law like the law of supply and demand, and act as if it were so; but it was.  At the time Non was beginning his career there was nothing in the building-market people found harder to hire than honesty.  Here was something, he saw at last, that thousands of busy and important men who did not have time to be detectives, wanted.  There did not seem to be any one very actively supplying the demand.  A big market, a small supply, and almost no competition.  Non stepped in and proposed to represent a man’s interest who is building a house as literally as the man would represent his interests himself, if he knew all about houses.  Everything has followed from this.  What Non’s business is now, when a man is building a house, is to step quietly into the man’s shoes, let him put on another pair, and go about his business.  It is not necessary to go into the details.  Any reader who has ever built a house knows the details.  Just take them and turn them around.

What those of us who know Non best like about him is that he is a plain business man, and that he has acted in this particular matter without any fine moral frills or remarks.  He has done the thing because he liked it and believed in it.

But the most efficient thing to me about Non is not the way he is making money out of saving money for other people, but the way the fact that he can do it makes people feel about the world.  Whenever I have a little space of discouragement or of impatience about the world because it does not hurry more, I fall to thinking of Non.  “Perhaps next week”—­I say to myself cheerfully—­“I can go down to New York and slip into Non’s office and get the latest news as to how religion is getting on.  Or he will take me out with him to lunch, and I will stop scolding or idealizing, and we will get down to business, and I will take a good long look into that steady-lighted, unsentimental face of his while he tells me across the little corner table at Delmonico’s for three hours how shrewd the Golden Rule is, and how it works.”  Sometimes when I have just been in New York, and have come home and am sitting in my still study, with the big idle mountain just outside, and the great meadow and all the world, like some great, calm gentle spirit or picture of itself, lying out there about me, and I fall to thinking of Non, and of how he is working in wood and stone inside of people’s houses, and inside of their lives day after day, and of how he is touching people at a thousand points all the weeks, being a writer, making lights and shadows and little visions of words fall together just so, seems, suddenly a very trivial occupation—­like amusing one’s self with a pretty little safe kaleidoscope, holding it up, aiming it and shaking softly one’s coloured bits of phrases at a world!  Of course, it need not be so.  But there are moments when I think of Non when it seems so.

In our regular Sunday religion we do not seem to be quite at our best just now.