With all three I had made close friends during the first prosperous days of the Dairy; the Professor's family had been customers for milk and eggs; the young doctor, living in my boarding-house, had been a pupil in my French and German class.
The third was a Scotsman, fairly well educated, about thirty years of age, who, while fully in sympathy with my line of thinking, had succeeded in reducing his dreams to some sort of order so that they did not interfere with his ordinary, practical career and yet were the guiding rule of his life.
He was in the cement business, and his clothes, even on Sunday, were always covered with a fine white dust, for he was unmarried and lived alone in a single room. He made a bare living at his work, but was thoroughly conscientious and devoted to the interests of his employer, and all he asked was steady work and fair remuneration for the rest of his life. He was a real mystic by temperament, though he belonged to no particular tradition. The world for him was but a show of false appearances that the senses gathered; the realities behind were spiritual. He believed that his soul had existed for ever and would never cease to exist, and that his ego would continue to expand and develop according to the life he led, and shaped by his thoughts and acts (but especially by his thoughts) to all eternity. This world for him was a schoolroom, a place of difficult discipline and learning, and the lessons he was learning were determined logically and justly by his previous living and previous mistakes. Talents or disabilities, equally, were the results of former action....
But to the ordinary man he appeared simply as a rather dull everyday worker, without any worldly ambition, absolutely honest and trustworthy, and always occupying a subordinate position in practical affairs.
In the "old country" he had belonged to some sort of society that kept alive traditions of teaching methods of spiritual development, and he told me much concerning their theories that immense latent powers lay in the depths
of one's being and could be educed by suitable living,
