The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

THE EQUINOX out works is dead,” so, good friends, Samadhi is all humbug unless the practitioner shows the glint of its gold in his work in the world. If your mystic becomes Dante, well; if Tennyson, a fig for his trances! But how does this tower of Samadhi stand the assault of Question-time? Is not the idea of Samadhi just as dependent on all the other ideas—man, time, being, thought, logic? If I seek to explain Samadhi by analogy, am I not often found talking as if we knew all about Evolution, and Mathematics, and His- tory? Complex and unscientific studies, mere straws before the blast of our hunchback friend! Well, one of the buttresses is just the small matter of common sense. The other day I was with Dorothy, and, as I foolishly imagined, very cosy: for her sandwiches are celebrated. It was surely bad taste on the part of Father Bernard Vaughan, and Dr. Torrey, and Ananda Metteyya, and Mr. G. W. Foote, and Captain Fuller, and the ghost of Immanuel Kant, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, and young Neuburg, to intrude. But intrude they did; and talk! I never heard anything like it. Every one with his own point of view; but all agreed that Dorothy was non-existent, or if existent, a most awful speci- men, that her buns were stale, and her tea stewed; evgo, that I was having a very poor time of it. Talk! Good God! But Dorothy kept on quietly and took no notice; and in the end I forgot about them. Thinking it over soberly, I see now that very likely they were quite right: I can’t prove it either way. Butas a mere practical man, I intend taking the steamer—for my sins I am 122