Let me give one pregnant quotation from Max Müller’s “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature”: “At the first dawn of traditional history we see these Aryan tribes migrating across the snow of the Himalaya southward toward the Seven Rivers (the Indus, the five rivers of the Punjab and the Sarasvati), and ever since India has been called their home. That before that time they had been living in more northern regions, within the same precincts, with the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Slavonians, Germans, the Celts, is a fact as firmly established as that the Normans of William the Conqueror were the Northmen of Scandinavia. The evidence of language is irrefragable, and it is the only evidence worth listening to with regard to ante-historical periods. It would have been impossible to discover any traces of relationship between the swarthy natives of India and their conquerors, whether Alexander or Clive, but for the testimony borne by language.” (“Sanskrit Literature,” pp. 12, 13.) To the learned Jew—a Semite, to the Hungarian, the Finn, or the Basque, who are Turanian settlers in Europe, the history of the Aryans is an interesting study, linguistic or racial. To us true Europeans, to us true Aryans, it has a far greater significance. It has all the charm of an inquiry into a piece of remote family history—all the glamour of a pedigree, not to be measured by a few puny centuries, but reaching far away into the clouds of incalculable æons. Talking idly in a garden, we can do no more than touch the mere fringe of a mighty problem, even though it should be suggested by the great silent Buddha. For instance, we have summoned as witness the one word “daughter,” when there are so many others that we use a dozen times a day which are equally strong links in the long chain of evidence by which we prove our descent. But no matter—we have started the clue: let who will pick it up. It will reward him. THE COMMUNE My Pegasus is not always inclined to take long flights. Sometimes when a lazy fit is upon him he will venture no more than a trip across the Channel, carrying me to Germany, Italy, Switzerland—perhaps landing me no further off than some place in France. But of that beloved country I have so many recollections, some gay, some sad, that I crave to go no further. One such trip is very short but very tragic. Forty-six years have passed since the episode of which I write, but the scenes of those few days are graven so deeply in my mind that no lapse of time can ever efface them. They haunt me like the pathetic thoughts which are aroused by the solitary little pink slipper of the Princesse de Lamballe in the Musée Cluny. Thoughts are such obstinate vagabonds that they must needs choose their own road, and not even the Buddha, in his Veluvana, can drive them eastward unless such be their will.