"Once, not very long ago, at an afternoon 'At Home,' I was handing a cup of tea to an old dowager, who bridled up in a mantle with bugles and beads, and some one noticed that in doing so my face wore an absent look, and I was afterwards asked where my thoughts were at that time. I could only reply that 'My mind was a blank, with a single vision in it, lower half yellow, upper half blue,' in other words, the yellow veldt of South Africa, topped with the blue South African sky. Possibly the scent of the tea had touched some memory chord which connected it with my black tin billy, steaming among the embers of a wood fire; but whatever it was then, my vision is to-day a reality. I am looking out on the yellow veldt and the blue sky; the veldt with its grey, hazy clumps of thorn-bush is shimmering in the heat, and its vast expanse is only broken by the gleaming white sand of the river-bed and the green reeds and bushes which fringe its banks. (Interruption: Stand to the tent! a 'Devil,' with its roaring pillar of dust and leaves, comes tearing by.) I used to think that the novelty of the thing would wear off, that these visions of the veldt would fade away as civilized life grew upon me. But they didn't. They came again at most inopportune moments: just when I ought to be talking _The World_, or _Truth_, or _Modern Society_ (with the cover removed), and making my reputation as a 'sensible, well-informed man, my dear,' with the lady in the mantle, somebody in the next room has mentioned the word saddle, or rifle, or billy, or some other attribute of camp life, and off goes my mind at a tangent to play with its toys. Old Oliver Wendell Holmes is only too true when he says that most of us are 'boys all our lives'; we have our toys, and will play with them with as much zest at eighty as at eight, that in their company we can never grow old. I can't help it if my toys take the form of all that has to do with veldt life, and if they remain my toys till I drop-- "'Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its grey, The stars of its winter, the dews of its May; And when we have done with our life-lasting toys, Dear Father, take care of Thy children, the boys.' May it not be that our toys are the various media adapted to individual tastes through which men may know their God? As Ramakrishna Paramahansa writes: 'Many are the names of God and infinite the forms that lead us to know of Him. In whatsoever name or form you desire to know Him, in that very name and form you will know Him.'"