But, if it be wiser and better to surround even little children with this

atmosphere of freedom, how much more essential is it for those who remain

under the parental roof long after they have ceased to be children! Just

here seems to me to be the fatal rock upon which many households make

utter shipwreck of their peace. Fathers and mothers who have ruled by

authority (let it be as loving as you please, it will still remain an

arbitrary rule) in the beginning, never seem to know when their children

are children no longer, but have become men and women. In any average

family, the position of an unmarried daughter after she is twenty years

old becomes less and less what it should be. In case of sons, the question

is rarely a practical one; in those exceptional instances where invalidism

or some other disability keeps a man helpless for years under his father's

roof, his very helplessness is at once his vindication and his shield, and

also prevents his feeling manly revolt against the position of unnatural

childhood. But in the case of daughters it is very different. Who does not

number in his circle of acquaintance many unmarried women, between the

ages of thirty and forty, perhaps even older, who have practically little

more freedom in the ordering of their own lives than they had when they

were eleven? The mother or the father continues just as much the

autocratic centre of the family now as of the nursery, thirty years

before. Taking into account the chance--no, the certainty--of great

differences between parents and children in matters of temperament and

taste, it is easy to see that great suffering must result from this;

suffering, too, which involves real loss and hindrance to growth. It is

really a monstrous wrong; but it seems to be rarely observed by the world,

and never suspected by those who are most responsible for it. It is

perhaps a question whether the real tyrannies in this life are those that

are accredited as such. There are certainly more than even tyrants know!

Every father and mother has it within easy reach to become the intimate

friend of the child. Closest, holiest, sweetest of all friendships is this

one, which has the closest, holiest tie of blood to underlie the bond of

soul. We see it in rare cases, proving itself divine by rising above even

the passion of love between man and woman, and carrying men and women

unwedded to their graves for sake of love of mother or father. When we

realize what such friendship is, it seems incredible that parents can

forego it, or can risk losing any shade of its perfectness, for the sake

of any indulgence of the habit of command or of gratifying of selfish

preference.

In the ideal household of father and mother and adult children, the one

great aim of the parents ought to be to supply, as far as possible to each

child, that freedom and independence which they have missed the

opportunity of securing in homes of their own. The loss of this one thing

alone is a bitterer drop in the loneliness of many an unmarried woman than

parents, especially fathers, are apt even to dream,--food and clothes and

lodgings are so exalted in unthinking estimates. To be without them would

be distressingly inconvenient, no doubt; but one can have luxurious

provision of both and remain very wretched. Even the body itself cannot

thrive if it has no more than these three pottage messes! Freedom to come,

go, speak, work, play,--in short, to be one's self,--is to the body more

than meat and gold, and to the soul the whole of life.

Just so far as any parent interferes with this freedom of adult children,

even in the little things of a single day or a single hour, just so far it

is tyranny, and the children are wronged. But just so far as parents

help, strengthen, and bestow this freedom on their children, just so far

it is justice and kindness, and their relation is cemented into a supreme

and unalterable friendship, whose blessedness and whose comfort no words

can measure.

The Ready-to-Halts.

Mr. Ready-to-Halt must have been the most exasperating pilgrim that Great

Heart ever dragged over the road to the Celestial City. Mr. Feeble Mind

was bad enough; but genuine weakness and organic incapacity appeal all the

while to charity and sympathy. If people really cannot walk, they must be

carried. Everybody sees that; and all strong people are, or ought to be,

ready to lift babies and cripples. There are plenty of such in every

parish. The Feeble Minds are unfortunately predisposed to intermarry; and

our schools are overrun with the little Masters and Misses Feeble Mind.

But, heavy as they are (and they are apt to be fat), they are precious and

pleasant friends and neighbors in comparison with the Ready-to-Halts.

The Ready-to-Halts are never ready for any thing else. They can walk as

well as anybody else, if they only would; but they are never quite sure on

which road they would better go. Great Hearts have to go back, and go

back, to look them up. They are found standing still, helpless and

bewildered, on all sorts of absurd side-paths, which lead nowhere; and

they never will confess, either, that they need help. They always think

they are doing what they call "making up their mind." But, whichever way

they make it, they wish they had made it the other; so they unmake it

directly. And by this time the crisis of the first hour which they lost

has become complicated with that of the second hour, for which they are in

no wise ready; and so the hours stumble on, one after another, and the day

is only a tangle of ineffective cross purposes. Hundreds of such days

drift on, with their sad burden of wasted time. Year after year their

lives fail of growth, of delight, of blessing to others. Opportunity's

great golden doors, which never stay long open for any man, have always

just closed when they reach the threshold of a deed; and it is hard, very

hard, to see why it would not have been better for them if they had never

been born.

After all, it is not right to be impatient with them; for, in nine cases

out of ten, they are no more responsible for their mental limp than the

poor Chinese woman is for her feeble feet. From their infancy up to what

in our comic caricature of words we call "maturity," they have been

bandaged. How should their muscles be good for any thing? From the day

when we give, and take, and arrange the baby's playthings for him, hour by

hour, without ever setting before him to choose one of two and give up the

other, to the day when we take it upon ourselves to decide whether he

shall be an engineer or a lawyer, we persist in doing for him the work

which he should do for himself. This is because we love him more than we

love our own lives. Oh! if love could but have its eyes opened and see!

If we were not blind, we should know that whenever a child decides for

himself deliberately, and without bias from others, any question, however

small, he has had just so many minutes of mental gymnastics,--just so much

strengthening of the one faculty on whose health and firmness his success

in life will depend more than upon any other thing.

So many people do not know the difference between obstinacy and

clear-headed firmness of will, that it is hardly safe to say much in

praise or blame of either without expressly stating that you do not mean

the other. They are as unlike as digestion and indigestion, and one would

suppose could not be much more easily confounded; but it is constantly

done. It has not yet ceased to be said among fathers and mothers that it

is necessary to "break the will" of children; and it has not yet ceased to

be seen in the land that men by virtue of simple obstinacy are called men

of strong character. The truth is that the stronger, better-trained will a

man has, the less obstinate he will be. Will is of reason; obstinacy, of

temper. What have they in common?

For want of strong will kingdoms and souls have been lost. Without it

there is no kingdom for any man,--no, not even in his own soul. It is the

one attribute of all we possess which is most God-like. By it, we say,

under his laws, as he says, enacting those laws, "So far and no further."

It is not enough that we do not "break" this grand power. It should be

strengthened, developed, trained. And, as the good teacher of gymnastics

gives his beginners light weights to lift and swing, so should we bring to

the children small points to decide; to the very little children, very

little points. "Will you have the apple, or the orange? You cannot have

both. Choose; but after you have chosen you cannot change." "Will you have

the horseback ride to-day, or the opera to-morrow night? You can have but

one."

Every day, many times a day, a child should decide for himself points

involving pros and cons,--substantial ones too. Let him even decide

unwisely, and take the consequences; that too is good for him. No amount

of Blackstone can give such an idea of law as a month of prison. Tell him

as much as you please of what you know on both sides; but compel him to

decide, and also compel him not to be too long about it. "Choose ye this

day whom ye will serve" is a text good for every morning.

If men and women had in their childhood such training of their wills as

this, we should not see so many putting their hands to the plough and

looking back, and "not fit for the kingdom of heaven." Nor for any kingdom

of earth, either, unless it be for the wicked little kingdom of the Prince

of Monaco, where there are but two things to be done,--gamble, or drown

yourself.

The Descendants of Nabal.

The line has never been broken, and they have married into respectable

families, right and left, until to-day there can hardly be found a

household which has not at least one to worry it.

They are not men and women of great passionate natures, who flame out now

and then in an outbreak like a volcano, from which everybody runs. This,

though terrible while it lasts, is soon over, and there are great

compensations in such souls. Their love is worth having. Their tenderness

is great. One can forgive them "seventy times seven," for the hasty words

and actions of which they repent immediately with tears.

But the Nabals are sullen; they are grumblers; they are never done. Such

sons of Belial are they to this day that no man can speak peaceably unto

them. They are as much worse than passionate people as a slow drizzle of

rain is than a thunder-storm. For the thunder-storm, you stay in-doors,

and you cannot help having pleasure in its sharp lights and darks and

echoes; and when it is over, what clear air, what a rainbow! But in the

drizzle, you go out; you think that with a waterproof, an umbrella, and

overshoes, you can manage to get about in spite of it, and attend to your

business. What a state you come home in,--muddy, limp, chilled,

disheartened! The house greets you, looking also muddy and cold,--for the

best of front halls gives up in despair and cannot look any thing but

forlorn in a long, drizzling rain; all the windows are bleared with

trickling, foggy wet on the outside, which there is no wiping off nor

seeing through, and if one could see through there is no gain. The street

is more gloomy than the house; black, slimy mud, inches deep on crossings;

the same black, slimy mud in footprints on side-walks; hopeless-looking

people hurrying by, so unhappy by reason of the drizzle that a weird sort

of family likeness is to be seen in all their faces. This is all that can

be seen outside. It is better not to look. For the inside is no redemption

except a wood-fire,--a good, generous wood-fire,--not in any of the modern

compromises called open stoves, but on a broad stone hearth, with a big

background of chimney, up which the sparks can go skipping and creeping.

This can redeem a drizzle; but this cannot redeem a grumbler. Plump he

sits down in the warmth of its very blaze, and complains that it snaps,

perhaps, or that it is oak and maple, when he paid for all hickory. You

can trust him to put out your wood-fire for you as effectually as a

water-spout. And, if even a wood-fire, bless it! cannot outshine the gloom

of his presence, what is to happen in the places where there is no

wood-fire, on the days when real miseries, big and little, are on hand, to

be made into mountains of torture by his grumbling? Oh, who can describe

him? There is no language which can do justice to him; no supernatural

foresight which can predict where his next thrust will fall, from what

unsuspected corner he will send his next arrow. Like death, he has all

seasons for his own; his ingenuity is infernal. Whoever tries to forestall

or appease him might better be at work in Augean stables; because, after

all, we must admit that the facts of life are on his side. It is not

intended that we shall be very comfortable. There is a terrible amount of

total depravity in animate and inanimate things. From morning till night

there is not an hour without its cross to carry. The weather thwarts us;

servants, landlords, drivers, washerwomen, and bosom friends misbehave;

clothes don't fit; teeth ache; stomachs get out of order; newspapers are

stupid; and children make too much noise. If there are not big troubles,

there are little ones. If they are not in sight, they are hiding. I have

wondered whether the happiest mortal could point to one single moment and

say, "At that moment there was nothing in my life which I would have had

changed." I think not.

In argument, therefore, the grumbler has the best of it. It is more than

probable that things are as he says. But why say it? Why make four

miseries out of three? If the three be already unbearable, so much the

worse. If he is uncomfortable, it is a pity; we are sorry, but we cannot

change the course of Nature. We shall soon have our own little turn of

torments, and we do not want to be worn out before it comes by having

listened to his; probably, too, the very things of which he complains are

pressing just as heavily on us as on him,--are just as unpleasant to

everybody as to him. Suppose everybody did as he does. Imagine, for

instance, a chorus of grumble from ten people at a breakfast-table, all

saying at once, or immediately after each other, "This coffee is not fit

to drink." "Really, the attendance in this house is insufferably poor." I

have sometimes wished to try this homoeopathic treatment in a bad case of

grumble. It sounds as if it might work a cure.

If you lose your temper with the grumbler, and turn upon him suddenly,

saying, "Oh, do not spoil all our pleasure. Do make the best of things:

or, at least, keep quiet!" then how aggrieved he is! how unjust he thinks

you are to "make a personal matter of it"! "You do not, surely, suppose I

think you are responsible for it, do you?" he says, with a lofty air of

astonishment at your unreasonable sensitiveness. Of course, we do not

suppose he thinks we are to blame; we do not take him to be a fool as well

as a grumbler. But he speaks to us, at us, before us, about the cause of

his discomfort, whatever it may be, precisely as he would if we were to

blame; and that is one thing which makes his grumbling so insufferable.

But this he can never be made to see. And the worst of it is that

grumbling is contagious. If we live with him, we shall, sooner or later,

in spite of our dislike of his ways, fall into them; even sinking so low,

perhaps, before the end of a single summer, as to be heard complaining of

butter at boarding-house tables, which is the lowest deep of vulgarity of

grumbling. There is no help for this; I have seen it again and again. I

have caught it myself. One grumbler in a family is as pestilent a thing as

a diseased animal in a herd: if he be not shut up or killed, the herd is

lost.

But the grumbler cannot be shut up or killed, since grumbling is not held

to be a proof of insanity, nor a capital offence,--more's the pity.

What, then, is to be done? Keep out of his way, at all costs, if he be

grown up. If it be a child, labor day and night, as you would with a

tendency to paralysis, or distortion of limb, to prevent this blight on

its life.

It sounds extreme to say that a child should never be allowed to express a

dislike of any thing which cannot be helped; but I think it is true. I do

not mean that it should be positively forbidden or punished, but that it

should never pass unnoticed; his attention should be invariably called to

its uselessness, and to the annoyance it gives to other people. Children

begin by being good-natured little grumblers at every thing which goes

wrong, simply from the outspokenness of their natures. All they think they

say and act. The rudiments of good behavior have to be chiefly negative at

the outset, like Punch's advice to those about to marry,--"Don't."

The race of grumblers would soon die out if all children were so trained

that never, between the ages of five and twelve, did they utter a needless

complaint without being gently reminded that it was foolish and

disagreeable. How easy for a good-natured and watchful mother to do this!

It takes but a word.

"Oh, dear! I wish it had not rained to-day. It is too bad!"

"You do not really mean what you say, my darling. It is of much more

consequence that the grass should grow than that you should go out to

play. And it is so silly to complain, when we cannot stop its raining."

"Mamma, I hate this pie."

"Oh! hush, dear! Don't say so, if you do. You can leave it. You need not

eat it. But think how disagreeable it sounds to hear you say such a

thing."

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I am too cold."

"Yes, dear, I know you are. So is mamma. But we shall not feel any warmer

for saying so. We must wait till the fire burns better; and the time will

seem twice as long if we grumble."

"Oh, mamma! mamma! My steam-engine is all spoiled. It won't run. I hate

things that wind up!"

"But, my dear little boy, don't grumble so! What would you think if mamma

were to say, 'Oh, dear! oh, dear! My little boy's stockings are full of

holes. How I hate to mend stockings!' and, 'Oh, dear! oh, dear! My little

boy has upset my work-box! I hate little boys'?"

How they look steadily into your eyes for a minute,--the honest,

reasonable little souls!--when you say such things to them; and then run

off with a laugh, lifted up, for that time, by your fitly spoken words of

help.

Oh! if the world could only stop long enough for one generation of

mothers to be made all right, what a millennium could be begun in thirty

years!

"But, mamma, you are grumbling yourself at me because I grumbled!" says a

quick-witted darling not ten years old. Ah! never shall any weak spot in

our armor escape the keen eyes of these little ones.

"Yes, dear! And I shall grumble at you till I cure you of grumbling.

Grumblers are the only thing in this world that it is right to grumble

at."

"Boys Not Allowed."

It was a conspicuous signboard, at least four feet long, with large black

letters on a white ground: "Boys not allowed." I looked at it for some

moments in a sort of bewildered surprise: I did not quite comprehend the

meaning of the words. At last I understood it. I was waiting in a large

railway station, where many trains connect; and most of the passengers

from the train in which I was were eating dinner in a hotel near by. I was

entirely alone in the car, with the exception of one boy, who was perhaps

eleven years old. I made an involuntary ejaculation as I read the words on

the sign, and the boy looked around at me.

"Little boy," said I, solemnly, "do you see that sign?"

He turned his head, and, reading the ominous warning, nodded sullenly, but

said nothing.

"Boy, what does it mean?" said I. "Boys must be allowed to come into this

railway station. There are two now standing in the doorway directly under

the sign."

The latent sympathy in my tone touched his heart. He left his seat, and,

coming to mine, edged in past me; and, putting his head out of the window,

read the sentence aloud in a contemptuous tone. Then he offered me a

peanut, which I took; and he proceeded to tell me what he thought of the

sign.

"Boys not allowed!" said he. "That's just the way 'tis everywhere; but I

never saw the sign up before. It don't make any difference, though,

whether they put the sign up or not. Why, in New York (you live in New

York, don't you?) they won't even stop the horse-cars for a boy to get on.

Nobody thinks any thing'll hurt a boy; but they're glad enough to 'allow'

us when there's any errands to be done, and"--

"Do you live in New York?" interrupted I; for I did not wish to hear the

poor little fellow's list of miseries, which I knew by heart beforehand

without his telling me, having been hopeless knight-errant of oppressed

boyhood all my life.

Yes, he "lived in New York," and he "went to a grammar school," and he had

"two sisters." And so we talked on in that sweet, ready, trustful talk

which comes naturally only from children's lips, until the "twenty minutes

for refreshments" were over, and the choked and crammed passengers, who

had eaten big dinners in that breath of time, came hurrying back to their

seats. Among them came the father and mother of my little friend. In angry

surprise at not finding him in the seat where they left him, they

exclaimed,--

"Now, where _is_ that boy? Just like him! We might have lost every one of

these bags."

"Here I am, mamma," he called out, pleasantly. "I could see the bags all

the time. Nobody came into the car."

"I told you not to leave the seat, sir. What do you mean by such conduct?"

said the father.

"Oh, no, papa," said poor Boy, "you only told me to take care of the

bags." And an anxious look of terror came into his face, which told only

too well under how severe a _régime_ he lived. I interposed hastily with--

"I am afraid I am the cause of your little son's leaving his seat. He had

sat very still till I spoke to him; and I believe I ought to take all the

blame."

The parents were evidently uncultured, shallow people. Their irritation

with him was merely a surface vexation, which had no real foundation in a

deep principle. They became complaisant and smiling at my first word, and

Boy escaped with a look of great relief to another seat, where they gave

him a simple luncheon of saleratus gingerbread. "Boys not allowed" to go

in to dinner at the Massasoit, thought I to myself; and upon that text I

sat sadly meditating all the way from Springfield to Boston.

How true it was, as the little fellow had said, that "it don't make any

difference whether they put the sign up or not!" No one can watch

carefully any average household where there are boys, and not see that

there are a thousand little ways in which the boys' comfort, freedom,

preference will be disregarded, when the girls' will be considered. This

is partly intentional, partly unconscious. Something is to be said

undoubtedly on the advantage of making the boy realize early and keenly

that manhood is to bear and to work, and womanhood is to be helped and

sheltered. But this should be inculcated, not inflicted; asked, not

seized; shown and explained, not commanded. Nothing can be surer than the

growth in a boy of tender, chivalrous regard for his sisters and for all

women, if the seeds of it be rightly sown and gently nurtured. But the

common method is quite other than this. It begins too harshly and at once

with assertion or assumption.

"Mother never thinks I am of any consequence," said a dear boy to me, the

other day. "She's all for the girls."

This was not true; but there was truth in it. And I am very sure that the

selfishness, the lack of real courtesy, which we see so plainly and

pitiably in the behavior of the average young man to-day is the slow,

certain result of years of just such feelings as this child expressed. The

boy has to scramble for his rights. Naturally he is too busy to think much

about the rights of others. The man keeps up the habit, and is negatively

selfish without knowing it.

Take, for instance, the one point of the minor courtesies (if we can dare

to call any courtesies minor) of daily intercourse. How many people are

there who habitually speak to a boy of ten, twelve, or fourteen with the

same civility as to his sister, a little younger or older?

"I like Miss----," said this same dear boy to me, one day; "for she

always bids me good-morning."

Ah! never is one such word thrown away on a loving, open-hearted boy. Men

know that safe through all the wear and tear of life they keep far greener

the memory of some woman or some man who was kind to them in their boyhood

than of the friend who helped or cheered them yesterday.

Dear, blessed, noisy, rollicking, tormenting, comforting Boy! What should

we do without him? How much we like, without suspecting it, his breezy

presence in the house! Except for him, how would errands be done, chairs

brought, nails driven, cows stoned out of our way, letters carried, twine

and knives kept ready, lost things found, luncheon carried to picnics,

three-year-olds that cry led out of meeting, butterflies and birds' nests

and birch-bark got, the horse taken round to the stable, borrowed things

sent home,--and all with no charge for time?

Dear, patient, busy Boy! Shall we not sometimes answer his questions? Give

him a comfortable seat? Wait and not reprove him till after the company

has gone? Let him wear his best jacket, and buy him half as many neckties

as his sister has? Give him some honey, even if there is not enough to go

round? Listen tolerantly to his little bragging, and help him "do" his

sums?

With a sudden shrill scream the engine slipped off on a side-track, and

the cars glided into the great, grim city-station, looking all the grimmer

for its twinkling lights. The masses of people who were waiting and the

masses of people who had come surged toward each other like two great

waves, and mingled in a moment. I caught sight of my poor little friend,

Boy, following his father, struggling along in the crowd, carrying two

heavy carpet-bags, a strapped bundle, and two umbrellas, and being sharply

told to "Keep up close there."

"Ha!" said I, savagely, to myself, "doing porters' work is not one of the

things which 'boys' are 'not allowed.'"

Half an Hour in a Railway Station.

It was one of those bleak and rainy days which mark the coming of spring

on New England sea-shores. The rain felt and looked as if it might at any

minute become hail or snow; the air pricked like needles when it blew

against flesh. Yet the huge railway station was as full of people as ever.

One could see no difference between this dreariest of days and the

sunniest, so far as the crowd was concerned, except that fewer of the

people wore fine clothes; perhaps, also, that their faces looked a little

more sombre and weary than usual.

There is no place in the world where human nature shows to such sad

disadvantage as in waiting-rooms at railway stations, especially in the

"Ladies' Room." In the "Gentlemen's Room" there is less of that ghastly,

apathetic silence which seems only explainable as an interval between two

terrible catastrophes. Shall we go so far as to confess that even the

unsightly spittoons, and the uncleanly and loquacious fellowship resulting

from their common use, seem here, for the moment, redeemed from a little

of their abominableness,--simply because almost any action is better than

utter inaction, and any thing which makes the joyless, taciturn American

speak to his fellow whom he does not know, is for the time being a

blessing. But in the "Ladies' Room" there is not even a community of

interest in a single bad habit, to break the monotone of weary stillness.

Who has not felt the very soul writhe within her as she has first crossed

the threshold of one of these dismal antechambers of journey? Carpetless,

dingy, dusty; two or three low sarcophagi of greenish-gray iron in open

spaces, surrounded by blue-lipped women, in different angles and attitudes

of awkwardness, trying to keep the soles of their feet in a perpendicular

position, to be warmed at what they have been led to believe is a

steam-heating apparatus; a few more women, equally listless and

weary-looking, standing in equally difficult and awkward positions before

a counter, holding pie in one hand, and tea in a cup and saucer in the

other, taking alternate mouthfuls of each, and spilling both; the rest

wedged bolt upright against the wall in narrow partitioned seats, which

only need a length of perforated foot-board in front to make them fit to

be patented as the best method of putting whole communities of citizens

into the stocks at once. All, feet warmers, pie-eaters, and those who sit

in the red-velvet stocks, wear so exactly the same expression of vacuity

and fatigue that they might almost be taken for one gigantic and unhappy

family connection, on its way to what is called in newspapers "a sad

event." The only wonder is that this stiffened, desiccated crowd retains

vitality enough to remember the hours at which its several trains depart,

and to rise up and shake itself alive and go on board. One is haunted

sometimes by the fancy that some day, when the air in the room is

unusually bad and the trains are delayed, a curious phenomenon will be

seen. The petrifaction will be carried a little farther than usual, and,

when the bell rings and the official calls out, "Train made up for Babel,

Hinnom, and way stations?" no women will come forth from the "Ladies'

Room," no eye will move, no muscle will stir. Husbands and brothers will

wait and search vainly for those who should have met them at the station,

with bundles of the day's shopping to be carried out; homes will be

desolate; and the history of rare fossils and petrifactions will have a

novel addition. Or, again, that, if some sudden convulsion of Nature, like

those which before now have buried wicked cities and the dwellers in them,

were to-day to swallow up the great city of New Sodom in America, and keep

it under ground for a few thousand years, nothing in all its circuit would

so puzzle the learned archaeologists of A.D. 5873 as the position of the

skeletons in these same waiting-rooms of railway stations.

Thinking such thoughts as these, sinking slowly and surely to the level of

the place, I waited, on this bleak, rainy day, in just such a "Ladies'

Room" as I have described. I sat in the red-velvet stocks, with my eyes

fixed on the floor.

"Please, ma'am, won't you buy a basket?" said a cheery little voice. So

near me, without my knowing it, had the little tradesman come that I was

as startled as if the voice had spoken out of the air just above my head.

He was a sturdy little fellow, ten years old, Irish, dirty, ragged; but he

had honest, kind gray eyes, and a smile which ought to have sold more

baskets than he could carry. A few kind words unsealed the fountain of his

childish confidences. There were four children younger than he; the mother

took in washing, and the father, who was a cripple from rheumatism, made

these baskets, which he carried about to sell.

"Where do you sell the most?"

"Round the depots. That's the best place."

"But the baskets are rather clumsy to carry. Almost everybody has his

hands full, when he sets out on a journey."

"Yis'm; but mostly they doesn't take the baskets. But they gives me a

little change," said he, with a smile; half roguish, half sad.

I watched him on in his pathetic pilgrimage round that dreary room,

seeking help from that dreary circle of women.

My heart aches to write down here the true record that out of those scores

of women only three even smiled or spoke to the little fellow. Only one

gave him money. My own sympathies had been so won by his face and manner

that I found myself growing hot with resentment as I watched woman after

woman wave him off with indifferent or impatient gesture. His face was a

face which no mother ought to have been able to see without a thrill of

pity and affection. God forgive me! As if any mother ought to be able to

see any child, ragged, dirty, poor, seeking help and finding none! But his

face was so honest, and brave, and responsive that it added much to the

appeal of his poverty.

One woman, young and pretty, came into the room, bringing in her arms a

large toy horse, and a little violin. "Oh," I said to myself, "she has a

boy of her own, for whom she can buy gifts freely. She will surely give

this poor child a penny." He thought so, too; for he went toward her with

a more confident manner than he had shown to some of the others. No! She

brushed by him impatiently, without a word, and walked to the

ticket-office. He stood looking at the violin and the toy horse till she

came back to her seat. Then he lifted his eyes to her face again; but she

apparently did not see him, and he went away. Ah, she is only half mother

who does not see her own child in every child!--her own child's grief in

every pain which makes another child weep!

Presently the little basket-boy went out into the great hall. I watched

him threading his way in and out among the groups of men. I saw one

man--bless him!--pat the little fellow on the head; then I lost sight of

him.

After ten minutes he came back into the Ladies' Room, with only one basket

in his hand, and a very happy little face. The "sterner sex" had been

kinder to him than we. The smile which he gave me in answer to my glad

recognition of his good luck was the sunniest sunbeam I have seen on a

human face for many a day. He sank down into the red-velvet stocks, and

twirled his remaining basket, and swung his shabby little feet, as idle

and unconcerned as if he were some rich man's son, waiting for the train

to take him home. So much does a little lift help the heart of a child,

even of a beggar child. It is a comfort to remember him, with that look on

his face, instead of the wistful, pleading one which I saw at first. I

left him lying back on the dusty velvet, which no doubt seemed to him

unquestionable splendor. In the cars I sat just behind the woman with the

toy-horse and the violin. I saw her glance rest lovingly on them many

times, as she thought of her boy at home; and I wondered if the little

basket-seller had really produced no impression whatever on her heart. I

shall remember him long after (if he lives) he is a man!

A Genius For Affection.

The other day, speaking superficially and uncharitably, I said of a woman,

whom I knew but slightly, "She disappoints me utterly. How could her

husband have married her? She is commonplace and stupid."

"Yes," said my friend, reflectively; "it is strange. She is not a

brilliant woman; she is not even an intellectual one; but there is such a

thing as a genius for affection, and she has it. It has been good for her

husband that he married her."

The words sank into my heart like a great spiritual plummet They dropped

down to depths not often stirred. And from those depths came up some

shining sands of truth, worth keeping among treasures; having a

phosphorescent light in them, which can shine in dark places, and, making

them light as day, reveal their beauty.

"A genius for affection." Yes; there is such a thing, and no other genius

is so great. The phrase means something more than a capacity, or even a

talent for loving. That is common to all human beings, more or less. A man

or woman without it would be a monster, such as has probably never been on

the earth. All men and women, whatever be their shortcomings in other

directions, have this impulse, this faculty, in a degree. It takes shape

in family ties: makes clumsy and unfortunate work of them in perhaps two

cases out of three,--wives tormenting husbands, husbands neglecting and

humiliating wives, parents maltreating and ruining children, children

disobeying and grieving parents, and brothers and sisters quarrelling to

the point of proverbial mention; but under all this, in spite of all this,

the love is there. A great trouble or a sudden emergency will bring it

out. In any common danger, hands clasp closely and quarrels are forgotten;

over a sick-bed hard ways soften into yearning tenderness; and by a grave,

alas! what hot tears fall! The poor, imperfect love which had let itself

be wearied and harassed by the frictions of life, or hindered and warped

by a body full of diseased nerves, comes running, too late, with its

effort to make up lost opportunities. It has been all the while alive, but

in a sort of trance; little good has come of it, but it is something that

it was there. It is the divine germ of a flower and fruit too precious to

mature in the first years after grafting; in other soils, by other waters,

when the healing of the nations is fulfilled, we shall see its perfection.

Oh! what atonement will be there! What allowances we shall make for each

other, then! with what love we shall love!

But the souls who have what my friend meant by a "genius for affection"

are in another atmosphere than that which common men breathe. Their "upper

air" is clearer, more rarefied than any to which mere intellectual genius

can soar. Because, to this last, always remain higher heights which it

cannot grasp, see, nor comprehend.

Michel Angelo may build his dome of marble, and human intellect may see as

clearly as if God had said it that no other dome can ever be built so

grand, so beautiful. But above St. Peter's hangs the blue tent-dome of the

sky, vaster, rounder, elastic, unfathomable, making St. Peter's look small

as a drinking-cup, shutting it soon out of sight to north, east, south,

and west, by the mysterious horizon-fold which no man can lift. And beyond

this horizon-fold of our sky shut down again other domes, which the wisest

astronomer may not measure, in whose distances our little ball and we,

with all our spinning, can hardly show like a star. If St. Peter's were

swallowed up to-morrow, it would make no real odds to anybody but the

Pope. The probabilities are that Michel Angelo himself has forgotten all

about it.

Titian and Raphael, and all the great brotherhood of painters, may kneel

reverently as priests before Nature's face, and paint pictures at sight of

which all men's eyes shall fill with grateful tears; and yet all men shall

go away, and find that the green shade of a tree, the light on a young

girl's face, the sleep of a child, the flowering of a flower, are to their

pictures as living life to beautiful death.

Coming to Art's two highest spheres,--music of sound and music of

speech,--we find that Beethoven and Mozart, and Milton and Shakespeare,

have written. But the symphony is sacred only because, and only so far as,

it renders the joy or the sorrow which we have felt. Surely, the

interpretation is less than the thing interpreted. Face to face with a

joy, a sorrow, would a symphony avail us? And, as for words, who shall

express their feebleness in midst of strength? The fettered helplessness

in spite of which they soar to such heights? The most perfect sentence

ever written bears to the thing it meant to say the relation which the

chemist's formula does to the thing he handles, names, analyzes, can

destroy, perhaps, but cannot make. Every element in the crystal, the

liquid, can be weighed, assigned, and rightly called; nothing in all

science is more wonderful than an exact chemical formula; but, after all

is done, will remain for ever unknown the one subtle secret, the vital

centre of the whole.

But the souls who have a "genius for affection" have no outer dome, no

higher and more vital beauty; no subtle secret of creative motive force to

elude their grasp, mock their endeavor, overshadow their lives. The

subtlest essence of the thing they worship and desire, they have in their

own nature,--they are. No schools, no standards, no laws can help or

hinder them.

To them the world is as if it were not. Work and pain and loss are as if

they were not. These are they to whom it is easy to die any death, if good

can come that way to one they love. These are they who do die daily

unnoted on our right hand and on our left,--fathers and mothers for

children, husbands and wives for each other. These are they, also, who

live,--which is often far harder than it is to die,--long lives, into

whose being never enters one thought of self from the rising to the going

down of the sun. Year builds on year with unvarying steadfastness the

divine temple of their beauty and their sacrifice. They create, like God.

The universe which science sees, studies, and explains, is small, is

petty, beside the one which grows under their spiritual touch; for love

begets love. The waves of eternity itself ripple out in immortal circles

under the ceaseless dropping of their crystal deeds.

Angels desire to look, but cannot, into the mystery of holiness and beauty

which such human lives reveal. Only God can see them clearly. God is their

nearest of kin; for He is love.

Rainy Days.

With what subtle and assured tyranny they take possession of the world!

Stoutest hearts are made subject, plans of conquerors set aside,--the

heavens and the earth and man,--all alike at the mercy of the rain. Come

when they may, wait long as they will, give what warnings they can, rainy

days are always interruptions. No human being has planned for them then

and there. "If it had been but yesterday," "If it were only to-morrow," is

the cry from all lips. Ah! a lucky tyranny for us is theirs. Were the

clouds subject to mortal call or prohibition, the seasons would fail and

death get upper hand of all things before men agreed on an hour of common

convenience.

What tests they are of people's souls! Show me a dozen men and women in

the early morning of a rainy day, and I will tell by their words and their

faces who among them is rich and who is poor,--who has much goods laid up

for just such times of want, and who has been spend-thrift and foolish.

That curious, shrewd, underlying instinct, common to all ages, which takes

shape in proverbs recognized this long ago. Who knows when it was first

said of a man laying up money, "He lays by for a rainy day"? How close

the parallel is between the man who, having spent on each day's living the

whole of each day's income, finds himself helpless in an emergency of

sickness whose expenses he has no money to meet, and the man who, having

no intellectual resources, no self-reliant habit of occupation, finds

himself shut up in the house idle and wretched for a rainy day. I confess

that on rainy mornings in country houses, among well-dressed and so-called

intelligent and Christian people, I have been seized with stronger

disgusts and despairs about the capacity and worth of the average human

creature, than I have ever felt in the worst haunts of ignorant

wickedness.

"What is there to do to-day?" is the question they ask. I know they are

about to ask it before they speak. I have seen it in their listless and

disconcerted eyes at breakfast. It is worse to me than the tolling of a

bell; for saddest dead of all are they who have only a "name to live."

The truth is, there is more to do on a rainy day than on any other. In

addition to all the sweet, needful, possible business of living and

working, and learning and helping, which is for all days, there is the

beauty of the rainy day to see, the music of the rainy day to hear. It

drums on the window-panes, chuckles and gurgles at corners of houses,

tinkles in spouts, makes mysterious crescendoes and arpeggio chords

through the air; and all the while drops from the eaves and upper

window-ledges are beating time as rhythmical and measured as that of a

metronome,--time to which our own souls furnish tune, sweet or sorrowful,

inspiriting or saddening, as we will. It is a curious experiment to try

repeating or chanting lines in time and cadence following the patter of

raindrops on windows. It will sometimes be startling in its effect: no

metre, no accent fails of its response in the low, liquid stroke of the

tender drops,--there seems an uncanny _rapport_ between them at once.

And the beauty of the rain, not even love can find words to tell it. If it

left but one trace, the exquisite shifting sheen of pearls on the outer

side of the window glass, that alone one might watch for a day. In all

times it has been thought worthy of kings, of them who are royally rich,

to have garments sown thick in dainty lines and shapes with fine seed

pearls. Who ever saw any such embroidery which could compare with the

beauty of one pane of glass wrought on a single side with the shining

white transparent globulets of rain? They are millions; they crowd; they

blend; they become a silver stream; they glide slowly down, leaving

tiniest silver threads behind; they make of themselves a silver bank of

miniature sea at the bottom of the pane; and, while they do this, other

millions are set pearl-wise at the top, to crowd, blend, glide down in

their turn, and overflow the miniature sea. This is one pane, a few inches

square; and rooms have many windows of many panes. And looking past this

spectacle, out of our windows, how is it that we do not each rainy day

weep with pleasure at sight of the glistening show? Every green thing,

from tiniest grass-blade lying lowest, to highest waving tips of elms,

also set thick with the water-pearls; all tossing and catching, and

tossing and catching, in fairy game with the wind, and with the rain

itself, always losing, always gaining, changing shape and place and number

every moment, till the twinkling and shifting dazzle all eyes.

Then at the end comes the sun, like a magician for whom all had been made

ready; at sunset, perhaps, or at sunrise, if the storm has lasted all

night. In one instant the silver balls begin to disappear. By countless

thousands at a time he tosses them back whence they came; but as they go,

he changes them, under our eyes, into prismatic globes, holding very light

of very light in their tiny circles, shredding and sorting it into blazing

lines of rainbow color.

All the little children shout with delight, seeing these things; and call

dull, grown-up people to behold. They reply, "Yes, the storm is over;" and

this is all it means to most of them. This kingdom of heaven they cannot

enter, not being "as a little child."

It would be worth while to know, if we only could, just what our

betters--the birds and insects and beasts--do on rainy days. But we cannot

find out much. It would be a great thing to look inside of an ant-hill in

a long rain. All we know is that the doors are shut tight, and a few

sentinels, who look as if India-rubber coats would be welcome, stand

outside. The stillness and look of intermission in the woods on a really

rainy day is something worth getting wet to observe. It is like Sunday in

London, or Fourth of July in a country town which has gone bodily to a

picnic in the next village. The strays who are out seem like accidentally

arrived people, who have lost their way. One cannot fancy a caterpillar's

being otherwise than very uncomfortable in wet hair; and what can there be

for butterflies and dragon-flies to do, in the close corners into which

they creep, with wings shut up as tight as an umbrella? The beasts fare

better, being clothed in hides. Those whom we oftenest see out in rains

(cows and oxen and horses) keep straight on with their perpetual munching,

as content wet as dry, though occasionally we see them accept the partial

shelter of a tree from a particularly hard shower.

Hens are the forlornest of all created animals when it rains. Who can help

laughing at sight of a flock of them huddled up under lee of a barn, limp,

draggled, spiritless, shifting from one leg to the other, with their silly

heads hanging inert to right or left, looking as if they would die for

want of a yawn? One sees just such groups of other two-legged creatures in

parlors, under similar circumstances. The truth is, a hen's life at best

seems poorer than that of any other known animal. Except when she is

setting, I cannot help having a contempt for her. This also has been

recognized by that common instinct of people which goes to the making of

proverbs; for "Hen's time ain't worth much" is a common saying among

farmers' wives. How she dawdles about all day, with her eyes not an inch

from the ground, forever scratching and feeding in dirtiest places,--a

sort of animated muck-rake, with a mouth and an alimentary canal! No

wonder such an inane creature is wretched when it rains, and her soulless

business is interrupted. She is, I think, likest of all to the human

beings, men or women, who do not know what to do with themselves on rainy

days.

Friends of the Prisoners.

In many of the Paris prisons is to be seen a long, dreary room, through

the middle of which are built two high walls of iron grating, enclosing a

space of some three feet in width.

A stranger visiting the prison for the first time would find it hard to

divine for what purpose these walls of grating had been built. But on the

appointed days when the friends of the prisoners are allowed to enter the

prison, their use is sadly evident. It would not be safe to permit wives

and husbands, and mothers and sons, to clasp hands in unrestrained

freedom. A tiny file, a skein of silk, can open prison-doors and set

captives free; love's ingenuity will circumvent tyranny and fetters, in

spite of all possible precautions. Therefore the vigilant authority says,

"You may see, but not touch; there shall be no possible opportunity for an

instrument of escape to be given; at more than arm's length the wife, the

mother must be held." The prisoners are led in and seated on a bench upon

one side of these gratings; the friends are led in and seated on a similar

bench on the other side; jailers are in attendance in both rooms; no words

can be spoken which the jailers do not hear. Yearningly eyes meet eyes;

faces are pressed against the hard wires; loving words are exchanged; the

poor prisoned souls ask eagerly for news from the outer world,--the world

from which they are as much hidden as if they were dead. Fathers hear how

the little ones have grown; sometimes, alas! how the little ones have

died. Small gifts of fruit or clothing are brought; but must be given

first into the hands of the jailers. Even flowers cannot be given from

loving hand to hand; for in the tiniest flower might be hidden the secret

poison which would give to the weary prisoner surest escape of all. All

day comes and goes the sad train of friends; lingering and turning back

after there is no more to be said; weeping when they meant and tried to

smile; more hungry for closer sight and voice, and for touch, with every

moment that they gaze through the bars; and going away, at last, with a

new sense of loss and separation, which time, with its merciful healing,

will hardly soften before the visiting-day will come again, and the same

heart-rending experience of mingled torture and joy will again be borne.

But to the prisoners these glimpses of friends' faces are like manna from

heaven. Their whole life, physical and mental, receives a new impetus from

them. Their blood flows more quickly, their eyes light up, they live from

one day to the next on a memory and a hope. No punishment can be invented

so terrible as the deprivation of the sight of their friends on the

visiting-day. Men who are obstinate and immovable before any sort or

amount of physical torture are subdued by mere threat of this.

A friend who told me of a visit he paid to the Prison Mazas, on one of the

days, said, with tears in his eyes, "It was almost more than I could bear

to see these poor souls reaching out toward each other from either side of

the iron railings. Here a poor, old woman, tottering and weak, bringing a

little fruit in a basket for her son; here a wife, holding up a baby to

look through the gratings at its father, and the father trying in an agony

of earnestness to be sure that the baby knew him; here a little girl,

looking half reproachfully at her brother, terror struggling with

tenderness in her young face; on the side of the friends, love and

yearning and pity beyond all words to describe; on the side of the

prisoners, love and yearning just as great, but with a misery of shame

added, which gave to many faces a look of attempt at dogged indifference

on the surface, constantly betrayed and contradicted, however, by the

flashing of the eyes and the red of the cheeks."

The story so impressed me that I could not for days lose sight of the

picture it raised; the double walls of iron grating; the cruel,

inexorable, empty space between them,--empty, yet crowded with words and

looks; the lines of anxious, yearning faces on either side. But presently

I said to myself, It is, after all, not so unlike the life we all live.

Who of us is not in prison? Who of us is not living out his time of

punishment? Law holds us all in its merciless fulfilment of penalty for

sin; disease, danger, work separate us, wall us, bury us. That we are not

numbered with the number of a cell, clothed in the uniform of a prison,

locked up at night, and counted in the morning, is only an apparent

difference, and not so real a one. Our jailers do not know us; but we know

them. There is no fixed day gleaming for us in the future when our term of

sentence will expire and we shall regain freedom. It may be to-morrow; but

it may be threescore years away. Meantime, we bear ourselves as if we were

not in prison. We profess that we choose, we keep our fetters out of

sight, we smile, we sing, we contrive to be glad of being alive, and we

take great interest in the changing of our jails. But no man knows where

his neighbor's prison lies. How bravely and cheerily most eyes look up!

This is one of the sweetest mercies of life, that "the heart knoweth its

own bitterness," and, knowing it, can hide it. Hence, we can all be

friends for other prisoners, standing separated from them by the

impassable iron gratings and the fixed gulf of space, which are not

inappropriate emblems of the unseen barriers between all human souls. We

can show kindly faces, speak kindly words, bear to them fruits and food,

and moral help, greater than fruit or food. We need not aim at

philanthropies; we need not have a visiting-day, nor seek a prison-house

built of stone. On every road each man we meet is a prisoner; he is dying

at heart, however sound he looks; he is only waiting, however well he

works. If we stop to ask whether he be our brother, he is gone. Our one

smile would have lit up his prison-day. Alas for us if we smiled not as we

passed by! Alas for us if, face to face, at last, with our Elder Brother,

we find ourselves saying, "Lord, when saw we thee sick and in prison!"

A Companion for the Winter.

I have engaged a companion for the winter. It would be simply a

superfluous egotism to say this to the public, except that I have a

philanthropic motive for doing so. There are many lonely people who are in

need of a companion possessing just such qualities as his; and he has

brothers singularly like himself, whose services can be secured. I despair

of doing justice to him by any description. In fact, thus far, I discover

new perfections in him daily, and believe that I am yet only on the

threshold of our friendship.

In conversation he is more suggestive than any person I have ever known.

After two or three hours alone with him, I am sometimes almost startled to

look back and see through what a marvellous train of fancy and reflection

he has led me. Yet he is never wordy, and often conveys his subtlest

meaning by a look.

He is an artist, too, of the rarest sort. You watch the process under

which his pictures grow with incredulous wonder. The Eastern magic which

drops the seed in the mould, and bids it shoot up before your eyes,

blossom, and bear its fruit in an hour, is tardy and clumsy by side of the

creative genius of my companion. His touch is swift as air; his coloring

is vivid as light; he has learned, I know not how, the secrets of hidden

places in all lands; and he paints, now a tufted clump of soft cocoa

palms; now the spires and walls of an iceberg, glittering in yellow

sunlight; now a desolate, sandy waste, where black rocks and a few

crumbling ruins are lit up by a lurid glow; then a cathedral front, with

carvings like lace; then the skeleton of a wrecked ship, with bare ribs

and broken masts,--and all so exact, so minute, so life-like, that you

believe no man could paint thus any thing which he had not seen.

He has a special love for mosaics, and a marvellous faculty for making

drawings of curious old patterns. Nothing is too complicated for his

memory, and he revels in the most fantastic and intricate shapes. I have

known him in a single evening throw off a score of designs, all beautiful,

and many of them rare: fiery scorpions on a black ground; pale lavender

filagrees over scarlet; white and black squares blocked out as for tiles

of a pavement, and crimson and yellow threads interlaced over them; odd

Chinese patterns in brilliant colors, all angles and surprises, with no

likeness to any thing in nature; and exquisite little bits of landscape in

soft grays and whites. Last night was one of his nights of reminiscences

of the mosaic-workers. A furious snow-storm was raging, and, as the flaky

crystals piled up in drifts on the window-ledges, he seemed to catch the

inspiration of their law of structure, and drew sheet after sheet of

crystalline shapes; some so delicate and filmy that it seemed as if a jar

might obliterate them; some massive and strong, like those in which the

earth keeps her mineral treasures; then, at last, on a round charcoal

disk, he traced out a perfect rose, in a fragrant white powder, which

piled up under his fingers, petal after petal, circle after circle, till

the feathery stamens were buried out of sight. Then, as we held our breath

for fear of disturbing it, with a good-natured little chuckle, he shook it

off into the fire, and by a few quick strokes of red turned the black

charcoal disk into a shield gay enough for a tournament.

He has talent for modelling, but this he exercises more rarely. Usually,

his figures are grotesque rather than beautiful, and he never allows them

to remain longer than for a few moments, often changing them so rapidly

under your eye that it seems like jugglery. He is fondest of doing this at

twilight, and loves the darkest corner of the room. From the half-light he

will suddenly thrust out before you a grinning gargoyle head, to which he

will give in an instant more a pair of spider legs, and then, with one

roll, stretch it out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snapping

that you involuntarily draw your chair further back. Next, in a freak of

ventriloquism, he startles you still more by bringing from the crocodile's

mouth a sigh, so long drawn, so human, that you really shudder, and are

ready to implore him to play no more tricks. He knows when he has reached

this limit, and soothes you at once by a tender, far-off whisper, like the

wind through pines, sometimes almost like an Aeolian harp; then he rouses

you from your dreams by what you are sure is a tap at the door. You turn,

speak, listen; no one enters; the tap again. Ah! it is only a little more

of the ventriloquism of this wonderful creature. You are alone with him,

and there was no tap at the door.

But when there is, and the friend comes in, then my companion's genius

shines out. Almost always in life the third person is a discord, or at

least a burden; but he is so genial, so diffusive, so sympathetic, that,

like some tints by which painters know how to bring out all the other

colors in a picture, he forces every one to do his best. I am indebted to

him already for a better knowledge of some men and women with whom I had

talked for years before to little purpose. It is most wonderful that he

produces this effect, because he himself is so silent; but there is some

secret charm in his very smile which puts people _en rapport_ with each

other, and with him at once.

I am almost afraid to go on with the list of the things my companion can

do. I have not yet told the half, nor the most wonderful; and I believe I

have already overtaxed credulity. I will mention only one more,--but that

is to me far more inexplicable than all the rest. I am sure that it

belongs, with mesmerism and clairvoyance, to the domain of the higher

psychological mysteries. He has in rare hours the power of producing the

portraits of persons whom you have loved, but whom he has never seen. For

this it is necessary that you should concentrate your whole attention on

him, as is always needful to secure the best results of mesmeric power. It

must also be late and still. In the day, or in a storm, I have never

known him to succeed in this. For these portraits he uses only shadowy

gray tints. He begins with a hesitating outline. If you are not tenderly

and closely in attention, he throws it aside; he can do nothing. But if

you are with him, heart and soul, and do not take your eyes from his, he

will presently fill out the dear faces, full, life-like, and wearing a

smile, which makes you sure that they too must have been summoned from the

other side, as you from this, to meet on the shadowy boundary between

flesh and spirit. He must see them as clearly as he sees you; and it would

be little more for his magic to do if he were at the same moment showing

to their longing eyes your face and answering smile.

But I delay too long the telling of his name. A strange hesitancy seizes

me. I shall never be believed by any one who has not sat as I have by his

side. But, if I can only give to one soul the good-cheer and strength of

such a presence, I shall be rewarded.

His name is Maple Wood-fire, and his terms are from eight to twelve

dollars a month, according to the amount of time he gives. This price is

ridiculously low, but it is all that any member of the family asks; in

fact, in some parts of the country, they can be hired for much less. They

have connections by the name of Hickory, whose terms are higher; but I

cannot find out that they are any more satisfactory. There are also some

distant relations, named Chestnut and Pine, who can be employed in the

same way, at a much lower rate; but they are all snappish and uncertain in

temper.

To the whole world I commend the good brotherhood of Maple, and pass on

the emphatic indorsement of a blessed old black woman who came to my room

the other day, and, standing before the rollicking blaze on my hearth,

said, "Bless yer, honey, yer's got a wood-fire. I'se allers said that, if

yer's got a wood-fire, yer's got meat, an' drink, an' clo'es."

Choice of Colors.

The other day, as I was walking on one of the oldest and most picturesque

streets of the old and picturesque town of Newport, R.I., I saw a little

girl standing before the window of a milliner's shop.

It was a very rainy day. The pavement of the side-walks on this street is

so sunken and irregular that in wet weather, unless one walks with very

great care, he steps continually into small wells of water. Up to her

ankles in one of these wells stood the little girl, apparently as

unconscious as if she were high and dry before a fire. It was a very cold

day too. I was hurrying along, wrapped in furs, and not quite warm enough

even so. The child was but thinly clothed. She wore an old plaid shawl and

a ragged knit hood of scarlet worsted. One little red ear stood out

unprotected by the hood, and drops of water trickled down over it from her

hair. She seemed to be pointing with her finger at articles in the window,

and talking to some one inside. I watched her for several moments, and

then crossed the street to see what it all meant. I stole noiselessly up

behind her, and she did not hear me. The window was full of artificial

flowers, of the cheapest sort, but of very gay colors. Here and there a

knot of ribbon or a bit of lace had been tastefully added, and the whole

effect was really remarkably gay and pretty. Tap, tap, tap, went the small

hand against the window-pane; and with every tap the unconscious little

creature murmured, in a half-whispering, half-singing voice, "I choose

_that_ color." "I choose _that_ color." "I choose _that_ color."

I stood motionless. I could not see her face; but there was in her whole

attitude and tone the heartiest content and delight. I moved a little to

the right, hoping to see her face, without her seeing me; but the slight

movement caught her ear, and in a second she had sprung aside and turned

toward me. The spell was broken. She was no longer the queen of an

air-castle, decking herself in all the rainbow hues which pleased her eye.

She was a poor beggar child, out in the rain, and a little frightened at

the approach of a stranger. She did not move away, however; but stood

eying me irresolutely, with that pathetic mixture of interrogation and

defiance in her face which is so often seen in the prematurely developed

faces of poverty-stricken children.

"Aren't the colors pretty?" I said. She brightened instantly.

"Yes'm. I'd like a goon av thit blue."

"But you will take cold standing in the wet," said I. "Won't you come

under my umbrella?"

She looked down at her wet dress suddenly, as if it had not occurred to

her before that it was raining. Then she drew first one little foot and

then the other out of the muddy puddle in which she had been standing,

and, moving a little closer to the window, said, "I'm not jist goin' home,

mem. I'd like to stop here a bit."

So I left her. But, after I had gone a few blocks, the impulse seized me

to return by a cross street, and see if she were still there. Tears sprang

to my eyes as I first caught sight of the upright little figure, standing

in the same spot, still pointing with the rhythmic finger to the blues and

reds and yellows, and half chanting under her breath, as before, "I choose

_that_ color." "I choose _that_ color." "I choose _that_ color."

I went quietly on my way, without disturbing her again. But I said in my

heart, "Little Messenger, Interpreter, Teacher! I will remember you all my

life."

Why should days ever be dark, life ever be colorless? There is always sun;

there are always blue and scarlet and yellow and purple. We cannot reach

them, perhaps, but we can see them, if it is only "through a glass," and

"darkly,"--still we can see them. We can "choose" our colors. It rains,

perhaps; and we are standing in the cold. Never mind. If we look earnestly

enough at the brightness which is on the other side of the glass, we shall

forget the wet and not feel the cold. And now and then a passer-by, who

has rolled himself up in furs to keep out the cold, but shivers

nevertheless,--who has money in his purse to buy many colors, if he likes,

but, nevertheless, goes grumbling because some colors are too dear for

him,--such a passer-by, chancing to hear our voice, and see the

atmosphere of our content, may learn a wondrous secret,--that

pennilessness is not poverty, and ownership is not possession; that to be

without is not always to lack, and to reach is not to attain; that

sunlight is for all eyes that look up, and color for those who "choose."

The Apostle of Beauty.

He is not of the twelve, any more than the golden rule is of the ten. "A

greater commandment I give unto you," was said of that. Also it was called

the "new commandment." Yet it was really older than the rest, and greater

only because it included them all. There were those who kept it ages

before Moses went up Sinai: Joseph, for instance, his ancestor; and the

king's daughter, by whose goodness he lived. So stands the Apostle of

Beauty, greater than the twelve, newer and older; setting Gospel over

against law, having known law before its beginning; living triumphantly

free and unconscious of penalty.

He has had martyrdom, and will have. His church is never established; the

world does not follow him; only of Wisdom is he known, and of her

children, who are children of light. He never speaks by their mouths who

say "Shalt not." He knows that "shalt not" is illegitimate, puny, trying

always to usurp the throne of the true king, "Thou shalt."

"This is delight," "this is good to see," he says of a purity, of a fair

thing. It needs not to speak of the impurity, of the ugliness. Left

unmentioned, unforbidden, who knows how soon they might die out of men's

lives, perhaps even from the earth's surface? Men hedging gardens have for

centuries set plants under that "letter of law" which "killeth," until the

very word hedge has become a pain and an offence; and all the while there

have been standing in every wild country graceful walls of unhindered

brier and berry, to which the apostles of beauty have been silently

pointing. By degrees gardeners have learned something. The best of them

now call themselves "landscape gardeners;" and that is a concession, if it

means, as I suppose it does, that they will try to copy Nature's

landscapes in their enclosures. I have seen also of late that on rich

men's estates tangled growths of native bushes are being more let alone,

and hedges seem to have had some of the weights and harness taken off of

them.

This is but one little matter among millions with which the Apostle of

Beauty has to do; but it serves for instance of the first requisite he

demands, which is freedom. "Let use take care of itself." "It will," he

says. "There is no beauty without freedom."

Nothing is too high for him, nothing too low or small. To speak more

truly, in his eyes there is no small, no low. From a philanthropy down to

a gown, one catholic necessity, one catholic principle; gowns can be

benefactions or injuries; philanthropies can be well or ill clad.

He has a ministry of co-workers,--men, women, and guileless little

children. Many of them serve him without knowing him by name. Some who

serve him best, who spread his creeds most widely, who teach them most

eloquently, die without dreaming that they have been missionaries to

Gentiles. Others there are who call him "Lord, Lord," build temples to him

and teach in them, who never know him. These are they who give their goods

to the poor, their bodies to be burned; but are each day ungracious,

unloving, hard, cruel to men and women about them. These are they also who

make bad statues, bad pictures, invent frightful fashions of things to be

worn, and make the houses and the rooms in which they live hideous with

unsightly adornments. The centuries fight such,--now with a Titian, a

Michel Angelo; now with a great philanthropist, who is also peaceable and

easy to be entreated; now with a Florence Nightingale, knowing no sect;

now with a little child by a roadside, holding up a marigold in the sun;

now with a sweet-faced old woman, dying gracefully in some almshouse. Who

has not heard voice from such apostles?

To-day my nearest, most eloquent apostle of beauty is a poor shoemaker,

who lives in the house where I lodge. How poor he must be I dare not even

try to understand. He has six children: the oldest not more than thirteen,

the third a deaf-mute, the baby puny and ill,--sure, I think (and hope),

to die soon.

They live in two rooms, on the ground-floor. His shop is the right-hand

corner of the front room; the rest is bedroom and sitting-room; behind are

the bedroom and kitchen. I have never seen so much as I might of their way

of living; for I stand before his window with more reverent fear of

intruding by a look than I should have at the door of a king's chamber. A

narrow rough ledge added to the window-sill is his bench. Behind this he

sits from six in the morning till seven at night, bent over, sewing slowly

and painfully on the coarsest shoes. His face looks old enough for sixty

years; but he cannot be so old. Yet he wears glasses and walks feebly; he

has probably never had in any one day of his life enough to eat. But I do

not know any man, and I know only one woman, who has such a look of

radiant good-cheer and content as has this poor shoemaker, Anton Grasl.

In his window are coarse wooden boxes, in which are growing the common

mallows. They are just now in full bloom,--row upon row of gay-striped

purple and white bells. The window looks to the east, and is never shut.

When I go out to my breakfast the sun is streaming in on the flowers and

Anton's face. He looks up, smiles, bows low, and says, "Good-day, good my

lady," sometimes holding the mallow-stalks back with one hand, to see me

more plainly. I feel as if the day and I had had benediction. It is always

a better day because Anton has said it is good; and I am a better woman

for sight of his godly contentment. Almost every day he has beside the

mallows in the boxes a white mug with flowers in it,--nasturtiums,

perhaps, or a few pinks. This he sets carefully in shade of the thickest

mallows; and this I have often seen him hold down tenderly, for the little

ones to see and to smell.

When I come home in the evenings, between eight and nine o'clock, Anton

is always sifting in front of the door, resting his head against the wall.

This is his recreation, his one blessed hour of out-door air and rest. He

stands with his cap in his hand while I pass, and his face shines as if

all the concentrated enjoyment of my walk in the woods had descended upon

him in my first look. If I give him a bunch of ferns to add to his

nasturtiums and pinks, he is so grateful and delighted that I have to go

into the house quickly for fear I shall cry. Whenever I am coming back

from a drive, I begin to think, long before I reach the house, how glad

Anton will look when he sees the carriage stop. I am as sure as if I had

omniscient sight into the depths of his good heart that he has distinct

and unenvious joy in every pleasure that he sees other people taking.

Never have I, heard one angry or hasty word, one petulant or weary cry

from the rooms in which this father and mother and six children are

struggling to live. All day long the barefooted and ragged little ones

play under my south windows, and do not quarrel. I amuse myself by

dropping grapes or plums on their heads, and then watching them at their

feast; never have I seen them dispute or struggle in the division. Once I

purposely threw a large bunch of grapes to the poor little mute, and only

a few plums to the others. I am sorry to say that voiceless Carl ate all

his grapes himself; but not a selfish or discontented look could I see on

the faces of the others,--they all smiled and beamed up at me like suns.

It is Anton who creates and sustains this rare atmosphere. The wife is

only a common and stupid woman; he is educating her, as he is the

children. She is very thin and worn and hungry-looking, but always smiles.

Being Anton's wife, she could not do otherwise.

Sometimes I see people passing the house, who give a careless glance of

contemptuous pity at Anton's window of mallows and nasturtiums. Then I

remember that an apostle wrote:--

"There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of

them is without signification.

"Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him

that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto

me."

And I long to call after them, as they go groping their way down the

beautiful street,--

"Oh, ye barbarians, blind and deaf! How dare you think you can pity Anton?

His soul would melt in compassion for you, if he were able to comprehend

that lives could be so poor as yours. He is the rich man, and you are

poor. Eating only the husks on which you feed, he would starve to death."

English Lodging-Houses.

Somebody who has written stories (is it Dickens?) has given us very wrong

ideas of the English lodging-house. What good American does not go into

London with the distinct impression that, whatever else he does or does

not do, he will upon no account live in lodgings? That he will even be

content with the comfortless coffee-room of a second-rate hotel, and

fraternize with commercial travellers from all quarters of the globe,

rather than come into relations with that mixture of vulgarity and

dishonesty, the lodging-house keeper?

It was with more than such misgiving that I first crossed the threshold of

Mrs. ----'s house in Bedford Place, Bloomsbury. At this distance I smile

to remember how welcome would have been any alternative rather than the

remaining under her roof for a month; how persistently for several days I

doubted and resisted the evidence of all my senses, and set myself at work

to find the discomforts and shortcomings which I believed must belong to

that mode of life. To confess the stupidity and obstinacy of my ignorance

is small reparation, and would be little worth while, except for the hope

that my account of the comfort and economy in living on the English

lodging-house system may be a seed dropped in due season, which shall

spring up sooner or later in the introduction of a similar system in

America. The gain which it would be to great numbers of our men and women

who must live on small incomes cannot be estimated. It seems hardly too

much to say that in the course of one generation it might work in the

average public health a change which would be shown in statistics, and rid

us of the stigma of a "national disease" of dyspepsia. For the men and

women whose sufferings and ill-health have made of our name a by-word

among the nations are not, as many suppose, the rich men and women,

tempted by their riches to over-indulgence of their stomachs, and paying

in their dyspepsia simply the fair price of their folly; they are the

moderately poor men and women, who are paying cruel penalty for not having

been richer,--not having been rich enough to avoid the poisons which are

cooked and served in American restaurants and in the poorer class of

American homes.

Mrs. ----'s lodging-house was not, so far as I know, any better than the

average lodging-houses of its grade. It was well situated, well furnished,

well kept, and its scale of prices was moderate. For instance, the rent of

a pleasant parlor and bedroom on the second floor was thirty-four

shillings a week, including fire and gas,--$8.50, gold. Then there was a

charge of two shillings a week for the use of the kitchen-fire, and three

shillings a week for service; and these were the only charges in addition

to the rent. Thus for $9.75 a week one had all the comforts that can be

had in housekeeping, so far as room and service are concerned. There were

four good servants,--cook, scullery maid, and two housemaids. Oh, the

pleasant voices and gentle fashions of behavior of those housemaids! They

were slow, it must be owned; but their results were admirable. In spite of

London smoke and grime, Mrs. ----'s floors and windows were clean; the

grates shone every morning like mirrors, and the glass and silver were

bright. Each morning the smiling cook came up to take our orders for the

meals of the day; each day the grocer and the baker and the butcher

stopped at the door and left the sugar for the "first floor front," the

beef for the "drawing-room," and so on. The smallest article which could

be required in housekeeping was not overlooked. The groceries of the

different floors never got mixed, though how this separateness of stores

was accomplished will for ever remain a mystery to me; but that it was

successfully accomplished the smallness of our bill was the best of

proof,--unless, indeed, as we were sometimes almost afraid, we did now and

then eat up Dr. A----'s cheese, or drink the milk belonging to the B's

below us. We were a party of four; our fare was of the plain, substantial

sort, but of sufficient variety and abundance; and yet our living never

cost us, including rent, service, fires, and food, over $60 a week. If we

had chosen to practise closer economies, we might have lived on less.

Compare for one instant the comfort of such an arrangement as this, which

really gave us every possible advantage to be secured by housekeeping, and

with almost none of the trouble, with any boarding or lodging possible in

New York. We had two parlors and two bedrooms; our meals served promptly

and neatly, in our own parlor. The same amount of room, and service, and

such a table, for four people, cannot be had in New York for less than

$150 or $200 a week; in fact, they cannot be had in New York for any sum

of money. The quiet respectfulness of behavior and faithful interest in

work of English servants on English soil are not to be found elsewhere. We

afterward lived for some weeks in another lodging-house in Great Malvern,

Worcestershire, at about the same price per week. This house was even

better than the London one in some respects. The system was precisely the

same; but the cooking was almost faultless, and the table appointments

were more than satisfactory,--they were tasteful. The china was a

pleasure, and there were silver and linen and glass which one would be

glad to have in one's own home.

It may be asked, and not unnaturally, how does this lodging-house system

work for those who keep the houses? Can it be possible that all this

comfort and economy for lodgers are compatible with profits for landlords?

I can judge only from the results in these two cases which came under my

own observation. In each of these cases the family who kept the house

lived comfortably and pleasantly in their own apartment, which was, in the

London house, almost as good a suite of rooms as any which they rented.

They certainly had far more apparent quiet, comfort, and privacy than is

commonly seen in the arrangements of the keepers of average

boarding-houses. In the Malvern house, one whole floor, which was less

pleasant than the others, but still comfortable and well furnished, was

occupied by the family. There were three little boys, under ten years of

age, who had their nursery governess, said lessons to her regularly, and

were led out decorously to walk by her at appointed seasons, like all the

rest of good little English boys in well-regulated families; and yet the

mother of these children came to the door of our parlor each morning, with

the respectful air of an old family housekeeper, to ask what we would have

for dinner, and was careful and exact in buying "three penn'orth" of herbs

at a time for us, to season our soup. I ought to mention that in both

these places we made the greater part of our purchases ourselves, having

weekly bills sent in from the shops, and in our names, exactly as if we

were living in our own house. All honest lodging-house keepers, we were

told, preferred this method, as leaving no opening for any unjust

suspicions of their fairness in providing. But, if one chooses to be as

absolutely free from trouble as in boarding, the marketing can all be done

by the family, and the bills still made out in the lodgers' names. I have

been thus minute in my details because I think there may be many to whom

this system of living is as unknown as it was to me; and I cannot but hope

that it may yet be introduced in America.

Wet the Clay.

Once I stood in Miss Hosmer's studio, looking at a statue which she was

modelling of the ex-queen of Naples. Face to face with the clay model, I

always feel the artist's creative power far more than when I am looking at

the immovable marble.

A touch here--there--and all is changed. Perhaps, under my eyes, in the

twinkling of an eye, one trait springs into life and another disappears.

The queen, who is a very beautiful woman, was represented in Miss Hosmer's

statue as standing, wearing the picturesque cloak that she wore during

those hard days of garrison life at Gaeta, when she showed herself so

brave and strong that the world said if she, instead of that very stupid

young man her husband, had been king, the throne need not have been lost.

The very cloak, made of light cloth showily faced with scarlet, was draped

over a lay figure in one corner of the room. In the statue the folds of

drapery over the right arm were entirely disarranged, simply rough clay.

The day before they had been apparently finished; but that morning Miss

Hosmer had, as she laughingly told us, "pulled it all to pieces again."

As she said this, she took up a large syringe and showered the statue

from head to foot with water, till it dripped and shone as if it had been

just plunged into a bath. Now it was in condition to be moulded. Many

times a day this process must be repeated, or the clay becomes so dry and

hard that it cannot be worked.

I had known this before; but never did I so realize the significant

symbolism of the act as when I looked at this lifeless yet lifelike thing,

to be made into the beauty of a woman, called by her name, and cherished

after her death,--and saw that only through this chrysalis of the clay, so

cared for, moistened, and moulded, could the marble obtain its soul.

And, as all things I see in life seem to me to have a voice either for or

of children, so did this instantly suggest to me that most of the failures

of mothers come from their not keeping the clay wet.

The slightest touch tells on the clay when it is soft and moist, and can

produce just the effect which is desired; but when the clay is too dry it

will not yield, and often it breaks and crumbles beneath the unskilful

hand. How perfect the analogy between these two results, and the two

atmospheres which one often sees in the space of one half-hour in the

management of the same child! One person can win from it instantly a

gentle obedience: that person's smile is a reward, that person's

displeasure is a grief it cannot bear, that person's opinions have utmost

weight with it, that person's presence is a controlling and subduing

influence. Another, alas! the mother, produces such an opposite effect

that it is hard to believe the child can be the same child. Her simplest

command is met by antagonism or sullen compliance; her pleasure and

displeasure are plainly of no account to the child, and its great desire

is to get out of her presence.

What shape will she make of that child's soul? She does not wet the clay.

She does not stop to consider before each command whether it be wholly

just, whether it be the best time to make it, and whether she can explain

its necessity. Oh! the sweet reasonableness of children when disagreeable

necessities are explained to them, instead of being enforced as arbitrary

tyrannies! She does not make them so feel that she shares all their

sorrows and pleasures that they cannot help being in turn glad when she is

glad, and sorry when she is sorry. She does not so take them into constant

companionship in her interests, each day,--the books, the papers she

reads, the things she sees,--that they learn to hold her as the

representative of much more than nursery discipline, clothes, and bread

and butter. She does not kiss them often enough, put her arms around them,

warm, soften, bathe them in the ineffable sunshine of loving ways. "I

can't imagine why children are so much better with you than with me,"

exclaims such a mother. No, she cannot imagine; and that is the trouble.

If she could, all would be righted. It is quite probable that she is a far

more anxious, self-sacrificing, hard-working mother than the neighbor,

whose children are rosy and frolicking and affectionate and obedient;

while hers are pale and fretful and selfish and sullen.

She is all the time working, working, with endless activity, on hard, dry

clay; and the neighbor, who, perhaps half-unconsciously, keeps the clay

wet, is with one-half the labor modelling sweet creatures of Nature's own

loveliest shapes.

Then she says, this poor, tired mother, discouraged because her children

tell lies, and irritated because they seem to her thankless, "After all,

children are pretty much alike, I suppose. I believe most children tell

lies when they are little; and they never realize until they are grown up

what parents do for them."

Here again I find a similitude among the artists who paint or model.

Studios are full of such caricatures, and the hard-working, honest souls

who have made them believe that they are true reproductions of nature and

life.

"See my cherub. Are not all cherubs such as he?" and "Behold these trees

and this water; and how the sun glowed on the day when I walked there!"

and all the while the cherub is like a paper doll, and the trees and the

water never had any likeness to any thing that is in this beautiful earth.

But, after all, this similitude is short and paltry, for it is of

comparatively small moment that so many men and women spend their lives in

making bad cherubs in marble, and hideous landscapes in oil. It is

industry, and it keeps them in bread; in butter, too, if their cherubs and

trees are very bad. But, when it is a human being that is to be moulded,

how do we dare, even with all the help which we can ask and find in earth

and in heaven, to shape it by our touch!

Clay in the hands of the potter is not more plastic than is the little

child's soul in the hands of those who tend it. Alas! how many shapeless,

how many ill-formed, how many broken do we see! Who does not believe that

the image of God could have been beautiful on all? Sooner or later it will

be, thank Christ! But what a pity, what a loss, not to have had the sweet

blessedness of being even here fellow-workers with him in this glorious

modelling for eternity!

The King's Friend.

We are a gay party, summering among the hills. New-comers into the little

boarding-house where we, by reason of prior possession, hold a kind of

sway are apt to fare hardly at our hands unless they come up to our

standard. We are not exacting in the matter of clothes; we are liberal on

creeds; but we have our shibboleths. And, though we do not drown unlucky

Ephraimites, whose tongues make bad work with S's, I fear we are not quite

kind to them; they never stay long, and so we go on having it much our own

way.

Week before last a man appeared at dinner, of whom our good little

landlady said, deprecatingly, that he would stay only a few days. She knew

by instinct that his presence would not be agreeable to us. He was not in

the least an intrusive person,--on the contrary, there was a sort of mute

appeal to our humanity in the very extent of his quiet inoffensiveness;

but his whole atmosphere was utterly uninteresting. He was untrained in

manner, awkwardly ill at ease in the table routine; and, altogether, it

was so uncomfortable to make any attempt to include him in our circle that

in a few days he was ignored by every one, to a degree which was neither

courteous nor Christian.

In all families there is a leader. Ours is a charming and brilliant

married woman, whose ready wit and never-failing spirits make her the best

of centres for a country party of pleasure-seekers. Her keen sense of

humor had not been able entirely to spare this unfortunate man, whose

attitudes and movements were certainly at times almost irresistible.

But one morning such a change was apparent in her manner toward him that

we all looked up in surprise. No more gracious and gentle greeting could

she have given him if he had been a prince of royal line. Our astonishment

almost passed bounds when we heard her continue with a kindly inquiry

after his health, and, undeterred by his evident readiness to launch into

detailed symptoms, listen to him with the most respectful attention. Under

the influence of this new and sweet recognition his plain and common face

kindled into something almost manly and individual. He had never before

been so spoken to by a well-bred and beautiful woman.

We were sobered, in spite of ourselves, by an indefinable something in her

manner; and it was with subdued whispers that we crowded around her on the

piazza, and begged to know what it all meant. It was a rare thing to see

Mrs. ---- hesitate for a reply. The color rose in her face, and, with a

half-nervous attempt at a smile, she finally said, "Well, girls, I suppose

you will all laugh at me; but the truth is, I heard that man say his

prayers this morning. You know his room is next to mine, and there is a

great crack in the door. I heard him praying, this morning, for ten

minutes, just before breakfast; and I never heard such tones in my life. I

don't pretend to be religious; but I must own it was a wonderful thing to

hear a man talking with God as he did. And when I saw him at table, I felt

as if I were looking in the face of some one who had just come out of the

presence of the King of kings, and had the very air of heaven about him. I

can't help what the rest of you do or say; _I_ shall always have the same

feeling whenever I see him."

There was a magnetic earnestness in her tone and look, which we all felt,

and which some of us will never forget.

During the few remaining days of his stay with us, that untutored,

uninteresting, stupid man knew no lack of friendly courtesy at our hands.

We were the better for his homely presence; unawares, he ministered unto

us. When we knew that he came directly from speaking to the Master to

speak to us, we felt that he was greater than we, and we remembered that

it is written, "If any man serve me, him will my Father honor."

Learning to Speak.

With what breathless interest we listen for the baby's first word! What a

new bond is at once and for ever established between its soul and ours by

this mysterious, inexplicable, almost incredible fact! That is the use of

the word. That is its only use, so far as mere gratification of the ear

goes. Many other sounds are more pleasurable,--the baby's laugh, for

instance, or its inarticulate murmurs of content or sleepiness.

But the word is a revelation, a sacred sign. Now we shall know what our

beloved one wants; now we shall know when and why the dear heart sorrows

or is glad. How reassured we feel, how confident! Now we cannot make

mistakes; we shall do all for the best; we can give happiness; we can

communicate wisdom; relation is established; the perplexing gulf of

silence is bridged. The baby speaks!

But it is not of the baby's learning to speak that we propose to write

here. All babies learn to speak; or, if they do not, we know that it means

a terrible visitation,--a calamity rare, thank God! but bitter almost

beyond parents' strength to bear.

But why, having once learned to speak, does the baby leave off speaking

when it becomes a man or a woman? Many of our men and women to-day need,

almost as much as when they were twenty-four months old, to learn to

speak. We do not mean learning to speak in public. We do not mean even

learning to speak well,--to pronounce words clearly and accurately; though

there is need enough of that in this land! But that is not the need at

which we are aiming now. We mean something so much simpler, so much

further back, that we hardly know how to say it in words which shall be

simple enough and also sufficiently strong. We mean learning to speak at

all! In spite of all which satirical writers have said and say of the

loquacious egotism, the questioning curiosity of our people, it is true

to-day that the average American is a reticent, taciturn, speechless

creature, who, for his own sake, and still more for the sake of all who

love him, needs, more than he needs any thing else under heaven, to learn

to speak.

Look at our silent railway and horse-cars, steamboat-cabins, hotel-tables,

in short, all our public places where people are thrown together

incidentally, and where good-will and the habit of speaking combined would

create an atmosphere of human vitality, quite unlike what we see now. But

it is not of so much consequence, after all, whether people speak in these

public places or not. If they did, one very unpleasant phase of our

national life would be greatly changed for the better. But it is in our

homes that this speechlessness tells most fearfully,--on the breakfast and

dinner and tea-tables, at which a silent father and mother sit down in

haste and gloom to feed their depressed children. This is especially true

of men and women in the rural districts. They are tired; they have more

work to do in a year than it is easy to do. Their lives are

monotonous,--too much so for the best health of either mind or body. If

they dreamed how much this monotony could be broken and cheered by the

constant habit of talking with each other, they would grasp at the

slightest chance of a conversation. Sometimes it almost seems as if

complaints and antagonism were better than such stagnant quiet. But there

need not be complaint and antagonism; there is no home so poor, so remote

from affairs, that each day does not bring and set ready, for family

welcome and discussion, beautiful sights and sounds, occasions for

helpfulness and gratitude, questions for decision, hopes, fears, regrets!

The elements of human life are the same for ever; any one heart holds in

itself the whole, can give all things to another, can bear all things for

another; but no giving, no bearing, no, not even if it is the giving up of

a life, if it is done without free, full, loving interchange of speech, is

half the blessing it might be.

Many a wife goes down to her grave a dulled and dispirited woman simply

because her good and faithful husband has lived by her side without

talking to her! There have been days when one word of praise, or one word

even of simple good cheer, would have girded her up with new strength. She

did not know, very likely, what she needed, or that she needed any thing;

but she drooped.

Many a child grows up a hard, unimpressionable, unloving man or woman

simply from the uncheered silence in which the first ten years of life

were passed. Very few fathers and mothers, even those who are fluent,

perhaps, in society, habitually _talk_ with their children.

It is certain that this is one of the worst shortcomings of our homes.

Perhaps no other single change would do so much to make them happier, and,

therefore, to make our communities better, as for men and women to learn

to speak.

Private Tyrants.

We recognize tyranny when it wears a crown and sits on an hereditary

throne. We sympathize with nations that overthrow the thrones, and in our

secret hearts we almost canonize individuals who slay the tyrants. From

the days of Ehud and Eglon down to those of Charlotte Corday and Marat,

the world has dealt tenderly with their names whose hands have been red

with the blood of oppressors. On moral grounds it would be hard to justify

this sentiment, murder being murder all the same, however great gain it

may be to this world to have the murdered man put out of it; but that

there is such a sentiment, instinctive and strong in the human soul, there

is no denying. It is so instinctive and so strong that, if we watch

ourselves closely, we shall find it giving alarming shape sometimes to our

secret thoughts about our neighbors.

How many communities, how many households even, are without a tyrant? If

we could "move for returns of suffering," as that tender and thoughtful

man, Arthur Helps, says, we should find a far heavier aggregate of misery

inflicted by unsuspected, unresisted tyrannies than by those which are

patent to everybody, and sure to be overthrown sooner or later.

An exhaustive sermon on this subject should be set off in three divisions,

as follows:--