outside clamor; voices of broken faith and lost opportunity and neglected tasks; voices of tawdry. ambitions that have been given a home in our hearts; voices of indulged pride and pampered vanity; voices of rebel longings and secret shames; the piteous, terrorizing voice of the wounded conscience. So that the silence "that is among the lonely hills" may serve but to make more audible these thin, shrill voices of inward origin. True silence we can know only when these voices within the sanctuary of the heart are stilled. Solitude will serve the purpose of making them audible, of revealing their existence to us. They are not to be easily or quickly quieted; how easily must depend upon their number and power. Time, contrition, a new life of grimmer resolve and more stubborn effort may be necessary. Only gradually, perhaps, will the thronging legionaries of all the lusts of the flesh, the crowd of selfseeking, self-asserting appetites and desires we have allowed to live with us be routed, slain, or manacled. And then the silence will grow until at length, above the deepening harmony of the subject powers of heart and mind and will, the clear, conquering voice of the higher self will be heard singing its joyous lay; a strain, which, like the wood-thrush's song in the midmost forest, is elate and ecstatic, yet peaceful as the unrippled surface of deep waters. Confessions of a Confirmed Lecturer...Gerald Stanley Lee...Criterion Theophilus had come home the day before from attending a course of lectures by himself. He had something on his mind. Every now and then he gave the fire a little gentle spoiling with the tongs. He lifted the back-log once or twice and put it on in front. I quietly put it back. He took no notice. Every few minutes he would get up and walk to the end of the room as if he were looking for something. Finally I said (he was looking eagerly at a door panel): "What are you thinking about, Theophilus?" "My soul!" said he, savagely. "Oh!" said I. I thought of several other things, but I confined my remark to this. Perhaps, as things turned out, it was the best I could have said. I took up my book again. It was not very many minutes before I felt him standing behind me. "Still at it?" said I. "Yes." "I don't see," said I, “why you “Well, you would, if you were going to Boston to-night and had to give a lecture you've never given before, on heaven only knows what, to the Club." "Couldn't be better," laughed I. "The very people of all others to make you forget yourself. They always help you to your best. You couldn't have an audience that had more confidence in you, Theophilus-more-" ness "Can't you see the point, man? I'm under a business engagement, eight o'clock this evening, doors open at seven, Copley Hall, Boston, ‘a busiengagement to be liked.'" Theophilus glared at me. "I'm not saying I'm not a fool, John; I've a right to be if I want to. It's an artificial, unspiritual, unintellectual, unreal (don't interrupt me!) prehistorically stupid thing to do -this bragging and advertising in advance, this sending out handbills for a man's soul; and here you are, supposably a sane and sympathetic human being, actually sitting by my fireside, with my slippers on, stroking your shins and stretching your arms, and yawning, and calmly wondering at me because-because I've been going about all day trying to arrange myself as I ought, and looking at myself with myself with other people's eyes." Theophilus paused. "If other people don't get any more out of it," he said, "than I do, I'm sorry for 'em." "I wonder what people go to a lecture for, anyway," speculated I. "So do I," said Theophilus. "I always wonder about it. I never think of anything else at mine, the first fifteen minutes." "Nobody does," said I. "It's what the first fifteen minutes of a lecture are for." "Never comes to anything, though," Theophilus added drearily; "I don't think anybody's ever found out yet why people go to lectures." "To rest their minds, dear." Henrietta had stolen into the study behind us. "Did you ever see an audience a single time in your life, Henrietta, Resting Its Mind? Was it the Woman's Club?" (Theophilus looked from his wife to me, with The Husband's Look.) "Did you know that the main drawback in being a lecturer at all, my dear-in going around the country from one audience to another, night after night-the main drawback is that an audience was never yet known in the history of this vale of tears to rest Its Mind?” "Of course it drops Its Mind," said Theophilus tentatively, "sometimes, and it laughs a little and picks it up again, and it has rested places in It; but I challenge anybody to scour this country from east to west, and catch a single audience anywhere in the act of Resting Its Mind. People never rest their minds at lectures. What they do is to come flocking in upon you, aisle after aisle. Then they plump themselves down before you. Then they arrange themselves. Then they lorgnette you. Then they sit there, row after row of them, and 'look responsible !'" Theophilus sighed as if he were casting off infinite audiences. "The fact is, we are all nervously broken down. We live too fast. We think too fast. Our very smiles are tired nowadays," said I. “And what is wanted in lectures," returned Theophilus, "is some way of arranging a kind of a murmur-something that will keep up an appearance of going on and yet relax people-something that will put them in the æsthetic mood, make them relax and think at the same time. I wish I knew some good stationary words, to use in lectures--words for people to wait in," Theophilus added thoughtfully. "There is no chance to say a thing suggestively, artistically." "A man like Theophilus," asserted Henrietta, "ought to lecture with a violin obligato." "Yes," said I. "Warble a few words-suggest the motif, and then stand perfectly still like a Statue of The Thought and let the violin enlarge upon it." "That's the way Theophilus lectures, anyhow," said Henrietta. "Silence would be better," responded Theophilus. "Yes," assented Henrietta. "Incidental silence -just the soft little orchestras in people's souls, going 'tum, tum, tum,' thinking the beautiful things you must have meant." "A man whose chief value consists in conveying moods, subtle suggestions, playing upon associations," Theophilus began seriously "Should lecture with a stereopticon," said I. There was a dead hush. It was the family hush of horror. Something seemed to be going on. Finally. "The stereopticon, John," said Theophilus, slowly (in what he supposed was his tone of self-control), "the stereopticon is an invention for not saying anything without being found out." "And what Theophilus wants is an invention for making people lecture to themselves," said Henrietta. "Some way of turning off the electricity in a lecture-room and turning it on to people's minds." "Yes," agreed Theophilus. "What people want is something that will light their minds from the inside." "The way Emerson did," said Henrietta. "And what a stereopticon lecturer does is exactly the opposite." "Instead of turning a current on the minds of his audience, he turns their minds off entirely," During the last few days accounts have appeared in the newspapers of a young lady-a Miss Maud Pryce-who suddenly lost her memory. She started out for a bicycle ride possessed of normal ability to recollect her past life. She was brought home only a short time later having forgotten everything-unable to recognize even her mother. Her home, her surroundings, all seemed strange; she did not know who she was nor where she came from-she had lost, as one is at first tempted to think, her individuality altogether. But on second thought one asks-Does individuality depend entirely on memory? If so, a good memory is certainly the greatest of mental gifts, and loss of memory is, while it lasts, the loss of the soul. Surely this cannot be the case. Memory can have but a reflex action on the character, which is slowly and irrevocably built up day by day, and which we are loth indeed to think can be destroyed by an illness or a blow on the head. A man in middle life might have an accident which left his youth a blank while not depriving him of the immediate use of his mental powers. He might suffer what we may call a conscious annihilation; he might no longer know himself or, rather, know what to expect of himself. Each new predisposition or tendency might surprise him as circumstances called it into sight; yet all those who had known him before he lost the power of recollection would be able to predict with tolerable certainty how he would act in any given situation-because they would know his character. If he had been kind, he would not be cruel because he had forgotten his former kindnesses. If he had been mean, he would not suddenly become generous because he had forgotten the details of his past penury. Memory is not the only record which a man bears in himself of his past actions, thoughts, and sufferings. These things become built into his character, which is not so much the sum as the outcome of them. A cathedral will continue to exist long after it is clean forgotten who designed it, and where the stones came from. A child, or even a dog, who has been subjected to cruelty before he is old enough to remember bears witness to that cruelty during his whole life, and will most probably grow up either timidly or else savagely suspicious, showing in his disposition the bitter fruit of forgotten experience. Some one who has all his life indulged his worst passions will not, if he should lose his memory, begin life again as an innocent child with a child's chance of leaving an admirable record. His character will not be recreated because he is unable to recollect its development. The personality of such a man is for the moment unconscious, but the daily round of events will soon bring it back to itself. The English people are said to forget their history, but every decade of our story is none the less recorded upon our national character. History repeats itself alike with men and nations. If we forget, we lose the power to predict, and impair our power of judgment, which faculty, according to Montaigne, depends preeminently upon the memory, but we do not lose our individuality. The effect upon us of the past is indelible whether we recollect it or no. We are said, as a nation, to forget our defeats, but the effect of the pain they cause is to make us fight with more grim determination next time. One often hears it said —“If in the next world I am to forget the events of my life here, I do not care to live again. Indeed, having lost my individuality, I consider that such an existence would be tantamount to annihilation." Now, while we agree that such a future life would be hardly worth living, we do. not think it would be in any sense annihilation. The generality of people recollect nothing before their fifth year, but they do not begin to count their existence from then. If the mental and moral conditions in the unseen world resemble the mental and moral conditions on this earth, it scems neither impossible nor unjust that our happiness or unhappiness, our worth or worthlessness, under our new conditions should depend upon the success we had attained in the race that was set before us here-and that although we had forgotten the running of it. Happily there is no ground for supposing that we shall lose our memories in the next world. If we accept any form of revealed religion, we must believe that our recollections of what happened on earth will be only too terribly vivid. We shall be able to give a full account of all that we did. "Son, remember," were the first words heard by Dives when he awoke after his soul had left his body. No doubt pleasant memories will be equally heightened with regrettable ones. The good deeds of some people will reappear before their eyes in all the gracious detail which humble men forget. But the bulk of our recollections consists of neither good actions nor bad. Memory is for the most part "a trivial fond record" of the affairs of everyday life, and our intense desire not to lose the remembrance of these unimportant everyday matters is one of the greatest testimonies to the predominance of happiness over unhappiness in the world. Do we not feel sorry from our hearts for anyone who has lost such an infinitely precious possession without even wondering whether or no there was anything in their past lives worth recollecting? After all, how few are the hours which any of us would blot out of our lives. Those, perhaps, during which we have witnessed or suffered acute physical or mental pain, the moment when we engendered the worm of remorse which dieth not, or those few minutes of humiliation which, whether we trace them to fault or fate, remain in our minds to "vex us like a thing that is raw." But how small is the part we would have taken away compared to the part we would retain. So much value do we set upon mere experience that even dreadful recollections often become dear in our eyes. What soldier would willingly forget his moments of extreme danger? The agnostic in Sir Alfred Lyall's poem entitled Theology in Extremis, who finds himself suddenly called on to endure torture and to sacrifice his life for his country, dreads the loss of his memory more than that of anything else which makes life sweet to him"Surely He pities who made the brain, When breaks that record of memories sweet." He feels that the loss to him of his past cannot seem a small thing even in the eyes of the Eternal to whom a thousand years are but as yesterday. Human nature seems instinctively to rebel against the yielding up of that which we all imagine that Providence has given us to be irrevocably our own. The present is too near to us to be seen in proportion, it passes too quickly to allow us to contemplate it; the future we can only grope after. If we lose the past, what have we left? A We believe the true relation of memory to individuality to be this. It is the one thing which lends it its value. Memory is the only thing which can, so to speak, endear a man to himself; without it he would as soon cease to exist. new store of recollections might be laid up in a new life, but if he had the choice, who would have the heart to begin again? The idea of a fresh start in a new world would have little fascination for us if we could know that we should never see again, even in memory, a face we had loved; never hear, even in imagination, the friendly voices which once delighted us. Should we care to awake possessed of nothing save that indefinable something which we call "personality," whose proclivities alone would bear witness to our forgotten past? Would any man choose to live again if he were sure he would be unable to recall the image of any friend, however intimate, even of that most intimate friend of all his forgotten self? Sayings of the Children* "Johnny, what distinguished foreigner aided the Americans in the Revolution?" Johnny (after a pause)-"God." -Tommy-We have got a new baby at our house. Sally (with upturned nose)-We don't want one; we've got a piano. -While walking in the suburbs, the Bishop of Norwich met a little girl of about eight or nine, who asked: "Oh, please sir, will you open this gate for me?" The bishop, smiling on the demure little maiden, held back the gate for her to pass through and when she thanked him with a smile, he asked her if she was not big enough to open the garden gate herself. "Oh, yes, sir," she replied, sweetly; "but, you see, the paint is wet and I should have dirtied my hands." ———A gentleman went into a shop one day to buy something. It was early, and the shopkeeper and his little boy were alone in the house. The shopkeeper had to go upstairs to get his cashbox in order to procure some change, but before doing so he went into the little room next to the shop and whispered to the boy: "Watch the gentleman that he don't steal anything," and, bringing him out, scated him on the counter. As soon as the shopkeeper returned the child sang out, "Pa, he didn't steal anything; I watched him." A child of Sunny Italy, with organ and monkey attachment, stopped in front of a house to the manifest delight of a little three-year-old girl. After watching the antics of the redskirted monkey for several minutes the little one begged a penny from her mother to give to the monkey. When she returned from the halldoor her mother asked what she had done with the penny. "I gave it to the monkey, mamma,” was the reply. "And what did he do with it?" queried the mother. "He gave it to his papa!" -A story which Mr. Chamberlain is said to be telling against himself just now is good enough to be true. A well-known inspector of schools spent a good quarter of an hour in impressing upon the little girls of a school near Birmingham the beauties of Nature, the wonderful nature of flowers, of trees, and of running streams. At the end of his discourse he thought fit to put a few questions. "Now, who is it," he asked, "who made these wonderful things? Who is it who made each blade of grass?" "Mr. Chamberlain!" was the prompt answer of the little girl who was *Compiled from Contemporaries, top. "Surely," said the inspector, rather taken aback, "surely Mr. Chamberlain could not make a blade of grass?" "O!" said the little girl, "you must be a pro-Boer!" Little Edith had been very sick, but was convalescent. Waking up suddenly and finding a strange lady at her bedside, she asked: "Are you the doctor?" "No dear," replied the lady, "I'm your trained nurse." "Oh!" exclaimed Edith pointing to a cage hanging near the window, "trained nurse, let me introduce you to my trained canary." —A pretty anecdote is related of a child who was greatly perturbed by the discovery that her brothers had set traps to catch birds. Questioned as to what she had done in the matter, she replied: "I prayed that the traps might not catch the birds." "Anything else?" "Yes," she said. "I then prayed that God would prevent the birds getting into the traps, and," as if to illustrate the doctrine of faith and works, "I went and kicked the traps all to pieces." -The youngest daughter of Mrs. Walter Damrosch was about finishing her prayers the other night when she abruptly asked her mother to "please leave the room," as there was something for which she wished to give extra and special thanks. Her mother wanted to know what it was, but the child let it be understood that it was of too personal and private a nature for even a mother to know about. Her mother accordingly withdrew; but the next night, when the same request was made, she insisted upon knowing just what it meant. "Well," said the little girl, after much persuasion, "I just wanted to give fanks for bein' 'lowed to steal some sugar the other day!" -There was once a little girl of four years or less, of fractious, but affectionate disposition, and who had a sweet and patient elder sister named Lily. After putting the little one to bed one night their mother overheard her offering the following prayer: "Now, God, you know I can't be good, but give me a hundred chances, and then if I'm not good to Lil let me die!" -The daughter of a prominent clergyman in New York City was playing with her little chum the other day. The latter said, “Oh, you ought to see the nice large egg my hen laid this morning. It is the largest, prettiest egg I ever saw.” "Pshaw!" said the dominie's daughter, "that ain't nothing, my papa laid a corner stone last week."‡ Contributed to Current Literature. What do you think the sailor ate? Of very long-forgotten date. Which would tend to underrate So long as the life of a Xerobate To throw him down from the minaret yate, Or give him a dose of zirconate. Miss Kitty's Lament.......... Ruth Sprague...... ...New York Press In your big Paris dolly's old second best dress, You say I look "cunning" and "awfully sweet," But what do I care about that? I'd rather chase flies on my four little feet, And be just a plain fur-dressed cat. It was very kind of you, that I will say, I really and truly don't care about style, If I did not love you a lot, Mistress Bess, |