penetrated the ceiling, the roof, swelling and lengthening out clear into the starlight, and forming to a point shot out and afar off into the very depths of space till I could follow it no more. Then I turned me again to the sleeping child; and what was my astonishment at beholding literally hundreds of bright shining and divinely beautiful forms, as of young children and the virgin dead, come trooping down the lane of pearly light, and, entering the house, gather and dance and play at the bedside of the slumbering little one. Good is catching! That child had enabled me to stave off a fit of jealous rage in sympathy with my friend; and now I was, through her again, about to learn one of the most important lessons of my life. I had kissed that child, and had become suffused with a portion of her own sweet aromal aura or atmosphere, and was, therefore, en rapport with the same bright beings as she was herself, and was played upon by the same celestial, pure and divine influences, whereof Love was the dominant or major clement.
A portion of these purer, better, and hyperphysical auras displaced and occupied the room of the grosser aura, earth-born and turbid. I found myself cleaner, better, than before, and comprehended Christ's "Suffer little children to come unto me." Not until that holy hour of rapt contemplation had I realized the immense meaning of a single touch of loving lips; that if it be purely given and received, both participants are blessed, not only directly, but through oblique ways, a myriad fold.
Love in very deed lies at the foot of all, and its mystic and ideal meaning outweighs the material and popular ones by as many degrees as the pure soul of that baby-girl outweighs the corrupt body of the low-lived debauchee. We may be hugged, embraced, kissed into heavenly states, or into their exact opposites! Hence, aside from common relational lip-contacts, they are worse than unwise who touch lips unless love be the underlying prompter; for if the kissed or kisser be bad, just so much of that specific evil is sure to flow from the magnetic poles of either pair of lips to the soul of him or her upon whose mouth they arc laid. I have said the moist lips are batteries charged with our very inmost good or evil. It is utterly impossible for a negress having
