“I spoke as I saw.

I report, as a man may report God’s work — all’s Love, yet all’s Law."

BROWNING.

I have spoken of Ariadne, and promised to re-introduce her to you. You will remember her as the graceful girl who accompanied Clytia and her husband to Thursia. She had not made quite so strong an impression upon me as had the elder woman, perhaps because I was so preoccupied with, and interested in watching the latter’s meeting with Elodia. Certainly there was nothing in the young woman herself, as I speedily ascertained, to justify disparagement even with Clytia. I was surprised to find that she was a member of our charming household.

She was an heiress; but she taught in one of the city schools, side by side with men and women who earned their living by teaching. I rather deprecated this fact in conversation with Clytia one day; I said that it was hardly fair for a rich woman to come in and usurp a place which rightfully belonged to some one who needed the work as a means of support, — alas! that I should have presumed to censure anything in that wonderful country. With knowledge came modesty.

Clytia’s cheeks crimsoned with indignation. “Our teachers are not beneficiaries,” she replied; “nor do we regard the positions in our schools — the teachers’ positions — as charities to be dispensed to the needy. The profession is the highest and most honorable in our land, and only those who are fitted by nature and preparation presume to aspire to the office. There is no bar against those who are so fitted, — the richest and the most distinguished stand no better, and no poorer, chance than the poorest and most insignificant. We must have the best material, wherever it can be found.”

We had but just entered the house, Clytia and I, when Ariadne glided down the stairs into the room where we sat, and approached me with the charming frankness and unaffectedness of manner which so agreeably characterizes the manners of all these people. She was rather tall, and slight; though her form did not suggest frailty. She resembled some elegant flower whose nature it is to be delicate and slender. She seemed even to sway a little, and undulate, like a lily on its stem.

I regarded her with attention, not unmixed with curiosity, — as a man is prone to regard a young lady into whose acquaintance he has not yet made inroads.

My chief impression about her was that she had remarkable eyes. They were of an indistinguishable, dark color, large horizontally but not too wide open, — eyes that drew yours continually, without your being able to tell whether it was to settle the question of color, or to find out the secret of their fascination, or whether it was simply that they appealed to your artistic sense — as being something finer than you had ever seen before. They were heavily fringed at top and bottom, and so were in shadow except when she raised them toward the light. Her complexion was pale, her hair light and fluffy; her brows and lashes were several shades darker than the hair. Her hands were lovely. Her dress was of course white, or cream, of some soft, clinging material; and she wore a bunch of blue flowers in her belt, slightly wilted.

There is this difference in women: some produce an effect simply, and others make a clear-cut, cameo-like impression upon the mind. Ariadne was of the latter sort. Whatever she appropriated, though but a tiny blossom, seemed immediately to proclaim its ownership and to swear its allegiance to her. From the moment I first saw her there, the blue flowers in her belt gave her, in my mind, the supreme title to all of their kind. I could never bear to see another woman wear the same variety, — and I liked them best when they were a little wilted! Her belongings suggested herself so vividly that if one came unexpectedly upon a fan, a book, a garment of hers, he was affected as by a presence.

I soon understood why it was that my eyes sought her face so persistently, drawn by a power infinitely greater than the mere power of beauty; it was due to the law of moral gravitation, — that by which men are attracted to a leader, through intuitive perception of a quality in him round which their own energies may nucleate. We all recognize the need of a centre, of a rallying-point, — save perhaps the few eccentrics, detached particles who have lost their place in the general order, makers of chaos and disturbers of peace.

It is this power which constitutes one of the chief qualifications of a teacher in Lunismar, because it rests upon a fact universally believed in, — spiritual royalty; an august force which cannot be ignored, and is never ridiculed — as Galileo was ridiculed, and punished, for his wisdom; because there ignorance and prejudice do not exist, and the superstition which planted the martyr’s stake has never been known.

Ariadne said that she had been up in the observatory, and that there were indications of an approaching storm.

“I hope it may be a fine one!” exclaimed Clytia.

I thought this rather an extraordinary remark — coming from one of the sex whose formula is more likely to be, “I hope it will not be a severe one.”

At that moment a man appeared in the doorway, the majesty of whose presence I certainly felt before my eyes fell upon him. Or it might have been the reflection I saw in the countenances of my two companions, — I stood with my back to the door, facing them, — which gave me the curious, awe-touched sensation.

I turned round, and Clytia immediately started forward. Ariadne exclaimed in an undertone, with an accent of peculiar sweetness, — a commingling of delight, and reverence, and caressing tenderness:

“Ah! the Master!”

Clytia took him by the hand and brought him to me, where I stood rooted to my place.

“Father, this is our friend,” she said simply, without further ceremony of introduction. It was enough. He had come on purpose to see me, and therefore he knew who I was. As for him — one does not explain a king! The title by which Ariadne had called him did not at the moment raise an inquiry in my mind. I accepted it as the natural definition of the man. He was a man of kingly proportions, with eyes from which Clytia’s had borrowed their limpid blackness. His glance had a wide compresiveness, and a swift, sure, loving insight.

He struck me as a man used to moving among multitudes, with his head above all, but his heart embracing all.

You may think it strange, but I was not abashed. Perfect love casteth out fear; and there was in this divine countenance — I may well call it divine! — the lambent light of a love so kindly and so tender, that fear, pride, vanity, egotism, even false modesty — our pet hypocrisy — surrendered without a protest.

I think I talked more than any one else, being delicately prompted to furnish some account of the world to which I belong, and stimulated by the profound interest with which the Master attended to every word that I said. But I received an equal amount of information myself, — usually in response to the questions with which I rounded up my periods, like this: We do so, and so, upon the Earth; how is it here? The replies threw an extraordinary light upon the social order and conditions there.

I naturally dwelt upon the salient characteristics of our people, — I mean, of course, the American people. I spoke of our enormous grasp of the commercial principle; of our manipulation of political and even social forces to great financial ends; of our easy acquisition of fortunes; of our tremendous push and energy, directed to the accumulation of wealth. And of our enthusiasms, and institutions; our religions and their antagonisms, and of the many other things in which we take pride.

And I learned that in Caskia there is no such thing as speculative enterprise. All business has an actual basis most discouraging to the adventurous spirit in search of sudden riches. There is no monetary skill worthy the dignified appellation of financial management, — and no use for that particular development of the talent of ingenuity.

All the systems involving the use of money conduct their affairs upon the simplest arithmetical rules in their simplest form; addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. There are banks, of course, for the mutual convenience of all, but there are no magnificent delusions called “stocks;” no boards of trade, no bulls and bears, no “corners,” no mobilizing of capital for any questionable purposes; no gambling houses; no pitfalls for unwary feet; and no mad fever of greed and scheming coursing through the veins of men and driving them to insanity and self-destruction. More than all, there are no fictitious values put upon fads and fancies of the hour, — nor even upon works of art. The Caskians are not easily deceived. An impostor is impossible. Because the people are instructed in the quality of things intellectual, and moral, and spiritual, as well as in things physical. They are as sure of the knowableness of art, as they are — and as we are — of the knowableness of science. Art is but refined science, and the principles are the same in both, but more delicately, and also more comprehensively, interpreted in the former than in the latter.

One thing more: there are no would-be impostors. The law operates no visible machinery against such crimes, should there be any. The Master explained it to me in this way:

“The Law is established in each individual conscience, and rests securely upon self-respect.”

“Great heavens!” I cried, as the wonder of it broke upon my understanding, “and how many millions of years has it taken your race to attain to this perfection?”

“It is not perfection,” he replied, “it only approximates perfection; we are yet in the beginning.”

“Well, by the grace of God, you are on the right way!” said I. “I am familiar enough with the doctrines you live by, to know that it is the right way; they are the same that we have been taught, theoretically, for centuries, but, to tell the truth, I never believed they could be carried out literally, as you appear to carry them out. We are tolerably honest, as the word goes, but when honesty shades off into these hair-splitting theories, why — we leave it to the preachers, and — women.”

“Then you really have some among you who believe in the higher truths?” the Master said, and his brows went up a little in token of relief. — My picture of Earth-life must have seemed a terrible one to him!

“O, yes, indeed,” said I, taking my cue from this. And I proceeded to give some character sketches of the grand men and women of Earth whose lives have been one long, heroic struggle for truth, and to whom a terrible death has often been the crowning triumph of their faith. I related to him briefly the history of America from its discovery four hundred years ago; and told him about the splendid material prosperity, — the enormous wealth, the extraordinary inventions, the great population, the unprecedented free-school system, and the progress in general education and culture, — of a country which had its birth but yesterday in a deadly struggle for freedom of conscience; and of our later, crueller war for freedom that was not for ourselves but for a despised race. I described the prodigious waves of public and private generosity that have swept millions of dollars into burned cities for their rebuilding, and tons of food into famine-stricken lands for the starving.

I told him of the coming together in fellowship of purpose, of the great masses, to face a common danger, or to meet a common necessity; and of the moral and intellectual giants who in outward appearance and in the seeming of their daily lives are not unlike their fellows, but to whom all eyes turn for help and strength in the hour of peril. But I did not at that time undertake any explanation of our religious creeds, for it somehow seemed to me that these would not count for much with a people who expressed their theology solely by putting into practice the things they believed. I had the thought in mind though, and determined to exploit it later on. As I have said before, the Master listened with rapt attention, and when I had finished, he exclaimed,

“I am filled with amazement! a country yet so young, so far advanced toward Truth!”

He gave himself up to contemplation of the picture I had drawn, and in the depths of his eyes I seemed to see an inspired prophecy of my country’s future grandeur.

Presently he rose and went to a window, and, with uplifted face, murmured in accents of the sublimest reverence that have ever touched my understanding, “O, God, All-Powerful!”

And a wonderful thing happened: the invocation was responded to by a voice that came to each of our souls as in a flame of fire, “Here am I.” The velocity of worlds is not so swift as was our transition from the human to the divine.

But it was not an unusual thing, this supreme triumph of the spirit; it is what these people call “divine worship," — a service which is never perfunctory, which is not ruled by time or place. One may worship alone, or two or three, or a multitude, it matters not to God, who only asks to be worshiped in spirit and in truth, — be the time Sabbath or mid-week, the place temple, or field, or closet.

A little later I remarked to the Master, — wishing to have a point cleared up, “You say there are no fictitious values put upon works of art; how do you mean?”

He replied, “Inasmuch as truth is always greater than human achievement — which at best may only approximate the truth, — the value of a work of art should be determined by its merit alone, and not by the artist’s reputation, or any other remote influence, — of course I do not include particular objects consecrated by association or by time. But suppose a man paints a great picture, for which he receives a great price, and thereafter uses the fame he has won as speculating capital to enrich himself, — I beg the pardon of every artist for setting up the hideous hypothesis! — But to complete it: the moment a man does that, he loses his self-respect, which is about as bad as anything that can happen to him; it is moral suicide. And he has done a grievous wrong to art by lowering the high standard he himself helped to raise. But his crime is no greater than that of the name-worshipers, who, ignoran............