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he stuck it at the side of the paper. Then, taking a round rubber seal, he made two imprints over the photograph. The seal was a red one, with the same inscription inside the periphery that was printed at the head of the paper. The inner space of the seal consisted of the five-pointed Bolshevist star, with a mallet and a plough in the centre.

"That is your certificate of service,' said the Finn; 'we will give you a second one of personal identification.'

Another paper was quickly printed off with the words, "The holder of this is the Soviet employee Joseph Ilitch Afirenko, aged 36 years.' This paper was unnecessary in itself, but two 'documents' were always better than one.

It was now after midnight, and the leader of the Finnish patrol ordered us to lie down for a short rest. He threw himself on a couch in the eating-room. There were only two beds for the remaining four of us, and I lay down on one of them with one of the Finns. I tried to sleep, but could n't. I thought of all sorts of things- of Russia in the past, of the life of adventure I had elected to lead for the present, of the morrow, of friends still in Petrograd who must not know of my return - if I got there. I was nervous, but the dejection that had overcome me in the train was gone. I saw the essential humor of my situation. The whole adventure was really one big exclamation mark. Forsan et hæc olim

IV

The two hours of repose seemed interminable. I was afraid of three o'clock, and yet I wanted it to come quicker, to get it over. At last a shuffling noise approached from the neighboring room, and the cadaverous Finn prodded each of us with the butt end of his rifle. 'Wake up,' he whispered; 'we'll leave in a quarter of an hour. No

noise. The people in the next cottage must n't hear us.'

We were ready in a few minutes. My entire baggage was a small parcel that went into my pocket, containing a pair of socks, one or two handkerchiefs, and some dry biscuit. In my other pocket I had the medicine bottle of whiskey I had hidden from Melnikoff, and some bread.

One of the four Finns remained behind. The other three were to accompany me to the river. It was a raw and frosty November night, and pitch-dark. Nature was still as death. We issued silently from the house, the cadaverous man leading. One of the men followed behind, and all carried their rifles ready for use.

We walked stealthily along the road the Finn had pointed out to me on paper overnight, bending low where no trees sheltered us from the Russian bank. A few yards below, on the right, I heard the trickling of the river. We soon arrived at a ramshackle villa, standing on the river-bank, surrounded by trees and thickets. Here we stood stock-still for a moment, to listen for any unexpected sounds. The silence was absolute. But for the trickling of the river, there was not a rustle.

We descended to the water under cover of the tumble-down villa and the bushes. The stream was about twenty paces wide at this point. Along both banks there was an edging of ice. I looked across at the opposite side. It was open meadow, but the trees loomed darkly a hundred paces away on either hand and in the background. On the left I could just see the cottage of the Red patrol, against which the Finns had warned me.

The cadaverous man took up his station at a slight break in the thickets. A moment later he returned and announced that all was well. 'Remember,' he enjoined me once again, in an under

tone, 'run slightly to the left, but keep an eye on that cottage.'

He made a sign to the other two, and from the bushes they dragged out a boat. Working noiselessly, they attached a long rope to the stern and laid a pole in it. Then they slid it down the bank into the water.

'Get into the boat,' whispered the leader, 'and push yourself across with the pole. And good luck!'

I shook hands with my companions, pulled at my little bottle of whiskey, and got into the boat. I started pushing, but with the rope trailing behind, it was no easy task to punt the little bark straight across the running stream. I was sure I should be heard, and had in midstream the sort of feeling I should imagine a man has as he walks his last walk to the gallows. At length I was at the farther side, but it was quite impossible to hold the boat steady while I landed. In jumping ashore, I crashed through the thin layer of ice. I scrambled out and up the bank, and the boat was hastily pulled back to Finland be hind me.

'Run hard!' I heard a low call from over the water behind me. D— it, the noise of my splash had reached the Red patrol! I was already running hard when I saw a light emerge from the cottage on the left. I forgot the injunctions as to direction, and simply bolted away from that lantern. Halfway across the sloping meadow I dropped and lay still. The light moved rapidly along the river bank. There was shouting, and then suddenly two shots; but there was no reply from the Finnish side. Then the light began to move slowly back toward the cottage of the Red patrol, and finally all was silent again.

I lay motionless for some time, then rose and proceeded cautiously. Having missed the right direction, I found that I had to negotiate another small stream

that ran obliquely down the slope of the meadow. Being already wet, I did not suffer by wading through it. Then I reached some garden fences, over which I climbed, and found myself in the road.

Convincing myself that the road was deserted, I crossed it and came out on to the moors, where I found a halfbuilt house. Here I sat down to await the dawn - blessing the man who invented whiskey, for I was very cold. It began to snow, and, half-frozen, I got up to walk about and study the locality as well as I could in the dark. At the cross-roads near the station I discovered some soldiers sitting round a bivouac fire, so I retreated quickly to my half-built house and waited till it was light. Then I approached the station, with other passengers. At the gate a soldier was examining passports. I was not a little nervous when showing mine for the first time; but the examination was a very cursory one. The soldier seemed only to be assuring himself that the paper had a proper seal. He passed me through and I went to the ticket-office and demanded a ticket.

'One first class to Petrograd,' I said boldly.

"There is no first class by this train, only second and third.'

'No first? Then give me a second.' I had asked the Finns what class I ought to travel, expecting them to say third. But they replied, first, of course, for it would be strange to see an employee of the Extraordinary Commission traveling other than first class. Third class was for workers and peasants.

The journey to Petrograd was about twenty-five miles, and, stopping at every station, the train took nearly two hours. As we approached the city, the coaches filled up, until people were standing in the aisles and on the platforms. There was a crush in the Finland station at which we arrived. The

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THE people were astonished, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as those who had gone to college (unauthorized translation). They were astonished that every reference to their sacred books was to contradict them; that over against their hitherto unquestioned authority he should set himself in authority; that these obvious things he said should be so true, so astonishingly new and true: homely, familiar things, not out of books, but out of life and nature.

Except for a faint echo of Isaiah and the Psalmist, and some half dozen references to Old Testament law (which he cited to refute), all the matter in the Sermon on the Mount is from common life and the out-of-doors: the house on the rock; the good tree and the evil fruit; the false prophet; the straight gate; the son who asks a fish; the pearls before the swine; the lilies of the field -familiar matter, and commonplace, but suddenly new with meaning, and startling with authority.

I

Isaiah had dealt earlier with these things; and one rises from that prophet wondering what more can be said, how better said. Yet Isaiah never spake like the man of this Sermon. This man had the books of Isaiah, but he went behind the books with his observations, as substance goes behind shadow, appealing from the books direct to life and nature.

Life and nature are still the source of originality, the sole seat of authority. Books make a full man. It is life and nature that give him authority. But life and nature are little reckoned with in formal education; small credit is given them in the classroom; yet authority, -authorship, poet and prophet, are the glory of education. Or is it the end of education to produce the scribe?

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Neither scribe nor author is the end of our school education; but that average intelligence upon which democracy rests. Not scribe but citizen, not author but voter, is the business of the school, the true end of its course of study. The schools are the public's, con

cerned with the public, with the education of living together. There are several educations, however: one, in the public school, for democracy; another, in and out of school, for individuality; and another distinct and essential education, in life and nature, for authority

as great a national need as democracy. We need peace and prosperity, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but quite as much does this nation need vision to walk in truth and beauty. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Can we educate for vision? teach men authority to preach a Sermon on the Mount? to land on Plymouth Rock? to write a Walden Pond? to be an Abraham Lincoln? to dare a league of nations? These are visions, daring, dangerous visions, not out of books, but new, out of life and nature. We must educate for vision-for dreams and deeds that are without precedent.

But not in school. Thoreau and Cyrus Dallin went to school, yet they went to nature more. Jesus went little to school. He knew a few great books profoundly; but he was not bound out to books for an education. It is hardly strange that the schools should make nothing of this. It is passing strange, however, that we parents, dreaming dreams for our children, should send them to school for their whole education, getting no hint from an opposite course that was found fit for Jesus.

There were schools and books aplenty, and young Saul of Tarsus had them, and had Gamaliel for his teacher. The boy in Nazareth had a few great books of poetry and prophecy; He had his school, too, but it was the carpenter's shop, the village street, the wild, lonely hills reaching off behind the town. This was his education; and there is none better none other perhaps - for authority.

Supreme utterance is always poetic

utterance, deeply human, deeply religious, and as fresh and daring as the dawn. Such utterance may come untaught. But if the conscious power for such utterance is the possession of the few, the instinct for it and the joy in it is a quality of all human minds. Deeper within us than our conscious mind, deeper than our subconscious mind, this instinct for utterance is the essence of the unconscious, the inmost, mind, whose substance is the flux of all originals. We can all utter, create, make; and we should have in our education the raw materials out of which new things are made.

There were other boys in Nazareth, who had the books, the work-bench, the village street and the lonely hills, without acquiring authority. This single boy was different. So is every boyYet no matter how different this particular boy, the significant thing is that He had for teachers the humble people, work with tools, the solemn, silent hills, and a few beautiful, intensely spiritual books, and that out of this teaching He learned to speak with authority.

So it was with Lincoln: the very same books, work with his hands, elemental people, the lonely backwoods. Lincoln and Edward Everett were different; not so different in genius, however, as in education. 'Lincoln,' says a biographer, 'was a self-made man, in whom genius triumphed over circumstance.' I should rather say that of Everett, the accomplished scholar, Greek professor, President of Harvard College, Governor of Massachusetts, editor, senator, foreign minister, who, in spite of all this circumstance, was something of an orator. But standing beside Lincoln at Gettysburg, he spoke for an hour with this vast book-education, like the Scribes, leaving Lincoln, with his natural education, to speak for five minutes with authority. No, genius and circumstance in Lincoln were by chance

joined together; conventional education happily did not put them asunder.

It is not often so with genius. Chance cannot get the consent of circumstance; nor to-day is there any match for convention. The trouble is too much school education and too little natural education. We limit education to the school, as if the school were a whole education! Neither Lincoln nor Everett had a whole education. It is idle to speculate on what Lincoln might have been, had his ancestors stayed in Hingham, where they landed, and had he gone to Derby Academy and to Harvard. What actually happened on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek is more significant. For here he was born, the son of a carpenter, and he had for teachers his father's tools, the prairie, the westering pioneers, the great river, the Life of Washington, Pilgrim's Progress, Æsop, Shakespeare, and the Bible

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faster by motor, that it seems that our existence in God must have been prenatal, or might become possibly a postmortem affair.

Religion in education is strictly the part of someone the parental part of education, and no business of any school. Is it because I fail that I seem to see all parents failing in religion? My children have not had what I had in religion not my Quaker grandfather certainly, who was lame and walked slowly, and so, I used to think, and still think, more surely walked with God. My first memory of that grandfather is of his lifting an adder out of the winding woodpath with his cane, saying, "Thee must never hurt one of God's creatures'-an intensely religious act, which to this day covers for me the glittering folds of the snake with the care, and not the curse, of God.

Years later I was at work in the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Dr. C. O. Whitman was lecturing. He had traced the development of the cod's egg back to a single cell of jellied protoplasm, when he paused.

'Gentlemen,' he said, with dramatic restraint, 'I can go no further. There is that in this cell we call life. But the microscope does not reveal it. We all know what it does. But who knows what it is? Is it a form of motion? The theologian calls it God. I am not a theologian. I do not know what life is.'

He need not have been a theologian

only a very little child once, with his lame grandfather to tell him the snake is God's; and in those after years, coming to the end of his great lecture on the embryology of the cod's egg, and to the greater mystery in that cell of living protoplasm, he would have spoken with authority.

It is not every child whose sleep is as light as little Samuel's, whose dreams are stirred by strange voices as were

Joan of Arc's; but there are many more

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