There was unworn power in the untilled earth that gave vigor. It keeps some of it still. Today there is something there of youth that can not grow old, joy that does not become tinsel, or cheap, an unfading fire in the heart. What can humanity do without youth? It leaked out through the post office, which was one small unpainted room with a hole in the wall, for things to go into or come out of, that I was buying packages of wicked books from Europe. The neighbors called to investigate. They carried away the startling report that it was packages of _yellow-back novels_. _Probably, highly immoral!_ One of these books disappeared. It happened to be a volume of Bossuet’s _Funeral Orations_. It did not come back. They burned it for safety’s sake. The town, however, was saved. Bossuet, whose silenced voice helped mark the decline of the great age of Louis XIV, had been confessor, in court circles, to fair ladies of France. But I will wager that even he would have been surprised at human inventiveness in the fields of sin, at what happened to his orations for the dead bodies of these same ladies. They felt the red rag of revolution was as evident in these books they could not read, as the red flannel around the lantern the old, bent, fat Santa Fé night-watchman carried, which spotted the long, lonely streets with round dots of light. After that I became a dangerous person. The eyes that were in the habit of glancing at me sideways were bright and shining with disapproval. But I was deliriously happy through it all, as long as pennies held out with which to buy books, and those magnificent, low, yellow moons of summer swung majestically out of the unknown to poise above the plains. I have never forgotten the feel of the warm winds of those nights of summer so long ago, upon my arms, upon my shoulders. It is one of the things I would like to know again. The way to study pictures is not to study them, not to try to know history, nor making, but just to look at them, then keep on looking. The beginning of joy is the beginning of wisdom. The eye trains itself. Like an independent organism, it searches, chooses, judges, until it has distinguished good from bad. Looking at pictures, making no attempt to interpret, to explain, trains vision, until everywhere we turn our heads, we make pictures for ourselves. The eye, without command, instruction, selects, adjusts, keys itself to the artist’s trained seeing. The more we enjoy a picture, the more, for that fleeting moment, we are in harmony with the mind that produced it. Pictures flash us out of our dull selves into clear, unvexed dominance. There is healing, health, in beauty. It represents that from which imperfections have been taken. Pictures are temperamental tuning forks. Small, paper-bound, cheaply-priced books containing prints should be as common upon reading tables as papers. It is not easy to measure the good of contact with the silent things of art.