ought to love it enough to be willing to work over it until it is
true,--true not only to the ideal, but true also to the real. The light
is a gift; but the local color can only be seen by one who looks for it
long and steadily. Artaban went with me while I toiled through a score
of volumes of ancient history and travel. I saw his figure while I
journeyed on the motionless sea of the desert and in the strange cities
of the East.

And now that his story is told, what does it mean?

How can I tell? What does life mean? If the meaning could be put into a
sentence there would be no need of telling the story.

HENRY VAN DYKE.


You know the story of the Three Wise Men of the East, and how they
traveled from far away to offer their gifts at the manger-cradle in
Bethlehem. But have you ever heard the story of the Other Wise Man, who
also saw the star in its rising, and set out to follow it, yet did not
arrive with his brethren in the presence of the young child Jesus? Of
the great desire of this fourth pilgrim, and how it was denied, yet
accomplished in the denial; of his many wanderings and the probations
of his soul; of the long way of his seeking, and the strange way of his
finding, the One whom he sought--I would tell the tale as I have heard
fragments of it in the Hall of Dreams, in the palace of the Heart of
Man.