“You see me, the possessor of all knowledge, and Heaven is mine—for Heaven is not a place, but a condition of mind. Seemingly I am alone, for your physical eye sees no one near; but she is ever by me—I feel her hand now as it rests lightly on my head. Friend, I am what I am through the love of woman. Love is life.
“There is a class of women who especially have my sincere and profound respect, these are the ‘old maids.’ They form to-day in this country a genuine sisterhood of mercy. They do the work no one else will do nor can do. In every village there are aged parents, orphan children, widowed brothers, helpless invalids, people homeless and friendless who owe a debt of gratitude which time can never repay to the unselfish devotion of some old maid. They are women who will not fling their womanhood away for the sake of a ‘provider,’ or to escape the supposed ignominy of maidenhood. If a woman once decides she must have a man, by just spreading her net, and not being over-choice about quality, she can always secure some sort of game, for no matter how foolish, frivolous and vain a woman is, there is a man near at hand who will out-match her. I am glad to know that the number of old maids is increasing, for a woman had a thousand times over better travel through life alone than to accept any alliance short of her genuine mental and spiritual mate. This may give you a clue to the reason for the well known fact that the average old maid excels in intelligence and culture her married sister. When a man marries the wrong woman it is a mistake, for the woman it is a blunder.”
[CHAPTER XIII.
FOURTH SUNDAY—ATMOSPHERE.]
I sat with note-book on my knee, pencil in hand and The Man began:
“The air here on this hillside is full of health and healing. Physical life you know is only possible in a right atmosphere. Add five parts more of carbonic acid gas and the body is poisoned—ceases to act—dies! Do you see the change in the constituent parts of the air? No—your senses are not aware of any change at all if the poison is introduced gradually; and so the use of the electric light in hotels has worked a great saving of life among the rural population, for the most frantic effort to blow it out proves futile; but in days gone by scarcely a month passed in any city when some innocent and ignorant individual did not lock the door, close the window, vitiate his physical atmosphere, and glide off slowly, surely, into that sleep which we call death.
“In the carboniferous period there was no atmosphere capable of sustaining animal life. Vegetation was flowerless, and the trees grew rank in swamps filled with poisonous miasma, death and gloom. No flowers decked the earth or the tree tops, no fruit hung on the branches, the song of birds was not heard and the only animal life was made up of mollusks and the lower forms of animate existence. Gradually the carbon in the air was absorbed by the vegetation, and sank beneath the bending swale, and new trees grew, and others followed still, and these sank and sank again, carrying down into the depths the material that has formed the shining coal which warms and cheers our homes.
“Gradually this purifying process continued; more and many kinds of plants sprang into being; these too absorbed the poison from the air, fit preparation that earth might receive her king. Animal life appeared in monster shape; fierce, awful forms, that crawled upon the land, through tangled swamps, or swam the sea, thriving in the atmosphere of slime—of gloom—of death. Gradually these nightmare forms have passed away, leaving only grim remains and foot-prints here and there, from which ingenious men have guessed the right proportion of the whole. Finer and finer, better and better grows the teeming life of animal and flower, until in words of prophet told,
“‘Sweet is the breath of morn,