Communism allows no time for fermentation, or lying fallow; God does: for brains, I mean, not souls. But what are we going to do with this blindness of human beings as to what they are fit for,--when they go, or are forced to go, stumbling along the wrong path all their lives? Why, the bitterest prayers that God bears are from men who think they have lost time in the world. The lowest matter alive, the sponges, _fungi_, know what they have to do, and are blessed in the doing, while we--Did you think the Socialist helped the matter? Men needed thousand years' education to make their schemes practicable; they ignored all this blindness, all selfishness, and overgrowth of the passions: no wonder these facts knobbed themselves up against their system, and so, in every instance it crumbled to pieces. The things are facts, and here; there is no use in denying that; and it is a fact, too, that almost every life seems a wasted failure, compared with what it might have been. Such hard, grimy problems there are in life! They weaken the eyes that look long at them: stories hard to understand, like that of this old machinist, Joe Starke. But over yonder, how cool and shady it is on that sweep of green! that rests one so thoroughly, in eyes and brain! The quiet shadows ebb and flow over the uncut grass; every hazy form or color is beyond art, true and beautiful, being fresh from God; there are countless purpled vines creeping out from the earth under that grass; the air trembles with the pure spring healing and light; the gray-barked old elms wrestle, and knot their roots underground, clutching down at the very thews and sinews of the earth, and overhead unfold their shivering delicate leaves fresh in the sunlight to catch the patter of the summer rain when it comes. It is sure to come. Winter and summer, spring and autumn, shall not fail. God always stays there, in the great Fatherland of Nature. One knows now why Jesus went back there when these hard riddles of the world made his soul sorrowful even unto death, and he needed a word from Home to refresh him.