This great tree is a world in itself, and the denizens appear full of curiosity as to the Gulliver who has taken up his abode beneath it. Pale green caterpillars and spiders of all sizes come spinning down to visit me, and have to be persuaded with infinite difficulty to ascend their threads again. There are flies with beautiful iridescent wings, beetles of all shapes, some of them like tiny jewels in the sunlight. Their nomenclature is a sealed book to me; of their life and habits I know nothing; yet this is but a little corner of the cosmos I am leaving, and I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come, as a great longing to open my eyes a little wider during the time which remains to me in this beautiful world of God’s making, where each moment tells its own tale of active, progressive life in which there is no undoing. Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening circle towards the fulfilment of the mystery of God. There are, I take it, two master-keys to the secrets of the universe, viewed _sub specie æternitatis_, the Incarnation of God, and the Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic little man of contemptible speech, that “all things are ours,” yea, even unto the third heaven. I have lost my voracious appetite for books; their language is less plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees; and for me the clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather than in the learning of men. “_Libera me ab fuscina Hophni_,” prayed the good Bishop fearful of religious greed. I know too much, not too little; it is realisation that I lack, wherefore I desire these last days to confirm in myself the sustaining goodness of God, the love which is our continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and height are all one. It is a time of exceeding peace. There is a place waiting for me under the firs in the quiet churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties or personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them unknown to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to live on the charity of one’s fellow-men. I am most gladly in debt to all the world; and to Earth, my mother, for her great beauty.