the underbrush was bright with roses and gracefully sweeping, pink-flowered raspberries; lower down under the denser foliage of the deodars were flowers of the shadows, growing singly or in friendly groups of several lilies-ofthe-valley and Solomon's seal, or so they appeared to American eyes. Then as a closer setting to the nest were banks upon banks of maidenhair fern, all in deep shadow- a filmy tracery bending to breaths of air which I could not sense. And wherever the ferns failed, crept the ivy, winding its dull green trail over fallen trunks or seeking to hide every stump or half-dead tree. For two days I watched from a distance, and at discreet intervals, in the absence of the mother, I examined the two amber shells and photographed them. Then late one afternoon as I passed by after a day with koklass pheasants, I saw tragedy, swift and sure, descend upon the Impeyan home.

The crash and roar of a troop of langur monkeys came to my ears. As I approached the noise lessened and died away in the distance; but as I came over the ridge, a long-tailed gray form leaped from the undergrowth upon a bare half-fallen tree and ran along it on three legs, holding something clutched in one hand. I suspected trouble and ran headlong at the monkey, who promptly dropped his booty and fled off through the trees, swearing roundly at me the while. The nest was empty, and one egg in sight had a gaping hole in the side from which the yolk streamed.

Then the marauding monkeys swung past, old and young hurling themselves recklessly from spire to spire. Tree after tree shook and bent as in a terrific gale of wind; branches crashed and splintered; cones, needles, and twigs rained to the ground as the troop rushed by. The uproar which the banderlog creates has usually but little

effect upon the lesser creatures of the forest. They well know the danger and the limitations of the four-handed folk. But when this troop passed from view, quiet did not settle down. There was no wind, no movement of the needles. Even the ferns hung motionless. But there was a sinister undercurrent of sound more potent than noise of elements. Something was about to happen, and not concerning any one animal, or in any one glade. The birds were restless and their notes were those of anxiety; small creatures dashed here and there among the leaves. Without knowing why, I picked up my gun and walked hastily toward camp.

I crossed two ridges. Still no wind, but still a sound of restless life everywhere, a tense uneasiness. And then came the climax. From the distant snows billowed a breath of cold air, -icy, unfriendly, and at the shock the sun hid his face. A dark mist closed down. The forest creatures became silent as death, and for as long as two minutes the silence was oppressive. Then in the distance the trees bent and straightened, the mist yellowed and a drop of rain fell. Finally came a sound as strange as any in the world, the noise of ice falling on flowers and leaves, a mitrailleuse-volley of hail such as only the great Himalayas know. Our horses whinnied with pain and crowded close to our shelter; a fleeing squirrel was flattened, dying without a struggle. Leaves and fans of needles were torn away and covered the bruised blossoms on the forest floor. The air was a screen of straight white lines, breaking near the ground into a maze of dancing, splintering crystal balls. Before the bombardment ended the sun came out and made the hail translucent, and so beautiful that for a moment one forgot the terrible damage the shredded foliage, the hosts of stricken nestlings and creatures which had not found a

safe retreat. When the last missile had fallen we wondered whether the most hardy tenant of the forest had survived. And Nature in mockery, having ceased her cruel play, sent out the frailest of frail butterflies, flickering its copper wings before me in the sun.

V

On the last day of my stay in Garhwal I squatted native-fashion on a steep slope, watching the day slowly die, and stirred as I always am with the great desire to remain. So quickly had this isolated valley become home, so familiar had its trails become, yet so few of its secrets had I been able to solve. Always its great age had impressed me, its centuries-old deodars, the soaring lammergeiers which seemed never to have known youth. But now a new sound in this land of strange sounds- came to me: a rhythmic beat, beat, too mechanical, too regular to be elemental. It was dull, muffled, and seemed very far off. But this was an illusion, for almost at once four men swung into view around a curve in the trail, and four others, and still four and four. My pulse leaped as a whole company of British regulars filed before me and broke ranks near my camp. What a contrast to the ragged Tibetans and Hillmen who for centuries had preceded them and for many years would follow! The spell of the wilderness was broken. My last link had been my thoughts aroused by the rhythm of the comet. Hadzia had fitted into the

scheme of detachment here, as if he had been a fawn or satyr. Now my connection with the outside world was forged anew by the rhythm of these men.

That evening as I sat on the hillside with a group of officers and listened to the soldiers' concert, the cockney accent in story and song fell on my ears like something recurring from a distant memory. I was glad to know that the pheasants and Hadzia had so profoundly influenced me.

When the camp-fire had burned to embers, and I had hand-clasped the last of this splendid type of man, I walked slowly up toward camp. Beyond the ridge I heard yet a new sound, yet a new rhythm, and my heart warmed to the sight. Around a flicker of twig-embers squatted the white forms of four natives-my khansamah and three soldiers' servants. Two had battered tin pans and sticks, and to the tom-tom beat their voices chanted some sad, minor melody, as old, probably, as India is old. I glanced up at the faint glow of the receding comet, and I thought of Hadzia somewhere deep among the distant mountains, perhaps with his hand close about his eight rupees - rupees whose brightness was dimmed with the yolk which had gained them. For the moment I resented the intrusion of those splendid rhythmic men. I wondered what Hadzia's thoughts might be. And I knew that if they were filled with affection for these great Hills and a great yearning never to leave them, they were mine also.

WHEN Hugh Benson, son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, went out of the Church of England into the Church of Rome, he carried with him the uninterrupted friendship of his friends. They disapproved of his proceedings, but they let him go without dispute, even without complaint. He liked to tell the story of an Anglican bishop who considerately accounted for a like change in one of his clergy by reminding his brethren that 'they must not forget the serious fall their poor friend had had from his bicycle not long before, which had undoubtedly gravely affected his mental powers.' His own experience, however, gave him little material for even such mild controversial anecdote as this. The Provost of Eton spoke for his friends when he sent him his affectionate benediction; and his mother spoke for his family when she said, 'If Hugh's father, when he was here on earth, would have always liked him to follow his conscience, how much more in Paradise.'

Nothing is more interesting in Mr. A. C. Benson's memoir of his brother 1 than this cordial recognition of the liberty of difference.

The book is frank and intimate to such a degree that a sensitive reader has an uncomfortable feeling that he ought not to be reading it; as if a casual week-end visitor were made the recipient of the most sacred confidences of a household. It is such a record as

1 Hugh: Memoir of a Brother. By ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.

might be passed about in manuscript among near relatives and very close friends. We perceive, with an uneasy sense of intrusion, that we are included in this inner circle on no other condition than the payment of a dollar and a half to a bookseller. This, however, is Mr. Benson's affair, not ours. If he is graciously willing to invite such remote persons as ourselves into these domestic privileges, we may accept the invitation, with wonder but with gratitude. And being thus made, for the moment, a member of the family of a young man whose one dramatic act was to leave the Church in which his father had been Primate and go into the Church of Rome, we may profitably note how quietly and without noise of contending voices this interesting step was taken. His people seem to have regarded his departure as the beginning of a journey into a strange country, which they themselves, indeed, had no desire to visit, but which would probably enrich his life with new and delightful experiences. Thereafter he was more interesting to them than he had ever been before. They liked to have him photographed with them in family groups, wearing the clothes which indicated the difference of his position.

It is true that the fact of difference is the condition of all progress, but this hospitable recognition of it is a distinctly modern manner of behavior. From the beginning of time men have insisted on their right to differ from their neighbors, but their neighbors, in

all lands and ages, have resented the difference and have resisted it.

Thus André Lagarde begins his Latin Church in the Middle Ages1 with this statement of the situation: 'In the middle of the fifth century the Western Church occupied a position without precedent in the Roman Empire. It ruled the emperor and gave him his orders. They were orders directed especially to the extermination of all religious rivals. It required the emperor to suppress the worship of idols, and he closed the pagan temples: sometimes he even authorized their destruction. The Church wished to be rid of dissenting sects, and the emperor forbade heretical meetings. Paganism, being driven from the towns, sought refuge in the country. Heresy went into hiding: the Church was victorious.' After a series of monographs on such themes as Sacraments and Devotions, the Monastic Life, the Pontifical Elections, the Pontifical State, the Pontifical Exchequer, and the Political and Religious Advance of the Papacy, the book ends with chapters on the heresies by which the right to differ in doctrine and in polity was gradually vindicated. Against these heresies the Latin Church brought the weapons of condemnation and excommunication, and proceeded to extremes of persecution.

If there was any warmth of human nature in the men who devised and directed this machinery, any sense of the vastness of truth and of the possibility that they might be ignorant of any part of it, such weakness does not appear in the pages of this book. The author's monographic method takes the plot out of the story of the Middle Ages, and gives us in the place of it a series of analyzed situations in which the heroes and the villains of the play are not

1 The Latin Church in the Middle Ages. By ANDRÉ LAGARDE. Translated by ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. VOL. 117-NO. 6

breathing men but labeled figures, ecclesiastics, schoolmen, and heretics. It is like the channel of a California river in summer, where furrowed sand and heaps of rounded stone show the effects of the swing and swirl of a swift current, but in which at present there is no water. The eager life of the Middle Ages, with its light and color, its spirit of adventure, its fierce hatreds and fierce loves, and its manifold complications and contradictions, does not appear. Instead of what Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor calls 'the mediæval mind,' we have here the medieval body anatomically articulated. So much the clearer, however, is the fact that the supreme contention of that exceedingly interesting period was between authority and the liberty of difference. The outstanding fact in mediæval life was the Church, whose consistent purpose was to bring all minds and wills into obedience. At the heart of every heresy the significant error was not so much a disagreement with the truth as a disagreement with the Church.

Accordingly, Dr. Schaff, writing an admirable biography of John Huss, after Five Hundred Years, publishes at the same time a translation of Huss's treatise on The Church. The point at issue in Huss's case was the divine right of the Church to suppress the liberty of difference. Huss was burned, not for his ideas concerning the Scriptures or the Sacraments, but for his persistent claim to have the right to have ideas at all. They told Huss at the Council of Constance that 'if the Council should tell him that he had but one eye, he was bound to agree that it was so.' To this suggestion Huss replied

2 John Huss, his Life, Teachings and Death, after Five Hundred Years. By David S. SCHAFF. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

The Church. By JOHN HUSS. Translated by DAVID S. SCHAFF. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

that 'if the whole world told him that he had but one eye, yet he could not, so long as he had reason, say so without violence to his conscience.' There was the whole matter in two sentences. In vain did Huss claim to speak the mind of the saints and of the Scriptures. It was plain that he did not speak the mind of the contemporary Church, and that fact made him a heretic, regardless of all saints and scriptures.

The Council of Constance was dealing, not so much with a problem in religion as with a problem in discipline. To persons in authority, discipline is essential to efficiency. It is easy for those who are out of office to criticize the administration of discipline. John Milton, for example, deprecated the censorship of the Presbyterians. 'Under the fantastic terrors of sect and schism,' he said, 'we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we should rather rejoice at.' But to the Presbyterians, precariously walking in the midst of perils, the 'terrors of sect and schism' were anything but 'fantastic.' They threatened the efficiency and even the existence of that godly authority which they had with such difficulty gained. 'Truth,' said Milton, 'is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression they sicken into a muddy pool of Conformity and Tradition.' But Mr. Glover, in his discriminating essay on Milton in Poets and Puritans,1 notes that the Rev. Thomas Tompkyns, chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom, as censor, the duty fell of licensing the publication of Paradise Lost, was the author of a pamphlet on The Inconveniences of Toleration. There spoke the honestly perplexed official.

1 Poets and Puritans. By T. R. GLOVER. London: Methuen & Co.

2

Many of the independent and freespoken thinkers who appear in the unfailingly fair pages of Principal Selbie's English Sects learned by experience that toleration was a much more complicated matter than they had at first imagined. Coming themselves into places of responsibility, and being in their turn asked to grant the liberty of difference, they refused. When the Presbyterians and Congregationalists came to deal with the Quakers and Baptists, they found themselves constrained to follow the policy for which they had so reviled the Anglicans.

This was in part the result of the annoying manner in which the dissidents manifested their dissent. The sight and sound of them was offensive. The Presbyterians and the Congregationalists resented the obtrusive and obstinate difference of the Baptists and the Quakers as the people of Fitchburg in the eighteen-thirties resented Joseph Palmer's beard. He was the only bearded man in that part of the country, and was persecuted for it. When he resisted the attack of several neighbors who proposed to shave him, he was put in jail on a charge of unprovoked assault. 'He far outstayed his sentence,' said his son in an interview which Miss Sears quotes in Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands, 'because he had to pay for all his food, drink, and coal for heating, and he considered they cheated him, so he refused to go. The sheriff and jailer, tired of having him there, begged him to leave. Even his mother wrote to him "not to be so set." But nothing could move him. He said that they had put him in there and they would have to take him out, as he would not walk out. They finally carried him out in his chair and placed it on the sidewalk.' The neighbors were irritated, not only by Joseph Palmer's beard

2 English Sects: a History of Nonconformity. By W. B. SELBIE. New York: Henry Holt & Co.