class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[xiv]"/> which is natural and acceptable perhaps to most minds. But the Saints and Martyrs testifying to their faith went farther and not only submitted to but gladly sought pain and suffering. Now pain and agony well endured undoubtedly strengthen character. Have we not a vivid example of this before us in the catastrophe of the European war; a war which is saved from being wholly evil and dreadful because out of it has come the spiritual regeneration of the allied nations who are engulfed in it? Still it can hardly be expected that ordinary flesh and blood should in this world, so full of love and beauty, invite and seek out suffering and disaster even in order to bear them bravely. Enough for most of us that if doomed to walk with them we

In these dull and lonely moments also one inevitably asks whether it is true that people exist who are stolid to pain? One may consecrate it before it comes and after it goes, but to most of us feeble folk pain when present occupies the whole limelight and leaves the rest of the stage in darkness! The only inmate of the hospital who stirred my temper was a patient who on making a rapid recovery from what he described as a very severe operation said he had refused ether and did not mind pain. I regained my equanimity when an orderly confided to me that the operation had been slight!

In health one is apt to think that Love is the great motive power of humanity. In illness and suffering Pain seems the great and pressing problem. They often go hand in hand and perhaps it is true that without them both life has not rendered its full wealth or its perfect discipline. "The ennobling depths of pain" need also "the purifying fire of love" to round out a perfect character.

These and many such questions can be as solemn, as perplexing and as engrossing as any that exercised the inmates of the Monastery to which we here find so much resemblance. As a contrast to such heart-searching thoughts the patient can wonder at the properties of that radium by which he may have been treated. How astonishing is it that this atom of matter should constantly emit rays which search out and destroy evil tissues and leave unharmed the good; and that they do this without any perceptible diminution of energy! How contrary this is to all we have hitherto known of the conservation of energy and of the impossibility of obtaining perpetual motion or continued power! What is so contrary to our preconceived ideas proves itself, however, by experience efficient in an almost supernatural or miraculous manner. Perhaps fatigued by these thoughts the patient can turn from them and closing his eyes begin to count "The flock of sheep that leisurely pass by one after one" and by happy chance submit himself to sleep.

The roof terrace has a wide view over the City of Baltimore, as well as of the heavens which encompass it. We sit there in our wheel chairs or lie tucked up in our rolling beds and talk flows freely. We watch the flocks of pigeons making endless circles in the upper air; the black and solemn buzzards hanging above us unmoved though the gale blow ever so fiercely; the cloud shadows moving over the panorama; the haze of mist and steam and smoke floating over the City; the ever-changing pageant of fleeting clouds and blue sky and blazing sunsets. At one time—

It is said that an eye unused to the telescope cannot see the canals on the planet Mars, but that through the same instrument they are plainly visible to an eye trained to such observation. Sometimes, when the clouds have hung in white masses over the city, I have been eager to see what was hidden by those luminous walls, but my untrained eyes could not pierce them. Day after day, however, I became more familiar with them. Others before now, without journeying like Columbus to prove the truth of his visions, have, even by their own firesides, enjoyed Castles in the Air and Châteaux and great possessions in Spain. In like manner as the breeze moved the silver edges of the clouds, I had unexpectedly through the rifts views of strange lands and fair cities which I had never before seen or heard of. As they were indeed lovely, in all haste I tried to make rapid notes of them to prove the truth of my strange experience.

Far to the north over Homewood, a pile of mountainous clouds was rent for a short space by the breeze, and disclosed a Minster in a meadow land. Its name seemed to be Upthorpe-cum-Regis. Its tower rose before me over the busy life of the town and looked down on the mansion of the Squire and the house of the Dean. Close around the walls of the Minster, indeed within sound of its prayers and anthems, were clustered the graves of the dead,—the former generations who had made the life of the town and who built the church and worshipped at its altar. It was a town in which the characters described by Trollope or George Eliot or Jane Austen would have felt themselves at home.

Again when a sunset was filling the western sky with "the incomparable pomp of eve," a break in the clouds above the gilded towers of Cardinal Gibbons's Cathedral disclosed an Italian town on a lovely lake shore. Boats with colored sails lined the Riva of Ranconezzo. Two piazzas teeming with life surrounded the Duomo or Cathedral and from them there were wide views over lake and mountain scenery. It appears that in the long ago, the Cardinal Schalchi-Visconti was the benefactor of this town, and there on the hillside, tree embowered, was his villa with its little port for the lake boats. His tomb I also saw, not in the Duomo, but in the Bramantesque Church of Santa Prassede, a building resembling the many small churches in northern Italy due to the refined influence of Bramante. In my dreaming I entered the church, and found that the great Cardinal lies beneath a tomb carved by Mino da Fiesole on the north side of Santa Prassede.

Then on a cool and crisp day when clouds were scudding through the sky, between them there was revealed to me a French town that seemed to bear the name of Rocher-St.-Pol. There was the river Merle winding its way through meadow and woodland. A range of hills bounded the horizon and from the plain rose the Rock. Not far away the ruined castle of "La Dame Blanche" crowned a steep hill, and close to the town was the Château Beaumesnil, beetling over the wooded hillside and bristling with conical towers and burnished girouettes. The Grande Rue of Rocher-St.-Pol I saw winding between gabled and half-timbered houses towards the church on the summit, and finally a long flight of stairs called by the people Jacob's ladder brings the pilgrim to the terrace in front of the church door. The interior of Ste. Frédigonde showed me the same