is recuperative, sedative, reposeful. It gives emotion opportunity to accumulate volume and force, thought time to clarify and review its conclusions, the senses that inaction which freshens them for clearer perceptions and keener enjoyments. A dull day is often the mother of many bright days. It is easy to surrender one's

self to the better

mood of

such a day;

to accept

its repose

and reject

its gloom. As the hours pass one finds himself gently released from the tension of the work which had begun to haunt his dreams, quietly detached from places and persons associated with the discipline and responsibility of daily occupation. The steady dropping of the rain soothes and calms the restlessness of a mind grown too fixed upon its daily task; the low-lying mists aid the illusion that the world beyond

is a dream, and that the only reality is here Iwithin these cheerful walls. After a time this passive enjoyment becomes active, this negative pleasure takes on a positive form. There is something pleasant in the beat of the storm, something agreeable in the colorless landscape. One has gotten rid of his every-day self, and gotten into the mood of a day which discountenances great enterprises and sustained endeavours of every kind. One stirs the fire with infinite satisfaction, and coddles himself in the cosy contrast between the cheerfulness within and the gloom without. One wanders from window to window, lounges in every easy chair, gives himself up to dreams which come and go without order or coherence, as if the mind had given itself up to play. Pleasant places and faces reappear from a past into which they had been somewhat rudely pressed by a present too busy to concern itself with memories; old plans reform themselves, old purposes and hopes are revived; the works one meant to accomplish and abandoned by the way disclose new posIsibilities of realisation. When the after

noon begins to darken, one finds that he has gathered from the past many fragments that promise to find completion in some new and sounder form. It has been a day of gleaning, if not of harvesting. As the night descends, fresh fuel renews the smouldering flame, and the past, so quietly, almost unconsciously, recalled, projects itself into the future, and stirs the imagination with a hope that to-morrow may become a purpose, and the day after an

achievement.

toms

CHAPTER XVI

THE UNIVERSAL

BIOGRAPHY

LL day long the snow has been whirling over the fields in shapes so varied and so elusive that I have

fancied myself present at a dance of phanwandering ghosts of dead seasons haunting the fields which once spread out sunlighted and fragrant before them. At intervals the sun has pierced the clouds and touched the earth with a dazzling brilliancy, but for the most part the winds have driven the storm before them, and at times wrapped all visible things in a white mist of obscurity. On such a day the open fire lights the open book with a glow of peculiar cheer and friendliness; it seems to search out whatever of human warmth lies at the root of a man's thought, and to kindle it with a kindred heat. On such a day the companionable quality of a

book discovers itself as at no other time; it seems to take advantage of the absence of nature to exert its own peculiar charm. In summer the vast and inexhaustible life of nature, audible at every hour and present at every turn of thought, makes most books pallid and meagre. In the universal light which streams over the earth all lights of man's making seem artificial, unreal, and