With another she goes often to the cities--rambling among the rooming-houses, cheaper restaurants and mills. She means to work in the mills soon--to forget herself and forget us for a time, to be with the harder-lucked girls whom she loves with thrilling passion. She has brought home from these little adventures wonderful stories of the patience and the laughter and the heroism crowding like hidden sacred presences about the duller lives. She brings a humour to the telling of the divine secrets of the poor--the clutching pang for food, the soldier going, his baby coming, the tortured spine, the stunted, the darkened, the wasted--an irresistible divinity about it all--pain impermanent, joy enduring. Back of the lacking eyes and leaking lives, she sees wonders that Zola never saw, that none can see with mere intelligence, that none can dream, who sees only the here and now, who has not learned to laugh at the so-called injustices of men, who cannot see the greater order to come because the present chaos is so devastating. One may report minutiæ of torments, mass the items of degradation and bring forth a great document of the underworld--but these are mere foundations. The Builders bring the dream, they live the hope, they open the long-road consciousness, they substantiate their visions of better days, bring order and coherence to all the splendid toil of the intellectualist; they raise their edifice upon _all_ that is done.... Here is the Little Girl's work of to-day's writing: MEDITATION In the night the Master came down to a woman who lay sad and sleepless in a dark house. He came so near that she felt his holy radiance. Her soul breathed; her body ceased to tremble; she felt within his sacred circle. The Master smiled and said: "Why do you not sleep?" The woman answered, "I am carried away by thoughts that will not hush. Night after night I lie here so bitterly close to old dreams. I realise that they are not worthy, but my brain is full of them." The Master smiled again. "There is a way to compel the silence of the brain." "I have not found it," said the woman. "Learn to be the soul," the Master said. He suggested a way to begin--then was gone. The rest of that night the woman thought of his words. Deeper and deeper his words sank into her heart. When morning came, a happiness brooded within; she dressed quickly and went out.... Back of her little house rose the golden brown hills. She climbed, and at the top of the nearest, sat down. The peace and purity and fragrance of the sun-steeped hills filled her soul. For a long time she thought in silence, then slipping off her loose white sandals, said: "I begin with the grass. Yes, I begin with my _feet_.... How wonderful you are--so ready to obey, to give your service at any time! What would happen if you carried me other than my will? Supposing some day I should be walking fast to the house of my beloved, when you suddenly took me the other way!"