found that incident after incident slipped into its lawful place in the general scheme. It happened that only two hours earlier a native had come in for medicine for his arm, which was marked up above the elbow by elephant bruise. We did what we could for him, and he went away. But although he was only one out of many who had come up to the house for medicine, because he had come last, he stood well in the foreground of events. And it was so with the water-buffaloes who had run me up a tree. It was only when I thought of the bullock-carts and the noisy wooden bells, of the dâk bungalow at Hambantotta with the yard where the chowkidar built his fire, of the beach and the old fishermen estimating so carefully the catch which had been brought in at sundown, that one thing after another fell into position. I saw that after all it was only a matter of contrast, that the values were relative.

And I tried to bring some of this philosophy into the question of leaving

Welligatta; but this being also a matter of emotion, it needed a little more time before it would fall into its legitimate groove. I knew that in a week I could look back and see that the expedition could not have remained always in Welligatta, but as it was I found it hard to leave. I looked out over the dark trees which grew at the edge of the jungle and saw the lake between the branches like bars of new silver, and thought of the work I had left undone, and of the people close by who were living mysteries daily which I could in no way understand; and I did not want to leave it all unsolved.

Then I heard Boy adjusting my hammock, which hung at the end of the porch. Since it was already well placed, and needed no readjustment, this meant that he was sleepy. So I stood up and all the unanswered questions straightway went out of my mind. I thought that I had no more regrets about leaving the jungle. Then from far away, I heard a thin, trembling sound, a little querulous. I do not know that the tortoise was awake at such an hour, but I know that the last thought in my mind was that although I had come to Ceylon for junglefowl and peacocks and had found them, that some day I would return. And I hoped that at such a time I would find somewhere a golden-backed tortoise singing to welcome me back to the East.

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The curious candle of your breath,

Body's and spirit's throbbing light. I hold you close, while Life and Death Already blow across you. White And soft, and warm against my cheek Oh, I could cry! But somehow, you With hands and feet and face bespeak

Laughter no tears can quiver through!

A changeling mother I must be,
To laugh, and not to cry, at you,
Dust of the starry worlds! - to me
The quaintest joke I ever knew!

A FORSAKEN GOD

BY HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK

I

AN Englishman of letters who, in the eyes of Americans at least, embodies the spirit of Oxford and Cambridge, expressed not long ago certain frank opinions about America. What motive induced him to tell the world what he thinks of us? It could not have been mere excitement over novel experiences. Englishmen of letters no longer write about America in the spirit of explorers. Mr. Lowes Dickinson could hardly have appeared to himself-reflected in the delicate mirror of his mind

as a gentleman adventurer, staring from a peak of Greek culture at our amazing characteristics, and differing from stout Cortez mainly in not being silent. The war had not yet begun;

there was no motive for bringing gentle suasion - such as may be implied in any expression of British interest in America to bear upon our neutrality. The readiest explanation of his writing is that he was prompted by a simple motive: he wrote under the need of saying what was on his mind. This is the very kind of criticism to give ear to. When the human heart must unburden itself of a load, it neither flatters nor detracts; it acts instinctively with no thought of consequences. The mood is a mood of truth. The man who speaks the truth to us is our best friend, and we should always listen to him.

Among other things Mr. Dickinson said, 'Describe the average Western man and you describe the American;

from east to west, from north to south, everywhere and always the samemasterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, and at once good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, ruthless if you do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity, intelligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and crass, contemptuous of ideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognizing nothing but the actual....

"The impression America makes on me is that the windows are blocked up. It has become incredible that this continent was colonized by the Pilgrim Fathers.... Religion is becoming a department of practical business. The churches-orthodox and unorthodox, old and new, Christian, Christian-Scientific, theosophic, higher-thinkingvie with one another in advertising goods which are all material benefits: "Follow me, and you will get rich," "Follow me, and you will get well," "Follow me, and you will be cheerful, prosperous, successful." Religion in America is nothing if not practical.

Some Americans do not like this criticism. They protest that the critic has no eye for the essential qualities that render our country dear to us, that he gazes dimly, through a mist of Cambridge traditions, from some spleenproducing point of vision, upon a people spiritually remote from him. Human nature instinctively lays flattering unction to its soul; but there is only one right way to take the faultfinding of an intellectual and highly educated man, and that is to see how much truth there is in his fault-finding and then strive to correct our faults. Most Americans do not care about the opinions of Oxford and Cambridge; they say that we must be a law unto ourselves, and absorb nourishment from the sunshine of our own self-esteem. But others, less robust, do set store by

the opinion of scholars bred, for the greater part, upon the recorded mind of the most gifted people that has ever lived in Europe, upon the books of Homer and Pindar, Æschylus and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, and their fellows. It will do us less harm to assume that there is too much truth in what Mr. Dickinson has said of us, than to assume that there is none.

Sixty or seventy years ago, a definite conception of what constitutes the mould of moral and intellectual form upon which men should seek to shape themselves, appeared to be solidly established. That conception was definite and readily accepted because it actually had been embodied in a living man, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Emerson, Lowell, Bayard Taylor, each in his respective way, and all other leaders of thought in America, acknowledged Goethe as the model for man, as an intellectual being, to strive to imi

tate.

Goethe's position seemed as secure as Shakespeare's, Dante's, or Homer's. Lower than they in the supreme heights of song, he was more universal. He had composed poetry that in peculiar sweetness rivaled the Elizabethan lyrics and surpassed them in variety and depth of thought; he had written a play judged equal to Hamlet or the. Book of Job; he had written romances that rivaled I Promessi Sposi in nice depiction of the soul's workings, and were as interesting in their delineation of human life as the most romantic of the Waverley Novels. He had been the chief counselor of a sovereign prince and had devised wise policy in a hundred matters of statecraft. His mind had put forth ideas as a tree in springtime puts forth leaves; his speculations had traveled in wide fields of scientific thought; he had divined certain processes concerning the origin of species in a manner that still associates his

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