and the period in the "schoolroom of this world," as he called it, could be shortened and the progress of one's real development hastened. It all lay, with him, in learning how to concentrate the faculties on this inner life, without neglecting the duties of the position one held to family or employer, and thus reducing the life of the body and the senses to the minimum that was consistent with health and ordinary duty. In this way he believed new forces would awaken to life, and new parts of one's being be stimulated into activity, and in due course one would become conscious of a new spiritual region with the spiritual senses adapted to it. It amounted, of course, to an expansion of consciousness.
All this, naturally, interested me very much indeed, and I spent hours talking with this cement maker, and many more hours reading the books he lent me and thinking about them. My friend helped in this extension. Carl du Prel's "Philosophy of Mysticism" was a book to injure no one.
He had published one or two volumes of minor poetry, and his verse, though poor in form, caught all through it the elusive quality of genuine mystical poetry, unearthly, touching the stars, and wakening in the reader the note of yearning for the highest things. I took him with me several times to my little private grove, and he would recite these verses to me in a way that made them sound very different from my own reading of them. And as he lay beside the lake and I heard his reedy voice mingling with the wind in the trees, and watched his watery blue eyes shine across the smoke of our fire, I realized that the value of his poems lay in the fact that they were a perfectly true expression of his self--of his small, mystical, unselfish and oddly elemental soul searching after the God that should finally absorb him up into something greater. I do not wish to criticize him, but only to picture what I saw. His attenuated body, and long thin fingers, his shabby clothes covered with white dust lying by my side under the stars, his eyes looking beyond the world, and
the sound of his thin voice that lost half its words some-
