At six next morning the sleepers awoke and performed the same rites on the improvised praying-stool; the shutters were rolled back; the Turks who had homes returned; in came the Arabic newspaper; once more Turkish delight, coffee, the clatter of dice and dominoes, the gathering of animated groups, loud, unpleasant voices and mirthless vivacity—­so the life of the coffee-house went on; so I imagine it goes on for ever.

* * * * *

As I think of this in retrospect it seems that the blind musician stood in some peculiar and significant relation to the more ordinary life about him.  But for him, I should probably have omitted to describe my night among the Turks.  He made the coffee-house worth living in, worth sketching, worth being re-seen in the reflection of words.  He was what I should call the glory of the coffee-house.

Thus the garden of Eden was beautiful, but Adam and Eve in the garden were the glory of the garden, the highest significance of its beauty, the voice by which relatively dumb beauty got a step farther in expressing itself.  The garden would never have been described but for the episode of Adam and Eve.  It would not have been worth while to describe it....  The forest is beautiful, but the bird singing in the forest is the glory of the forest.  The morning is beautiful, but the tramp walking in the morning is the glory of the morning; he also, in his youth and morning of life, is a voice by which beauty endeavours to reveal itself.

Each scene, each picture, has a highest significance if we could but find it.  Thus the blind musician was a revelation of the very soul of the Turks.  The tramp wandering through life and exploring it tries always to find what is particularly his in the scenes that come before his eyes.  It is what he means by living a daily life in the presence of the Infinite.

IX

AT A GREAT MONASTERY

I

In the Middle Ages, when Christianity was still young, there was much more hospitality than to-day.  The crusader and the palmer needed no introduction to obtain entertainment at a strange man’s house.  The doors of castle or cottage, of monastery or cell, were always on the latch to the wanderer, and not only to those performing sacred dues but to the vagabond, the minstrel, the messenger, the tradesman, even to crabbed Isaac of York.

Since those days it has become clear that the thirty pieces of silver not only sold the author of Christianity but Christianity itself.  As my Little-Russian deacon said, “Money has come between us and made us work more and love less.  We are gathered together, not for love but for mutual profit.  It is all the difference between conviviality and gregariousness.”  The deacon was right, and when one comes upon the Middle Ages, as yet untouched, in Russia, one reflects with a sigh—­“The whole of Europe, even England, was like this once.”  One says with Arnold—­