she knew both when he had talked too much, and when he had not talked enough, so that his mind was pent up in itself, and he became cross and fractious.  Now, in reality, the little maid was one of the oldest and most beautiful of spirits.  She had lived many lives, each apparently humbler than the last.  She never grumbled about her work, or wanted to amuse herself.  She loved the silly flies that darted about her kitchen, or brushed their black heads on the ceiling; she loved the ivy tendrils that tapped on her window in the breeze.  She did not go to church, she had no time for that; or if she had gone, she would not have understood what was said, though she would have loved all the people there, and noticed how they looked and sang.  But the wise man himself was one of the youngest and stupidest of spirits, so young and stupid that he had to have a very old and wise spirit to look after him.  He was eaten up with ideas and vanity, so that he had no time to look at any one or think of anybody, unless they praised him.  He has a very long pilgrimage before him, though he wrote pretty songs enough, and his mortal body, or one of them, lies in the Poets’ Corner of the Abbey, and people come and put wreaths there with tears in their eyes.”

“It is very bewildering,” I said, “but I see a little more than I did.  It is all a matter of feeling, then?  But it seems hard on people that they should be so dull and stupid about it all,—­that the truth should lie so close to their hand and yet be so carefully concealed.”

“Oh, they grow out of dulness!” he said, with a movement of his hand; “that is what experience does for us—­it is always going on; we get widened and deepened.  Why,” he added, “I have seen a great man, as they called him, clever and alert, who held a high position in the State.  He was laid aside by a long and painful illness, so that all his work was put away.  He was brave about it, too, I remember; but he used to think to himself how sad and wasteful it was, that when he was most energetic and capable he should be put on the shelf—­all the fine work he might have done interrupted; all the great speeches he would have made unuttered.  But as a matter of fact, he was then for the first time growing fast, because he had to look into the minds and hearts of all sorrowful and disappointed people, and to learn that what we do matters so little, and that what we are matters so much.  When he did at last get back to the world, people said, ’What a sad pity to see so fine a career spoilt!’ But out of all the years of all his lives, those years had been his very best and richest, when he sat half the day feeble in the sun, and could not even look at the papers which lay beside him, or when he woke in the grey mornings, with the thought of another miserable day of idleness and pain before him.”

I said, “Then is it a bad thing to be busy in the world, because it takes off your mind from the things which matter?”