intervening landscape rested upon the taller conifers and yews, lighting them up with a perfect flood of glory. Up in the sky the same change was proceeding on a grander and more complete scale. The golden sunbeams passing up behind the purple bank of cloud illuminated the blue-gray vault above, gilding with untold splendor all the fragments of cloud both great and small, which were massed together or scattered over its surface, suggesting the beauty, glory, and power of the ideal man as conceived in the cosmic mind, and awaiting the fulness of time to be manifested on earth.

And now the great purple cloud bank itself, and the two mighty mounds changed swiftly from their deep heavy purple to a wonderful golden mauve. At the same time, the five cloud trees in the actual centre became a gauzy film, partially veiling the brightness of the sun itself. Here verily was the completion of the song. The trinity of man was now fully portrayed in the scenic parable. Man's spiritual nature had come to the birth, and straightway the mists of ignorance and the gloom of suffering and misery were to be dispersed as if they had never been: indeed, as if to confirm the thought, the breeze gathering strength and vigor from the sun's newborn glory now drove away the last remnants of the cruel, disfiguring mist.

And ever the joyous songs of the birds grew more and more triumphant, and always the light grew brighter and more effulgent, until at last the sun passing up from behind the great bank of illuminated cloud broke full and brilliant upon the view, flooding sky and land, tree and shrub, with a radiant splendor indescribably beautiful. Once more the trees and bushes were just their own happy selves, the sweet-briar hedge and the rhododendrons proudly exhibited their wealth of pink and white and rosy-red blooms. Then their sweet perfumes, freely liberated by the warm glowing sunshine, were gently wafted up to me; and now, fairly carried away with the beauty and glamour of the scene rendered still more enthralling by the joyous caroling of the birds, I bowed my head in unutterable thankfulness that such a revelation of harmony had been so wonderfully declared to me.

Losing myself in an enchanting reverie, a grand and lovely picture arose in my imagination, portraying the transformation that would take place in this beautiful world of ours when the Son of righteousness should actually have arisen in the hearts of men, on the same magnificent scale of power and beauty as my eyes had that morning been privileged to behold. In my mind's eye I saw all humanity freed from the mists and shadows of ignorance and sin, transformed from sons of men into sons of God, becoming that "pure river of the water of life" described by St. John, "clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb."

I saw also that the pure river of the water of life, by reason of its very nature, was made up of myriads of drops and particles; that one impure or sullied drop would affect the clearness of the whole crystal river: therefore I knew it behooved me to remember and obey that perfect law of life delivered long ago on a mountain top to a great multitude of people, and summed up in the Teacher's own words:-"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect."

"All that springeth from the sod, tendeth upward unto God, All that cometh from the skies, urging it anon to rise. Winter's life-delaying breath, leaveneth the lump of death, Till the frailest fettered bloom moves the earth and bursts the tomb."

"There is no safer test of greatness than the faculty to let mortifying and insulting expressions pass unheeded, and to ascribe them, like many mistakes, to the weakness and ignorance of the speaker, merely, as it were, perceiving without feeling them.-Schopenhauer.

"He is not dead whose glorious mind

Lifts thine on high

To live in hearts we leave behind

Is not to die."

BUILDING A POWERFUL MIND.

PART I.

BY MAUD SIMMONS BRUNTON.

"Oh!" she exclaimed tearfully, "What can you mean?" "I mean," he replied, "that I understand you at last; that a marvelous life opens before you of which I know practically nothing of which I am hopelessly, wilfully ignorant because I hate drudgery. I am not a student; I dislike lessons; men and women of intellect bore me; philosophies, sciences, literature of all sorts, which you say mean everything of importance to evolving humanity, I purposely ignore. They are your life; they are your world; you have trained yourself to live in that world, to work in it; to you 'there is no conquest worth while but the conquest of ideas.' To me, to possess the woman I love is the one absorbing passion of my life. You have cared for me, you say, as a true woman cannot help caring for the only man she has met who truly knows how to love, but sometimes, you say, I have seemed to you like a sort of elegant tiger in a menagerie-that you would like to stroke but dare not. It is the thought-world which you live in, not this whirling, seething world of passion and desire. To give yourself up to this might mean the sacrifice of your intellect. I would dominate your thought and crush out your thirst for knowledge. Yes, I think you are right. You would then stop growing. You would be useless in the world, as I am. Then you would despise yourself-and me!"

He stopped a moment short of breath.

"I love you," said the girl with intense feeling; "a woman ought to willingly endure any sacrifice for the man she loves— but-no, no-I am not willing-the thought almost suffocates me!"

"It sounds selfish, I know," she continued, "egotistical too, but it is neither-it is my higher self that is speaking; and your higher self, could it find speech, would uphold me;

it is the voice of humanity calling within me, demanding my strength and my life for the world's service."

There was a strange calm in her voice now, as she looked up clear-eyed and confident that she was right.

Not so the man by her side.

He sank wretchedly upon the garden wall, stunned and hopeless. He had no arguments to offer to such a woman. In fact, he could at first think of nothing but the blow to his pride; he, the petted society favorite, whom fortune had favored with vast wealth, with the face and form of a Greek god-he, who loved as only a man can love to whom love is everything he was nothing to "a woman of brains!"

Why had he always refused to study? Why did he detest books? Why had he continually ignored the world's problems, content in his own supremely good fortune to possess all that the world holds most dear? Why were the sunshine and the forest his only teachers? Why had he thoughtlessly rushed away from the world's intellects, only to fall hopelessly, desperately in love with "a woman of brains?"

She had gone to the house now. He sorrowfully wended his way down the lane, through the meadows, even to the edge of the woods. He presently came upon an empty hut, threw himself down within it, and slept through the night, unmindful of the fact that disease lurked in the damp, mosscovered floor. On the morrow he awoke in a raging fever. A lad happened along. "Did you hear the news?" he asked.

"What news?" queried the man indifferently.

"Of her, the lady I saw you with yesterday." "The lady!" He was all attention now.

"Yes. She was drowned in the river. She was crossing on a narrow plank and fell in.”

"It could not have been she," exclaimed the man, but the words choked in his throat.

"Have it your own way," quoth the lad, and, without more ado, he was off, whistling a merry tune, in the careless fashion of youth.

In the meantime the man in the hut lay at the point of.

death for days. His wealth, his large estates near by, with an army of workmen upon them, availed him nothing. He lay here day after day starving, dying-for want of a helping hand. The careless lad who had brought such sad news to him had by this time no doubt almost forgotten the man's very existence, and no one else had any idea where to find him. He was now becoming emaciated, but as the body wasted, the mind grew wonderfully keen, and a strange thirst for knowledge was born in him, an ardent longing for light that would brook no denial. He knew now that it was for this he was destined to live-this, in spite of the intense desire to die which had for many days had complete possession of him. Desire, for the first time in his life, had been transmuted into aspiration, into determination.

He crawled on his hands and knees to the door of the hut and emerged into the sunshine, so wrapped in thought that he was scarcely conscious of what he had done. But the glare of the sun at once both blinded him and thrilled him with a vague sense of a new world now opening before him. He fainted.

With the return of consciousness, he was surprised to see myriads of many hued little beings soaring in the air above him. They began to alight upon his shoulders. He tried to sweep them off but to no avail, and he finally crept into the hut to escape them, but they swarmed in after him-and he soon began to realize that he would have to face his strange visitors. The hut was fast filling with them, and hewas smothering! With a mighty effort, he aroused himself, and gazed at them fearlessly. "Stand back!" he exclaimed, and a space cleared before him.

He then noticed that they seemed to be diminutive men, but that a large majority of them had wings, others being carried on their backs.

"Why are you here?" the man inquired.

"To build you a new house; you are sick because you live in this wretched hut."