How courageous they had been! How faithful! Not a few had met starvation face to face, and even that dread sight had not power to turn them from the pursuit of their ideals. Again and again he had seen the bravest and brightest fall, their aim unattained, their hands empty, their names unrenowned, their hearts broken. But now he saw, as by a revelation, that the defeated were victors too. Putting his hand over his eyes as if to shut out the sight of the striving, suffering throng, he groaned mentally, for here in this quiet spot, far from the great centres of life, was another getting ready for a pilgrimage on the same hot, dusty road. The child was the first to break the silence into which they had fallen. “My own people are somewhere in the real world, I am sure, and I must go and find them,” she said. “I was singing about it to this dear old tree when you came, for when I go the tree will miss me and be lonely. We are great friends. I tell it many things, and it answers by waving its branches over me--see, like that, and I understand.” “You are eleven years old,” said the stranger, “and are eager to go and find your people. I am many, many years older and yet have found very few of mine. The search is long and sometimes heart-breaking, but it has to be made. But remember one thing, and forget it not, I pray you. If you have some dream in your mind dearer than all others--some thought that burns to spring forth into life--be faithful to it, for it is your ideal. Follow it at any cost. Your story of the woman who did not do her best contains a great philosophical truth. Somewhere, sometime we are destined to reach a state where our dreams shall come true, where we shall have the desire of our hearts, where we shall be in accord with all beauty and all good. But we can only reach that state by doing our best every day--in little things and great. If we do less we shall have to do it over again. “One is with you who always knows. It is your soul--your real self. When you want to find your work, when you are ready to tell what you feel, ask not the world what it wants, but say to your soul, ‘What wilt thou have me to do?’” She looked at him admiringly, gratefully, and said, “I thank you. I know you are wise, for you come from the big, busy world that I long to enter, and shall enter. There one can see and learn everything. Less than a mile away two railroads cross each other. I hear the locomotives whistle every day as they pass, dragging people after them. I shall go, too, some day, and then, and then”-- “And _then_,” said the stranger, sighing; but she did not understand. How could she? “And then I shall be happy,” she added.