Front matter (continued 3)

You may retouch a faded picture, you may patch up an old piano, you may mend a shattered vase, but you cannot make a plucked rose grow again; it will wither and die in spite of every effort to restore it to the stem from which it fell. And so with the heart from which a low desire in the guise of an alluring temptation has snatched the flower of innocence. That heart will fade into hopeless loss unless a greater love than yours or mine intervenes to save. An impure soul never started out impure from the first any more than a peach was decayed in the blossom. It is the small beginnings, dear girls, that lead up to the bitter endings. The impure book read on the sly, the questionable jest laughed at in secret, the talk indulged in with a schoolmate or a friend which you would be unwilling for "mother" to hear, the horrible card circulated under the desk or behind the teacher's back, those are the beginnings of an ending sadder than the blight of any desolation that storm or drought or frost can bring upon the blossoms. If I only could, how gladly I would dip my pen to-night in a light that should outshine the electric splendor of our streets and write a message against the dark background of the sky, to startle young girls into the realization of the danger that lurks in the first indulgence of thoughts and companionships that are not pure. Avoid all such as you would avoid the contagion of small-pox, and a thousand times more. Small-pox, at its worst, can only mar the body, but the friend who lends you bad books or tells you "smutty" stories proffers a contagion to your soul which all the fountains of all your tears can never cleanse away.

THIS BABY OF OURS.

There's not a blossom of beautiful May, Silver of daisy, or daffodil gay, Nor the rosy bloom of apple tree flowers, Fair as the face of this baby of ours. You could never find, on a bright June day, A bit of fair sky so cheery and gay; Nor the haze on the hills in noonday hours, Blue as the eyes of this baby of ours. There's not a murmur of wakening bird— The clearest, sweetest, that ever was heard In the tender hush of the dawn's still hours— Soft as the laugh of this baby of ours. There's no gossamer silk of tasseled corn, Nor the flimsiest thread of the shy wood fern— Not even the cobwebs spread over the flowers— Fine as the hair of this baby of ours. There's no fairy shell by the sounding sea, No wild rose that nods on the windy lea, No blush of the sun through April's showers, Pink as the palm of this baby of ours.

Don't you get awfully tired of people who are always croaking? A frog in a big, damp, malarial pond is expected to make all the fuss he can in protest of his surroundings. But a man! Destined for a crown, and born that he may be educated for the court of a king! Placed in an emerald world with a hither side of opaline shadow, and a fine dust of diamonds to set it sparkling when winter days are flying; with ten million singing birds to make it musical, and twice ten million flowers to make it sweet; with countless stars to light it up with fiery splendor, and white, new moons to wrap it round with mystery; with other souls within it to love and make happy, and the hand of God to uphold it on its rushing way among the countless worlds that crowd its path: what right has a man to find fault with such a world?

When the woodtick shall gain a hearing, as he complains that the grand old century oak is unfit to shelter him, or the bluebird be hearkened to when he murmurs that the horizon is off color, and does not match his wings, then, I think, it will be time for man to find fault with the appointments of the magnificent sphere he inhabits.

"It is a fine day!" remarks Miss Cherrylips.

"Too cold," says the croaker; "beastly wind, not fit for a dog to breathe."

Oh, yes, my dear, I heard him say it this very morning, and while I sat and listened to him I could but think to myself, "What would become of the croaker without the weather topic to fall back upon?" When all else failed him, he is sure to have something to find fault with within the range of this universal and inexhaustible topic. It is too warm or too cold; there is too much rain, or there is a drought; the winters are changing and microbes are on the increase; the peach buds are blighted by a cold snap in spring, and the potatoes have failed or are about to fail, owing to a wet June.

That is the way the croaker holds forth whenever he can get anybody to listen to him. I sometimes wonder what he would do if he really had great things to fret about; if one of his beautiful children were to die, or the faithful wife he loves so well in his heart, perhaps, but never takes the trouble to acquaint with the fact, were to weary of his endless faultfinding and steal away from it all into the quietude of the grave. I wonder if he would not then look back upon these days of "croaking" with amazement that he was ever so blind and stupid a fool.

I knew a woman once who was very, very charming. She could sing "Allan Percy" in a way that would melt the heart within you. She could paint on china and decorate the panels of doors, and on the whole she was calculated to enjoy life and make it enjoyable for others. But her home, on the contrary, was utterly devoid of peace and comfort. Her husband took no pleasure there, although he was lavish in the expenditure of money to render the place attractive. Her children were glad to get away from their home and find otherwhere the freedom and gaiety denied them there. Why was all this, when the mother was so eminently fitted by grace and accomplishments to create a beautiful and happy home? Simply because she was always fretting and fussing about trifles. She was a croaker and always finding fault. She fought flies until life was a burden to everybody who watched her. She said that they would spoil the paint, poison the food and ruin the curtains. She was after them at early dawn nor gave over the chase until late at night. She would leave the dinner table to chase a fly and kill it with a folded paper. She would stop the lullaby song she was singing to her pretty baby, to get up and call somebody to come in and hunt a stray blue-bottle that was bunting its stupid head against the window screen. She said that her life wasn't worth a farthing to her if the flies got into her home, and she would sooner jump in the river than submit to the pestilential infliction. Then she was forever prophesying some dreadful fate for herself by reason of the muddy footprints that occasionally found their way onto the carpets.

"I declare," she would say, "if you boys don't stop tracking dirt into the house I'll die before my time. If there is anything I hate it is a careless boy!"

And the boys took her at her word and stopped tracking mud. But they were gradually lured to stay away from home, and the soil they took into their hearts was perhaps harder to efface than the footmarks they left upon the floor of mother's neatly kept hallways.

She was always anticipating trouble that never came. She knew the girl was going to leave. She was simply too great a treasure to keep. She was absolutely certain that the milkman was watering his milk, and the baby would get sick. She had no doubt whatever but what her husband was going to ruin himself on 'Change, and then what would become of them all? So she worried and fretted and fumed, until patience, like a hunted bird, spread its wings and flew away, and what might have been a happy home became a stranded wreck upon the rocks of contention.

Oh, I tell you right now, girls, if you can only cultivate one accomplishment out of the many that wait to crown a perfect womanhood, cultivate a pleasant temper and cheerful disposition. The ability to speak many languages, to paint, to dance, to sing, or even to wield a graceful pen is nothing compared to the ability to make a lovely home. Nobody ever yet succeeded in that noblest endeavor without abjuring needless faultfinding, croaking and fretting.

As a general thing I don't believe in sermons served as restaurants serve beef—in slices. I believe in teaching truths, rather, as one whips cream, dropping in the moral as an almost imperceptible flavoring. But I tell you there are times when I feel like mounting a pulpit and thundering with old Calvin, until the air emits sulphur. Especially when I see the inhumanities and outrages practiced upon children by witless parents, do I feel stirred to my soul's depths. If we treated our flower beds as we do our children there wouldn't be a blossom left in the world. If we served our meals as we do our children, there would be rampant indigestion and black-browed death at the heels of every one of us. Now and then you see a wise mother and sensible father, but the biggest half of humanity receive their children as youngsters receive their Christmas toys, to be played with when in a good humor, and bundled anywhere out of sight when out of sorts or engrossed with more important matters. We forget, half of us, that a little child's sense of injustice and sorrow and wrong is compatible with its own growth and experience rather than with our own. What to us is a paltry trial is the cause of keenest, unalleviated woe to the child of five. The possession of uncounted gold at forty will not be more precious than the possession at three of the apple or the book we so rudely snatch from the little hands without a word of apology. Take the time to explain to the little fellow why you deprive him of some cherished possession and you will save the tender bit of a heart a vast amount of unnecessary aching.

I have many things to be thankful for this stormy winter night. One is that the coal bin is full and the lock on the outer door secure. Another is that the rooftree bends above an unbroken band, and that disease with its fell touch lingers the other side of the threshold of the little home. Another is that, as a family, we all have straight backs and moderately developed intellects; that we are neither dime museum freaks, lunatics, nor half-wits. Another is that none of us chew gum, carry around dogs, nor make expectoration the chief business of a day's outing. Another is that I am getting so used to the alarm clock that I sleep through its wild clamor and escape the duties that fall to the lot of that other member of the home circle whose ear and conscience are not so sadly seared as mine. Another is that I know enough to detect butter from oleomargarine, and am not roped in by Blank street vendors with their dollar and a half tubs. Another is that I am not the sort of fellow to be always hitting another fellow when he has been down and is trying to stand steady again. Another is that I am modest enough to question whether I could run a grip any better than he does? Another is that I got one answer to the "ad." wherewith I sought to capture a gold watch. It would have been an embarrassing thing to have received not one solitary little nibble. Another is that the elevator boy who occasionally carries me to the top floor and intermediate stations around at Blank's is kind and does not treat me with the haughty scorn he bestows on others. Another is that I have the serene equipoise of nerve which renders me calm and even cheerful under the knowledge that there is nothing in the house to eat, and two invited guests gently sleeping the happy hours away in the chamber above, dreaming perchance of toothsome viands not to be. Another is that in spite of weather I take no colds, and am as impervious to catarrhal or pneumonic affections as an eagle is impervious to the attack of tom-tits. Another is that I live in a town where people sell no beer; they may steal and backbite, and raise the old lad generally, but thank goodness the baleful glitter of a glass beer bottle has never yet eclipsed the moral splendor of the scene. Another is that I have been enabled to preserve a few staunch and trusty friends through the evolution of that rainy-weather costume which a few of my sex have joined me in essaying. I cannot speak for future tests, but so far my henchmen have stood firm. And right here let me say that any friend, man, woman or babe, who can remain loyal to you after you have been seen in public in a dress-reform garment is worth cultivating, and should be made the theme of special psalms of praise. Another is that the picture I had taken the other day looks worse than I do, and when I send it off to unsuspecting admirers I am not torn with the thought that when they see the original they will drop scalding hot tears of disappointment. This idea of raising false hopes in the minds of confiding strangers savors too much of Ananias and Sapphira. Another is that so far in life I have preserved a stern and unshaken resolution not to wear a false front. A woman in a store bang is next worse to a chromo in an art gallery, or a muslin rose among American beauties fresh from the rose gardens. Artificiality, my dear, pretense and assumption, are harder to put up with than anything else in the world, unless it is corns. But far ahead of all the above enumerated causes for gratitude is one which thrills me most profoundly, and which can be summed up in half a dozen words, the echo of which, perhaps, will find a lodgment in some other hearts. I am thankful, very, very thankful, that I am not the mother, nor the aunt, nor the half-sister, nor the first cousin, nor even the next-door neighbor, of the boy who kills sparrows for two cents bounty on the little heads. If I had such a boy within range of my voice to-night I should say to him, "Be poor, my man; be unsuccessful in business, and not up to bargains all your life, but don't be shrewd and sordid and cruel in seeking your gains. Better go by the name of 'mollycoddle' and 'baby' among the other boys than get to be a little ruffian with your arrow and your sling-shot, and the name of a keen-killer tacked on to yourself. Let the sparrows alone, or if you really feel that they are the nuisance they are made out to be, kill them if you like, but do it in a gentlemanly way (if such a paradox is possible), and don't take money for the job." The boy or the man who will take a life for sordid ends, or, in other words, who will seek to enrich himself on "blood money," is pretty low down in the human scale.

Laughter is a positive sweetness of life, but, like good coffee, it should be well cleared of deleterious substance before use. Ill-will and malice and the desire to wound are worse than chicory. Between a laugh and a giggle there is the width of the horizons. I could sit all day and listen to the hearty and heartsome ha! ha! of a lot of bright and jolly people, but would rather be shot by a Winchester rifle at short range than be forced to stay within earshot of a couple of silly gossips. Cultivate that part of your nature that is quick to see the mirthful side of things, so shall you be enabled to shed many of life's troubles, as the plumage of the bird sheds rain. But discourage all tendencies to seek your amusement at the expense of another's feelings or in aught that is impure. It was Goethe who said: "Tell me what a man laughs at and I will read you his character."

I'll take my chances any day to find heaven on earth, if I can have the run of the woods up along our northern lake shore in early springtime. I want no companions either, unless, perhaps, it be a child or a dog, for artificial women and dudish men, let loose in the woods, are harder to endure than gad-flies. It was scarcely more than sunrise, the other morning, when I left the house and took my way toward the forest shrine undesecrated as yet by surveyors or wood-choppers, the advent of either of whom in a country town means good-bye to heaven on that particular spot of earth! We found the air so full of sweetness, the instant we struck the depths of the woods, that one could almost fancy the wise men of the East had been there before us to greet the new-born Spring with spices as they greeted another Heaven-born child a score of centuries ago in Bethlehem. Every shrub held a softly-tinted leafbud half unfolded, like a listless hand. The maple leaves were pink and glossy, like rose petals wet with rain. The hickory trees were unfolding great creamy buds that looked like magnolias. The hawthorns were all afloat with silver blossoms, like loosened sails. The earth seemed singing to the heavens, "God is here!" and from the blue depths of quietude, where a few clouds spread their soft wings like brooding birds, came back the answer, "He is here!" The lake claimed Him, and a thousand azure waves murmured His presence on the deep. Wherever we looked, at our feet where the June lilies whitened the ground like perfumed snow, and the moss was bubbling like a wayside spring with sunshine in place of water; at the misty foliage overhead, like shadowy spirit wings; at the circle of blue that bounded the earth, or into the very heart of heaven above us, it seemed as though God, visible and manifest, was there to give us greeting. Finally, we found a point of high land, touched here and there with shadows flung down from budding birches, and starred with dandelions in flocks, like golden butterflies. Here, leaving the material part of me leaning up against a tree-trunk to rest, as one thrusts a cumbersome garment on a nail, my soul went wandering off into Paradise, and forgot awhile its environment and its earth-born responsibilities. Next time the world has failed to use you well and you are smarting from the sense of injury undeserved, or the frets of domestic life have worn you down to the minimum, like a blade that is eternally upon the grindstone, start for the woods. Take a big basket with you and fill it full of lilies, and, ten to one, before you get home again the lilies will have taken root in your heart and your basket will be full of contentment.

Educate the children to the expectation of sorrow, not as a monster who is to devour them, but as an angel who is to meet them on the way and lead them gently home to heaven. Teach them to hold themselves in readiness for whatever life has in store, as soldiers are trained for a battle whose end is certain peace. Teach them to endure all things, only striving to sweeten and soften rather than to harden under the discipline of sorrow. Unselfishness is the most rare and at the same time the most Christian virtue possible for human nature to attain to, but did anybody ever yet grow unselfish through a life of indolent self-indulgence and ease? Did fruit ever amount to anything that was left unacquainted with the sharp discipline of the gardener's shears? I tell you, all the way up from an apple to a man it takes lots of pruning and lopping off of superfluous branches to bring out the flavors and sweeten the fiber of the fruit.

I can imagine a lot of way-worn pilgrims drawing up to heaven's gate.

"What will you have?" asks old St. Peter, standing idle and calm in the perpetual sunshine that lies beyond the swinging portal.

"I will have my crown," says one. "I have earned it."

"And I will have my harp," says another; "my fingers are eager to pick out the heavenly tunes."

"And I will hie me at once to my heavenly mansion," says a third. "Long time I have plodded, foot-sore and weary, to gain the habitation of its enduring rest."

But if you can imagine "Amber" piping forth her small request, I think you might hear her say: "Conduct me, oh, aged friend, to the nearest sand-bank, where I may lie face downward in the sunshine for fifty years to come, and hear the surf break on 'Sconsett's reef." That is what I have been doing for the past fortnight, and both soul and body have waxed strong in the process.

What a tired passenger we carry around with us, sometimes, in this marvelous Pullman coach of ours, wherein the soul takes passage for its overland trip from the cradle to the grave. How restless it gets, and how troublesome. How it turns from companionship, even that of books, and finds no panacea for its torment, until some kind fate side-tracks it and lets the noisy world rumble on with the clatter and clash of conflicting cares beating the hours to dust beneath their flying wheels.

When I went away for my yearly outing I was so cross that there was no living within six miles of my own shadow. I hated everything on earth, and everything on earth hated me. But I have come back as sweetly as the breath of a rose steals through a lattice. That is the effect of a jaunt, my dear; and let me say right now that if you are holding on to your money in the hope of getting rich sometime, or if you are traveling in a rut because you think you are too poor to avoid it, or if you are grinding your soul into fine dust in the process of laying up against a rainy day, just stop right where you are and listen to me. Any money that is gained at the expense of health, either physical or mental; any duty held to in the face of nervous breakdown; any gain secured at the expense of peace of mind and growth of soul, is not worth the holding. You cannot be of any use in the world if you are worn out or sick. You may persist in holding on, but your grip is weak, and your effect on affairs and people is simply that of an irritant. You owe it to yourself, as well as to others, to go away and get rested. If it costs money to do so, consider money well spent that gains so fair an equivalent as rest and change, and renewed vigor. I tell you there are few better uses to which you may put your dollars than in a yearly outing. Your pockets may be lighter when you get back, but so will your heart be, and the few sacrifices necessary in the way of less expensive clothes and cigars, or less frequent gloves and bonnets, will be well worth the making for the result gained.

I wish Columbus had never discovered us. I wish that he had never steered his old bark westward and found the "land of the free and the home of the brave." For with discovery came civilization, and I believe we would have been better off without it. If we only could have been left to ourselves and gone on sitting under lotus trees unaffected by dressmaker and tailor bills, I believe the sum total of happiness would have been far greater in the world than it is to-day. I would love to return to my allegiance to nature and forever desert the haunts of civilization and the marts of trade. I want to gather together a picked band of kindred souls and go out and pitch tent by the Gunnison River. Ever been there? Imagine a stream of gold flowing through hills colored like an apple orchard in May, with a sky bending down above them like the wing of an oriole. I want to forget the insolence of a class who may be as good as I am in the eye of the law, but whom it would take a ton of soap and God's grace to make my equal in point of cleanliness and decency. I want to forget forever the clang of the cable car and the rumble of its wheels. I want to return to the heathendom that worships gods instead of dollars and loves mankind simply because it knows nothing of faithlessness and fraud.

"Plaze, sor," said a servant to the head of a certain suburban household the other morning, "the gintleman who sthole the chickens left his hat in the hincoop." Just so, Bridget. And the lady who attends to the affairs of the kitchen has her foot upon the neck of the miserable woman who is nominally at the head of the house. Oh, no! I am not going to enter into a disquisition upon the merits of the servant question. Years ago, when I cantered lightly in my ride against windmills, I might have undertaken it, but the question has grown too large to be settled by talking. The state of things in this free country is growing just a trifle too free. There are no longer any servants in this proud land. It is not ladylike to serve. The person who superintends the domestic affairs of our home merely condescends for a consideration. We no longer have any rights as employers. The wind has tacked to another quarter. Should we wish to discharge our lady cook or dispense with the services of a gentleman artisan it stands in place for us to approach them in a respectful manner, put the case before them clearly and ask them humbly, without offense to their delicate sensibilities, if they will kindly allow us to forego their so-called services. Question yourself seriously, my dear; are you sufficiently considerate? Think how these defenseless ladies and thin-skinned gentlemen who fill positions of trust in your establishment must suffer sometimes from your boorish impetuosity. Are you always cordial in your greeting when the worn face of the cook appears at the delayed breakfast hour and she places before you the hurried pancake and the underdone steak? Do you stop to think how the poor creature has danced all night at a ball and has crept home after your stiff-necked and rebellious husband has bounded away to catch the early train, breakfastless and profane? And when the low-voiced and timid second girl tells you that, as a lady who knows her place, she really cannot demean herself to wipe off the paint or sweep the front steps, do you take her by the hand and acknowledge the indiscretion of your coarser nature in expecting her to do such menial service? How many of us, clods that we are, have raged when the mild-mannered laundry maid has appropriated our underclothing, or remonstrated when the number seven foot of the blue-blooded cook has condescended to stretch our silken hose? It behooves us to join the ranks of the "philanthropic fiends" and look to it that we improve our methods of treating the delicate gentry who tarry with us so briefly.

By the way, I think I occasionally hear a feeble pipe from a man to the effect that the girls are responsible for all the tomfoolery in the world. Don't you know that you are the very ones who tend to make them so—you men? You follow after and woo and wed just that sort of girls. You won't look at a sensible little woman who can make "lovely" bread, abjures bangs, can't dance and has no "style." You laugh at and make sly jokes at the expense of our big hats and our pronounced fashions, but when you choose your company, and often your wives, I notice you pass right by the home-keeping birds and take the peacocks. Of course, no one lives in this age who doubts for a moment that woman's chief aim in life and purpose of creation, as well as her hope of a blessed hereafter, is to please the men and get a husband. If you won't have her modest and simply gowned she is willing to make a feather-headed doll and a travesty of herself to get you and win heaven! You know perfectly well, you men, that you don't care half so much for brains as you do for general "get-up," and the woman you honor with your choice is selected for a pretty face and form, and a becoming costume rather than for a clever head and an honest heart. I am not talking to old fogies who cling to old-fashioned notions, but to young men who ridicule the customs of their grandmothers, who shake their heads at salaries of two and three thousand a year as inadequate to support wives; who rail against woman's extravagance, yet do their best to maintain her in it. When you, my fine and dapper gentleman, begin to seek out the modestly appareled and the sedate girls, then shall folly and vain show fly over seas for want of encouragement and the grand transformation of sawdust dolls into women and pleasure-seekers into home-keepers take place.

TWO DAYS.

I said to myself one golden day When the world was bright and the world was gay, "Though I live more lives than time has years Either in this or the infinite spheres, I will fear no blight and I'll bear no cross, Against my gains I will write no loss, But I and my soul, twin lilies together, Shall whiten in endless summer weather!" I said to myself one weary day When the world was old and the world was gray, "Has God forgotten His wandering earth? Are its tears His scorning, its groans His mirth? There's no blue above where the torn clouds fly, There's no bloom below where the dead leaves lie; Would I and my soul were at rest together Wrapped from the chill of this wintry weather."

There are some people who live in this world as a cucumber grows in a garden. They cling to their own vine and serve no higher end than rotundity and relish. There are others who live in the world as a summer breeze lives in a meadow; they find out all the hidden flowers and set the perfumes flying. There are others who live as the sea lives in a shell; their existence is nothing but a sigh. There are others who live as the fire lives in a diamond; they are all sparkle. And there are others, and they outnumber all the rest, who live as a blind mole lives in the soil; they see nothing, feel nothing, suffer and enjoy a little now and then, perhaps, but know nothing to all eternity. Such people walk through life as the mole walks through the glory of a summer day, or burrows beneath the dazzle of a winter storm. They are as irresponsive to the voices all about them as the mole is to the singing of April robins. They are as untouched by the myriad influences of life as the mole is by the light of a star or the flash of a comet. Their only interest is in the question, "Wherewith shall we be clothed, and what shall we have to eat?" They gather the ripened hours from the tree of life as a child gathers fruit, merely for the gratification of an instant appetite, not as the careful housewife does, who garners in a store for wintry weather. Life to them is merely a fattening process. They remind one of prize beef at a county fair; to-morrow brings the shambles and the butcher's axe, but in the serene content of a well-filled stall and a full stomach, they take no thought of the future. We meet such people every day and everywhere. On the streets they may see a brute tyrannizing over a helpless beast of burden, or a mother (?) yanking a sobbing child along by the arm, as full of ugliness herself as a thunder-cloud is of electricity, or a man following an innocent young girl with the devil in his heart, or a big boy tyrannizing over a smaller one; and they pass it all by as indifferently as the mole would sneak across a battlefield the morning after a battle. They have too much to do themselves to waste time in remedying other people's grievances. They think too much of personal reputation to involve themselves in an altercation with defilers of the innocent, and tramplers of the weak. They are too respectable to get mixed up in brawls, even if the disturbance is brought about by the devil's own drummers looking up recruits among the championless and defenseless working-girls, or the parentless and homeless children of a great city. We meet them traveling through the mountains or loitering by the sea. Their only use for mountains is that they may carve their precious initials on the highest peaks, pick winter-greens and blue-berries and display their fashionable suits and striped stockings. They look upon the sea as a big bathing-tank, and the sky, with all its splendor of cloud and its glory of sunrise and sunset, as a barometer to forecast the weather. We meet them in business relations, and they never believe that courtesy and business can go together. A merchant in his office or a lady in her parlor will bluntly refuse to buy of a worn-out, discouraged, heart-sick book-agent, ignoring the fact that a smile accompanying even a refusal acts like a spoonful of sugar in bitter tea, and costs less. Even a "lady" clerk, behind a counter, will be haughty and unaccommodating and insolent to the woman who comes to buy, forgetful that a customer will go a long distance out of her way to deal with a polite and well-mannered clerk, and that, like honesty, politeness is ever the best policy. And, on the other hand, a woman shopper will be whimsical and captious and trying, forgetting that the girl who serves her has human blood in her veins, and often carries a troubled heart behind her smile or her frown.

They have come! Without the sound of a bugle, the bright hosts have marched down and taken possession of the land. The southern slopes are all alive with their wind-shaken tents, and when the sun comes out warm and glowing from the cloudy pavilions of the April sky, he finds a million blossoms on the hills that yesterday were white with snow. Some of them are tinted like the flush that lingers in the evening sky before the stars find it; some of them are stainless as unfallen snow; some of them are purple as a nautillus sail adrift upon a twilight sea; and all of them are joyfully welcome to hearts that are weary of Winter's long reign. And after the hypatica shall come the violet, and after the violet the trillium, and after the trillium the wild-rose, and after the wild-rose the cardinal-flower and the wood-lily, and after them the gentian and the golden rod, to mark the wane of the year. Oh, who would not live in a world whose dial-plate is made of flowers and whose circling seasons are told over with blossoming trees and gentian-buds?

I saw a great many things on the way this morning as I was coming to town. Suppose, as the weather is too warm for preaching, I enumerate them and let you strike the balance at the close, to see which way the world is jogging. I saw a father, drunk, beside his little blue-eyed daughter. His head was laid in maudlin sleep upon her shoulder, and with blushes that came and went across her face like cloud shadows on the slope of a hill, she sat and bore the burden of her childish shame like a little angel. I saw a hard-faced, labor-grimed man step out of his way to pick a wild rose that grew by the side of the road. I saw a young man lash his horse because his own bungling driving came near colliding his vehicle with a cable car. I saw a policeman spring to the rescue of an old beggar woman who stumbled on a street crossing, and saw him fall and trampled upon in the discharge of duty. I saw a pretty girl reach out her white fingers and feed a discouraged street-car horse the banana she was eating as she passed by. I saw a beaten dog turn and fawn beneath his master's brutal kick, and I thought to myself, where is a more faithful friendship than that? I saw a little golden-headed boy at the window of a house as I rode by, and when I waved my hand he kissed his in return. I saw a tired mother stoop to hug the child who fidgeted at her knee in the tedious depot waiting-room, and I saw another slap her baby because its sticky fingers sought to fondle her cheek. I saw a little girl get up, without suggestion from her mother, and yield her seat to an older person. I saw a lamed and dying bird just brought down by a boy's sling-shot. (I saw that same boy in Sabbath-school last Sunday!) I saw one woman in fifty thousand wearing the dress-reform. I saw eleven girls out of nineteen with tightly-laced waists! I saw a hurt kitten tenderly attended to by a soldier in blue, as I passed Fort Sheridan Camp, and involuntarily I said to myself: "The bravest are the tenderest; the loving are the daring." I saw a small boy beating his mother with both fists because she carried him over the crowded and dangerous way, and so, I thought, we treat the tender God who sometimes lifts us, against our will, from evil ways. I saw a little coffin in an undertaker's window, and thought, what child in this busy, bustling city is doomed to fill that casket? What love-watched home shelters the head that shall one day sleep upon that satin pillow? I saw a teacher in one of our public schools and overheard a gross bit of slang as she passed by. I see myself sending a child of mine to such a teacher if I knew it! I saw a father wheeling his baby in a perambulator, with the sun blazing straight into its blinking eyes. I saw one man out of every ten dodge into a liquor saloon when he thought nobody was looking. I saw a homely girl transformed into a beauty by a service of love accorded a stranger. I saw a woman lean out of a Marshall Field 'bus to laugh at another who wore shabby clothes and walked with a drooping head. I saw lots of things besides, but how does the balance strike?

If we have been living on bad terms with a neighbor; if we have been maintaining a chilling silence and a forbidding reserve with anybody thrown often in our way, let us have done with such nonsense and live in the world as God meant we should.

Out of the exuberance of a merry heart the housekeeper has loosened the tacks in the parlor carpet, and the epoch of housecleaning begins. The head of the family, pro tem. dweller in the land of desolation and sojourner in the valley of wrath, hies him to town and wishes vainly for the return of the days when he had no wife save in Spain and no family outside of Elia's land of dreams. The calciminer comes and drops leprous splashes all over the hallways and the bannisters. One paperhanger taketh unto himself another, and the two scatter ringlets of snipped paper all over the bed chambers, and cumber up the floors with sticky paste-pots and brushes. The scrub woman breathes hard and devastates the approaches of the front steps, while the hired girl skips playfully here and there with damp cloths and bars of silvery soap. There is no breakfast, no lunch, no dinner. We take what provender the gods deliver to us in out of the way places, like stalled oxen or uncomplaining army mules! We sleep by night in beds loosely put together and smelling of soap. We awake betimes to the rattle of the scrubbing brush and the sharp overthrow of stovepipes. We see the young person, like McStinger, on the rampage from morn till night. We watch her hand to hand encounters with the pictures that have been wont to hang upon the walls. How she swoops upon them, bears them down, buffets them with dusters and heaps them high like stumbling blocks in the path of the righteous! How she sneers at our feeble, yet apt, suggestion, and pharisaically "thanks goodness that she is good for something besides standing around and giving unsolicited advice!" How she charges upon our cherished books and whacks them together vindictively to loosen the dust and the bindings! How she tosses the piano like a feather in her strength and probes its sensitive heart-strings with a knitting needle in search of dirt and pins! How she rebukes the Captain for idling away her time at doll-playing while there is so much work to do, and drives that gallant young field officer forth to do battle with the unresisting tomato can in the backyard! What a pandemonium reigns over all the domain of yesterday's content! Carlo, the dog, whose flippant youth is getting its first severe taste of life's discipline, retires to an adjacent covert and howls a fitful protest. The cat blinks sleepily in the sunshine and dreams of a future unmarred by suds and a slippery foothold. When she has occasion to walk across the kitchen floor she shakes her hind foot gingerly, like a pilgrim delicately removing the dust of the enemy's land from his members. The goblin brood of chickens chuckle with amazement while the hired man beats the rugs like a snare drum and charges upon the carpet that hangs like a vanquished foe across the clothesline. But, like everything else, my dear, we take the trials of spring housecleaning as the tourist takes the storms in the Alps or the sailor meets the tempest on the sea. It has not come to stay; the sun-lighted peaks of deliverance lie just ahead of us, and there is fine sailing for another year when the squall is weathered.

I am tired of the endless dress parade of the great alike—aren't you? I am tired of walking in file, as convicts walk together in stripes—aren't you? I glory in cranks who have enough individuality to refuse to be sewed up in the universal patchwork, like the calico blocks we used to overcast with our poor little pricked fingers ever so long ago when we were children—don't you? The onward sweep of progress in this age has prepared the way for non-conformists, and, glory be to God! they are swinging into line like beacon lights up the Maine coast. I confess I have no heart-pining for emancipation that shall place me alongside of Dr. Mary Walker or others of her ilk. I would like to retain my womanliness, but I would like also to make a distinct mark upon my times, be it ever so small and insignificant, as an individual and an intelligence quite as distinct from the conventional masses as a blackbird is when it leaves the flock and silhouettes itself in solitary state against the deep blue sky from the top of a windy elm tree—wouldn't you?

I want one good square fling on earth before I die. I want the chance to know what it is to have enough money to be able to buy silk elastic occasionally instead of cotton, and to have my teeth filled with gold instead of concrete without feeling as though I had been robbing hen-roosts for a month after. I want to go to the theater in a swell carriage, and sit in the best box, with a pale pink ostrich boa draped about my shoulders and the opera-glasses of the entire house leveled at me for a stunning beauty. I want the sensation, for once, of knowing that I am as handsome as I am bright, and as well-dressed as I am virtuous. I want to have ice cream seven times a week and "Pommery Sec" by the dozen in the cellar. I want to own a silk umbrella with a golden crook, and wear a diamond ring on every finger. I want to buy candy whenever I feel like it without having to register it in the family account book under the head of "sundries" and "cough drops." I want to see the time when I can call the average shop-girl out into the alley and have it out with her with none to interfere. I want to settle with her for the indignities I have long suffered with the pusillanimity of a meek nature. I want to ask her between clips why she has always sold me just what I didn't want, and sneered at me because I didn't buy more of it. I want also to engage in hand to hand conflict with the female gum-chewer. I want to convince her that I have endured all I will of her facial contortions, and that the time has come for the extinction of her type from the face of the blooming earth. I want the power to consign every man who even mentions "nose bag" to a horse, to the guillotine, and to imprison for life every brute who carries a snake-whip or uses a check-rein. I want to solder the man or woman who objects to fresh air inside a tin can and label them "sardines." I want to shoot on sight the first human being who mentions the word "draught" in my hearing, and set my dog on the fiend who blots the face of nature with his ear-muffs. I want to live for a while in a country where there are neither thunderstorms nor cyclones, but where I can sleep nights right through, from March until November, without getting up to look for funnels or shooing the whole family down cellar as a hen gathers her chickens from the swooping hawk. I want to live in a community made up of people who mind their own business. I want to be able now and then to receive a letter from out of town (it is generally a bill!) without having the village postmaster regard me as a burning fagot. I want to find a recipe for making buckwheat cakes that do not taste like sand. I want to be able to detect a hypocrite and a traitor on sight, without waiting for a broken heart to evidence the fact that I am sold again. I want to rise out of the range of small annoyances, and fly above the aim of inferior people to disturb. I want to grow to be more like an eagle that wings its way out of the habitat of gadflies, and less like a trembling hare pursued by hounds. I want to take the lesson to my heart that the soul that is constant to itself and aspires towards heaven shall never be left a prey to care and unrest. I want to strike a dress reform which shall make women look less like guys, and to encounter a rainy day in which I shall not bite the dust, I and my umbrella, and my flippety-floppety skirts, and my nineteen bundles. I want to cut down the ballot privilege and make it impossible for an immigrant to vote before he is a twenty-one-year resident of America. I want to convince the woman suffragist that the greatest curse she can precipitate upon her sex is the ballot. I want to teach my sisters that if they will pay more attention to their homes and less to outside issues American institutions will be more of a success. If the career of a politician will spoil a man what would it do for a woman? On the principle that a strawberry will decay sooner than a pumpkin, or that a violet is more fragile than a sunflower, it would take about one election day to change a woman into a harridan. I never knew but one out and out politician who preserved intact the amenities of a gentleman, and he died early of heart trouble. The thing killed him physically before it destroyed him morally. If any politician reads this and wants to challenge the point I want to meet him and either convince him or be slain.

If you are not glad to be alive such weather as this it is because you are a clod and not a sentient being. Why, I never open my door these radiant mornings and walk out into a world that is more golden than any topaz and more radiant than any diamond that I do not hug myself for very joy that I am alive! The grave has not got me yet! And, though I be poor and quite alone and go hungry for the fleshpots that make my neighbors great about the girth, I am happy as a queen and quite content to cast my lot with clovers and birds and wayside weeds that feel the vigor of summer weather in every fiber of prodigal life. To-night the sky was like the flame of King Solomon's opal—did you see it? And just as the glory was growing and deepening into an intensity of beauty that made you want to shut your eyes and say Oh—h—h! as the little boys do at the circus when the elephants go round, a thrush whipped out his mellow flute and gave us a vesper song that made one think of heaven and bands of singing angels! And yet we are discontented and feel ourselves misused because we happen to be a little poverty-stricken now and then, and it is hard work to find the plums in our pudding!

The other morning, before the town clock struck 7, I was riding over country in a hack, driven by a courtly mannered colored boy and drawn by a couple of discouraged mules. I was going over to Hampton and Chesapeake City to see the sights. A robin was quarreling with a sparrow for possession of a nest in a treetop hung with blossoms thick as Monday's washing, and a small pickaninny stood in a doorway and held his breath with terror as our driver slashed the air with his long whip. The morning was superb. The sea lay like an opal with a dark setting of hills shadowed like oxidized silver, the birds were out like blossoms of the upper air with song in place of perfume, and the world seemed altogether too jolly and bright a spot to link with thoughts of sorrow and pain and death. We drove over to the soldiers' home, where from four to five thousand veteran warriors have found shelter from the bombarding storm of mundane care. Under the shadow of great willows in half-leaf and still golden with April sap, in sunny corners of broad piazzas, on benches by the slope of sluggish streams, or walking about the well-kept paths, these old and battle-scarred warriors pass the time away. "What a hero I might have been," says each one to himself, "if only——!" or, "What a narrow miss I made of glory when that premature shell took off my legs and stranded me here!" Peacefully they behold life's sun decline, and peacefully in turn they take possession of the narrow beds awaiting them in the near cemetery, where so many soldiers are sleeping the unheeded years away. Without motive or purpose their life is scarcely more eventless than their death shall finally be. Some way the grounds where these patient old graybeards sit day after day with nothing to do but muse upon the past remind me of the human heart with its pensioned hopes, its stranded intentions and its crippled endeavors! What heroisms, what subtle intents for good, what pretentious desires were frustrated and made worthless by the destiny which changed life's battlefield into a "soldiers' home" and the scene of action for the shaded seat under the willows of a long regret!

I wonder if Eve, looking over the battlements of heaven now and then, and seeing how tired we get down here and how discouraged and broken-hearted we often are, is ever sorry for the heritage she left us, all for the sake of an apple! Does she not curse the memory of the earth fruit whose flavor has so embittered humanity! Think of it, oh far-removed and perverse ancestress, if it were not for you we might have lived in a world where dinners walked into the pot and boiled themselves over fires that called for no replenishing; where rent stockings lifted themselves on viewless hands and were deftly darned by sunshine needles in the air; where last year's garments glided into this year's styles without the snip of scissors or the whirr of sewing machine wheels; where brooms swept and dust-cloths dusted unassisted by human hands; where windows cleaned themselves as fogs lift from the lake, and washing and ironing were spontaneous, like the growth of flowers. I for one am heartily tired of having to suffer for Eve's heartless stupidity. Hard work has too much of the blight of the primal curse about it to suit me, and no matter what philosophy we call to our aid the fact remains that labor of a certain sort is the heritage of sin, and sin was, is and ever shall be accursed. But there is something a great deal worse than hard work, and that is laziness. The man who toils until the great muscles of his arm stand out like cords and his broad shoulders are bent like the branches of a pine under the force of a strong wind from the north is a king among his kind compared to the shiftless do-nothings of life, between whose feet are spun the cobwebs of sloth and within whose lily-white fingers nothing more burdensome than a cigar finds its way. Give me a blacksmith any day rather than a dude. Work is hard and sometimes thankless, but, like tough venison served with jelly sauce, it is spiced with self-respect and smacks of honest independence.

THE STORY OF A ROSE.

A white rose grew in a garden place, On a slender stem, with a royal grace; The nursling of June and her gentle showers, Fairest and sweetest of all her flowers. The south wind was out one day for a sail, In a cloudy boat, so fleecy and frail, And he chanced to spy, where musing she stood, My dear little rose in her snowy hood. Oh, softly he whispered and tenderly sighed, "Starry Eyes, Starry Eyes, I wait for my bride." But she laughed in his face, and told him to go; She didn't see why he bothered her so. A dewdrop fell in the starry hush, Lured from heaven by her dreamy blush; But the tender kiss of his balmy lip She gave to a bee, next morning, to sip. A bobolink left the bloom of a tree To tell her tale of whimsical glee; The moon dropped a pearl to wear in her breast; Dawn wove her a cloak of silvery mist. But her hard little heart was colder than ice, She sent every suitor away in a trice; Till the wind drew nigh, with a terrible roar, And said: "Pretty Rose, your playtime is o'er." He shook her with might, and he drenched her with rain, Till the poor little rose swooned away with her pain; And her shiny crown, with its moonbeam glow, He tossed far and wide, like the feathery snow. And all that is left of that splendid bloom, The diadem gay, and the spicy perfume, Is a handful of dust, that once was a rose— The sport of the wind, as it fitfully blows.

Once upon a time there lived a woman. She was not very young, nor was she very old. She was neither handsome, homely, a genius, nor a fool. She was just a commonplace, good-intentioned, fair type of the average woman. This woman prided herself but little upon the various accomplishments that contribute to the modern woman's popularity. She could not dance a step, save in front of a northeast gale, or in a game of romps with her little folks. She could not decorate a tea cup to save her life, nor hand-paint a clam shell, nor embellish a canvas with fleshy cupids and no less corpulent rosebuds. She could sing a few insignificant ballads, such as "Annie Laurie," "Twilight Dews," and "Nearer, My God, to Thee." These with a number like them, she was always ready to furnish in a manner to bring down the house, but I doubt if she would have been a success either in a comic opera or a church choir. She could make bread and pieplant pie after a fashion that would make a man wish that he had been born earlier to enjoy more of them. She could tidy up a room quicker than a cat could wink its eyes, and in the matter of housecleaning she was a regular four-in-hand coach and a tiger. If you had asked her to lead a class in ethical culture or make a speech on suffrage or score a point for reform, this woman would have ignobly turned her back and run away, and yet perhaps she wielded an influence in the world quite as strong as many a woman whose name is recorded on the roll call of noisy fame. But there was one thing this woman abhorred with all the might and strength of her soul, and that was slang. She had been brought up to consider the use of anything more pronounced than the "yea" and "nay" of the Quaker vernacular an outrage to refinement, and although drifting far from her childhood's faith in many ways still preserved an innate shrinking from the exuberance of vain speech. She allowed no little boys to slide the cellar door with her own precious yellow-heads who could be positively convicted of using naughty language. Her husband left his worldly ways in town and only carried home to this nice little woman the aroma of propriety and coriander seeds. But who ever yet was assured of a firm foothold upon the pinnacle of self-righteousness that the old boy did not whip out an arrow and bring them low? It becomes my painful duty to chronicle the temptation and downfall of the upright woman.

It was a tempestuous day of early autumn. It not only rained, it poured! It not only blew, but it tore, howled, twisted, cavorted! The woman had to go to town. At the eleventh hour the family umbrella was kidnaped by a demon. (When the prince of evil has nothing else to do he sends out his imps to hide umbrellas, handkerchiefs, thimbles, scissors, and other domestic essentials.) The woman had no time to track the umbrella to its lair, so she pinned a newspaper over her bonnet and leaped for the train. Arrived in town she bought a 50 cent umbrella from a man who was peddling them on the street corner, and from that moment we date her downfall. The umbrella proved to be fashioned of gum arabic and cobweb. It leaked, it exuded, it faded away like a frost-flake in her hands, so that ere half an hour had passed she gave it to a newsboy, and laughed to see him kick it into an alley. Then she took off her plumed hat and pinned it underneath her cloak, wrapped a lace scarf about her head and proceeded on her way. Remarking the pleased expression on the faces of all she met, she wondered at it, with an Indian outbreak so imminent. Small boys danced by her in the rain to the sound of their own bright laughter; strong men seemed overcome as she drew near, and even the stern policemen at the street crossings turned aside to hide a 9×14 smile. The woman lunched at a popular restaurant in the midst of a mysterious carnival of glee, and finally took the train for home and, leaving the city limits, skirted the northern shores of the lake to the sound of muffled mirth. Reaching home and looking into the mirror she was confronted by a countenance that bore all the seeming "of a demon that is dreaming." The sea-green warp of cotton in the gum-arabic umbrella had melted and run in long lines over brow and nose and chin. For one moment the woman gazed at her frescoed charm, and as to what follows we will drop the curtain. Suffice it to say, she fell, and the shocked echoes of that little home put cotton in their ears and fainted into lonely space at being called upon to repeat the strong language that rent the air. Who shall blame the woman if she said "darn" with an emphasis that might have made a pirate wan with envy? Who shall cast the first stone at her until the day dawns that releases my sex from the thralldom of its bondage to those demons who walk abroad and plot her downfall in rainy weather?

Wear this bead upon your heart, girls; have nothing whatever to do with so-called "fascinating" or "magnetic" men. Put no faith in mystery when it comes to a question of the man you think you love. Rapt glances and tender sighs that lead to nothing in the way of an honest declaration are as despoiling to your womanhood as the breath of a furnace is to a flower. There is no mystery in genuine love, and there is no counterfeiting it, either. It is open-faced, ready-tongued and clear-eyed. It is a virtue for heroes, not a platitude in the mouth of fools. It is undefiled and set apart, like the snow on high hills. Allow no man to make you a party to anything clandestine. A man who is afraid to meet you at your own home, and appoints a tryst in the park, or a down-town restaurant, is as much of a menace to your happiness as a pestilence would be to your health. Remember, in all your experience with so-called love, that the fewer adventures a young woman has, the fewer flirtations and the fewer "affairs," the more glad she will be, by and by, when she is a good man's wife and a brave boy's or sweet girl's mother. A gown oft handled, you know, is seldom white, and each romance you weave with idle fellows who roll their eyes and talk love, but never show you the respect to offer you their hand in honest marriage—these fascinating "Rochesters" and wicked "St. Elmos," already married, or steeped to the lips in evil-doing—deprive you of your whiteness and your bloom.

Do you ever get discouraged and feel like saying: "Oh, it's no use! I want to amount to something! I have it in me to do great and grand things, but the circumstances of poverty are against me. I can be nothing but a drudge and the sooner I get over dreaming of anything higher, the better!" Of course you have just such times of thinking and talking, but did you ever comfort yourself with the thought that though all these things you can not be, you are, really, in the sight of God? A diamond is no less a diamond because it has been mislaid, and passed off through ignorance as common glass. A tulip seed is no less the sheath of a flower because through mistake somebody has labeled it as common timothy. A silk fabric is no less the product of the mulberry-feeding worm because somebody has wrapped it in a brown paper parcel and valued it as domestic jeans. What you are, you are, and there is no power on earth can gainsay it. Other folks may ignore it in you; half the world, nay all the world, may fail to see it, but if nobility, and strength, and sweetness are there you are worth just that much to God! Blessed thought, isn't it, you poor, overworked clerk, with your brain always in a muddle with the dry details of a business you hate! Blessed thought, isn't it, you dear, tired woman with more burdens to carry than a maple tree has leaves! No matter how impossible it may be for you to live out what is in you, that something true and grand and beautiful is deathless and shall have its chance of development by and by.

I shall never again meet the pretty maid with the larkspur eyes and the corn silk hair who traveled with us a part of the way, but wherever she goes, joy go with her! She was so modest and unspoiled and sweet, I declare the sight of such a girl in this day of dancers and high-steppers is like the sound of "Annie Laurie" between the carousals of a break-down jig, or the taste of a wild strawberry after pepper tea. God bless the old-fashioned girl with her helpful ways, her arch face and her blithe and hearty laugh. May her type never vanish from the face of the earth, and may the mold after which her soul was fashioned never get mislaid and lost in the heavenly work-shop.

I think I shall be a little sorry when the commanding officer sends out the word to break camp and leave this dear old earth forever. For I love this world. I never walk out in the morning when all its radiant colors are newly washed with dew, or at splendid noon, when, like an untired racer the sun has flashed around his mid-day course, or at evening, when a fringe of shadow, like the lash of a weary eye, droops over mountain and valley and sea, or in the majestic pomp of night when stars swarm together like bees and the moon clears its way through the golden fields as a sickle through the ripened wheat, that I do not hug myself for very joy that I am yet alive. The cruel grave has not got me! Those jaws of darkness have not swallowed me up from the sweet light of mortal day! What matter if I am poor and unsheltered and costumeless? Thank God, I am yet alive! People who tire of this world before they are seventy and pretend that they are ready to leave it are either crazy or stuck full of bodily ailments as a cushion is of pins. The happy, the warm-blooded, the sunny-natured and the loving cling to life as petals cling to the calyx of a budding rose. By and by when the rose is over-ripe, or when the frosts come and the November winds are trumpeting through all the leafless spaces of the woods, will be the time to die. It is no time now, while there is a dark space left on earth that love can brighten, while there is a human lot to be alleviated by a smile, or a burden to be lifted with a sympathizing tear. It will be time to die when you are too old or too sick to be a comfort in the world, but if God has given you a warm heart and a ready hand, look about you and be glad He lets you live. Yesterday I was passing through the street and I saw a woman stoop down and pick up a faded lilac from the middle of a crossing and transfer it to a corner where it would not be trampled under foot. The world wants such people alive in it, not buried under its green sods. The heart that is not unmindful of a crushed flower will be a royal hand in the ministrations of life. May the day tarry long on its way that lays in the grave such helpful, tender hands that seek to do good.

The good book says, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," but it don't say, Tell thy neighbor all thy secrets. We can love one another without establishing an unsafe intimacy. In an age when so little remains set apart and sacred, keep the treasury of your inmost heart intact. It is a hard thing to believe that in every present friend is hidden a possible future enemy, but it is safer to shape the conduct of our life upon that belief than to live to see our inmost thoughts and the sanctities of one's heart of hearts hawked about like green peas in a street vender's basket by a spiteful and treacherous enemy. The safest course to pursue in a world so full of unfaith and desertions is to be friendly and sweet and helpful to all, but communicative and confiding to none.

Once when I was a child, with two long yellow braids down my back, and a very great capacity for happiness in my heart, I lived in a remote country with an aunt who didn't believe in any one having too good a time here on earth. She thought they would appreciate the new Jerusalem all the more, perhaps, for having a dismal experience here (there are lots like her, too, in the world to-day). Well, once afterward when I came home from school (and, ah! as I write how I can see the old road where I walked, winding its way under silver birches by the side of a trout-brook), somebody came out of the house and beckoned wildly, madly for me to hurry up. It was my little cousin, and she looked as though she had just skipped out of heaven! Her cheeks were all aglow and her eyes were shining like stars. "Oh, come! Come quick!" she shouted. "There's something in the parlor." I made haste to enter, and there before me sat a doll, the biggest and most splendid it had ever entered my young heart to imagine. It was dressed in pink tarletan, and had a pair of jeweled earrings in its exceedingly life-like ears. At once I became embarrassed. Self-consciousness sprang into full being. I was painfully aware that my own dress and general appearance suffered by contrast with the doll. Nor have I ever since experienced a keener sensation of embarrassment than overcame me as I faced that gaudy image in wax. My aunt's sarcastic remark, "No wonder that child's mother can't lay up a cent for a rainy day when she throws away her dollars on a doll like that!" gave me the sad impression that my darling mother was a spendthrift, something after the pattern of the prodigal son. From the first moment the doll was a source of disappointment and sorrow to me. I never could play with it with any comfort because I was afraid of soiling its splendid clothes, losing its earrings, or feeling myself and my calico and homespun abashed by its superior attire. That doll did me no good, and just what it did for me its costly and extravagantly dressed sisterhood is doing for hundreds of little girls to-day. Too fine to be played with, rigged out in all its paraphernalia of empty headed flesh and blood women, with powder, puff and bustles, real jewelry and costly lingerie, the modern doll is a demoralizer, a torment.

Protracted broiling is, I think, on the whole, more wearing to the sensibilities than sudden conflagration. A lightning stroke is soon over, but who shall deliver us from the torments of dog-days? A bull of Bashan encountered in a ten-acre lot may be outrun, but who shall escape from a cloud of mosquitoes on a windless night? Give me any day a life to live with a tempestuous, gusty sort of person, and I can endure it, but deliver me from existence with one who bottles up his thunder and looks like a storm that never breaks. A hearty shower, beating down the flowers to call them up again in fresher beauty, brightening the hills and swelling the brooks, treading with musical footfall the dusty streets, and lashing the violet-tinted lake into a foam-flecked sea, veining the hot air with sudden fire, and calling out a thousand echoes to answer the thunder's call, is it not far better than lowering skies that look rain and won't yield it, dragging, sultry days of neither sunshine nor storm?

LINES TO MY LOVE.

When the salt has left the ocean, And the moon forgets the sea, When with gay and festive motion Ox shall waltz with bee, When we wash our face in cinders, And bake our meat on ice, When tender mercy hinders The cat from eating the mice, When gray heads grace young shoulders And icicles form in June, When Quakers all turn soldiers, And bull frogs sing in tune, Then, and not till then, my treasure, My darling, tender and true, My heart shall claim the leisure To think no more of you.

The other morning, lured by the splendor of a golden day, I started to walk to town, a distance of twenty-four miles. But after the tenth mile the truth was so forcibly and increasingly borne in upon me that "all flesh is grass," and that the strength of a man (or woman either) "lieth not in his heels," that I postponed the finish until another day. But who shall take from me the glory of the start? Shall anybody forget that a sunrise was fair and full of promise because the noon was clouded and the evening declined into rain? Although my twenty-five-mile walk ended at the tenth in a rocking-chair, yet those ten miles were beautiful and full of glory.

"It will certainly kill you!" wailed the martyr as I bade her good-bye. "Oh, will it kill her?" echoed the poor little Captain, and lifted up her voice in lamentation as I vanished from her sight and struck for the bluff road. The morning was so beautiful that I could imagine the world nothing but a big bunch of tulips standing within a crystal vase in the sun. The maples glistened like gold, and were flecked with ruby drops that burned and glowed like spilled wine. The oaks were russet brown and dusky purple, cleft here and there with vivid green, like glimpses of a windy sea through shadowed hills. The leaves that had fallen to the earth were musical underneath the foot, and gave forth a faint fragrance that made the air as sweet as any bakeshop. The odor of fallen leaves and wood shrubs sinking into decay is not like any other fragrance so much as the scent of well-baked bread, browned and finished in summer's ruddy heat.

The lake—but what can I say to fitly describe that translucent sapphire, over which a mist hung like a gossamer web above a blue-bell, or the haze of slumber upon a drowsy eye? As I stood upon the bluff, before the road struck landward through the woods, I could but extend my arm to the glorious expanse of waters and bless the Lord with all my soul for so lovely a place to tarry in between times. If this world is only a stopping-place, a country through which we march to heaven, as Sherman marched overland to the sea, then thank God for so glorious a prelude to eternity; and what shall the after harmonies be when the broken sounds of idly-touched flutes and harps are so divine?

After leaving Ravinia I proceeded to get lost in the woods. A very small boy and a very large dog were standing by a fence. "Does that dog bite?" I asked. "Yes'm," promptly replied the sweet and candid child. So I climbed a fence and struck for the timber. I soon found that all knowledge of the points of the compass had failed me. "If I am going east," I mused, "I shall soon strike the lake; if west, the track; south will eventually bring me to the Chicago River; but a northerly direction will restore me to the sleuth-hound. I will say my prayers and endeavor to keep to the south." The way grew denser. My hat gave me some trouble, as it insisted upon hanging itself to every tree in the wilderness. The twigs twitched the hair-pins from my hair and poked themselves into my eyes. A few corpulent bugs toyed with my ankles and a large caterpillar passed the blockade of my collar-button and basked in the warmth of my neck. I nearly stepped on a snake and was confronted by a toad that froze me with a glance of its basilisk eye. So I changed my course and suddenly entered a little woodland graveyard—a handful of neglected mounds of earth and silence. No tombstones marked the graves. A rudely-constructed cross of wood, gray with lichens, alone told of consecrated ground. There, away off from the road in the silence of the woods, a few tired hearts were taking their rest. Silently I stood a moment, then stole away and left the place to its hush of lonely peace. What right had I, with my frets and feathers, my twig-punctured eye-balls and my toad-perturbed nerves, to bring an unquiet presence within this abode of silence and of rest? I sat down on a fence-rail a moment while, like Miss Riderhood, I deftly twisted up my back hair and mused briefly. When the time comes, oh, intensely alive and happy Amber, for your feet to halt in the march, ask to be buried in the woods, where your grave will be forgotten and the constant years with falling leaves and driving snows may have a good chance to obliterate the earthly record of your misspent years.

"Sooner or later the shadows shall creep Over my rest in the woods so deep; Sooner or later—"

But enough of this, my dear. I did not intend to incorporate a whole cemetery, an obituary discourse, and "lines to the departed" in my "Glints." After leaving the little graveyard I allowed my instincts to carry me in a new direction, and soon a rustling among the dead leaves, and the sound of hushed breathing, convinced me that I was approaching a living presence. I felt for my revolver. It was there, but unloaded. (I would sooner walk arm in arm with death than carry loaded firearms.) I advanced bravely and became speedily aware of a score or so of large and startled eyes, all fixed upon me. A half-score of woolly heads were lifted, and a flock of sheep stood ready to take instant flight if I showed sign of battle. "My dear young friends," said I, "it is a relief to meet you, and I give you good morrow. I fully expected to encounter a band of cutthroat tramps who should toss pennies for my heart's blood. The blessings of a rescued woman rest upon your crinkly coats, my beauties." A half-hour's walk through the woods brought me to a clearing where a flock of bluebirds were holding council together among the falling leaves. They seemed inclined to start southward, but tarried for one last frolic. How beautiful they were as they flitted in and out among the golden underbrush no eye but mine shall ever know. Bluebirds have always been associated with thoughts of spring and apple-blossoms heretofore. I could hardly believe my senses to find them here amid the late and falling leaves. For a while I loitered in their midst and wished for a fairy to change me into one of their winged company, that I might forget care and find no need of revolvers; but time, as sternly announced by my exquisite Waterbury, admitted of no delay, so I hied me onward. At this point in my walk I approached a broken gate and a stretch of shockingly muddy road. The vanity of confidence in any strength that emanates alone from the "heels of a man" was by this time beginning to make itself felt. I longed to sit down in the miry way and go to sleep. A child could have played with me despite my revolver, and a day-old lamb have gained the victory in a personal encounter. At this moment, while I lingered, picking my way daintily from tuft to tuft of the swamp, I was confronted by a tall, gaunt woman. Of course you don't believe this; it reads too much like a dime novel. You think I am painting my picture in lurid tints for public exhibition, but in spite of your incredulity I repeat that I was confronted by a tall, gaunt woman, who appeared as suddenly as though invoked by an evil spell from the mud. The woman was shabbily dressed and wore an old-fashioned scoop bonnet. She had a bundle on her arm, and was dragging by the hair of the head, as it were, an indescribable umbrella. My voice sank out of sight, like a stone in the sea, and my feet grew too heavy to lift. I stared in silence. "Is your name Maria Hopkins?" asked the woman.

"Indeed it is," I replied, prepared to get down on my knees and swear to the truth of what I said, if need be. "I thought so," said my companion; "let us pray." But I didn't stop for prayers. Convinced that my time had come, and that I was in the presence of a lunatic, I fell over the fence and ran. When I was out of breath I looked over my shoulder, but the woman was nowhere in sight. To pursue my walk seemed unnecessary, especially as I was nearing the house of a friend, so summoning what strength was left me I toddled onward, completing my tenth mile in five hours from the starting. After my sympathizing friend had emptied her camphor bottle upon me I asked her if she knew a party of the name of Hopkins anywhere in town, and if there was any resemblance between such a person and myself. I saw she thought I was delirious, and no explanation has ever dispelled that belief. Some day I shall complete the walk and write up the finish.

Said some one to me the other day: "Amber, you have lots of good friends among the girls." "Good," said I; "then I am all right." Anybody who gains the friendly approval of the right sort of girls has a passport right through to glory! I mean it. There is nothing on earth I love better than a good, sweet girl. I would rather watch a crowd of them any day than all the pictures Fra Angelica ever painted of saints in paradise. But there are girls and girls. There is as much difference between them as there is between griddle cakes made with yeast and griddle cakes in which the careless cook forgot to put the leaven. Shall I tell you the kind of girl I especially adore? Well, first of all, let us take the working girl. She is not a "lady" in the acceptance of the term by this latter day's hybrid democracy. She is just a blithe, cheery, sweet-tempered young woman. She may have a father rich enough to support her at home, but for all that she is a working girl. She is never idle. She is studying or sewing or helping about the home part of the day. She is romping or playing or swinging out of doors the other part. She is never frowsy nor untidy nor lazy. She is never rude nor slangy nor bold. And yet she is always full of fun and ready for frolic. She does not depend upon a servant to do what she can do for herself. She is considerate to all who serve her. She is reverent to the old and thoughtful of the feeble. She never criticises when criticism can wound, and she is ready with a helpful, loving word for every one. Sometimes she has no father, or her parents are too poor to support her. Then she goes out and earns her living by whatever her hands find to do. She clerks in a store, or she counts out change at a cashier's desk, or she teaches school, or she clicks a typewriter, or rather a telegrapher's key, but always and everywhere she is modest and willing and sweet, provided she doesn't get that meddlesome little "bee" of "lady"-hood in her bonnet. If she tries to be a lady at the expense of all that is honest and frank in her nature, she is like a black baby crying for a black kitten in the dark—you can't tell what she is exactly, but you know she is mighty disagreeable. She has too much dignity to be imposed upon, or put to open affront, but she has humility also, and purity that differs from prudishness as a dove in the air differs from a stuffed bird in a showcase. She is quick to apologize when she knows she is in the wrong, yet no young queen ever carried a higher head than she can upon justifiable occasions. She is not always imagining herself looked down upon because she is poor. She knows full well that out of her own heart and mouth proceed the only witnesses that can absolve or condemn her. If she eats peanuts in public places, and talks loud, and flirts with strange boys, and chews gum or displays a toothpick she is common, even though she wore a four-foot placard emblazoned with the misnomer, "lady." If she is quick to be courteous, unselfish, gentle and retiring in speech and manner in public places, she is true gold, even though her dress be faded and her bonnet be old. You cannot mistake any girl any more than you can mistake the sunshine that follows the rain or the lark that springs from the hawthorn hedge. All things that are blooming and sweet attend her! The earth is better for her passing through it and heaven will be fairer for her habitation therein. God bless her!

Some day I am going gunning. In a reform dress suit, with the right to vote in my pocket, and a shotgun delicately poised upon my enfranchised shoulder, I shall start forth on my "safety" and proceed to lay low for a few victims. The first to perforate with my murderous bullet shall be the fiend in human guise who toys with my "copy" from time to time and makes me spell whether without an "h," or so distorts the sense of what I write that my best friends wouldn't know me from Martin Tupper. I shall show no mercy to him. I shall continue to shoot until he is perforated like a yard of mosquito netting, and I shall leave a little note pinned to the lapel of his coat saying that I have more bullets left for his "successor in trust." If there is one thing that has survived the buffetings of a harsh and somewhat disconcerting bout with fate it is the knowledge that I know how to spell. But even of this the fiend in question would deprive me. He has brought his fate upon himself and will excuse me if I remark that I thirst for his gore.

Dominated by that superfluous energy which has, so far, rendered my earthly career cyclonic, I called together a confiding band during the height of the recent snow carnival for the purpose of a sleigh ride. The opening up of that sleigh ride was propitious. The caravan moved due north, bound for a destination that shall be nameless. We tried to look upon the attention we attracted as a public ovation, but it was far more suggestive of the way they used to accompany outlaws beyond the limits of a mining town, or of the children of Israel chased by Pharaoh's mocking hosts. It was cold. Our noses, in the light of a wan old moon, looked like doorknobs. Our ears cracked to the lightest touch, like harp strings in the wind. Patient, long-suffering "doctor!" Shall I ever forget how, turning to him when the carnival of sport was at its height, I murmured: "Are you enjoying yourself, dear?" And he replied, with ghastly sarcasm: "Tumultuously, my love!" So might an arctic frigate, ice-bound, have hailed a polar bear. Suddenly, when all seemed progressing serenely, we came to a standstill, something like what might be expected from a runaway horse checked by the newly patented electric button. What was the matter? Bare ground. Now, under ordinary circumstances, the term "bare ground" is not synonymous of disaster. But if ever in the dispensation of providence it falls to your lot to be one of a band of sleigh-riding imbeciles then shall those two words be to you what snags in the channel are to seaward-hastening keels. The driver shouted and became distinctly profane. "Would you please get out and walk over this bad place?" said he. With such speed as our petrified members would allow we all got out, and the women sat on a wayside fence, while the men "heaved to" and dragged the chariot over about a mile and a quarter of bare ground.

"Shall we make for the nearest line of street cars?" asked one of the party, whose well-known position as Sunday-school superintendent kept him in a state of abnormal calm. "What will become of the sleigh and the poor, tired horses?" asked that one of the party directly responsible for this mad jubilee.

"Oh, you women can lead the horses while we men carry the old band wagon on our shoulders back to shelter." "It is no time for jokes," cried one, "I am going home," and we all followed suit, to vow later, in the shelter of our happy homes, that our future attempts at sleigh riding should be confined to wheels and the time of roses.

I think I would rather lose this serviceable old right hand of mine than have it write a word that could be construed into defense or encouragement of loud and blatant women. The over-dressed and slangy sisterhood who parade in public places and storm the land these latter days will meet with nothing from Amber and her pen but wholesale denunciation while the lamp of an insignificant life holds out to burn. I hate them as a Quaker hates gunpowder, and I am more than half inclined to believe that the total extermination of the stock would be one of the supremest blessings that could be vouchsafed to man. The tendencies toward boldness and effrontery which characterize the present day, the unabashed speech and action and the manifest lack of old-fashioned courtesy and the reserve that springs from gentle breeding are evils that grow rather than diminish. A gentlewoman, a pure, correct and lovely gentlewoman, occupies a loftier place than any throne, and wields an influence more potent than the swing of a jeweled scepter. Yet it is never by vulgar assumption that she enters into her kingdom. The parrot is not a bird we prize, although its plumage is resplendent with green and purple and gold. In the proud breast of the homely and unpretentious thrush is hidden the heavenly song. Wherever gentle forbearance is found, wherever patience and tenderness and love idealize and sweeten life, there you will find woman as heaven meant she should be—the crowned queen of hearth and home. And in saying all this I do not wish to be understood as advancing the idea that a woman has no wider scope than home, or that she must be all sugar, without any spice. Next to the loud and bold-mannered woman as a specimen to be detested I would put the meek Griselda, with less spirit than a boneless herring and less sparkle than tepid tea. There is no charm left to femininity when you add idiocy to a pretty woman's make-up. A fool may be very docile, but a fool is not good company. Of the two, perhaps, if a man were forced to choose a comrade to share a life that was to be cast on a South Sea island, he would do better to take the "loud" type. Either would drive him to the "cups," if such relief were to be found upon an island of the sea. But who would not rather go to wreck in a storm than founder in becalmed waters? Or, to bring it nearer home, who would not rather be drowned away out in the middle of Lake Michigan in a howling gale than in a gentle 7×9 cistern? If circumstances call a woman out into the thickest of the old bread-and-butter fight that has been waging ever since Eve ran afoul of the apple, it is to her credit if she rolls up her sleeves and goes into the thickest of the scrimmage and holds her own with the pluckiest of them all. It is no disgrace to her to be quick to seize an opportunity and shrewd to find a point of vantage. Let her rank with the men, and make ever so fine a name for herself in whatever business vocation she chooses to make her own, it will not detract one whit from her womanliness, provided she keep herself unsullied of soul and tender of heart. The moment she lends herself to practices that lead men to forget to touch their hats when she passes by she becomes unsexed, and a sexless woman is worse than a pestilence, a cyclone and a strike condensed into one vast calamity. No sensible man will think any less of a woman if she has spirit enough to get downright mad at injustice, insult or iniquity. I don't know, though, why we women should always get together and compare notes as to what course of conduct will best please the men. They don't lie awake nights to conform their behavior to ways and manners that shall please us; but, even putting our argument on the basis of what shall win approval from men, I repeat that I don't believe that there are many of them who would object to a woman knowing how to use a pistol or to her carrying one in case of an unprotected walk, or a night spent in an unguarded home. There would be fewer tales to tell of assaults and woful disappearances of young women if all our girls were versed in the ethics of the revolver. Ah, my dear, you can never get a more adorable portrait of a woman to hang upon the walls of glorified fancy than the pen-portrait drawn by the master hand of Robert Browning when he wrote of beautiful Evelyn Hope: "God made her of spirit, fire and dew." There is the swiftest and most splendid stroke of the artist's brush ever given to literature. And yet half the world would substitute "putty" for "spirit," "feathers" for "fire" and "dough" for "dew."