The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Hive

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe HiveThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The HiveAuthor: Will Levington ComfortRelease date: November 17, 2013 [eBook #44208]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Robert Cicconetti, Sue Fleming, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (https://archive.org/details/americana)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HIVE ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The HiveAuthor: Will Levington ComfortRelease date: November 17, 2013 [eBook #44208]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Robert Cicconetti, Sue Fleming, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (https://archive.org/details/americana)

Title: The Hive

Author: Will Levington Comfort

Release date: November 17, 2013 [eBook #44208]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Robert Cicconetti, Sue Fleming, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (https://archive.org/details/americana)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HIVE ***

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Hive, by Will Levington Comfort

BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

The HiveThe Last DitchChild and CountryLot & CompanyRed FleeceMidstreamDown Among MenFatherland

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

The HiveBYWILL LEVINGTON COMFORTAUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "CHILD AND COUNTRY,""THE LAST DITCH," "DOWN AMONG MEN," ETC.NEW YORKGEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

The Hive

BYWILL LEVINGTON COMFORTAUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "CHILD AND COUNTRY,""THE LAST DITCH," "DOWN AMONG MEN," ETC.

NEW YORKGEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MARY

... soft gold and deepfragrance and pomegranate red.

... soft gold and deep

fragrance and pomegranate red.

FOREWORD

There is much to say. Many have a part in this story of our days. Their work is on the table. Yet no manuscript, no chapter, is a real beginning. One must start a book this way—with a fresh sheet in the machine and tell what he is going to tell about.... First of all, it has to do with the unfolding of the child mind; all the Stonestudy work has been for that, but the brimming wonder of it all is that we have chiefly been employed unfolding ourselves.

No one can begin upon the sweet and sacred story of life to a child without taking a stride nearer into the centre of things, and living it. That's what all telling is about—presently to stop talking and to catch up on conduct. The fairest culture of all is to become artists in life.... Thinking of this, thinking much upon this one thing, we have been lured out of the heaviness of work into the dimension of Play. We tell here about this particular passage.

Also something about the story of Man and Woman, hinting at what is contained in pages of the Book of Life not opened heretofore for theeyes of the many, but preparing now for the eyes of the children of the New Race—a beautiful story, be sure of that, but one that requires art in the telling. No one could bring this story to the lovers and the children of the New Race who had not found out that Beauty belongs to the divine trinity with Goodness and Truth.

Many seers have not held that well in mind, many sages have forgotten it, many saints have not learned it adequately at all. We have to build our own heavens here before we can have them anywhere else. The more of an artist a man is, the more reverent he becomes about perfecting his thought-forms. Just a mention now—that we rejoice to make much of the Beauty side of things in this book; that a thing cannot be beautiful and bad; that Beauty is the next quest of the many, as they escape one by one from the bondage of Gold.

We try to express the Soul of things rather than to delineate boundaries of matter, but a very strong point is made upon the fact that one cannot deal in the spirit until he has mastered to a good degree the coarser stuff that bodies and worlds are made of. We do not care how the young minds aspire mystically, so long as their abutments hold fast in the bottom-lands. A man must not drag his anchor as he climbs the hill; he must unfold line all the way—a line made ofstrands of himself, woven of his own wisdom, love and power.

Much is made in this book of the fact that we are givenpoundsfor a purpose—that all here below is symbol and intimation of a globe and perfection elsewhere—that we cannot look upon the archetype of gold until we have mastered the imitation in clay.... We come even closer to this precious subject: For instance, we know that it is only from the soul of things that one can see materials—that no one can get a glimpse of the meaning of materials so long as he is lost in the ruck of them. At the same time we do not believe that we have access, even to the lesser grades of mysticism, until we have all the power and force of the material-minded. We believe we must do well that which the world is doing, even the tasks of the average man, that nothing can be missed.

We do not encourage that mystic or poet who requires endowment. If we are to be artists, we believe in supporting our own groups; we have a suspicion that we are not through with conditions, any conditions no matter how hateful, so long as they have us whipped.

We aspire to be writers and politicians and painters and heroes; we aspire to be masters in all the superb productions of life, but we are content to begin with the ground. We are content with poverty, yet we believe that very early as workmen, we are entitled to a fastidious poverty, whichis expensive. No possessions—but all possessions. As writers we are convinced that it is necessary to do—and inimitably well—the things that the public wants and pays ten cents the word for, quite as well as to reveal the deeper folds of our growth for which we have to finance publication. We are not sure yet which is the worthier achievement.

Perhaps we speak much of Soul in this book, but we mean nothing more formidable than the better part of every man. This is the Big Fellow who takes us over when we do that which is worth while—in billiards or diplomacy, in art or love or trade. I think it is the Big Comrade which we are really unfolding—the Workman and Player. Much of Soul, we write, because it is the point of our educational drive—to set It free in the child or the young workman, to make It speak or write or play, and not mere brain and hand.

We speak much of love—not as an emotion, not as a sentiment, but as a cosmic force. You will see much more what we mean by this as you turn the pages. It is the most challenging thing in the world. It is the inner white-hot core of the Fatherland that is to be—the great white Democracy of the future....

Democracy—that's the point of inception of it all; that word is the seed. The more you dwell upon it—you know what the Seamless Robe ofthe Christ means—the more you realise that the Master Jesus was the first Big Democrat.... We have them speak the word softly and thoughtfully here each day—we like to hear the young ones say it. They are apt to know as much about it as you do—for the word doesn't mean exactly what they mean, who have used it most heretofore. It isn't the name of a political party—yet.... It is government of the people by the people, but only to those who see the sons of God in the eyes of passing men. We only ask its magic, not its presence upon these pages.... They're fighting for it gloriously—every hour. The boys here thrill with the boys there. We hold our hands high to them. Some of our boys are there. They are all our boys! Some are waiting the call to go—but there or here, we are pulling together for the real Fatherland, for the adequite fraternity, under the endless and thrilling magic of the wordEquality.

... I can say no more splendid word to you than My Equal: I know of no greater adventure than to become one of the Many. It is true that you and I—the best of us, the Immortal within us each, are of one house—that this is but a far outpost of the journey, Egypt if you like, the husks if you like—but that we have arisen and are on our way home to the Father's House.

Canyon, Santa Monica, California.

CONTENTS

1NORTH AMERICANS

NORTH AMERICANS

The thing called the New Race—the passion of poets, the phantom running ahead and forever calling the dreamer and revolutionist and occultist, is far from a reality as yet among the commonplaces of the world. It is the spirit of everything worth while, but that means nothing to one who has not a breath of it in his own body.... A story went forth from this shop recently in which certain ideals and presences of the new social order were carried through to a cheerful ending. The publisher wrote, "Yes, but what is the New Race?"

It's a fair question, but remember one cannot adequately describe a spiritual thing in terms of matter. It is only possible of portrayal where it has broken through into terms of three-space. First you are apt to get the nearest and most striking picture of the New Race at your own supper-table—the presence of one of your own children, especially if the young one is hard to understand.

Parents and children of all times have found confusion and alarm in each other's ways. But there are rare periods of human history when the difference between two generations has been not a normal and superficial crack, but an abyss. It is so now. The Old has reached its climacteric point of destructivity. All self-passions destroy themselves in time. Fear, greed, sensuality—all are self-destructive. Great human numbers and decadent principles have been recently broken down in the world with a swiftness and abandonment heretofore unrecorded, except in the traditions of planetary flood and flame....

You may watch closely the child under seven who plays in the Unseen, whose companions are not in the room for older eyes; watch the one of fancies and fairies and fragrances which others cannot quite discern. Many a child has been driven with a soul-wound into corroding silence by parents who thought they were punishing falsehood, when they were in reality repressing the imagination—the faculty which master-artists denote as the first and loveliest possession of the creative mind. Too coarse and unlit to see what the child saw, the parents again and again have looked gravely at each other, saying:

"This is a crisis. Our child has begun to lie. We must forget her own feelings and punish her——"

So often it isher—but not always. The boyswho are to do the great tasks of song and prophecy and architecture—they, too, dream dreams and see visions and have the rapt eyes of Joan in the forests of Domremy; they, too, are severely questioned by the pharisees; none escape this scourging; they, too, in many cases shall be put to death.

The new ideals of the parenthood, education, romance, are now being introduced and promulgated by pioneers long since emerged from the old litter and humus. Education will mean first of all a turning for power to the Unseen. The quest of the Swan and the Star and the Beloved, are never carried along on the levels and inequalities of the earth—always the uplifted face for the saint and the sage and the seer. Great parents kneel beside their children and beg to be delivered from the heaviness which holds them to the dim shadows, where the child sees face to face. Education will mean finding his intrinsic task for the child—the intensive cultivation of the human spirit from the Soul outward, not alone from the brain inward.

The quest of the passing age was for Gold. The real meaning and symbol and glory of gold, as the highest, smoothest and most finished of minerals, has been lost in the bulkier products and possessions it meant to measure and signify. More and more has gold itself hid away from vulgar hands and been represented by objects intrinsically inferior. We now behold a civilisationdestroying itself for commodities and destroying the commodities for which the destruction began.

Gold itself will serve Beauty in the coming age; commerce will serve æsthetics. The lovers of Beauty begin with the sand, with the clay. They love nature from the ground up; they are fervent for light and air, for sun and sky and water, for fruits and grains and bees, for stars and rains and romances. They say such things are holy. Words are inadequate for their loves and appreciations. They find the ways to love God infinite. They see Him in stone and stream; they see Him in the eyes of the deep down men; they see Him risen and inevitable in the eyes of their lovers....

Straight goodness will not do for the New Race, nor straight intellectuality. Artists, singers, painters and idealists will be the heroes of the generations to come, for they will add the quest of Beauty to the unwashed goodness of the saints and pilgrims.

These are but flaring points; one is embarrassed in short space because of a myriad things to say. Free verse is a sign of the New, also the dream of a free world and the planetary patriotism. The immanence of thespiritof all things, is a sign; the sense of the underlying oneness of humanity; not alone the Fatherland, but the Kinterland, where new Fountains are established and sages and masters come for inspiration—all these, like a passing train of wonder, a glimpse of many cars....

I think I can bring the picture in closer by using a few pages of work from one of the young men with me. His name is Steve. I called him The Dakotan,[1]in the book,Child and Country. We've romped and ridden together for three years, and I've known Steve better every day—still far from the end. The rest of the chapter is Steve's writing:

NORTH AMERICANS

Out of the centuries of moil and mix and fuse of Europe, the orient and the north countries, a gleaming archetype has emerged here which may be called the real North Americans. They are scattered here and there among the younger generation—young people new in name only; in soul they are as old as Zeus. Often they are strangers in their father's house. They blend the mind of the occidental with the soul of the east; splendid firstlings of an untried future. They betray themselves by their genius. Heredity is the first fetich overthrown by them.

From the first they are a law unto themselves. They cast off churches, codes, creeds, schools and parents as preliminary steps in their teens. In the twenties they are prodigies, leaders in the arts or the revolutions. It is their aim to over-reach themselves, not to further a type. Very early they conjourn together in secret and obscure places, revolting against life as it is lived, like a handful of white dwellers in a foreign city.

There is always an alien, intangible something about these people. One senses the double life they lead, their own, and others. Conditions are not yet adjusted for them. They are super-nationalists, the first mark of the new. They are dreamers who make their dreams come true in matter, and first among their dreams is of the planet in one piece. They are naturally intolerant of barriers and partitions. They see ahead a new social order vast and shining as a devachanic vision—the real democracy of the future. They see that the new has come in not to kill, but to build. Theirs will be the spiritual heroics. Yet all this, of the greater patriotism, must not yet be spoken. It only alienates them the more from those they must live with. Their arch enemy is Ignorance, personified so often in their elders.

It is noticeable that these young people are healthier, stronger, swifter, sharper, tougher, bolder and at the same time lighter and finer than the passing generation. They have thenew healthiness. They belong to the open and are practically immune to disease. Theirs is the health of sun and wind and spirit—vitality instead of constitution, something the old can never understand. Constitution is weight, solid, ungiving. Vitality is volatile, springy, electric, constantly being given, constantly being acquired, self-refining. Constitution does not change; it accumulates all it can, then begins to die....

The young women of this new Race are open, strong, eye-to-eye, free spoken. They are capableof friendships; they are not adverse to being wholly understood by males. They are not popular with ordinary women, who surmise their superiority but comprehend it not. Deceit, jealousy and such common disturbances evident in the sex are unknown to them. They have character and are lovely rather than beautiful. They are apt to go half way in their love-making, for who should know better when the chosen father of their children arrives.

All of these people are bringers of true love. Love is their philosophy and religion. They listen to the heart as well as the brain. Others think them cruel in their discrimination in mating. They take all or nothing—prodigious riskers, great sufferers, throwing even love's dream on the board to be played for, and laughing as they play. The slightest blight on the loved one is deepest agony.

Perhaps the surest way of discovering these young giants is to search about for the most sorely harassed children. Invariably they are put to it, to break into this day and generation. They fight their way up through all the banked-up ignorance and antagonism of unlit humanity. Often they are solitaires, coming and going with the secrecy of kings and eagles.

2QUICKENINGS

QUICKENINGS

A few pages of drift first of all with the younger boys.... There is a lane of Lombardy poplars from the Lake to the interurban car-line—a half mile. It is a lifting walk at any time, but summer evenings are wonderful with all the sounds and scents of a true pastorale—lake-breath and meadow-lands, the whole sky to look at, and the murmuring dissonance of the poplars. Often we walk to the car with passing guests. One evening a guest went away whom we loved very much. A lad of seven, named John, and I walked back from the car alone.

He was ignited. I felt this at last through his hand. I had been thinking about my own things all too long, missing the beginnings of his talk.... He hurried forward in the dusk, speaking in a hushed rapt voice. Because I had missed the first part, I said: "John, I want you to write that—either to-night or to-morrow."

And this is what came in:

The Magic Lane:

It was at dusk. Two people left their tracks in Nature's dust road.

Love is found on that road. It is the road of the mystics.

They leave their love in it; Nature kisses their feet.

Many horses' feet have been kissed on that mystic road.

That mystic road will last forever.

I long to walk upon that road of love.

Love on that road will last forever.

It is all true love.

Our friends have been met on that road of love.

It leads to the Hills of God.

Certain spelling matters have been corrected. We pay little attention to spelling in the work here. The young ones learn by reading and get the proper look of a word altogether too soon in many cases. There was another high moment from John at the same time. The following three lines have stood out from the period with memorable magic:

Wonder

The soft breath of the Mother came in through the window of vines.

The stars were shining like the face of the New Generation.

My spirit was away in the Hills. A noise at the door brought me back——

John then fell into a psychological tangle which we found little profit in following. By the "Mother" he referred to Nature.... The verse period has passed for the time. Around the age of seven, boys change. Often, as in this case, they are not so interesting for a while afterward. John is coming nine now and is writing "action" stories with all the worn and regulation props and settings. The early tendency will return with a dimension added. All transitions are times of disorder, but they are followed by larger areas and truer fulfilments of order. A cloud falls upon the sanctuary, but when it is dispelled, one perceives a lifted dome, bright with its new cloth of gold.

I am struck every day in dealing with young boys how wisdom and beauty and truth can be inculcated in their lives, without pain and strain to them, and with great profit to the teacher. The young mind is quick to change. It has not grown its pharisaical ivory....

The sanction of a boy must be won on a physical basis. A man must know what the boy knows and go him one better. The man must understand boy points of view, but never expect the boy to be puerile. Parents of the past generationshave had the steady effrontery to expect very little from children. "Why, they are only children!" has done more to make for vacuousness and drivel than any other visionless point of view, none of which has been missed. There is a difference in ages, to be sure. The child's mind has not massed for use the external impacts of twenty or thirty years of life in the world, but there is also an Immortal within—a singer, hero, builder, or a teacher possibly, eager to manifest through the child's fresh mind, fervid to bring the mind of the child to its subjection, for the expression of its own revelations. Indeed, the parents themselves are enjoined to become as little children. In arriving at this wisdom and humility, they may suddenly find masters in their own children.

There is also a lad here of seven named Tom. Yesterday I found him beside me on the sand, down by the water's edge. I began to tell him about the Inner Light that we all carry. You can talk over a child's head, if your words are choked with mental complications (which is apt to be second-rate talk, anyway), but you seldom are out of reach of a fine child's grasp when you speak of spiritual things. He was sitting cross-legged, folded hands between his knees—a little six pointed star—head and shoulders the three upper points, knees with folded hands between, the three lower. He was bare from the waist upand thighs down, and brown as the honey of buckwheat.... I told him that the seventh and perfect point of his star was within; that if he shut his eyes and kept very still, putting away for the present all his thoughts about himself, his feelings, his wants and his rights—looking into himself as one would look ahead for a lamp in the night, listening deep within, as one would listen for the voice of a loved friend,—I promised that at last he would see what the three wise men saw—the Star in the East. He need only follow that Star and be true to its guidance to come at last to the Cave and the Solar Babe.... After that I hinted that I would come tohisfeet and listen.

Tom felt that it was worth trying for at once—shut his eyes, turning all thoughts and gaze within. He held the posture long.... I have marvelled again and again at the quickness with which the child-mind attains to concentration so essential for all original production. The little ones have no mad emotional lists to sort out and subdue; their wants are simple "yes" and "no" in so many cases. Indeed, they are spared the struggle of becoming as little children.... Tom held the posture, until I was actually tense from the strain of waiting and keeping my thoughts from calling his.

It was a picture—sun-whitened hair, long yellow lashes, brown body with a bit of babe's softness left to it, and glorious sunlight. He openedhis eyes at last saying that he had the door, where the light was, almost opened, when a fly bit him.

I thought of the perfection of the instance of the mind's waywardness—the coming of the Master spoiled by a fly bite.... Tom will search for his Star every day. It is strange that he is closer to the hill-pastures around Bethlehem, under seven, than for years afterward.

To learn concentration in mid-life after the world "has been put through a man," is an ordeal at best; and yet we are by no means masters of ourselves, nor capable of significant achievement until the brain can be stilled at will of its petty affairs (the first aim of concentration) and becomes the glad servant of the "giant" within.

A little later I saw Tom on the back of a huge black walk-trot saddle-horse of show quality—passing up the Lane at a fast clip, his feet half way to the stirrups, holding on to the saddle with one hand, the bridle-rein in the other. A year or two ago I should have been afraid to permit that, but we manage now to relieve the young ones of a large part of our fears for their welfare. Children have enough to overcome from their parents. Frequently the New Age young people have to master their heredity before they begin upon themselves.

Life is a big horse to ride, so often a black horse. It is well to start children free and unafraid. We do not let them dwell in thought of pain. We do not permit tears. We inform them early that to be sick is a confession of uncleanness, that lying is for the use of cowards only, and that to be cruel marks the idiot.

We are occasionally serious over repeated failures, but we laugh over things done well. Tennis has unfolded marvellous possibilities in the training of will force. Children are shown that there is a mystic quality to all the perfect games—that the great billiardists and tennis and baseball players perform feats in higher space, whether they know it or not. There is the essential ideal first in the making of the athlete as in the making of the poet. The great moments of play require faculties swifter and more unerring than the human eye or hand or mind. Ask the master of any game if he had time to think in pulling off the stroke that won. It is inspiration that he uses quite the same as the poet in his high moments.

Education is the preparation of the mind to receive and answer to inspiration from a plane above. The more you develop merely the brain of a child, the more he is detached from the great principles of being, the more also is he closed to the real, and subjected to the danger of actual lesion and sickness. The more you develop the spirit of a child, or rather give the significant One within an opportunity to come forth andbethe child,the more you make for beauty, health, goodness and glory of bodily life.... A lucky day when you start really to associate with your children, luckier still when you undertake the work of teaching them incidental to your own work. Then and there, you begin to realise that children are close to a source of things that you cannot touch. Presently you realise that they are teaching you....

Day after day I have studied and practised the development of the child from within outward. I have seen the capacity to synthesise and assimilate mere mental matters developed in a year, by training the mind from the centre of origins outward, that mental training alone could never accomplish. The mind itself becomes vigorous and avid and capacious and majestically swift. It is trained to express its true self. That is power—that is king-play. This sentence covers the whole matter:

The perfect way to develop the mind of the child is to teach him to sit and listen at the feet of his own master, the Soul.

The right to live and to bring the laughter of power to the days must be won afresh each morning. No two days alike. We make ourselves impossible to children of the New Age by trying to confine them in the laws and rules of yesterday. The young people whom I serve live in a different intensity. Their interest flags if I repeat,if I fall into familiar rhythms. Continually they spur me on. I think, after all, great teaching is the capacity to feel what the younger minds are thinking. If we are too coarse to catch the first warning of their resistance, they slip farther and farther from our grasp.

It would not seem possible to hold American young people with spiritual affairs; yet this is done daily. We call the Unseen—the great gamble. I have shown how all else betrays—how all matter is a mockery at the last—that even love and friendship fail for those who are called to weep and worship wholly at the tomb of the body.... The truth is out: The beginnings of real teaching is in making the Unseen interesting and dramatic.

We dwell upon the mystic white lines which connect all things—the sources of daring and beauty and creativeness. I ask my young people where they were—when they did any rare and improved bit of work, when they felt like great comrades, met some magnanimous impulse, arose to superb instants of play, or when in Chapel the big animation touched us all and set us free. They always answer that they wereout of themselves.

That's a secret of the new teaching again—to lift the students out of themselves. Men take to drink or drugs for this same reason: men and women set out on the great adventures, pleasuresand quests for this. We hunger and toil for this freedom; we suffer and adore—to get out of ourselves. Mental teachings tie us in more firmly. The teaching here—and no two days alike—is to startle and encourage the young minds to arise and live and breathe in that lovelier and more spacious dimension which at least borders upon the Unseen. The doors open and shut so softly. One does not know he has been out—until he is back with strange light in his eyes and in his hands a gift from the gods.

The essential spirituality of the new teaching must not be confused with religious affairs as they are known and exploited in the world. You cannot teach the New Age religion of the world's kind. It has its own. No dry as dust sage will do. A snort will answer your sanctimoniousness; flexible science will reply to the abysses of your logic.... You must be the consummate artist if never before in your life, to teach the beauty of the soul to youth. The young workers of the new social order will never bring forth their great harvests from yourreflectedlight. You must be spontaneous—you must flood them with pure solar gold; you must show them by your life and your work, how you come and go into the Unseen.

There is no rest.... One commands his disciples to go forth at last. The teacher strides forward faster when they cling. He tells them one day they must race the gamut to follow him; and the next day he puts another in his place and begs to be allowed a cushion in the midst of the children.... We hold them by setting them free—the first law of love. All unions of the future—in trade and friendship and matrimony—will be founded upon the principle of freedom; and this is the essence of the new teaching—to liberate the children into their larger and God-quickened selves.

No rest and no two days alike.

A Bob White called me this morning across the uncut hayfields at the edge of the lake-bluff.... His two smooth and patient notes seemed to contain the secret of putting off all fret and fear and unrest. He seemed to ask if I had not done this already—had not yet put all boyish and merely temporal things away? "Not yet?... Not yet?" he called the question.

I answered that I would try again, and I set out straightway to be honest once more with the world, with the soil and with myself. I would begin with the clay again to be clean—to rise and think and dwell in cleanliness, to think no thought, to perform no action second-rate—to begin with the Laugh again—the warm laugh of conquest that always opens some inner door to fresh powers—to arise afresh in the glory and gamble of the Unseen.... I returned and sawthe young ones one by one—from Tom and John up to the men and women—doing their work. I set about mine with a laugh and called the day good. The teacher knows best who is taught.

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