is to fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue of the devotional thoughts it has called forth so often for so many years in the mind of that poor old woman who is kneeling before it, it is no longer a wax doll for her, but has undergone a transubstantiation quite as real as that of the Eucharist.  The moral is that we must not roughly smash other people’s idols because we know, or think we know, that they are of cheap human manufacture.

—­Do you think cheap manufactures encourage idleness?—­said I.

The Master stared.  Well he might, for I had been getting a little drowsy, and wishing to show that I had been awake and attentive, asked a question suggested by some words I had caught, but which showed that I had not been taking the slightest idea from what he was reading me.  He stared, shook his head slowly, smiled good-humoredly, took off his great round spectacles, and shut up his book.

—­Sat prates biberunt,—­he said.  A sick man that gets talking about himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop.  You’ll think of some of these things you’ve been getting half asleep over by and by.  I don’t want you to believe anything I say; I only want you to try to see what makes me believe it.

My young friend, the Astronomer, has, I suspect, been making some addition to his manuscript.  At any rate some of the lines he read us in the afternoon of this same day had never enjoyed the benefit of my revision, and I think they had but just been written.  I noticed that his manner was somewhat more excited than usual, and his voice just towards the close a little tremulous.  Perhaps I may attribute his improvement to the effect of my criticisms, but whatever the reason, I think these lines are very nearly as correct as they would have been if I had looked them over.

Wind-clouds and star-drifts.

VII

          What if a soul redeemed, a spirit that loved
          While yet on earth and was beloved in turn,
          And still remembered every look and tone
          Of that dear earthly sister who was left
          Among the unwise virgins at the gate,
          Itself admitted with the bridegroom’s train,
          What if this spirit redeemed, amid the host
          Of chanting angels, in some transient lull
          Of the eternal anthem, heard the cry
          Of its lost darling, whom in evil hour
          Some wilder pulse of nature led astray
          And left an outcast in a world of fire,
          Condemned to be the sport of cruel fiends,
          Sleepless, unpitying, masters of the skill
          To wring the maddest ecstasies of pain
          From worn-out souls that only ask to die,
          Would it not long to leave the bliss of Heaven,
          Bearing