A Winsome Thing is the Human Heart.

243

cloud, and without asking them to make any acknowledgment whatever to you, freely pour out in their ears your own acknowledgment, with the assurance of your affectionate good will." And this I did next day. The recital of my experience in going back on such an errand to "my ain familiar town," would be both pathetic and humorous. At first some of my dearest friends declared I should do nothing of the kind, that the bad behavior had been wholly on one side, and it would be an undignified and hypocritical admission of ill-conduct if I should go and make apology. My brother was specially strenuous on this point, but I said to him, “I am going to see the president of the University; you are my only near male relative, and I think it behooves you to act as my escort." When the matter was put before him in this light he could not refuse to accompany me. There was a revival meeting that night in the University chapel that we attended and in which I was called upon to participate, which I did. When it was over and nearly all had left the chapel, my brother went forward to the president and said I wished to speak to him and he would please tarry for a moment. How plainly I

can see at this moment the tall, slight figure of my brother as he strolled up and down the aisle, at a distance, while in a recess of the chapel I went to the president, saying as I extended my hand, "I beg your pardon for everything I have ever done and said that was not right," with other friendly words, assuring him that I desired to be at peace with God and every human soul. He received me with the utmost kindness and responded in about these words: "To one who comes to me as magnanimously as you have done, I surely can not say less than that I beg your pardon," and from that hour we have been the best of friends. He and my brother shook hands, too, which was no small victory. Others whom I saw received me with tenderness even, and we knelt in prayer with many tears, so that when I left the dear home village and came whizzing back to my duties in the city, the buoyancy of my spirit was greater than if I had been made that day the heir to some rich inheritance. Nor do I know, nor ever mean to know in this or any world, a reason why any human being should hesitate to speak to me with cordiality and kindness, or why any middle wall of partition should exist between my spirit and any other human spirit that God has made.

The vexed question of government received special attention after I left, and I have every reason to believe that the Woman's College has been under the accomplished Deans, Ellen Soulé and Jane M. Bancroft, and is under the present gifted Dean, Prof. Rena A. Michaels, doing for young women all that their parents could expect from a first-class institution, while the University as a whole, with its two millions invested, its eleven elegant buildings, twelve departments, one hundred professors, and nearly fifteen hundred students, greatly outranks any other west of Lake Michigan, and richly deserves its name of the "NORTHWESTERN" in the modern sense of that great and comprehensive designation. Steadily may its star climb toward the zenith, growing clearer and more bright with each succeeding year!

"SLEEP SAFE, O WAVE-WORN MARINER!
FEAR NOT, TO-NIGHT, OR STORM OR SEA.
THE EAR OF HEAVEN BENDS LOW TO HER:
HE COMES TO SHORE WHO SAILS WITH ME."
-N. P. Willis.

THE TIRELESS TRAVELER.

EARLY JOURNEYINGS.

One lonesome day in early spring, gray with fog and moist with rain, a Sunday at that, and a Puritan Sunday in the bargain, I stood in the doorway of our old barn at Forest Home. There was no church to go to, and the time stretched out before me long and desolate. I cried out in querulous tones to the two who shared my every thought, "I wonder if we shall ever know anything, see anybody, or go anywhere!" for I felt as if the close curtains of the fog hedged us in, somehow, from all the world besides. Out spoke my cheery brother, saying, "Oh, I guess I would n't give up quite yet, Frank!" and sweet little Mary clasped my thin hand with her warm, chubby one, looked into my face and smiled that reassuring smile, as sweet as summer and as fresh and fair as violets. "Why do you wish to go away?" she asked.

"Oh, we must learn-must grow and must achieve! It's such a big world that if we don't begin at it we shall never catch up with the rest,' was my unquiet answer.

Always in later years when the world has widened for me, as it has kept on doing, I have gone back in thought to that gray, "misty, moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather," and been ashamed and sorry for the cross child I was, who had so little faith in all that the Heavenly Father had in store.

My mother says I never crept, but, being one of those cosseted children brought up by hand, started at once, by reason of the constant attention given me by herself, when I was less than two years old, to walk, having declined up to that time to do anything except sit in her arms. The first independent traveling of which I am cognizant was running away, with that primitive instinct of exploration that seems well-nigh universal.