Yet once again he smiled in his sleep—
Smiled on till the gray dawn's gleam
When those near by might have heard him weep:
"I want my dream—my dream!"
For he dreamed of the yesterdays of youth,
And the smile on a mother's face;
A hearth of old-time faith and truth
In the light of an old home place;
He had won his share of the fame and fight
In the struggle and toil of men—
Yet he sobbed and sighed, in the breaking light:
"I want my dream again!"
—The Tennesseean.
(1172)
FULNESS, CHRIST'S The late Charles Cuthbert Hall said: I recall the wonder and delight with which I saw the ocean tide come up the Bay of Fundy and fill the empty river-bed. Through the hours of the ebb, the Nova Scotian rivers dwindled and shrank within their banks. Broad and barren reaches of sand exposed themselves; ships listed heavily on their sides, deserted by the feeble stream trickling in mid-channel. Then came the tide up the Bay of Fundy, up from the abundance of the unfathomable sea. You could hear it coming with a distant sound of motion and life and unmeasured power. You could see it coming, with a pure white girdle of foam, that looked in sunlight like a zone of fire. It entered the river-bed; it filled the empty channel as one fills a pitcher at the fountain; it covered the barren sands with motion and sparkling life; it lifted the heavy ships, gave back to them their rights of buoyancy, set them free upon the broad water-way of world-wide opportunity; it changed the very face of the land from sadness and apathy and dulness to animation and color and glittering activity. So Christ comes into empty human lives, and fills them with His fulness, which is the very fulness of God. The difference between a life without Christ and a life with Christ is the difference between ebb and flood: the one is growing emptier, the other is growing fuller.
(1173)
FUNCTIONS AND GIFTS IN THE EAST The function in the non-Christian world must be regarded, because there etiquette and propriety are on dress parade. Presents are another difficulty. Be sure to look into this matter, and do not think that you are doing all that is required when you send a present. You have to be very particular about the number of presents, about the manner in which they are wrapt, about their proper delivering, etc. Receiving gifts is quite as serious a problem to the person who desires to rank as polite, as is the making of presents.—H. P. Beach, "Student Volunteer Movement," 1906.
(1174)
FUNDAMENTALS Every life is dominated by a fundamental note, good or bad. All its over-*tones will ultimately correspond. The wires strung from pole to pole are set into oscillation by the wind, somewhat as the strings of a violin are set into vibration by the bow. In skilful hands the violin bow can be made to bring forth from the string one powerful fundamental note and several overtones of higher pitch, but in perfect harmony with the fundamental. But the wind is a very skilful performer, and brings forth at the same time not only the deepest fundamental bass note of the wire, but a great variety of overtones, both harmonious and discordant. In fact, the many wires strung overhead, from pole to pole, constitute splendid Eolian harps.—Telephony.
(1175)
See Vital Faiths.
FURY INCREASING STRENGTH
The almost superhuman pluck of certain
prize-fighting animals—bulldogs and badgers,
for instance—may in reality be founded on a
temporary insensibility to pain, and the evident
advantages of that negative endowment
suggest its development by the agency of
natural selection. Individuals gifted with
that faculty of emotional anesthesia were
less likely to succumb to the terrors of a
life-and-death struggle, and therefore more
apt to prevail in that struggle for existence
which in a state of nature is implied by the
frequent necessity of contesting the physical
superiority of sexual rivals or alien antagonists.
The invigorating tendency of certain
passions may have been developed in a similar
manner. The formidable and, indeed, quite
abnormal strength of infuriated man is so
well known that even an athlete will hesitate
to try conclusions with an adversary under
the influence of raging passions, and in such
moments fury-inspired vigor has often accomplished
feats which afterward surprized
