It may be a year, or a day— It may be to-morrow—God knows! When, to answer, I’ll up and away, But when and wherever it be, This birthright is bound to foreclose— I must go back to the sea! “Well, yes,” commented Gale, as I sat down. “I seem to gather what you were driving at then, but it didn’t seem to me you meant quite the same thing the day we sailed.” Edith Gale came out of a reverie to join in the laugh. I wondered if she knew what I had meant by my floundering about before beginning the verses—if she realized that a word, or perhaps three words, from her would mean more to me now than all the seas and lands of earth. But Ferratoni, at a signal from Gale, had arisen. For days he had been as one in a dream. We had thought him depressed by the oncoming night. It seems doubtful, now, that he even realized that there was a night. “Force!” he began. “In that word lies the secret of all the worlds and skies. “Force, and its visible symbol, vibration! “Sound—it is vibration—all know it. “Heat, light, color, Electricity—they are vibrations:—many recognize it. “Life, thought, soul—these, too, are vibrations, yet more subtle:—I have proved it. “And from vibrations—harmony. “Music—the fitting together or chording of sounds—the union of vibrations—it is the form all know, it has soothed and charmed so many.” He paused and looked toward Edith Gale. “Beauty,” he continued, “that which _you_ so well offer to men as spirit sustenance, what is it but the combining of life and color vibrations into chords which bring joy to those whose souls awake to answer? “Harmony—it is Nature’s law. Only the hand of man may work discord. Left undisturbed for even a brief period, the wood and the stream, the meadow and the hill, fall into rhyme and melody, while from the sun and moon falls a quivering glory of light, and voices of the air come whispering or shouting past to blend more perfectly the elemental chord.” His eyes wandered about to the others in the room. “Lives vibrating to lives—the chord is friendship.” His gaze came back to Edith Gale, then to me. “Soul vibrates to soul—the chord is love.” During the brief silence which followed this there was no question as to vibrations on my part. They were distinct waves, in fact, and I did not dare to look otherwise than straight ahead. “For myself,” he continued, and I breathed again, “I have found the way of mental unity which means the voiceless speaking.” He motioned to Miss Gale, who struck a chord on the harp near her. From the strings of the piano across the room came a faint yet perfect answer. “That,” he said—“it contains it all. Thus the electric chords answer to each other and we speak without wires across the spaces. So the vibrations of the thought awaken in the mind of another their echo, and men are made to know, and may answer, without words.”