a difference, but somehow, the women of the present day are so disillusionising, and to be in love one has to live on illusion. I have no illusions in regard to a woman's modesty; she has not as much as a man. This may be shocking and, to an American, sacrilegious, but nevertheless true. A woman, whose morals are like Cæsar's wife's, will dress in front of a window with the blinds up, when a man will not. A woman, in conversation, will handle without gloves subjects that a man handles with tongs, or not at all. I took a woman in to dinner the other night whom I had met but once before, but we had many common friends, mostly of her own sex. galed me with an account of their diseases, of operations that had been performed upon them, and like private facts of which I had been previously ignorant. I tried

She re

to lead her gently back into channels less personal and distressing to others, but her pride in the fact that she was the only woman of her acquaintance quite sound and healthy must be proved first. I could not help wondering, if our friends could have overheard, what sort of a death they would have wished her.

I am so glad your affairs are coming on so well. I firmly believe there is a certain sort of magnetism about a piece of luck that draws another piece out of its hidingplace. Please don't tell me there is no such thing as "luck." A man told me that once, and he is now where he deserves to be — in a lunatic asylum. You certainly have a marvellous capacity to control your destiny, but I also have a marvellous capacity to let my destiny control me. Perhaps mine may prove the better way.

Hour by hour I have writ and writ, so see you do the same. Answer this or prepare to blush with shame on the Judgment Yours,

Day.

DOUGLAS DAYTON.

SECOND LETTER

DEAR DOUGLAS :

West Braintree, Mass.

So you have read and disliked Amiel's Journal. It seemed to me worthy of more praise than you vouchsafe it. But when one is in bed, as am I through this stupid accident, it is a temptation to devour books, and to leave the critical faculty to one side.

How many years it is since you and I knew one another well! I mean by daily contact. Since then, I have been ten years a country parson in Massachusetts, and you

what have you been or become? At all events, you have lost none of your kindliness, else I should not have heard from you

so soon after my accident. That I should have plunged into writing you of books may have surprised you, but books have been for a long time my adventures, as I fancy they have not been yours. It is wonderful how we slough off an old self, and forget him until the companion of that old self brings him fresh to mind. You at the club in New York, how could you be expected to visualise my parish here in West Braintree? I sometimes wonder how I got here myself! I who know the streets of London, Paris, Leipzig, and Berlin better than I know the tortuous paved paths of Boston, even here am I jogging along in as narrow a round of duties as ever befell a parson. There are people here, not an hour and a half from Boston by rail, who have never been to Boston, -two of my parishioners, indeed, have never been in a train.