and Nocturne is bowed out of the store with the profoundest deference. Nocturne and Bridget must both provide for winter, the demand is identical; the mode of meeting that demand, how different!

And yet, when all is said, these are but minor matters. I think more sadly of my laundress for other griefs than these.

A favorite servant once said to me as she wiped the perspiration from her face after a hard day's work, "I wonder if you ever think what a poor life it is for us who must be always managing to get a bit to eat and something to wear? We must be always working for the body and doing nothing for the soul, and yet after a while the body'll go away from us, but the soul, you know, never goes away.

I cannot forget the words, and memory still brings back with sad distinctness the plaintive tones in which poor, patient Margaret said, "The soul, you know, will never go away." Pitiful as it is to be hungry and cold; painfully industrious as a woman must be to ward off cold and hunger by the labors of the laundry, there is something still more pitiful in the life-long hunger of unfed capacities, and the stupor of faculties unused.

A deformed body is a sad sight, I know; but who shall paint the frightful portrait of a deformed soul? We think but little of it in this world, where things visible so much engross us, but it is none the less true that the screen of a material form delivers us from the hideous spectacle which many an undisguised soul would present.

Weakened by disease; distorted by the life-long grasp of ignorance, scarred in its futile strife with fate; stung by a world's implied contempt-what conception is so terrible

as this of a thwarted will, a barren intellect, an outraged sensibility?

For that weary, uncouth woman who broke the spell of my reflections, the torch of history is still unlighted; for her, science reveals no secret ; artists evoke from canvas the visions which haunt their dreams, sculptors carve their thoughts in marble, and singers wake from lyre and organ mystic voices to mingle with their own; but these radiant revelations of the beautiful are lavished on more favored lives than hers. I know this is a land of plenty; I know the rich are often generous, and our thoughts are turned toward the poor in every prayer we hear and often in our sermons and our songs. But do we think enough of their great loss in losing throughout all their years the choicest treasures that enrich our own? With what zest do we gather truth after truth into our memories! How keen is our relish for "the quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" for the calm and kindly teaching of the wise and good who flourished in past ages! How we please ourselves with song and story; with following the explorer into strange and distant regions, or visiting with the tourist the shrines of learning and of beauty in all lands and centuries, so that we count our books a solace in all trouble and loneliness, and turn to them for comfort when all other sources fail!

But contemplate a life that has no past; that wins from the wisdom of sages, the eloquence of orators, and the inspiration of poets, no comforting suggestion; a life undignified by research-unbeautified by accomplishment! We do well to think with tenderest regret of these for whom no Shakespeare "holds the mirror up to nature's face," no

Wordsworth muses, no Milton sings! But we do better if we work and pray to bring again that golden age of which traditions tell us, when all men's weal shall be each man's care; when the only aristocracy known upon the earth shall be the aristocracy of wisdom; to whose loftiest seat the patient steps of the poorest may certainly attain.

CHAPTER X.

NOVEL-READING.

MUCH as I disliked the restriction then, I am now sincerely thankful that my Puritan father not only com manded me not to read novels, but successfully prohibited the temptation from coming in his children's way. Until I was fifteen years old I never saw a volume of the kind. "Pilgrim's Progress was the nearest approach we made, but it seems profanation to refer to that choice English classic in this degenerate connection. (I should add that Rev. Dr. Tefft's "Shoulder Knot" was also early read at our house, in the Ladies' Repository; but then that delightful work was an historical story, and even my father praised it.)

A kind and garrulous seamstress, who declared that this law of our household was "a shame," told us what she could remember of "The Children of the Abbey," and finally brought in, surreptitiously, "Jane Eyre" and "Thaddeus of Warsaw." But the glamor of those highly seasoned pages was unhealthful, and made "human nature's daily food," the common pastoral life we led, and nature's soothing beauty seem so tame and tasteless that the revulsion was my life's first sorrow. How evanescent and unreal was the pleasure of such reading; a sort of spiritual hasheesh-eating with hard and painful waking; a benumbing

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of the healthful, every-day activities; a losing of so much that was simple and sweet, to gain so little that was, at best, a fevered and fantastic vision of utter unreality. In all the years since then I have believed that novel-writing, save for some high, heroic, moral aim, while the most diversified, is the most unproductive of all industries. The young people who read the greatest quantity of novels know the least, are the dullest in aspect, and the most vapid in conversation. The flavor of individuality has been burned out of them. Always imagining themselves in an artificial relation to life, always content to look through their author's glasses, they become as commonplace as pawns upon a chess-board. Sir, we had good talk!" was Sam Johnson's highest praise of those he met. But any talk save the dreariest commonplace and most tiresome reiteration is impossible with the regulation reader of novels or player of games. And this is, in my judgment, because God, by the very laws of mind, must punish those who kill time instead of cultivating it. For time is the stuff that life is made of; the crucible of character, the arena of achievement, and woe to those who fritter it away. They cannot help paying great nature's penalty, and "mediocre," "failure," or "imbecile" will surely be stamped upon their foreheads. Therefore I would have each generous youth and maiden say to every story-spinner, except the few great names that can be counted on the fingers of one hand I really cannot patronize your wares, and will not furnish you my head for a football, or my fancy for a sieve. By writing these books you get money, and a fleeting, unsubstantial fame, but by reading them I should turn my possibility of success in life to the certainty of failure. Myself plus time is the