“I consider it my duty,” the other replied, “to keep all the external circumstances of my life as simple and as humble as I should have to if I were quite poor. If I were not physically unable, I should feel that I ought to do for my own self all that I needed to have done, for I think that if it is necessary that others should be degraded to menial service in order that my soul might be beautiful and true, then life is bad at the heart of it, and I want none of its truth and beauty. I do not have to look into my heart very long, Miss Davis, to discover that what I am seeking in life is something that no millions of money can buy me; and when I am face to face with the sternness of what I call that spiritual fact, I see that fine houses and all the rest are a foolish kind of toy, and wonder that any man should think that he can please me by giving the labor of his soul to making them. It is much the same thing as I feel, for instance, when I go to hear a master of music, and find that he has spent his hours in torturing himself and his fingers in order to give me an acrobatic exhibition, when all the time what I wish him to do, and what his genius gave him power to do, was to find the magic word that should set free the slumbering demon of my soul. So I think that a man who wishes to grow by sympathy and worship should do without wealth, if only because it is so trivial; but of course I have left unmentioned what is the great reason for a self-denying life, the reason that lies at the heart of the matter, and that includes all the others in it,--that he who lives by prayer and joy makes all men richer, but he who takes more than his bare necessity of the wealth of the body must know that he robs his brother when he does it. The things of the soul are everywhere, but wealth stands for the toil and suffering of human beings, and thousands must starve and die so that one rich man may live at ease. That is no fine rhetoric that I am indulging in, but a very deep and earnest conviction of my soul; first of all facts of morality stands the law that the life of man is labor, and that he who chooses to live otherwise is a dastard. He may chase the phantom of happiness all his days and not find it, and yet never guess the reason,--that joy is a melody of the heart, and that he is playing upon an instrument that is out of tune. Few people choose to think of that at all, but I cannot afford ever to forget it, for my task is to live the artist's life, to dwell close to the heart of things; it is something that I simply cannot understand how any man who pretends to do that can know of the suffering and starving that is in the world, and can feel that he who has God's temple of the soul for his dwelling, has right to more of the pleasures of earth than the plainest food and shelter and what tools of his art he requires. If it is otherwise it can only be because he is no artist at all, no lover of life, but only a tradesman under another name, using God's