Page:Letters from Abroad.pdf/56

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immensely different from the religious festivals of our country, These Western people have made their money, but killed their poetry of life. Here life is like a river, that has heaped up gravel and sand and choked the perennial current of water that flows from an eternal source on the snowy height of the ancient hill, I have learnt since I came here to prize more than ever the infinite worth of frugal life and simple faith. These western people believe in their wealth, which can only multiply itself and gain nothing.

How to convince them of the utter vanity of their pursuits! They do not have the time to realise that they are not happy. They try to smother their leisure with rubbish of dissipations lest they discover that they are the unhappiest of mortals, They are like drunkards who are afraid of their lucid intervals--whose drinking produces the misery which only further drinking can drown. They deceive their soul with counterfeits, and then, in order to hide that fact from themselves, they artificially keep up the prize of those false coins by an unceasing series of self-deceptions.

My heart feels like a wild duck from the Himalayan lake lost in the endless desert of Sahara, where sands glitter with a fatal brilliance, but the soul withers for want of the life-giving spring of water. This visit of mine to America has done me one great service; it has produced in my mind an intense feeling of contempt for money,