the little "school ma'am" gave them each a card, such as I used to receive. She tried to make a little farewell speech, but embarrassment and tears choked her, and we helped her out. We found human nature so in love with flowers that it embowered the roughest cabin in morning-glories. We also found human nature, alas! so unsavory, barren, dirty, that it turned us away from the big house without courage to ask for the dinner we needed. We found human nature grim and selfish, tender and generous. We encountered the blight of plenty, the complacency of independent ease, and just over the way we found the generosity of pinched lives, the beneficent pity of the poor for the poor.

One night the road grew long and we fain would shorten the projected route by asking shelter along the way. The farms were ample and the farm-houses modern and roomy, but their owners one after another refused to take us in. They were not "fixed to keep travellers," they said. The fifth time the plea for the tired horse fell on unresponsive ears and the refusal was shaking our faith in human nature, when the young farmer said, "I'll tell you where you can stop, a half mile ahead, at my mother's." And,

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sure enough, we found there the promised welcome. While enjoying the bread and milk in the cozy home of the Irish widow, I asked, "How long have you lived here?" "Forty years, sir. I have raised nine boys, and buried my husband twenty years ago." The boy that directed me was a graduate of the State University. They taught him trigonometry at college, but they neglected to put in a course on hospitality. Perhaps it is expecting too much of a university to teach such high virtues to men who live in big houses and have married women who have been "off to school" and can play on the piano and read French; but the open door, spiritual and mental as well as material, of the widow's home suggests communications with heaven, and the teaching of it is worthy of a professor's chair in our colleges.

Another night found us entering a nook of bewitching loveliness at the base of a great castellated rock standing like a Titanic throne in the centre of circling strata and splendid hills, with a dashing, chattering brook of spring-water at its foot. Both horse and rider espied with joy the pretty house on the knoll and the ample barn fragrant with new-mown hay. The motherly

housewife thought we might stay. The horse more than the rider appeared to win her. But she said we must wait "until the old man comes," and the old man said no, he wasn't "fixed to keep strangers." We did not tell him that the needed "fixtures" were were missing on the inside. Another and another "no" followed, and the two tired travellers climbed the hill out of that valley as darkness was settling down upon it, with the lines of the missionary hymn forcing themselves into the mind of one of the travellers,

"Where every prospect pleases,

And only man is "- discouraging.

That night I slept in a trundle-bed in a Norwegian log house, and found next morning that three or four of the white-headed children had slept on the floor that I might have a bed. At breakfast the good woman urged me to take more molasses. She didn't want to take any pay, because she wasn't "fixed to keep strangers.' could not tell her how much ampler were her accommodations than those of the crusty farmer with the big barn and the white house, how much wealthier she was than he.

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But what is the chief lesson of this vacation

ride? Simply this: There is much life all about us that we fail to realize. To teach us to appreciate and utilize the resources of this life is the

We need help to realize

mission of religion.
the bigness of the world.

We perhaps have

dwelt too long upon the inconceivable stretches of Astronomy. We have tried to fix in our minds the distance between us and the sun. This should not exclude from our minds that higher realization of the wealth there is in the spaces which we can traverse. From Chicago to Spring Green by train is only a night's sleep, but from Chicago to Spring Green on horseback is a week full of miles, each mile of which sustains its quota of marvellous life. From Chicago to Spring Green by country road the way is lined with hundreds of schoolhouses and scores of churches, with probably a graveyard once in every six miles or less. Every quarter of a mile, or oftener, there is a home, and in these homes babes are born, children wail, and mothers weep. Around these homes cluster the hopes of spring and the disappointments of autumn, the strain of summer and the solitudes of winter. Between Chicago and Spring Green I passed through some thirty villages with their

clustered groups of workmen and workwomen, and the road I traversed is only one of the countless two-hundred-mile stretches that radiate from Chicago. Perhaps realizing the extent and content of one such route, feeling the mystery of it, letting its pains and joys, its past and present, touch one with awe, may bring God nearer, make revelation a reality and inspiration a fact of inward experience more successfully than would a course in a divinity school, and may prove a greater help to piety than knowing all about the Hebrew kings or being able to read the New Testament in the original Greek.

But marvellous and awe-inspiring as is such a stretch of space, it is still empty and barren compared to the still greater stretches that reach through any human life. It was a greater distance from the cradle of that simple schoolteacher to the schoolroom than it is from Chicago to Spring Green, or even to Boston, with the Hudson River and Berkshire Hills thrown in. There are greater alternations of heights and depths, thirsting sands and blooming flowers, in the life of that unsophisticated little "schoolma'am" not yet out of her teens than nature has to give anywhere in her geological or geo