mazy lines, some faint and wayward as a hair, and some straight and
decided as a steel track--whence and whither do they lead? I love the map
best when the journey is done--when I can pore on its lines as into the
lined face of some dear friend with whom I have travelled the years, and
say--here this happened, here that befell! This almost invisible dot is
made of magic rocks and is filled with the song of rapids; this
infinitesimal fraction of "Scale five miles to the inch" is a haunted
valley of purple pine-woods, and the moon rising, and the lonely cry of a
sheep that has lost her little one somewhere in the folds of the hills.
Here, where is no name, stands an old white church with a gilded cross,
among little white houses huddled together under a bluff. In yonder
garden the priest's cassock and trousers are hanging sacrilegiously on a
clothes-line, and you can just see a tiny graveyard away up on the
hillside almost hidden in the trees.

Even sacred vestments must be laundered by earthly laundresses, yet
somehow it gives one a shock to see sacred vestments out of the
sanctuary, profanely displayed on a clothes-line. It is as though one
should turn the sacred chalice into a tea-pot. A priest's trousers on a
clothes-line might well be the beginning of atheism. But I hope there
were no such fanciful deductive minds in that peaceful hamlet, and that
the faithful there can withstand even so profound a trial of faith. If it
had been my own creed that those vestments represented, I should have
been shaken, I confess; and, as it was, I felt a vague pain of
disillusionment, of an indignity done to the unseen; as, whatever the
creed, living or dead, may be, I always feel in those rooms often
affected by artistic people, furnished with the bric-a-brac of religions,
indeed not their own, but, none the less, once or even now, the living
religions of other people--rooms in which forgotten, or merely foreign,
deities are despitefully used for decoration, and a crucifix and a Buddha