"Sunshine. Just the ordinary, everyday sunshine that you can get at this blessed minute on the south side of the straw-stack. Not moral or spiritual or intellectual sunshine, but the kind that is making the hens cackle--just listen to them--the kind that the red cow over there is soaking into her skin. Just let the brand of sunshine that is spilling over the world to-day work its way into your system and you will forget all your troubles. Get into the sunshine and keep there." That was an unusually long speech for my Mahatma--proof that he was very much in earnest. To the ordinary, unilluminated eye he was simply a farmer--"a goodly, portly man i' faith, and a corpulent." It was just for these qualities that I chose him as my Mahatma. At the present time everybody who can afford a ouija-board--or is worth fleecing by a medium--is trying to get in touch with the next world. All sorts of fakirs with unhealthy complexions are reaping a harvest from the credulous. But the passion of my life is to get in touch with this world--with the dreary, wonderful, tragic, exhilarating, proxy, poetical world that we have been born into. And I find it just as hard to get in touch with this world as the seekers find it to get in touch with the next. That is why I chose a good, fat, material Mahatma who is quite obviously in touch with such gross things as food, shelter, clothing, the sunshine, the fresh air, and the good brown earth. While others are trying to establish communications with outlying planets, I am trying to get into communication with the planet on which I live. Instead of trying to lease a private wire to the Invisible, I want, as far as possible, to learn a little about the visible and tangible and audible, and smellable, and tasteable world in which I am obliged to sojourn. In this humble quest my Mahatma is a great help. He does not say cryptic things or babble trivialities in the name of the mighty Dead--the mighty Damned or the mighty Blest. He tells me the right way to plant potatoes and prune apple-trees, and our communion is blest with eupeptic content. So when he pointedly directed my attention to sunshine as the greatest need of the world, I felt it was my duty to listen.