"Give up this!" said Life. "When the thorns have pierced me, who will suck
the poison out? When my head throbs, who will lay his tiny hands upon it
and still the beating? In the cold and the dark, who will warm my freezing
heart?"

And Love cried out, "Better let me die! Without Joy I can live; without
this I cannot. Let me rather die, not lose it!"

And the wise old woman answered, "O fools and blind! What you once had is
that which you have now! When Love and Life first meet, a radiant thing is
born, without a shade. When the roads begin to roughen, when the shades
begin to darken, when the days are hard, and the nights cold and long--then
it begins to change. Love and Life WILL not see it, WILL not know it--till
one day they start up suddenly, crying, 'O God! O God! we have lost it!
Where is it?' They do not understand that they could not carry the
laughing thing unchanged into the desert, and the frost, and the snow.
They do not know that what walks beside them still is the Joy grown older.
The grave, sweet, tender thing--warm in the coldest snows, brave in the
dreariest deserts--its name is Sympathy; it is the Perfect Love."

South Africa.



II. THE HUNTER.

In certain valleys there was a hunter. Day by day he went to hunt for
wild-fowl in the woods; and it chanced that once he stood on the shores of
a large lake. While he stood waiting in the rushes for the coming of the