The Mystic appeared actually to know where he wanted to go. After conducting her to the outskirts he led her upward to the summit of a bluff overlooking the City, the Asylum and the Vanderhook drug store. Then he became strangely silent. Indeed, he had spoken but once in their long walk, and then only when his companion halted suddenly, dropping a few paces behind him. “What is it, dear Miss Sheets, art weary?”--he had murmured softly, and he anxiously contemplated her listless expression. “It’s nothing,” the lady replied, and then she smiled bravely. But it was something, very unpleasant and very painful. Miss Sheets was breaking in a new pair of boots--an immense feat, as any Chicago girl knows. It made her very tired. Finally they reached and paused upon the summit. It was the hour when the sun is apparently sinking. Kankakee lay bathed in that rosy afterglow. “Is not this inspiring--uplifting? Is not this Realization? Let us VIBRATE.” His large, round, blue eyes were fixed steadfastly upon nothing. He wore an expression of ineffable self-satisfaction. But the lady was silent. She seemed not to hear. She was busy with some burrs on her gown. Her gaze lingered fondly upon her new sparkling diamond. “Still silent,” he murmured, “still wrapped in your own thoughts. Why that disturbed expression, why no response? You frown; alas, what does this portend?” and Alonzo, the Guru, momentarily diverted from contemplation of Himself, clasped his hands, cast his eyes upward and bent as if he might kneel. “It isn’t anything,” indifferently. “Alas, and alas!” ejaculated her escort. “Not anything you say; yet we who walk the Path are taught that everything Objective is the outcome of something which is Subjective, and therefore nothing is something and ‘not anything’ is everything to me, when it disharmonizes YOU. Tell me, fair one, what and why?” “O, well, if you must know,” and Miss Sheets sniffed, “I was just wondering if I could ever tie up to these dreadful, grassy smells of the country. One gets _so_ used to City odors, you know. And Chicago has more of ’em, especially about the Yards, and better mixed than in any city in the world. When you’re in Chicago you know what’s a-coming”--and the city-bred girl held up her dainty “mouchoir” to ward off the scent of new mown hay. A wave of perplexity, of doubt over-swept the solemn countenance of the Mystic. “Then you would tell me--” “Yes, that I don’t like the odors, and I don’t like this dead-and-alive stillness. Why, anybody who comes from the Yards, and is used to the roar and crash and squealing, gets nervous prostration in a cemetery like this.”