"No. You have got to know what it is, got to walk up it a little ways, so that you are not afraid of it any more. When you know a thing, you are not afraid of it any longer. Before you know, it looks all dark to you. Nothing can hurt you when you are not afraid.... It's just the same as with the animals. All the black things that come into you are animals. If they find nothing but love and whiteness inside, they will go away and not even look at you again; but if fear and darkness are there, they get mad and bite." Leaning forward with a laugh, he added, "You can't cut across from the black path to the white. You've got to go all the way back and start over." * * * * * 13 THE ABBOT The Abbot is now seventeen. He is doing well at Columbia. Classes and routine there are mere externals. The Abbot is living a life far more real than appears--a life that few men in America have learned how to live. He has actually arrived at the conviction of the unfathomable riches that lie within. Many occultists and a few great artists have a working knowledge of this kind. We hoped the Abbot could remain at Stonestudy, but his parents wanted some letters after his family name as well as before. Our young man was enjoined to make the best of it. As a matter of fact, he is putting on a lot of brain things that work admirably with the inner activity which we made much of in our work together. In another book,[14] I told of the Abbot's awakening--how we called him from mysterious regions of silence and mystification, to a more or less adequate expression of material facts. Here was a boy almost overshadowed by his own soul at times, inclined to be half out of the body and not altogether present in the mind, when moving among the sordid affairs of the world--a lad who knew the arrangement of planets and the flow of meteoric matter better than the geography of our own continent; who swung very readily back into memories of other lives, mainly monastic, rather than into the episodes of his own kid-days. [14] _Child and Country._ I forget just how it was that we first sensed the giant in this boy. In any case, we struck one. The ordinary training that I would give an American youth to breathe the soul of him, was not at all necessary with the Abbot. Rather, pressure was exerted from the first to make him come down into our world, to make him be one of us, to make him see streets and alleys, doorsteps and servant-stairs. They have succeeded better at Columbia in this regard than we were able to do, but the wonder and satisfaction of it all is, that the aroused mystic, the aroused artist, has not receded--but dominates his days and work. I understand that he is considered a sensation in a literary way.