CICERO IN MAINE 
 
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 COPYKIGMT DEPOSIT: 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 The Library of Congress 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/ciceroinmaineothOOdunn 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 And Other Essays 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 And Other Essays 
 
 BY 
 
 MARTHA BAKER DUNN 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 1905 
 
UBRARY of CONGRESSI 
 
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 COPYRIGHT I9O5 BY MARTHA BAKER DUNN 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published September jqoj 
 
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 - 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 Li 
 V 
 
 C 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Cicero in Maine i 
 
 II. A Plea for the Shiftless Reader . . 29 
 
 III. The Meditations of an Ex-School-Commit- 
 
 tee Woman 53 
 
 IV. Piazza Philosophy . . . . 87 
 V. The Browning Tonic . . . .121 
 
 VI. The Book and the Place . . . 153 
 VII. Concerning Temperance and Judgment to 
 
 come ....... 191 
 
 VIII. Book-Dusting Time . . . . 223 
 
 IX. Education 251 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 WHEN I was a girl attending the high 
 school, — a when that opens the gate- 
 way into a magic land of youth, — we were 
 fortunate enough to have a teacher who was, 
 as I heard a college youth phrase it the other 
 day, " dead stuck on Latin." It was not sim- 
 ply that this gifted man had a passion for Latin 
 literature, but he was, or seemed so to our 
 youthful imaginations, besotted with the gram- 
 mar of the language. No degree of profi- 
 ciency or distinction to which we could attain 
 in the matter of fluent translations was ever 
 allowed to excuse us from the daily collection 
 of gems of knowledge from Andrews and 
 Stoddard's Latin Grammar. 
 
 The class of which I was a member was a 
 small but unique aggregation. Our teacher 
 had high hopes of classical triumphs for us 
 because, though our intellectual gifts might 
 not be of surpassing lustre, our critical fac- 
 
4 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 ulties were abnormally developed. The heroic 
 degree of discipline which enabled the im- 
 mortal Light Brigade to feel that it was 
 
 Theirs not to make reply, 
 Theirs not to reason why, 
 
 would have found no favor in our ranks. The 
 most uncouth lad in the class, the least hope- 
 ful of success in polite literary attainments, 
 was the very one, it seems to me now, who 
 oftenest voiced our united conclusions most 
 clearly. 
 
 " If we ain't to ask questions, and ain't to 
 say what we think, what are we goin' to do? " 
 he queried ; and one and all felt that to such 
 a question there could be but one reply : we 
 were to ask questions, we were to say what 
 we thought, — for what else were we in school ? 
 
 To this method of pursuing our researches 
 our teacher had no objection provided we 
 kept within reasonable bounds, and he had 
 his own way of setting the limits. 
 
 " Ain't we ever goin' to git through studyin' 
 grammar ? " inquired the aforementioned awk- 
 ward lad, after months of hope deferred. 
 
 " If Mr. Brown thinks he has learned all 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 5 
 
 the grammar has to impart, perhaps he will 
 kindly give us a little information about its 
 contents," the teacher suggested blandly ; and 
 then followed a terrible ten minutes for Mr. 
 Brown, during which every vestige of his fan- 
 cied familiarity with Andrews and Stoddard 
 fled from his grasp. 
 
 The victim sat down at last baffled, per- 
 spiring, but by no means entirely vanquished ; 
 no sooner was he seated than his hand began 
 to wave frantically aloft, signaling the fact 
 that he had yet a Parthian arrow to dispatch. 
 
 " Obstupui, steteruntque comae, et vox f aucibus haesit," 
 
 he quoted in a quavering voice from yester- 
 day's lesson, while we looked at him open- 
 mouthed at such erudition. " When I 'm all 
 badgered up so, I know a good deal more 'n 
 I 'pear to be able to tell." 
 
 "It would seem so, Mr. Brown, it would 
 seem so," the teacher assented with a dark- 
 ling glance which warned the rest of us of 
 sorrow to come, " and therein you differ from 
 some of your classmates, who are often able to 
 tell more than they can know." 
 
6 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 It was owing to this lively, though shallow, 
 intelligence of ours, and the facility with 
 which we engrafted pagan Rome on Puritan 
 New England, that our instructor was en- 
 couraged to jump us from Caesar to Virgil 
 with no intervening stages. To him, as to 
 Mr. Cooper, the commentator whose notes 
 assisted our studies, the reading of Virgil was 
 a joy of which one could not partake too soon 
 or too copiously. He expected us to become 
 rapturously interested in the progress of the 
 story, to enjoy with him the favorite passages 
 which he rolled out sonorously for our bene- 
 fit ; mouth-filling lines like 
 
 Exoritur clamorque virum clangorque tubarum, 
 
 or the softer modulations of 
 
 Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. 
 
 Alas, how grievously we disappointed the 
 good man's hopes ! Virgil's poetic genius ap- 
 pealed to us little more than Milton's Paradise 
 Lost would appeal to a primer class suddenly 
 plunged into its mysteries. Even when we 
 translated most glibly we were like creatures 
 
 Moving about in worlds not realised. 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 7 
 
 The virtues of the pious JEneas were of a 
 variety not mentioned in our Sunday-school 
 lessons ; we held his seamanship very cheap ; 
 we had reasons of our own for doubting the 
 authenticity of the whole Trojan legend. 
 
 " How did they ever git to Troy ? " our class 
 orator inquired dubiously. " There wan't one 
 in the whole lot 't knew any more 'bout navi- 
 gation 'n a fly in a pan o' milk ! " This was 
 after we had learned from Mr. Cooper's pre- 
 face to Book I that our friend -#Lneas had 
 already been roaming the seas for seven years 
 before presenting himself for the pleasure of 
 our acquaintance. 
 
 From the first we had no use for Dido. 
 Love was an emotion which had been men- 
 tioned in our hearing, and there were boys 
 and girls among our number who " went to- 
 gether," and displayed varying degrees of 
 what we called " softness " in so doing ; but 
 that any human creature could be soft enough 
 deliberately to toast herself upon a funeral pile, 
 simply because another human creature sailed 
 away and left her, was beyond our wildest con- 
 ception of the tender passion. 
 
8 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 The uncouth lad, who frequently wrote 
 notes for general circulation among the girls 
 of the class, issued the following as soon as 
 Dido's funereal intentions were announced : — 
 
 " Pass this On, 
 " Dido was a Fool ; how 'd she know but 
 Eneeus would be Blowed back by the first 
 Wind ? " 
 
 Some of the boys who were studying Greek 
 originated a sort of class chant, and the school- 
 room for a time resounded during play hours 
 with the ringing notes of 
 
 Dido, Dido, died ou' doors ! 
 
 As a result of such callousness to all the 
 tender and lofty emotions, we were at last 
 transferred to Cicero, and here, for the first 
 time, we touched solid ground. We lived in 
 an age when treason and traitors were mat- 
 ters of recent history, and philippics were 
 something we were very familiar with, albeit 
 under a different name. 
 
 The class lyric, by an easy transition, blos- 
 somed into 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 9 
 
 We '11 hang old Cat'line to a sour apple tree, 
 and without a dissenting voice we took the 
 great orator to our homes and hearts. 
 
 The teacher, when he discerned our enthu- 
 siasm, and heard the uncouth lad vociferating 
 genially, " He 's jest givin' it to the old Cat 
 to-day, ain't he ? " heaved a sigh, perhaps, over 
 the incomprehensible vagaries of pupils, and 
 wisely addressed himself to making the most 
 of the situation. 
 
 One Saturday forenoon he brought Rufus 
 Choate's " Eloquence of Revolutionary Peri- 
 ods," and read us what a great American ora- 
 tor had to say about the genius of Cicero. 
 Splendid words they were, these vibrating 
 sentences of Choate's, and as we listened our 
 eyes shone and our hearts beat : — 
 
 " From that purer eloquence, from that 
 nobler orator, the great trial of fire and blood 
 through which the spirit of Rome was pass- 
 ing had burned and purged away all things 
 light, all things gross ; the purple robe, the 
 superb attitude and action, the splendid com- 
 monplaces of a festal rhetoric, are all laid by ; 
 the ungraceful, occasional vanity of adulation, 
 
io CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 the elaborate speech of the abundant, happy 
 mind at its ease, all disappear ; and instead, 
 what directness, what plainness, what rapid- 
 ity, what fire, what abnegation of himself, what 
 disdain, what hate of the usurper and the 
 usurpation, what grand, swelling sentiments, 
 what fine raptures of liberty roll and revel 
 there ! " 
 
 On the next declamation day, as soon as 
 the class orator mounted the platform, we 
 realized by the light in his dark eyes that he 
 had something new to offer us. There never 
 was a more moving speaker than our class 
 orator. No matter how many times he de- 
 claimed Virginius, — and, owing to many 
 pressing engagements which swallowed up 
 his time for learning new " pieces," this hap- 
 pened with tolerable frequency, — with that 
 slow, deliberate, musical accent he captured 
 his audience. At every repetition, 
 
 Over the Alban mountains the light of morning broke, 
 
 as if it were for us a new birth ; when, at the 
 critical moment, 
 
 Virginius caught the whittle up and hid it in his gown, 
 
CICERO IN MAINE n 
 
 we greeted its disappearance with the same 
 shuddering breath; and the " hoarse, changed 
 voice " in which he spake, " Farewell, sweet 
 child, farewell!" never lost its magic for tears. 
 
 On this well-remembered day, however, 
 the sorrows of Virginius were forgotten ; it 
 was Rufus Choate's magnificent version of a 
 representative passage of Cicero's oratory that 
 fell upon our charmed ears, and we listened 
 to the swelling tones of the speaker with that 
 quickened, thrilling breath which marks the 
 hearer who has Surrendered himself to the 
 emotion of the moment. 
 
 " Lay hold on this opportunity of our sal- 
 vation, conscript fathers — by the immortal 
 gods I conjure you ! — and remember that 
 you are the foremost men here, in the council 
 chamber of the whole earth. Give one sign 
 to the Roman people that even now as they 
 pledge their valor, so you pledge your wisdom 
 to the crisis of the state," — thus the appeal 
 opened. It was the ageless cry for liberty, 
 the cry that is the same yesterday, to-day, 
 and forever. 
 
 " Born to glory and to liberty, let us hold 
 
12 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 these distinctions fast, or let us greatly die ! " 
 — these are words that belong to every cen- 
 tury and to every race of men. We did not 
 know how to formulate what we felt, but it 
 was a moment when Bull Run and Gettys- 
 burg, that worn face of Abraham Lincoln, 
 and all the unmarked graves on Southern 
 battlefields confused themselves within us in 
 some indefinable passion, and took hold on 
 the heroic memories of ancient Rome, — a 
 moment when, as in all the high impulses 
 of life, the barriers of time and place were 
 melted away. 
 
 I believe, as I look back now, that our first 
 conscious inspiration toward what was best 
 in literature and noblest in statesmanship 
 took root from that time. We were living in 
 strenuous days of reconstruction after a great 
 war, and the air was still full of battle echoes, 
 but we drank in the influences of the hour as 
 unheedingly as a plant drinks the sunshine 
 and the dew ; it needed this breath from an- 
 cient Rome to shape the cumulative forces 
 within us into the beginnings of American 
 citizenship. 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 13 
 
 No healthy young creature realizes the pro- 
 cess of his own growth, but many of us can 
 vaguely remember the period when 
 
 those first affections 
 Those shadowy recollections, 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing, 
 
 first reminded our bodies of the souls that 
 dwelt mysteriously within. We received that 
 reminder noisily or undemonstratively ac- 
 cording to our varying temperaments, but in 
 each one of us, none the less, life marked the 
 hour when a new epoch began. 
 
 The regular daily session of the school 
 closed at half-past four in the afternoon, but 
 from that time until five o'clock a dark -faced, 
 sweet-voiced woman, with what seemed to 
 us a marvelous twist to her tongue, gave in- 
 struction in French to the ambitious few 
 who aspired to a knowledge of that polished 
 language. There was the girl who learned 
 easily and forgot everything, the girl who 
 learned ploddingly and forgot nothing, and 
 another, still, who seems to me now the far- 
 
i 4 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 thest away of all, although there are buoyant 
 hours when her once overflowing youth and 
 bounding vitality return to her pulses like 
 the resurrection of a lost joy. 
 
 Of the three male members — for the class 
 was a well-balanced one — the class orator 
 and the uncouth lad constituted two, and the 
 third was the genius of the school, the only 
 scholar, perhaps, whose intuitions leaped un- 
 erringly to the goal, who saw a subject whole, 
 and wrested the inwardness from it while the 
 rest of us were laboriously pondering its 
 earliest developments. Just why the uncouth 
 lad elected to study the French language I 
 could not then comprehend, though I have 
 often told myself that the mere recollection of 
 his recitations added a distinct flavor to life. 
 
 He himself accounted for his presence in 
 the class by the statement that " as he took 
 care o' the schoolhouse he might 's well be 
 recitin' French as doin' nothin', seem' as he 'd 
 got to stay anyway ; " and to behold the vital 
 interest which he displayed in the sugar and 
 spice of the grocer, or the mahogany table of 
 the cabinet-maker, was only one degree less 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 15 
 
 joy-inspiring than when he announced, giving 
 to each syllable its full value, " Jay lese belles 
 pantou-flees de ma bellemare," or clothed 
 himself gayly in the ribbons of his father-in- 
 law. 
 
 It was when the French recitation had 
 ended, however, and the old brick schoolhouse 
 was left to our undisturbed possession, that 
 we sat around the great sheet-iron stove, 
 with no light but the red blur of the setting 
 sun through the western windows, and told 
 all things that ever we knew. On one Tues- 
 day afternoon in particular, I remember, the 
 talk began with that tale of the celebrated 
 wooden horse which Virgil makes ^Eneas tell 
 as a sort of after-dinner story in the second 
 book of the ^Eneid. Our teacher, always hop- 
 ing against hope that he might some day 
 interest us in his beloved Virgil, had that 
 afternoon been dwelling on the great poet's 
 talent as a raconteur. 
 
 It is needless to say that we rejected the 
 whole narrative as puerile. The school gen- 
 ius, indeed, made some modifying reflections 
 in regard to the primitiveness of the age in 
 
i6 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 which the deception was located. " I s'pose 
 we ought to consider " — he began deprecat- 
 ingly, but the uncouth lad brusquely inter- 
 rupted, — 
 
 " We ain't got to consider nothin'," he de- 
 clared, " except that the' wan't any last one 
 of 'em 't had any more head 'n a carpet tack." 
 
 " A wooden hoss," the class orator sneered, 
 taking up the theme ; " poh ! 't would n't fool 
 a baby. My little brother had one for a 
 Christmas present, an' 't would n't go into 
 his stockin', so mother took an' hitched it on 
 with a string." 
 
 " I '11 bait ye, sir," the uncouth lad declaimed 
 oratorically, "that we couldn't 'a' fooled the 
 rebels with any wooden hoss when we was 
 tryin' to take Richmond. If they 'd seen us 
 drawin' off an' leavin' any such contrivance 
 round to hitch to their stockin', they 'd said, 
 * No, thank ye. We ain't keepin' Christmas 
 this year, an' if we was, the Yankees ain't no 
 Santy Claus.' " 
 
 " What do you think," asked the girl who 
 was quick to learn, " of the man that came 
 into school to-day ? " It was a part of her 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 17 
 
 adaptability that she knew how to change a 
 subject in season to prevent it from growing 
 threadbare. 
 
 We lived within two miles of the State 
 capitol, and in all the high moments of life 
 we felt ourselves enhaloed by the shadow of 
 its dome. The State legislature was in ses- 
 sion, and our visitor that day had been one of 
 the members of this august body. Our gen- 
 eration was much less sophisticated than the 
 present up-to-date class of young people, and 
 for us very simple things frequently assumed 
 heroic proportions. To our admiring eyes 
 this visitor was not a mere country lawyer, 
 with that taste for the literature of Latin 
 which many country lawyers used to possess, 
 — he was a wise and powerful being, who 
 created laws out of his inner consciousness, 
 and hobnobbed with principalities and pow- 
 ers, and we venerated him accordingly. The 
 teacher had informed him of our intimacy 
 with Cicero, and when, at the close of the 
 recitation, the great man " addressed " us, he 
 had the acumen to leave the ordinary plati- 
 tudes unsaid, and draw from the Roman 
 
18 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 orator's life and words the message of that 
 nobler patriotism, that larger citizenship, 
 whose ideal forever appeals to ardent souls 
 with the thrill of a passion for which men 
 have been content to die. 
 
 When the girl who was quick to learn re- 
 called our visitor to our minds the thrill came 
 back too, and our eyes turned toward the red 
 streamers in the darkening west, as if they 
 were the banners of victory beckoning us on. 
 
 " Le 's go up to the legislature to-morrow," 
 the slow girl suddenly suggested, seized by 
 an unwonted inspiration ; and with one accord 
 we assented, for Wednesday afternoon would 
 be a holiday. 
 
 When, next day, we met at the appointed 
 hour for our long walk, the afternoon seemed 
 to have been created for our purpose. It was 
 one of those clear, bracing winter days when 
 the snowy path echoes crisply under one's 
 tread, and snow and sky melt into a dazzle, 
 whose blended light and color is emphasized 
 by the dark shapes of feathery pine and fir 
 trees. 
 
 It must not be thought that our little com- 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 19 
 
 pany dallied along in couples absorbed in 
 any sentimental discourse. On the contrary, 
 we marched by threes, the boys leading the 
 way, the girls briskly keeping pace. The 
 road which we followed was then, and to me 
 is to this day, rilled with childhood memories 
 of " the war," and it was of these things that 
 we discoursed as we went along. That com- 
 monplace-looking, hip-roofed farmhouse had 
 been the military pesthouse, and awesome 
 associations lingered around it still ; in yonder 
 field a battery had once encamped, and one 
 of the girls related the story of how, at the 
 venturesome age of twelve, she, with several 
 companions of equally mature years, having 
 wandered within the limits of the camp, had 
 been promptly arrested and haled before the 
 commanding officer, the terrors of whose 
 cross-examination had been little mitigated by 
 roars of laughter from surrounding listeners. 
 The echoes of marching infantry and the 
 beating hoofs of cavalry horses seemed to us 
 hardly to have died from the air, and when 
 we reached the State House at last we were 
 keyed for heroic doings. 
 
20 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 The capitol building of our native State 
 was to us, in those days, the grandest struc- 
 ture in the world. I confess here that it has 
 never lost its ancient charm for me. It stands 
 on high ground, and I have seen its dome 
 blur grandly into many sunrises and sunsets ; 
 when one begins to mount the successive 
 flights of broad, granite steps that lead to the 
 majestic front entrance, one begins to say 
 to one's "inward ear," "Here is a centre of 
 deeds; here events are shaped for good or 
 ill ; " and the fact that many of these shap- 
 ings are trivial in themselves — sometimes, 
 indeed, ill-shaped — does not altogether rob 
 them of their significance in the eternal frame- 
 work of things. 
 
 As we entered the rotunda that day, our 
 footsteps resounding on the floor seemed al- 
 most an impertinence. We lingered to look 
 at the portraits of the old-time governors in 
 their gay coats ; we paused in sincere homage 
 before the clustering battle-flags, which were 
 then being gathered into the State House 
 as their last, honored resting-place. A copy of 
 Moses Owen's stirring poem, " The Returned 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 21 
 
 Maine Battle- Flags," hung beside the sacred 
 relics, and the class orator could not resist the 
 opportunity to thrill us with its music. As 
 he read he forgot himself and the place, and 
 more than one hurrying foot checked itself at 
 the sound, as if a sentinel had called " Halt ! " 
 
 As the word is given — they charge ! they form ! 
 And the dim hall rings with the battle's storm ! 
 And once again through the smoke and strife 
 Those colors lead to a nation's life. 
 
 After numerous digressions we reached the 
 gallery of the House of Representatives, and 
 hung over the rail gazing at the mighty men 
 below. The triviality of the subjects under 
 discussion might, had we been maturer audi- 
 tors, have served to dampen our heroic mood, 
 but to us it was all mysteriously large and 
 significant. When two honorable members 
 chanced to indulge in lively recrimination, 
 the uncouth lad was observed to murmur as 
 in meditation, " How long, O Catiline," — 
 the familiar phrase which had become to us 
 like a household word. 
 
 Once during the afternoon a large, blond 
 young man, with a cherubic visage, rose in 
 
22 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 answer to a question, and drawled forth a 
 reply which commanded the instant and 
 amused attention of the house. 
 
 " That 's Tom Reed," we heard somebody 
 say, and we looked with quickened interest at 
 a speaker who had already begun to make 
 himself felt as a power. 
 
 By and by there was a stir in the rear of 
 the great hall as loitering men in the corri- 
 dor greeted a fresh comer. Now Cicero was 
 indeed among us ! We all knew that erect 
 form, with the head gallantly thrown back, 
 and the keen, dark eyes that had not then 
 learned to question Fate otherwise than 
 blithely, — the eyes that had ever a smile of 
 quick recognition, as we well knew, for every 
 boy and girl to whom their glance had been 
 directed. It was little wonder that we all 
 loved Mr. Blaine, — there was much about 
 him that was supremely lovable. 
 
 The usual routine of a visit to the State 
 House included the climbing of the winding 
 stairs which led to the cupola, to assure our- 
 selves that Kennebec County remained se- 
 curely anchored below ; but, on this occasion, 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 23 
 
 as the short winter afternoon was waning fast, 
 we contented ourselves with a visit to the 
 massive stone balcony which opens from the 
 second story. A tinge of rosy light was al- 
 ready reflected in the eastern sky, and a few 
 ambitious stars had begun to show them- 
 selves. In front of us lay the " State grounds," 
 which had so lately been a bustling camp, 
 empty now and solitary save where a marble 
 shaft glimmered whitely to mark the spot 
 where some departed statesman had wrapped 
 the drapery of his couch about him and lain 
 down to pleasant dreams. Even the glimmer- 
 ing line of the river was white, too. As we 
 stood at the balustrade's edge, brooding over 
 the landscape, life thrilled large within us, 
 life uncomprehended, unformulated, the full 
 cup, the fulfilled dream, which seem wholly 
 possible only to the hopfulness of youth. 
 When the 
 
 whole soul revolves, the cup runs over, 
 The world and life 's too big to pass for a dream. 
 
 A large bird rose slowly in the distant sky, 
 his wings showing black against the clear 
 ether. " It's funny, too," the genius said, think- 
 
24 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 ing aloud ; " the Roman eagles, the Ameri- 
 can eagle, — and those old chaps thought 
 their birds were the emblems o' freedom 
 jest as we think ours is ! Well, I don' 
 know 's I 'd change James G. Blaine for old 
 Cicero." 
 
 In the middle of the Latin recitation next 
 day the uncouth lad inquired abruptly, " What 
 ever became o' him, anyhow, — I mean what 
 end did he make ? " 
 
 The teacher stared for a moment, uncom- 
 prehending. " Oh, you mean Cicero ? " 
 
 " Course," the uncouth one replied laconi- 
 cally. 
 
 Then the teacher — how fortunate it was 
 for us that this wise man always knew how 
 to seize the heart of an opportunity ! — gave 
 us a brief sketch of the great Roman's life, 
 showing us how his true nobleness over- 
 balanced his political weaknesses and vanity. 
 He — the teacher — " knew a man " who had 
 visited Tusculum and seen the spot where 
 the ruins of Cicero's villa still stand, with the 
 great ivy tree growing against the sunny 
 wall. He told us of the neighbors whose 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 25 
 
 country houses surrounded Cicero's dwelling, 
 
 — Caesar, Pompey, Brutus, the poet Catullus, 
 
 Lucullus, celebrated for his feasts, with whom 
 
 Cicero used to exchange books, — names 
 
 these were to conjure with. He told us, too, 
 
 of our hero's beloved daughter, his little 
 
 Tullia, and her early death ; and he made it 
 
 all more real by reminding us that this was 
 
 the same Tusculum with whose long, "white 
 
 streets " we were so familiar in Macaulay's 
 
 poem. Here the class orator's lips began to 
 
 move, and we knew that he was muttering 
 
 dumbly, — 
 
 From the white streets of Tusculum, 
 The proudest town of all. 
 
 He had often declaimed it. 
 
 When the narrator went on to describe 
 how Cicero, betrayed and deserted, was finally 
 assassinated, the fatal blow being struck by 
 a man whom he had formerly defended, 
 the uncouth lad, forgetting the dignity of the 
 place and hour, brought his hand down on 
 his knee with a resounding smack, and de- 
 clared in quivering tones, " I call it gol-darned 
 mean ! " 
 
26 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 All this passed years ago. The girl who 
 was quick to learn and the school genius 
 both heard the call early in life to that land 
 where naught but evil is ever forgotten, and 
 where insight is divine and eternal. The girl 
 who never forgot has spent her powers in 
 patiently bestowing her accumulations on 
 others ; the class orator has disseminated his 
 gifts of language through the pen rather than 
 the persuasive voice ; and it was, after all, the 
 uncouth lad, uncouth no longer, magnificent 
 in stature and in wisdom, who, on a well- 
 remembered day, rolled grandly forth that 
 noble address on Christian Citizenship. 
 
 There was a lump in my throat when I 
 heard him say, " My own first conscious im- 
 pulse towards making a good citizen of myself 
 dates from the time when I was awkwardly but 
 enthusiastically translating Cicero's orations 
 in the old brick schoolhouse in my native 
 town. I was fortunate enough to begin the 
 study of Latin under a teacher who taught 
 with the spirit and the understanding also, 
 and who had the magnetic power of mak- 
 ing his pupils realize that every great Ian- 
 
CICERO IN MAINE 27 
 
 guage possesses a soul as well as an an- 
 atomy." 
 
 When I stood before that former uncouth 
 lad at the close of his discourse, and saw him 
 look at me questioningly, as one who dimly 
 divines a ghost of the past, I said to him, — 
 since it is generally wiser to laugh than to 
 cry, — " Avez-vous les pantoufles de velours 
 de l'epicier ? " 
 
 He seized my hand in a mighty grasp of 
 recognition and welcome : " I have, — and 
 those of the butcher and baker and candle- 
 stick-maker as well. The women in my parish 
 were always sending 'em to me before I was 
 married." 
 
 But, when all is said, the true link between 
 us, in the new as in the old day, was something 
 in which the grocer's velvet slippers had little 
 part : that which made our old school days 
 worth remembering, the image which shaped 
 itself in both our minds as we stood there, — 
 
 One and one with a shadowy third — 
 
 was that of the wise schoolmaster, who had 
 known how to draw us into the grand cir- 
 
28 CICERO IN MAINE 
 
 cle where old Rome and young America — 
 all nations, indeed, and all races of men — 
 were made one and indivisible in the death- 
 less continuity of a moral ideal. 
 
II 
 
 A PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS 
 READER 
 
A PLEA FOR THE SHIFT- 
 LESS READER 
 
 A CERTAIN "stark and sufficient man " 
 called Michel de Montaigne, an old 
 Gascon whom Emerson tells us he found 
 " still new and immortal," once wrote : " There 
 is more ado to interpret interpretations than 
 to interpret the things, and more books upon 
 books than upon all other subjects ; we do 
 nothing but comment upon one another." 
 
 Not long ago I stood in one of the win- 
 dowed alcoves of a college library, looking 
 with wearied gaze at shelves containing row 
 after row of these same " books upon books," 
 set there for the assistance of the student 
 in interpreting interpretations. With the 
 contents of many of them I was familiar ; I 
 knew the helpful criticism which they some- 
 times offered to the perplexed seeker ; I knew, 
 too, the cheerful readiness with which they 
 
32 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 stood prepared to snuff the immortal spark 
 out of genius, grind the inspiration out of in- 
 spiration, and distill a fog of commonplace- 
 ness over the consecration and the poet's 
 dream; and I asked myself whether, if it 
 were proposed to pass a law making the pro- 
 fession of criticism punishable with death, I 
 should use my influence in favor of behead- 
 ing the critic, or be content to let him escape 
 with imprisonment for life. 
 
 It is true, one may say of critics, as of in- 
 toxicants, that both the use and the abuse of 
 them is a matter of personal choice ; but this, 
 like most general statements, cannot be alto- 
 gether proved. The critic is always stealing 
 insidiously upon us in the magazines, creep- 
 ing into the columns of the newspapers, 
 foisting his opinions upon us before we real- 
 ize it, finding weak places in our favorite 
 sonnets, pointing out to us that the poems 
 we love best are not " high poetry," suggest- 
 ing that the authors we delight in are ephem- 
 eral creatures destined to live but a day ; 
 and such is the web he weaves around us 
 that, unconsciously, we accept him at his 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 33 
 
 own valuation, and forget that he too is 
 mortal. 
 
 It may be that I love the sonnet, as I love 
 my friend, all the more because it is faulty ; 
 it may be that the minor poet appeals to me 
 more than the high poet, — that I find in the 
 author who is not a god something that rouses 
 my aspiration and satisfies my need. My 
 friend the critic, who, as Montaigne has it, 
 " will chew my meat for me," tells me that 
 my judgment is wrong and my taste per- 
 verted, because neither coincides with his 
 own. In spite of the bonds thus imposed on 
 me I have a right to arraign the decisions of 
 the critic himself, since nothing is truer than 
 that it is difficult for the wisest man to judge 
 his contemporaries justly, and that every 
 man's taste is more or less influenced by in- 
 dividual temperament and training. 
 
 " What is history," said Napoleon, " but a 
 fable agreed upon ? " No man could justly 
 ask that question in regard to criticism, be- 
 cause every critic brings to his task the col- 
 oring of his own mind and temperament, and 
 does not necessarily agree with any other. 
 
34 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 Even after he has dissected his literary 
 prey, and laid bare its anatomy, flesh and 
 blood, sinews and bones, there yet remains 
 in his mind an involuntary bias, because he 
 really likes the thing or really dislikes it. 
 
 It is precisely for this right of individual 
 judgment and individual taste that I plead. 
 In this age, when so many people are pain- 
 fully, laboriously, and conscientiously making 
 a study of literature, agonizing themselves 
 in interpreting interpretations, it gives one a 
 thrill of joy to remember that one has an un- 
 doubted right to read the author and omit 
 the interpretation, and to say boldly, "I like 
 this," or " I do not like that," without being 
 obliged by any law of the land to give a rea- 
 son for the faith that is in him. It is per- 
 fectly legitimate for the humblest reader on 
 earth to dissent from the judgments of au- 
 thors, critics, and all other geniuses, however 
 godlike, and recklessly, shamelessly, to form 
 his own uninspired opinions, and stick to 
 them, — all the more that the godlike ones 
 themselves have been known to differ widely 
 in their decisions. 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER ' 35 
 
 Emerson, for instance, tells us in his " Eng- 
 lish Traits " that Scott's poems are a mere 
 traveler's itinerary. Ruskin, on the contrary, 
 finds in Scott the typical literary mind of his 
 age, and his artist eye unfailingly discerns 
 the color chord in the poet's descriptions 
 of nature ; but if neither Emerson, Ruskin, 
 nor any other mighty one of the earth had 
 found anything to praise in Scott's poetry, I 
 am not therefore compelled to forget the 
 sense of bounding life and joy with which, 
 in my girlhood, I first read The Lady of 
 the Lake, Marmion, and The Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel. 
 
 For me Scott's poems were alive. His 
 armies marched, his watch-fires burned, his 
 alarums sounded. The printed page was full 
 of the inexhaustible energy of the man who 
 wrote it; with him I climbed the hill and 
 trod the heather, and the full tide of his love 
 for everything romantic and chivalrous and 
 Scotch swept me along in its current. When 
 I became a woman, with children of my own., 
 I read these poems to them with the same 
 sense of having discovered a new country, 
 
36 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 a land full of color and romance, and I 
 read to listeners who were never tired of 
 hearing. 
 
 I remember that those young auditors 
 asked a hundred eager questions, and that in 
 the questionings and the replies we all found 
 fresh inspiration ; but the questions were 
 never those of analysis. The children gave 
 themselves up to the joy of the narrative, and 
 the message that it brought stole upon them 
 as unconsciously as the sound of the rushing 
 mountain breeze steals on the accustomed 
 ear. It was, perhaps, my duty, as a wise 
 parent, to have taught them to pull every- 
 thing they read to pieces, and put it together 
 again, as one does a dissected map ; but if I 
 had done so, the poem or the story, like the 
 map, would henceforth have seemed to their 
 imagination a thing ready to crumble to 
 pieces at a touch. 
 
 I remember, too, the message these poems 
 brought to another life, — that of a man who 
 lived in a remote mountain village, knew lit- 
 tle of Emerson or Ruskin, and cared not a 
 jot for critics or criticism. I fell in with him 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 37 
 
 one day when I was taking a long walk along 
 the beautiful country road on which his farm 
 lands bordered, — a taciturn-looking, shaggy- 
 browed old farmer, yet with a twinkle in his 
 eye that contradicted the sternness of his 
 face when in repose. He invited me to ride 
 with him, and our conversation started from 
 the book I held in my hand. 
 
 " I guess you 're a reader," he said, " or you 
 would n't be carrying a book with you on 
 such a long walk." 
 
 " Yes," I answered, " I am something of a 
 reader. I do not read much on a walk like 
 this, but I have a fancy that a book is a good 
 companion." 
 
 " My father used to run of a notion," he 
 told me presently, " that reading was a clear 
 waste of time, but mother liked to read. I 
 guess she went hungry for books the most 
 of her life. I took after her in liking books, 
 though I ain't never read any too many ; but 
 when she went to Bangor one time, when I 
 was 'bout seventeen year old, she brought 
 me a copy of Walter Scott's poetry, an' I 've 
 thought a good many times 't that book made 
 
38 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 a difference in my whole life. I think likely 
 you 've read it ? " 
 
 " Yes, and enjoyed it. 5 ' 
 
 " Well, I set by it in the first place because 
 I knew what it meant to mother to buy it. 
 Her money come hard, an' books cost more 
 then than what they do now. I s'pose I had 
 naturally more of a romantic streak in me than 
 most farmers' boys, an' it jest needed such a 
 book as that to wake it up. I 'd always no- 
 ticed the sky and the mountains and the like 
 a good deal, an' after that mother 'n ? I begun 
 to pick out places round here an' name 'em 
 for places in the book. You 'd laugh now if 
 I told you the names I 've give 'em in my 
 mind ever since ; but I don't laugh, because 
 I remember what comfort mother got out of 
 it. She located Edinburgh over there behind 
 that farthest hill you see ; an' I declare, she 
 talked about it so much I ain't never ben 
 sure to this day that it ain't there. I think 
 likely all this seems foolish to you ? " 
 
 " On the contrary," I said, " I think there 's 
 an admirable sort of common sense about it." 
 
 " I 'm pretty sure I picked me out a differ- 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 39 
 
 ent kind of a wife from what I should if I 
 had n't fallen in love with Ellen Douglas for 
 my first sweetheart. I did n't choose her jest 
 because she was pretty or smart, or could 
 make good butter an' cheese. An' when I 'd 
 got her, mother liked her, an' they lived happy 
 together. Then, pretty soon, the war broke 
 out. We lived 'way off here where we did n't 
 hear much, an' we did n't get newspapers 
 very often, an' father thought the main thing 
 was to stay here on the farm an' raise a good 
 crop o' potatoes an' apples ; but I was uneasy. 
 I did n't think war was goin' to be all romance 
 an' troubadours, but I kept sayin' to myself 
 that here was my chance to show what kind 
 of a man I was. 
 
 " One day I had to go part way up Cedar 
 Mountain, there, to hunt after a steer 't had 
 strayed off ; an' when I looked away off an' 
 saw the mountains all around the sky, an' 
 the sun shinin' on the fields an' ponds, an' the 
 trees wavin' their tops as if they was banners, 
 I broke right out an' hollered : — 
 
 " Where 's the coward that would not dare 
 To fight for such a land ? 
 
40 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 " That settled it. I enlisted, an' stayed in 
 the army till the war was over. 'T wan't all 
 poetry, but there ain't any part o' my life 't I 
 feel any better satisfied with. I was lucky. 
 I did n't get hurt to speak of till the Rebs 
 put a bullet into my shoulder at Gettysburg, — 
 an' that reminds me o' somethin'. The third 
 day o' the fight, when our boys was waitin' 
 for orders, an' we could see the regiments all 
 round us goin' into action, there was some- 
 thin' goin' through my mind over 'n' over as 
 if it was wound up an' went by machinery ; 
 an' that night, when I was layin' there 
 wounded an' mighty uncomfortable, it come 
 to me like a flash what it was. You know 
 how a thing '11 get into your head an' keep 
 buzzin' there. I was sayin' to myself : — 
 
 " The stubborn spearmen still made good 
 Their dark, impenetrable wood, 
 Each stepping where his comrade stood 
 The instant that he fell." 
 
 This man, who knew nothing about critics 
 and criticism, had involuntarily chosen, in 
 his moment of high impulse and emotion, the 
 very passage which the authorities have pro- 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 41 
 
 nounced as Homeric as anything in Homer. 
 I doubt if it would have meant half as much 
 to him if he had ever pulled it to pieces, to 
 ask himself why it moved him, or if he had 
 any rhetorical right to be moved by it at 
 all. 
 
 It has been my good fortune, on one or 
 two occasions, to wait for a car in a little sta- 
 tion which is evidently a rendezvous for two 
 plain-looking men, farmers from their appear- 
 ance, who seem to meet in this place now and 
 then for the purpose of talking over their fa- 
 vorite literature. I have heard them discuss 
 Thomson's " Seasons," Young's " Night 
 Thoughts," and poems of Goldsmith, Crabbe, 
 Collins, and others. One of them finds his 
 greatest enjoyment in reading Rogers's 
 " Pleasures of Memory ; " the other, on a bright 
 winter day, discoursed so lovingly of Cowper's 
 " Task " that I came home and read it with a 
 new comprehension. They search out the 
 beauties, and not the flaws, of their favorite 
 authors ; they never — apparently — stop to 
 ask themselves whether these are the writers 
 that persons of trained literary taste ought 
 
42 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 to enjoy ; and they will probably go down to 
 their graves in happy oblivion of the fact that 
 they have never chosen the " highest " poetry. 
 
 I do not wish to be understood as condemn- 
 ing the training that helps the student to 
 distinguish between good and bad literature, 
 but I do mean to say that if the reader has 
 not that within his own soul which interprets 
 to him the indefinable something which we 
 call genius, it will never be revealed to him 
 by catechisms and anatomical processes. " I 
 hate to be tied down," Tennyson once said, 
 " to say that ' this means that! because the 
 thought within the image is much more than 
 any one interpretation." 
 
 There are, at present, a multitude of wom- 
 an's clubs in America, most of which are 
 studying the works of some author or authors. 
 For their use and profit and that of similar 
 seekers after truth, Outline Studies have been 
 provided. I have before me, as I write, such 
 a handbook on Lowell, of which Mr. Lowell 
 himself wrote (we are told), " The little book 
 both interested and astonished me." I choose 
 some questions from it at random, asking the 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 43 
 
 reader to supply the answers which naturally 
 occur to the mind as he reads : — 
 
 " To whom was the * Invitation ' addressed ? 
 The objects and requirements of travel ? 
 Could the small portmanteau hold Lowell's 
 outfit ? " (And if not, why did he not take a 
 bigger one ?) " Have Americans, especially 
 Western Americans, any genuine love of 
 trees? How is it with Lowell? Have you 
 seen his Genealogical Tree ? In what month 
 is Lowell happiest? And you? In what 
 seasons and moods can Lowell ' bear nothin* 
 closer than the sky ' ? What hint does he 
 give of a home not far from Boston ? " and 
 so on, indefinitely. 
 
 It hardly seems that Lowell's poetry could 
 have the juice taken out of it more thoroughly 
 if one went on to inquire : " Does Lowell say 
 anywhere that he had been vaccinated? 
 Which are New Englanders generally said 
 to prefer, pies or puddings ? Compare Bar- 
 low's ' Hasty Pudding' and Whittier's 'The 
 Pumpkin' with Lowell's reference in 'The 
 Courtin" to Huldy parin' apples. Would 
 you gather from the text that Lowell had 
 
44 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 an especial preference for apple pies? And 
 you ? " 
 
 I was once present at the session of a Bible 
 class in a country church, where the topic 
 under discussion was the story of Daniel in 
 the lions' den. The teacher asked each mem- 
 ber of the class, one after the other, " What 
 do you suppose Daniel's thoughts were, when 
 he found himself in this dangerous position ? " 
 The answers given varied more or less ac- 
 cording to the gifts of imagination possessed 
 by different individuals, but the last person 
 to whom the question was addressed, a heavy- 
 looking man, who seemed to have been pain- 
 fully anticipating the moment when this de- 
 mand should be made on his intellect, replied 
 slowly, as if struggling with the depth of his 
 thought, "Why — I s'pose — he thought — 
 he was in — a den o' lions ! " 
 
 It seems to me that the attempt to inter- 
 pret genius by the Socratic method must 
 frequently bring forth replies as concise and 
 practical as that of the man in the Bible class. 
 The most perfect piece of literature may be 
 rendered absurd by such a catechism. 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 45 
 
 We go to a physician for advice about diet, 
 but when he has given it we do not expect 
 him to digest our food for us. So, when the 
 student has been taught in a general way 
 what is admirable in literature, it is not ne- 
 cessary for the teacher to go on labeling every 
 page with, " This is a fine passage." " Do 
 not admire this line ; the metaphor is faulty," 
 and so on. If the reader is ever to develop 
 into a thinker, he must learn to dispense with 
 such literary guide-posts. 
 
 When I was a pupil in the high school, 
 translating Virgil, I remember how my spirit 
 rose in rebellion when the footnotes gushed 
 like this: — 
 
 " Suffusa oculos : wet as to her shining eyes 
 with tears. Female beauty never appears so 
 engaging, and makes so deep an impression 
 on the reader, as when suffused with tears 
 and manifesting a degree of anxious solici- 
 tude. The poet therefore introduces Venus 
 in that situation, making suit to her father. 
 The speech is of the chastest kind, and can- 
 not fail to charm the reader." 
 
 I had it in me to have had some dim appre- 
 
46 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 ciation of the /Eneid, if I had been let alone. 
 Indeed, there comes clearly to my mind at 
 this moment the memory of a sunny morning, 
 when, in a day-dream, I beheld a certain Sici- 
 lian youth, clad in an embroidered cloak of 
 Iberian purple, stand forth to be shot down 
 by a Tuscan arrow. He lived somewhere in 
 the ninth book of the JEneid; and when I 
 found that the emotional commentator was 
 not suffused as to his shining eyes with tears, 
 I felt at liberty to mourn for the fair youth 
 whose violet mantle faded so long ago. I am 
 still distinctly grateful to the compiler of foot- 
 notes for omitting to deliver a funeral oration. 
 There are no beauties like those one discovers 
 for one's self, and no emotions as sweet as 
 those which are never put into words. 
 
 Every real work of genius holds in it much 
 more than the author himself knew, and each 
 reader interprets it, as he interprets God, 
 according to the poverty or riches of his own 
 nature ; yet, even so, that interpretation, 
 meagre though it may be, which comes to 
 him out of the struggle of his spirit is worth 
 more to him than all the rest. 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 47 
 
 It is a great step gained when one has 
 shaken off the bondage of feeling obliged to 
 comprehend at once everything that one ad- 
 mires. It is perfectly possible to enjoy a 
 thing, even to get some degree of good out 
 of it, before one has arrived at any accurate 
 understanding of its meaning. " No complex 
 or very important truth," De Quincey tells 
 us, " was ever yet transferred in full develop- 
 ment from one mind to another. Truth of 
 that character is not a piece of furniture to be 
 shifted ; it is a seed which must be sown and 
 pass through the several stages of growth. 
 No doctrine of importance can be transferred 
 in a matured state into any man's understand- 
 ing from without ; it must arise by an act of 
 genesis within the understanding itself." 
 
 There is nothing strange in the fact that 
 an ordinary mind cannot at once and entirely 
 comprehend the message of an extraordinary 
 one ; but one may be caught at first by mere 
 beauty of language, by rhythm and swing, by 
 some faint glimmer of significance, elusive 
 but divine ; and by and by, when experience 
 and love and joy and sorrow and pain have 
 
48 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 gone on day by day offering their commen- 
 taries on all the meanings of life, one may 
 wake suddenly to know that the interpreta- 
 tion he vainly sought has come while he was 
 unconscious of it. Your message may not be 
 mine, mine may not be as richly full as that 
 of another, but sooner or later each one comes 
 to his own. 
 
 " It is all nonsense to talk about enjoying 
 what you don't understand," a gruff old pro- 
 fessor of rhetoric said to me once. After the 
 finality of this dictum, it was a pleasure to 
 find, soon after, a book written by another 
 distinguished authority on rhetoric, in which 
 he quotes the following lines from " A Gram- 
 marian's Funeral," with the confession that, 
 although he likes them very much, he does 
 not know what they mean : — 
 
 Sleep, crop and herd ! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, 
 
 Safe from the weather ! 
 He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, 
 
 Singing together, 
 He was a man born with thy face and throat, 
 
 Lyric Apollo ! 
 Long he lived nameless : how should Spring take note 
 
 Winter would follow ? 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 49 
 
 Such an admission on the part of an accom- 
 plished scholar encourages one to hope that, 
 after all, even rhetoricians — some of them — 
 are but men, and that they too may acquire 
 a reprehensible appetite for odds and ends of 
 prose and poetry which — to speak accurately 
 — choose themselves, by one knows not what 
 principle of selection, and persist in clinging 
 in the mind and attaching themselves to it 
 like burs. 
 
 What real lover of reading has not such a 
 collection of tramp quotations, which haunt 
 him, apropos, frequently, of nothing at all? 
 Right gypsies they are; but all the joy of 
 their vagabondage would be lost, if one felt 
 obliged to sort them, analyze their charm, and 
 store them away, each in its own pigeonhole, 
 labeled " Hope," " Memory," and so on. 
 
 It is often claimed that the spirit of our 
 age is a reaction from Puritanism, but it 
 seems to me that there are still a good many 
 people who feel that there must be something 
 sinful in reading anything that one really en- 
 joys. They grind away at the chosen volume, 
 whatever it may be, trembling as they ask 
 
50 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 themselves : " Ought I to like this ? Is it the 
 sort of thing a truly intellectual person would 
 approve ? " Their eyes are blinded, so that 
 they never realize how, all the while, other 
 happy souls are led on little by little, from 
 flowery peak to peak, until they find them- 
 selves unconsciously treading with serene 
 footsteps the heights where the masters dwell, 
 the paths where duty is transfigured into de- 
 light. 
 
 The reader who begins by enjoying Long- 
 fellow may end with a genuine appreciation 
 of Milton and Browning; in the meantime, 
 if he never attains to that proud preeminence, 
 there is no law making the offense punish- 
 able with death. In literature, as in life, one 
 has a right to choose one's own friends. The 
 man who has poetry enough in his soul to 
 thrill when King Olaf's war horns ring 
 
 Over the level floor of the flood 
 
 is not wholly without knowledge of the mys- 
 tic voices that call. Charles Lamb tells us 
 that the names of Marlowe, Drayton, Drum- 
 mond of Hawthornden, and Cowley — minor 
 
PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 51 
 
 poets all — carry a sweeter perfume to him 
 than those of Milton and Shakespeare. A 
 man whom I once knew, a German scholar 
 of some repute, entitled also to add D. D. and 
 Ph. D. to his name, sent me Rider Haggard's 
 " Dawn " as his notion of a really good story. 
 His taste and mine differed widely, yet I was 
 willing that he should live. I was even able 
 to understand how a man of naturally active 
 and adventurous spirit, compelled by force of 
 circumstances to content himself with a con- 
 fined and quiet life, might find some sort of 
 outlet in this rampant sensationalism. 
 
 There are good authors and eloquent au- 
 thors and "high" authors enough to go 
 around amongst us all, and allow us one or 
 two decently creditable favorites apiece ; and 
 occasionally, in this bleak world of duty, it 
 ought to be permitted us to go browsing over 
 the whole field of literature just for the very 
 deliciousness of it, searching out the forgot- 
 ten nooks, cropping the tender herbage, and 
 drinking the golden filter where the sunlight 
 drips through the thick branches of hidden 
 trees. Let us cast aside our literary con- 
 
52 PLEA FOR THE SHIFTLESS READER 
 
 sciences, and taking our authors to our 
 hearts, laugh with them, cry with them, 
 struggle and strive and aspire and triumph 
 with them, and refrain from picking their 
 bones. 
 
 This is a stern and exacting and workaday 
 world ; it demands analysis and accuracy and 
 purpose ; it expects every one of us to be able 
 to reduce life to a mathematical quantity and 
 extract the square root therefrom. The man 
 who works and exacts and analyzes and pur- 
 poses is the man who succeeds, — as the world 
 counts success, — yet it is none the less true 
 
 that 
 
 A dreamer lives forever, 
 
 And a toiler dies in a day. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE 
 
 WOMAN 
 
 ONCE upon a time — that is the way 
 good stories used always to begin — 
 a certain Maine town electrified itself by 
 choosing a woman to serve on its superin- 
 tending school committee, and — to precipi- 
 tate myself into the narrative as dramatically 
 as possible — I was that woman. 
 
 Towns, as well as individuals, are subject 
 to occasional lapses from sound judgment, 
 and that I was the victim offered to the gods 
 in this particular case was as fortuitous an 
 occurrence as the aberration itself. It did not 
 seem that I was thus distinguished above my 
 peers on account of any especial fitness for 
 the position, since the only reason I ever 
 
56 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 heard alleged for the choice was the state- 
 ment offered by one of the members of the 
 nominating committee that I " had nothing 
 else to do." I may add in passing that two 
 years later, when the town became a city and 
 the school committee was transformed into a 
 school board, my name was dropped from 
 the list on the ground that during my term 
 of office I had " done nothing," a result at 
 which, as it seems to me, no one had a right 
 to complain, since it was the only one to be 
 expected from the given premises. 
 
 I was away from home at the time the 
 election took place, and when I returned to 
 find my unprepared feet suddenly planted 
 upon the ladder of greatness, my earliest 
 sensations were those of unmitigated dismay. 
 In the first place, granting the alleged pre- 
 mises, namely, that I had nothing else to do, 
 as a just reason for election to office, there 
 seemed to be no limit to the surprises the 
 future might have in store. I might awake 
 on some melancholy morning to find myself 
 President of the United States. Second, when 
 I remembered with meekness the position I 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 57 
 
 occupied in the voting — or non-voting — list, 
 — "women, Indians, idiots, and minors," I 
 asked myself how it happened that I was 
 eligible for office. Was it possible to discrim- 
 inate in this manner against the rest of my 
 class, and might I not, by accepting the 
 greatness thrust upon me, be opening the 
 door to Indians and idiots also ? 
 
 When I mentioned these misgivings to my 
 friends they unanimously advised me to re- 
 sign myself, but not the office. 
 
 " As far as idiots are concerned," A said 
 cheerfully, " the door has been open to them 
 a long time." " And in regard to your feeling 
 of unfitness for the position," B suggested en- 
 couragingly, " you have only to remember the 
 old story of the father's advice to his boy on 
 leaving home : ' Keep your mouth shut, and 
 people won't find out what a fool you are ! ' " 
 
 Thus panoplied in the optimism of my 
 friends, I examined my qualifications as they 
 stood in my own mind, and found that they 
 were mainly negative. 
 
 I had never taught school. My only rela- 
 tion toward public schools in the past had 
 
58 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 been one of those which the pupil naturally 
 and inevitably assumes toward the teacher, — 
 either that of active partisanship or armed 
 neutrality. I had no prejudices to overcome, 
 no theories to work out, no ideas that had any 
 sufficient reason for being. I was conscious 
 that I knew a great deal more about my 
 neighbors' affairs than I did about a com- 
 mon denominator, and that if an examina- 
 tion in elementary branches were proposed 
 to me I should take to the woods. Indeed, I 
 have a distinct recollection of one occasion 
 early in my career as an office-holder, when 
 an examination in arithmetic was pending 
 in one of the grammar school grades, and I 
 sought my young son, to whom mathematical 
 studies presented comparatively few difficul- 
 ties, for advice and assistance in preparing 
 for the ordeal. He was engaged in some boy- 
 ish avocation out of doors, and I sat beside 
 him on a sunny bank while the business in 
 hand was settled. When I rose to go, I left 
 him soliloquizing as one more in sorrow than 
 surprise, " And this is your school-committee 
 
 woman ! ,: 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 59 
 
 It will be perceived that I was very much 
 in the position of a neophyte about to be 
 initiated into mysteries. I sat down, as one 
 may say, at the feet of The School System, 
 all ready to absorb it at every pore. Not 
 being of sufficiently logical mind, I was never 
 able to reduce The System to any definite 
 form, or to approach it from any but an ex- 
 oteric standpoint. My position in regard to 
 this mysterious bulwark of our nation has 
 always been that of George Sampson in " Our 
 Mutual Friend," when he says of Mrs. Wilfer's 
 under petticoat, — viewed only by the eye 
 of faith, " After all, you know, ma'am, we 
 know it 's there ! " Now and then, at the full 
 of the moon, when all the auspices seemed to 
 favor, under the influence, let us say, of large 
 doses of " McGuffey's Reader," or when I 
 heard the most infantile of all the physiology 
 classes reciting, 
 
 My eyes, my ears, my nose, 
 
 and so on to the triumphant finale of " my 
 toes," — at such moments as these I almost 
 caught the rustle of the advancing or retreat- 
 
60 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 ing skirts of The System, but I was, I fear, 
 never worthy to have full vision of it. It is 
 impossible, however, for the most unimpres- 
 sionable school-committee woman to sit for- 
 ever, like a bump on a log, and learn nothing 
 in an atmosphere where wisdom is as plen- 
 teous as dew. When a pupil bounded the 
 United States, " On the North by Canada, on 
 the east by Fairfield" (Maine), "on the south 
 by the ' Artie ' Ocean, and on the west by 
 Van Diemen's Land," though I doubted his 
 geographical accuracy, I learned something 
 about the vagaries of which the human mind 
 is capable. 
 
 The continuous, wearying routine of school 
 life, the endless monotony combined with 
 endless variation, the limitless demands on 
 patience, the iteration and reiteration neces- 
 sary to impress a single idea on the mind of 
 the average pupil, — all these I marked, and 
 gained from them some conception of the 
 difficulty of the problem with which educa- 
 tors are confronted, — a problem rendered the 
 more discouraging by the fact that in its solu- 
 tion it continually demands the impossible. 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 61 
 
 Early in my career as a school-committee 
 woman I began to make discoveries — dis- 
 heartening discoveries — like the following : 
 The educational problem is one whose work- 
 ings can never be fully accounted for by the 
 accepted laws of nature ; the only principle 
 which can be relied upon as of universal ap- 
 plication being the one which sets forth that 
 the introduction of a new element will always 
 produce perturbations. Moreover, to an or- 
 dinary mind like my own, the constant con- 
 templation of this problem had the effect of 
 upsetting my previous theological convic- 
 tions, and even of rendering the consolations 
 of religion a doubtful quantity, since, after 
 studying " the tricks and manners " of the 
 aggregated youth of the community in- 
 timately, the claim that they all possessed 
 souls seemed absolutely untenable. If it was 
 sometimes possible to believe of the children 
 of the lower grades that 
 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy, 
 
 it also seemed true beyond a doubt that 
 
 Shades of the prison house begin to close 
 Upon the growing boy, 
 
62 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 and whether his soul should be introduced to 
 him — or he be introduced to his soul — 
 by methods of outside or inside application 
 became one of the most serious questions to 
 be answered. 
 
 My experiences as a school official ushered 
 me into a new world, — a world of hitherto 
 undreamed-of difficulties and responsibilities. 
 At first I was disposed to dwell on the pos- 
 sibilities of the situation under ideal con- 
 ditions, but I speedily came down to earth, 
 and began to ask myself what could be done 
 with the materials at hand. I grew to love 
 the bright faces of the children even at their 
 naughtiest, — and that was sometimes very 
 naughty, — but when, at the end of my two 
 years' apprenticeship, I retired from my un- 
 deserved eminence, I carried with me into 
 the obscurity of private life the conviction, 
 which has been growing ever since, that it 
 is not the children, but the teachers, who 
 stand in need of a champion. Indeed, my 
 only reason for dragging my ancient honors 
 with such a flourish of trumpets into public 
 gaze is to give myself some apparent claim to 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 63 
 
 hurl my glove into the arena in the teachers' 
 behalf, and to hurl it so violently that some- 
 body will know it is there, and so rise up and 
 call me blessed — or the contrary ! 
 
 A teacher is in the nature of things a crea- 
 ture sui generis ; his world is not our world. 
 Even Charles Lamb — even the gentle Elia 
 — has his gibe at " the schoolmaster " in the 
 midst of his pity for him because he is com- 
 pelled in the very nature of things to regard 
 the universe itself as an eternal lesson book. 
 " The least part of what is to be expected of 
 him " (the schoolmaster), Lamb tells us, " is 
 to be done in school hours. He must insinu- 
 ate knowledge at the mollia tempora fandi. 
 He must seize every occasion — the season 
 of the year, the time of day, a passing cloud, 
 a rainbow, a wagon of hay, a regiment of 
 soldiers going by — to inculcate something 
 useful. Nothing comes to him not spoiled 
 by the sophisticating medium of moral uses." 
 A clergyman's profession offers the nearest 
 parallel to that of a teacher, but the former 
 is supposed to be under the direct guidance 
 and protection of the higher powers, whereas 
 
64 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 the teacher, with most of the clergyman's 
 responsibilities, is obliged to accept as his im- 
 mediate Providence a school board of whom 
 it is not always possible to say, " Of such is 
 the kingdom of heaven." It is true that we, 
 as parents, have more far-reaching duties 
 toward our children than their teachers can 
 have ; but if we do not choose to perform 
 these duties, there is, unless we transgress 
 the law of the land, no one who is entitled to 
 call us to account. There are, however, pe- 
 riods when we exist simply for the purpose of 
 calling the teacher to account. Is he not paid 
 out of the public treasury ? Go to, then ! if 
 our children are not models, is it not his duty 
 to make them so ? 
 
 It is, to the initiated, a self-evident fact that 
 for the thoroughly successful teacher there 
 is but one standard : he must be an angel for 
 temper, a demon for discipline, a chameleon for 
 adaptation, a diplomatist for tact, an optimist 
 for hope, and a hero for courage. To these 
 common and easily developed qualities of 
 mind and heart, he should add india-rubber 
 nerves, and a cheerful willingness to trust a 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 65 
 
 large portion of his reward to some other 
 world than this. One of the most difficult 
 phases of the teacher's profession is the fact 
 that he, more than almost any other man, is 
 at the mercy of theorists. Nearly every edu- 
 cational dignitary who enters into the sub- 
 ject with any energy of purpose brings his 
 pet theories into the work with him, and who 
 but the long-suffering teacher shall put those 
 theories into action, and discover whether 
 they have any practical basis? Oftentimes, 
 unfortunately, the theories go on operating 
 long after it has been sufficiently demonstrated 
 that their basis is untenable. Take, for in- 
 stance, the "development" theory, — which 
 is intended, as far as one can judge, to de- 
 velop the child at the expense of the teacher. 
 This theory dispenses largely with the use of 
 textbooks, being based on the idea that the 
 child, if cut off from other sources of supply, 
 can go on indefinitely spinning a thread out 
 of his own inner consciousness. The teacher 
 soon finds out that there is an inherent differ- 
 ence between a child and a silk-worm, and 
 that the latter is much better fitted by nature 
 
66 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 to furnish cocoons on a business basis. As a 
 matter of fact, it is the teacher who does most 
 of the spinning. One teacher writes me : " I 
 am very much dissatisfied with the work in 
 grammar, or ' language ' as it is now called. 
 The pupils do not have books ; we write from 
 year to year the lessons for the classes on the 
 board. The pupils copy into blank books 
 what is necessary. It seems to me drudgery 
 for the teacher to be required to do so much 
 unnecessary work. The pupils need some 
 technical grammar, — need to know how to 
 use books. One reason why Latin is so hard 
 for them during their first year in the high 
 school is that they do not know how to use 
 an English grammar." 
 
 It is tolerably obvious that when the pupil 
 who is living from hand to mouth on the con- 
 tents of a grammar book or a " sum book " of 
 his own construction desires to know anything 
 not contained in these invaluable classics, he 
 must, unless he has become thoroughly versed 
 in the cocoon process, ask his teacher, who 
 thus becomes the final authority in these 
 branches. I once heard of a young man who, 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 67 
 
 when teaching a country school, was much 
 disturbed by an unpleasant tendency on the 
 part of his pupils to ask him the definitions 
 of words with which he was not familiar. 
 One day, resorting in his exasperation to the 
 vernacular of his youth, which seemed to him 
 to make the statement doubly emphatic, he 
 put an end to these inquiries. " I want you 
 to remember," he said with decision, " that 
 I ain't no dictionary!" I imagine that the 
 teacher referred to and others similarly sit- 
 uated have long desired to proclaim freely 
 and to all whom it may concern, " I ain't no 
 grammar ! " 
 
 Another comment upon the workings of 
 the cocoon theory is that which I have many 
 times heard from high school teachers who 
 complain that pupils coming from the gram- 
 mar grades are so accustomed to being carried 
 along by the teacher that the work of teach- 
 ing them methods of independent thought is 
 an exceedingly difficult one. The same com- 
 plaint is made by grammar school teachers 
 whose graduates — as is the custom in some 
 schools — are admitted to the high school on 
 
68 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 probation for two months, at the end of 
 which time, " if unable or unwilling " to keep 
 up with the class, they can be sent back to 
 the grammar school. " I contend that it is 
 not fair," says one teacher. " The pupils can- 
 not in two months' time get used to the 
 change from grammar to high school meth- 
 ods, inasmuch as in the high they are thrown 
 on their own resources, while in the grammar 
 they are spurred on by the teacher." There 
 is one gleam of hope in regard to these 
 methods of child development. The people 
 who are making a specialty of child study 
 with a view to being able eventually to take 
 the dear little victims apart like dissected 
 maps, and, by combining Tommy's superior 
 abilities with Willie's unresting energy and 
 Samuel's moral virtues, construct a model 
 for the species, — these wise philosophers, it 
 seems to me, must sooner or later discover 
 that the amount of spinning material in a 
 child's interior has been overestimated, and 
 that the dreamed-of cocoon process is only 
 another instance of " The desire of the moth 
 for the star " ! 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 69 
 
 Another modern notion which helps to 
 make the path of the school-teacher a thorny- 
 one is the theory that a child ought to be 
 putting out simultaneously and in every di- 
 rection as many feelers as a centipede has 
 legs. As a matter of fact, a pupil who has 
 learned thoroughness and application has 
 acquired something, even if he cannot explain 
 the precession of the equinoxes or tell how 
 many feathers there are in a hen. There 
 used, in the former days, to be a good many 
 poetic similes in which the unfolding of a 
 child's mind was likened to the gradual open- 
 ing of a flower, leaf by leaf. The revised 
 plan admits of no such sentimental and slow- 
 moving processes. A child's mind is now 
 opened like an umbrella, expanding equally 
 and instantaneously at all points, and, for- 
 tunately for the child, it also resembles the 
 umbrella in that it sheds a good deal more 
 than it retains. 
 
 Perhaps I can best illustrate what is at- 
 tempted in this expansive process by giving 
 an actual schedule of work, furnished me by 
 a teacher in grammar grades. The teacher in 
 
70 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 question has had long experience, and is 
 deeply interested in her work, in which she 
 has been most successful. It is, in fact, be- 
 cause she has an exalted ideal of what a 
 teacher's work should be that she complains 
 of the constantly increasing demands which 
 make it impossible for her to do work satis- 
 factory to herself in any department. 
 
 I give her details of regular classes and 
 " extras," with some of the comments added 
 by herself : — 
 
 " Two classes reading ; try to study author's 
 meaning, give expression to same ; tell about 
 author ; phonics in lower grades. Two classes 
 spelling ; definitions ; use of words in sen- 
 tences. Two classes geography. The geog- 
 raphy taught is mostly physical. The pupil 
 learns very little of his own country, does n't 
 even know the names and capitals of States. 
 I asked one of mine to point out Boston on 
 the map, and, to my surprise, she hunted in 
 the woods of Maine ! 
 
 " Two classes history. Two classes gram- 
 mar. Two classes arithmetic. 
 
 " These classes constitute the regular pro- 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 71 
 
 gramme. Add to these the following ex- 
 tras : — 
 
 " On Mondays we have the ' American 
 Citizen.' Write Greek stories each week. 
 Twice each week, writing. Once a week 
 physiology, including hygiene and temper- 
 ance. Twice a term study some poem and 
 send result to superintendent. 
 
 " Our music teacher comes once in two 
 weeks. He selects one or two pieces of music, 
 and we teach the pupils. In two weeks more 
 he comes to see the results of our work. 
 Pupils must sing every day. The special 
 teacher in gymnastics comes once in two 
 weeks and takes the class herself, after which 
 we give lessons each day until she comes 
 again. Our next extra teacher is in mechan- 
 ical drawing. He teaches only in the high 
 school and highest grammar grade. We have 
 had no instruction in geometry. He went 
 to the board and drew an equilateral tri- 
 angle, tried to get the name from pupils. 
 I finally told him that I doubted if they 
 had ever heard the word. He said they 
 would have to do most of the figures by 
 
72 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 copying them. I question the advantage 
 gained. 
 
 " We have also questions in physics, copied 
 on cards and sent to the principals of each 
 grammar grade. These have been given to 
 the pupils to try at home and afterwards at 
 school. Have not yet had time to test results. 
 
 " Instead of examinations at the end of the 
 term, as formerly, we now give tests each 
 month, so that I always have sets of papers 
 to be corrected and ranked. We get the total 
 average of all, the average of each study, the 
 class standing, our estimate of each pupil, — 
 which we guess at, — and then the general 
 average. If you add to our course some of 
 the requirements of the larger cities, — man- 
 ual training, sewing, cooking, algebra, Latin, 
 science, and geometry, you can see how the 
 grammar school course has been overcrowded, 
 — ■ enriched,' they call it, — and why it is so 
 hard for us to do thorough work, with so many 
 things to cram into the poor children's brains." 
 
 I confess that, as far as I am personally 
 concerned, when I reached this point in the 
 narrative I positively declined to " add " any- 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 73 
 
 thing more. I was already mentally black 
 and blue, and felt that one more extra would 
 be more than flesh could bear. Indeed, when 
 the writer of the schedule went on to state 
 that she was at that moment suffering from 
 an illness one of the manifestations of which 
 was the inflammation of every particle of 
 mucous membrane in her body, I felt, in the 
 midst of my compassion, the sort of elation 
 which comes from seeing the logical sequence 
 of events carried out to its legitimate conclu- 
 sion. Why should not her mucous membrane 
 be inflamed, and all her microbes get out on 
 the warpath ? It seems the only natural re- 
 sult to be expected from the successful work- 
 ing of an enriched grammar school course. 
 
 II 
 
 It may, perhaps, have been observed, in 
 my exposition of the sufferings of the teacher 
 in the preceding pages, that the authorities 
 quoted have been mostly taken from my own 
 sex, and if, when I go on to propose my long- 
 meditated scheme for organizing a Society 
 for the Prevention of Cruelty to Teachers, I 
 
74 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 assume that this society would be predomi- 
 nantly female in its membership, which would 
 presumably be largely recruited from the 
 ranks of the teachers themselves, the reasons 
 for such an assumption would not all be 
 drawn from an offensive partisanship on my 
 part. 
 
 There are probably three times as many 
 women as men engaged in teaching in the 
 United States; moreover, so far as I have 
 been able to observe, the men teachers have 
 fewer wrongs that cry aloud for redress. The 
 man who is a good disciplinarian, who can 
 " govern a school," is practically his own man 
 everywhere. He may be inexperienced, liable 
 to mistakes, not wholly up to par in intellect- 
 ual acquirements, but if he has that in him 
 which enables him to control and stimulate 
 pupils, the average school board does not 
 greatly interfere with him. As for the reverse 
 of the picture, the man who, as the phrase is, 
 " has no government," the sooner he seeks some 
 other avocation the better for all concerned. 
 He was not born for school-teaching. With 
 the woman teacher, however, the case is 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 75 
 
 always and innately different. She may have 
 taught for years, may fill her position admi- 
 rably as one who is mistress of it, but she can 
 never acquire so large a stock of knowledge, 
 discretion, tact, or experience, but that a man, 
 any man, because he is a man, can teach her 
 something about her duties. 
 
 In the smaller cities and towns the super- 
 intendents of common schools and principals 
 of high schools are very likely to be bright 
 young fellows, who have just been graduated 
 from college, and wish to fill these positions 
 for a few years in order to lay up money for 
 studying a profession. They come to their 
 work fresh-hearted, filled with confidence and 
 theories, and the woman teacher who has 
 seen the same theories rise and flourish and 
 decay under previous regimes is expected to 
 greet each new appearance with perennial 
 ardor, and manifest the same surprise when 
 they disappear into the eternal framework of 
 things. She no sooner accustoms herself to 
 the amiable vagaries of one superintendent 
 of schools than another and different sun 
 rises on her horizon, and she is obliged to 
 
76 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 learn a new and varied style of genuflec- 
 tions toward the east. Meanwhile, the school 
 board, excellent men who frequently under- 
 stand their own business much better than 
 that of other people, are at perfect liberty, 
 when they find a moment's leisure to attend 
 to it, to move her about as if she were a 
 pawn on a chessboard. 
 
 During her official working hours the 
 teacher is responsible for the health, man- 
 ners, and morals, as well as the intellectual 
 progress, of her pupils. She is equally at 
 fault in regard to the bright ones who are 
 kept back and the stupid ones who are not 
 brought forward. On the days when rank is 
 announced she is to expect to be greeted with 
 tears and innuendoes on the part of those 
 pupils who habitually expect rewards they 
 have not worked for. All the loss of time 
 and mental energy brought about by prac- 
 tice in athletics, by dancing-schools, evening 
 gayeties, and the like, lies, of course, at her 
 door. As a rule, parents know that these 
 things must be the teachers fault. When 
 — after dismissing those victims who are un- 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 77 
 
 justly kept after school — the teacher goes 
 home at night, she is accompanied by les- 
 sons to study, papers of different kinds to 
 correct, work to lay out, and wasted tissues 
 to renew. 
 
 But does the teacher have no recreations ? 
 Certainly, — her recreations are many, but 
 not varied. Not infrequently the school su- 
 perintendent has a hobby, in which case he 
 forms classes in psychology, history, peda- 
 gogy, or what not, and the teacher may find 
 recreation by joining in these intellectual 
 revels. If she does not join, it may be sus- 
 pected that the root of the matter is not in 
 her. There are teachers' meetings also, some- 
 times for conference and for conveying in- 
 formation of real benefit, and sometimes for 
 the purpose of telling the teacher something 
 she has heard before, or that she knows has 
 no practical truth in it. If she is too weary 
 to go out when her tasks are ended she may 
 refresh herself at her home by reading edu- 
 cational publications, for one or more of which 
 she is recommended to subscribe. Almost 
 every term there are teachers' institutes or 
 
78 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 conventions, where she can hear papers read 
 all day, and attend a lecture in the evening. 
 She would better not attend whist or dancing 
 parties, lest she should be quoted as setting 
 a bad example to her pupils, but she is at 
 perfect liberty to " prepare a paper " for a 
 woman's club, study American history with 
 the Daughters of the Revolution, plunge into 
 the wild dissipation of church socials, or join 
 in the revels at a " pronunciation picnic," 
 a form of entertainment which I have seen 
 gravely recommended by authorities on edu- 
 cational matters. 
 
 In the summer, during the long vacation, 
 there are summer schools. These begin in 
 July, and continue through August. They 
 are not compulsory, but it is a politic meas- 
 ure for the woman teacher to attend one or 
 more of them. Here she may meet other 
 superintendents and other teachers, hear 
 more papers read, and attend more lectures. 
 Or she may join a Traveler's Club, provide 
 herself with a bag and a hammer, and go to 
 and fro over the earth, chipping off the face 
 of nature, and taking in instruction at the 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 79 
 
 pores. In short, she may do what she pleases, 
 provided there are papers and lectures and 
 tediousness connected with it, and provided 
 she never, never, allows herself — or anybody 
 else — to forget that she is a schoolma'am. 
 
 There is a hue and cry raised some- 
 times that the higher education for women 
 diminishes the ratio of marriages. A large 
 number of college-educated women become 
 school-teachers because it is necessary for 
 them to be self-supporting, and when they 
 have once plunged into the vortex, opportu- 
 nities for marriage must be either accidental 
 or miraculous. The masculine superintend- 
 ents and principals are usually men already 
 married, or, if of callow years, they are apt 
 to be "engaged" to some giddy girl whose 
 knowledge of psychology has been mainly 
 acquired by sitting under white umbrellas at 
 the seashore, or on the stairs at evening 
 parties. The young men who show them- 
 selves at the summer schools either bring 
 their wives with them, or appear for a brief 
 period in order to " read a paper," or deliver 
 a lecture on an abstruse subject, before retir- 
 
80 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 ing in good order to some spot where there 
 is more fun and less wisdom. Occasionally 
 it occurs to two educators to wed each other, 
 but this is sometimes more objectionable than 
 the marriage of cousins. 
 
 When the society of which I have dreamed 
 has been organized, it will involve the send- 
 ing of female teachers during each vacation 
 period to some frivolous place of resort where 
 the labels will be taken off their backs, and 
 they will be forbidden under penalty of law 
 to listen to papers or lectures, to talk shop, 
 or " take a course " in anything but hilarity. 
 They will be encouraged to ride and row, 
 play golf and tennis, to climb mountains 
 for the fun of it, without making the least 
 effort to find out what ingredients enter into 
 the composition of the everlasting hills. 
 They will also be allowed to dance, to talk 
 with young men on subjects distinctly unin- 
 structive, to sit on the sea sand, and ask no 
 questions about what the wild waves are say- 
 ing, and to wake in the night without utiliz- 
 ing the time by repeating the multiplication 
 table or giving the parts of speech. 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 81 
 
 What effect this society will have remains 
 to be seen, but I believe the experiment 
 is worth trying. 
 
 Ill 
 
 When I had progressed thus far in my 
 " Meditations " A came in, and I read to him 
 what I had written. A is always a good 
 target at which to fire one's mental ammuni- 
 tion, because he is willing to comment, and 
 has no scruple about saying disagreeable 
 things if he considers that the occasion calls 
 for them. 
 
 " There is some French writer, — I Ve for- 
 gotten which one," he began with his usual 
 cheerful readiness when I had finished, — 
 " who says there are three sexes, ' men, wo- 
 men, and clergymen.' I see you divide them 
 into men, women, and teachers." 
 
 " On the contrary," I asserted, " I have 
 taken especial pains to discriminate between 
 the men and women teachers, and to call 
 attention to the fact that * male and female 
 created he them.' " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; you 've discriminated as one 
 
82 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 discriminates between Methodist and Baptist, 
 or as a man does if you ask him, ' What 's the 
 difference ? ' and he answers, ' Oh, the differ- 
 ence is the odds ! ' You say the male of the 
 species is more independent than the female, 
 and has a better time ; but, in general, you Ve 
 lumped them together as a set of poor devils, 
 just a little outside the pale of common 
 humanity, who can never allow themselves 
 to be moved by the sweet influences of the 
 Pleiades, or feel their hearts leap up when 
 they behold a rainbow in the sky without 
 remarking, — 
 
 " ' Thanks for the lesson of this spot ! ' " 
 
 " I have tried to describe them," I answered 
 with that immediate personal application of 
 the subject for which my sex is noted, " as 
 beings of like passions as ourselves, and 
 doing a great deal more for the uplifting 
 of society than you and I are ever likely to 
 do. They would be overworked if they had 
 only their own legitimate burdens to carry, 
 but, in addition, we — you and I and the rest 
 of the world — are always shoving off our re- 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 83 
 
 sponsibilities on to them, and every educator 
 who has a new theory is asking them to em- 
 body it in their work." 
 
 " Now, see here," A said comfortably ; 
 "just remain calm! A woman always gets 
 so excited over everything ! I had an idea 
 that the modern school-teacher — and I '11 
 call him a her since you seem to prefer it — 
 had a good deal done for her. Aren't we 
 building schoolhouses for her full of light 
 and air, and ventilation and sanitation, and 
 all the rest of it? Don't we give her school 
 libraries, and pictures on the walls, and plants 
 in the windows ? Are n't we talking now," he 
 went on with a grin, " of letting her add 
 menageries to the other attractions, — cats 
 and dogs, and hencoops under the windows, 
 and sheepfolds pretty soon, where the kids 
 can observe the whole evolution of the Duch- 
 ess Trousers, ' from the sheep to the man ' ? 
 What more do you want ? " 
 
 " I don't want any more; I want a good 
 deal less. As a rule, every added ' attraction,' 
 as you call it, means more work for the 
 teacher." 
 
84 THE MEDITATIONS OF AN 
 
 "And you don't think you have overstated 
 the case — just for the sake of making out a 
 good story, you know ? " 
 
 " I think," I affirmed, with just that degree 
 of increased warmth which this question was 
 intended to call forth, " that I have under- 
 stated it. I have said nothing about the 
 extra work at graduation and exhibition sea- 
 sons, neither have I mentioned the subject 
 of school fairs and debates, nor the parties 
 and rides where the teacher is expected to 
 officiate as 'guide, philosopher, and friend.' 
 Why," — casting all moderation to the winds, 
 and prepared to nail my colors to the mast, 
 — " from the time a child first enters school 
 until he departs from it, the teacher seems to 
 be expected to do everything for him but put 
 him to bed." 
 
 " The teacher does sometimes hear him 
 say his prayers," A remarked gravely. " I can 
 testify to that." 
 
 " This state of things is n't confined to 
 any one place, either," I went on, plunging 
 once more into unqualified assertion. " I 
 have a friend who teaches in one of the Bos- 
 
EX-SCHOOL-COMMITTEE WOMAN 85 
 
 ton schools, the last person in the world who 
 would ever voluntarily be found marching 
 in processions or engaging in hand-to-hand 
 encounters with mobs. Yet on Dewey Day 
 she spent hours in helping to marshal a host 
 of schoolchildren through crowded streets, 
 picking them from under the feet of tramp- 
 ling hordes, and protecting them from utter 
 destruction when they were overrun by mob 
 violence." 
 
 "Well, what then? Would you have had 
 the poor little chaps all left at home ? That 's 
 the way we teach 'em patriotism, — rub it in, 
 you see." 
 
 " Every one of those children," I said 
 severely, " was legally entitled to two parents. 
 There must be some use for parents in the 
 everlasting economy of things, though many 
 of them don't seem to suspect it. If the time 
 ever comes when the enriched natural history 
 courses demand that the pupil shall be sent 
 into wild beasts' cages in order to observe 
 their habits, it is the teacher who will be 
 doomed to accompany him. And if during 
 the visit the lion begins to lick his chaps 
 
86 MEDITATIONS 
 
 and demand food, it is the teacher who will 
 be expected to come cheerfully to the front 
 and say, ' Eat me ! When I accepted my 
 present munificent salary, I prepared myself, 
 of course, not to falter at little sacrifices like 
 this.' In the meantime the child will have 
 retired in good order, and the parent — the 
 female parent — will be safely at home em- 
 broidering a doily, or writing a paper for the 
 Woman's Club. What the male parent will 
 be doing is one of the things ' no fellow could 
 be expected to know ' ! " 
 
 " What I admire about you," A said, with 
 his hand upon the door knob, " is the restraint 
 you put upon your imagination." He stepped 
 outside, then reappeared for an instant to in- 
 quire, " Well, what are you going to do about 
 it ? " and with this Parthian shot he kindly 
 closed the door, — kindly, because he was 
 well aware that I did not know the answer to 
 his question. 
 
IV 
 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 THERE is an old story, with which every- 
 body is familiar, of a man who said that 
 the proper way to construct a house was to 
 build a piazza first and then tack the house 
 on to it. That was not the way our piazza 
 came into being. The house itself had been 
 built many years before it became our house. 
 When we entered into possession it was al- 
 ready memory-haunted, full of delightful tra- 
 ditional shadows which we have never wished 
 to displace, although I do bethink me now 
 of one bad quarter of an hour which was in- 
 flicted on me by an estimable old lady, one of 
 my earliest callers in the days of my young 
 housekeeping. 
 
 " My dear," she inquired placidly, " would 
 it trouble you to know that somebody has 
 died in every room in your house ? " 
 
 I repeated this question to my husband, 
 who at once took the sting out of it. 
 
9 o PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 " Well, what more do you want ? " he asked. 
 " Don't you see that they have n't left us any 
 room to die in ? " 
 
 It was owing to this cheerful view of the 
 matter that when we built the piazza, and so 
 annexed a new joy, we made the ghosts as 
 free of it as ourselves, and it is perhaps through 
 their presence and influence that it became at 
 once a place for dreaming dreams and seeing 
 visions. 
 
 It is, as to architecture, a Colonial-Grecian 
 piazza. I know it is colonial because the man 
 who designed it was especially bidden to 
 make it so, and I am equally sure that it is 
 Grecian because a college professor referred 
 to it in an art lecture as a " Grecian portico." 
 
 It is a long and wide piazza, with airy 
 spaces and groups of slender columns ; and if 
 it seems to my fancy both ampler and more 
 romantic than it really is, it is because since 
 it grew up into the world of piazzas it has 
 taken in (in the mind of one woman at least) 
 the whole material universe, — the green earth 
 and blue vault of heaven, sun, moon, and 
 stars, — and has added thereto the Garden of 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 91 
 
 Eden, the Age of Pericles, all the stateliest 
 features of our own colonial era, and some 
 very satisfactory bits of the present century, 
 with here and there a background borrowed 
 from Chaos and Old Night. I hardly know 
 what more one need ask of a mere sublunary 
 nineteenth-century piazza ! I could give the 
 actual dimensions, but I am not one of those 
 commonplace beings who measure everything 
 by feet and inches ; it is wider than a church 
 door, and not so deep as a well, — that is, a 
 very deep well, — and that suffices. 
 
 On this piazza I have entertained many a 
 wonderful guest. Indeed, at the very first, 
 just after the art lecture in which the piazza 
 began to masquerade as a Grecian portico, 
 there came — on one of the fairest of summer 
 mornings, I remember — a certain squat, 
 snub-nosed, barefooted philosopher, whom I 
 recognized at a glance. He was a man whose 
 silver tongue had in the old days made many 
 an Athenian youth forget the lapse of time, 
 but I did not encourage him to speak, because 
 I did not know whether it would be one of 
 his good or bad days. He might, indeed, dis- 
 
92 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 course of immortality in language of serene 
 and noble beauty, or he might spend hours on 
 end splitting hairs. 
 
 " Come, Parmenides," I seemed to hear him 
 say, " let us go to the Ilissus, and sit down 
 in some quiet spot, and discuss freely as to 
 whether things begin at both ends, or in the 
 middle, or upside down, or inside out. And 
 if a part is equal to the whole, as we have 
 sometimes argued that it might be, why is not 
 a quarter of a dollar just as good as a whole 
 one and a little better ? " 
 
 And Parmenides might reply, even as of 
 old,— 
 
 " But if one is to remain one, it will not be 
 a whole, and will not have parts." 
 
 It is patent to the feeblest imagination that 
 this sort of conversation, though it may be 
 Greek, is not in the least colonial, and, there- 
 fore, not suited to a Colonial-Grecian piazza ; 
 but on that moonlight night when the young 
 Alcibiades, wine-flushed, rose-wreathed, beau- 
 tiful as a god, sat just where the great elm 
 tree casts its moving shadow between the 
 twin groups of slender pillars, the words 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 93 
 
 which fell from his lips were neither Grecian 
 nor colonial, but spoke the innermost lan- 
 guage of the hearts of men in all times. What 
 the message of Socrates could be when he 
 chose, I learned from this imperishably beau- 
 tiful young drunkard. 
 
 " If I were not afraid that you would think 
 me drunk I would have sworn as well as 
 spoken to the influence which they [the words 
 of Socrates] have always had and still have 
 over me. For my heart leaps within me more 
 than that of any Corybantian reveler, and my 
 eyes rain tears when I hear them. . . . This 
 man has often brought me to such a pass 
 that I have felt that I could hardly endure the 
 life which I am leading. . . . For he makes 
 me confess that I ought not to live as I do, 
 neglecting the wants of my own soul and 
 busying myself with the concerns of the 
 Athenians, therefore I hold my ears and tear 
 myself away from him. He is the only person 
 who ever made me feel ashamed, which you 
 might think not to be in my nature, and there 
 is no one else who does the same. . . . 
 
 "For, although I forgot to mention this 
 
94 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 before, his words are ridiculous when you 
 first hear them, — he clothes himself in lan- 
 guage that is as the skin of the wanton 
 satyr, — but he who pierces the mask, and 
 sees what is within, will find that they are the 
 only words that have a meaning in them, and 
 also the most divine, abounding in fair ex- 
 amples of virtues and of the largest discourse, 
 or rather extending to the whole duty of a 
 good and honorable man." 
 
 I told the story of this vision to a real 
 young man who sat on the piazza the next 
 morning, — a nineteenth-century young man 
 with all the modern improvements, — and I 
 went on to remark to him — very reprehensi- 
 bly, no doubt — that it would be a good thing 
 for every young man to get drunk once if he 
 could receive such an accession of divine com- 
 mon sense in the process as Alcibiades seems 
 to have done. 
 
 He answered me soberly enough, looking 
 vaguely at my daimon, which had just then 
 lighted on the arm of his chair, " Oh, well ! 
 I suppose there are times in every fellow's 
 life when he hears the Voices — don't you ? " 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 95 
 
 So I knew that the miracle performed for 
 Alcibiades was not a solitary one. 
 
 Socrates had a daimon, and so have I. I 
 do not know whether the Grecian portico had 
 anything to do with the appearance of my 
 familiar, or if the fact of Socrates' possession 
 bears any relation to my own. I know that 
 his daimon was a divinity within his own 
 breast, and that mine — differentiated per- 
 haps by his semi-colonial environment — is 
 an outward and visible devil's darning-needle. 
 He is not a painted dragon-fly, but a long, 
 angular, loose-jointed, interfering, meddle- 
 some devil's darning-needle, and, so far as I 
 have any reason to know, he was built simul- 
 taneously with the piazza. At any rate, he 
 appeared soon after we took possession of our 
 new territory, and has reappeared there with 
 each succeeding summer. 
 
 I know nothing about the average length 
 of days which is granted to creatures of his 
 kind ; it matters not in his case, because he 
 is a supernatural insect, one of the few, the 
 immortal devil's darning-needles, who were 
 not born to die. In the early days of his so- 
 
96 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 journ with us, I had an instinctive habit of 
 jumping, whenever he came near in that 
 swooping, waggle-tailed manner which char- 
 acterizes his methods of approach, but the 
 wisdom of the poet has been verified in this 
 case as in many another, — I first endured, 
 then pitied, then embraced. Gradually he 
 became my guide, philosopher, and friend. 
 He has taught me a good deal and I have 
 taught him a good deal, and that means, as it 
 generally does when such is the case, that 
 first and last there has been an appreciable 
 amount of disagreeableness between us. He 
 is an insect of violent prejudices, and I can 
 usually tell at once whether or not he approves 
 of the callers who frequent the piazza. He 
 has, I am sadly aware, two settled antipa- 
 thies, — tramps and nervous women. 
 
 How well I remember the first tramp who 
 made my daimon's acquaintance ! He was a 
 care-free, happy-go-lucky fellow, who had seen 
 better days which he was contented to forget. 
 With a deferential " Allow me," he sank into 
 a piazza chair, removed his shabby hat, wiped 
 the perspiration from his brow, and from that 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 97 
 
 moment, despite the wildest efforts to dis- 
 lodge him, the darning-needle sat like black 
 care on the bald spot on that hobo's crown. 
 I had not supposed that a professional wan- 
 derer, used to living near to Nature's heart 
 and resting his head upon the lap of earth, 
 would have minded a trivial creature like a 
 devil's darning-needle so much, but I confess 
 that I have never personally been in a posi- 
 tion to judge just how ticklish a thing a long 
 and active insect nestling on one's bald spot 
 can make itself. 
 
 He paused — my hobo guest — in the 
 midst of an eloquent and lucid exposition of 
 the duty of every human being to help every 
 other human being, passing good deeds on 
 from one to another, apropos of the fact that 
 the world, in my person, owed him a dinner, 
 to remark suddenly and with violence, " Oh, 
 the dev — il's darning-needle, I mean ! " And 
 just at that moment his tormentor soared 
 into the air and thus — apparently — pre- 
 served himself from battle, murder, and sud- 
 den death. When my visitor was about to 
 go, after a square meal, eaten under cover 
 
98 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 and far from the haunts of harassing insects, 
 I asked him, — 
 
 " To whom are you going to pass this good 
 deed on ? — if it is a good deed, of which I 
 am not sure." 
 
 He replied airily, " Oh, I may find a chance 
 to help some other poor devil. But, madam, 
 if I don't, it's all one. When I took to the 
 road, I freed myself from all my previous re- 
 sponsibilities." 
 
 The darning-needle flew down and perched 
 on the arm of my chair, and I said to him, 
 as I watched the departing figure of the wan- 
 derer, " I begin to wish I was a tramp my- 
 self. My responsibilities are always hanging 
 like a millstone around my neck. How abso- 
 lutely delightful it would be to shed them all 
 and be free ! " 
 
 " Somebody," remarked my ungrateful dai- 
 mon, " said on this very piazza the other day, 
 1 The people who talk most about their re- 
 sponsibilities are the ones who feel them 
 least'" 
 
 Since I have allowed myself to keep a dai- 
 mon I know how politicians feel when the 
 
 M 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 99 
 
 newspapers begin to look up their records. 
 I live constantly under the shadow of a here- 
 after. Why, prithee, should a mere ignorant 
 devil's darning-needle be continually hoisting 
 me with my own petard ? Must I, forsooth, 
 live up to all my smart sayings ? 
 
 I never knew by just what underhand — 
 or perhaps I should say underfoot — method 
 my daimon insinuated himself into the pocket 
 of the female book agent, the black and 
 yawning pocket under her dress skirt wherein 
 she carried the book which she intended to 
 spring upon the unwary. 
 
 This work, whose merits she was advo- 
 cating to a needy world, was one of those 
 compiled with the purpose of enabling the 
 unlearned to appear wise without the trouble 
 of being so, and as she restored the volume 
 to its mysterious receptacle she remarked 
 pleasantly to me, — 
 
 " Of course you are aware, madam, that no 
 matter what your other advantages may be, 
 unless you are able to appear cultured you 
 can never expect to enter the best society.' , 
 
 It is a disheartening trying to know that 
 
 •a*n 
 
ioo PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 one's lack of culture is such as to be appar- 
 ent at a moment's glance to the meanest 
 observer, and it was while I was watching 
 with saddened vision the yawning pocket, 
 into whose depths all my hopes of good 
 society were disappearing, that my friend, the 
 devil's darning-needle, flew suddenly forth 
 and dashed himself against the prophetic 
 forehead of Cassandra. At that moment, too, 
 he and Cassandra rose simultaneously into 
 the air and flapped their wings. 
 
 When peace had been restored within our 
 borders and I saw my daimon gleefully gy- 
 rating to and fro in the sun, I said to him 
 with some asperity, — 
 
 " May I ask what that devil's dance is 
 intended to indicate ? " 
 
 " I am rejoicing," he answered, " because I 
 am only a plain devil's darning-needle — " 
 
 " Plain enough, if that is what you want," 
 I interrupted maliciously. 
 
 " I heard you telling somebody the other 
 day that I was not so black as I had been 
 painted. However, that 's neither here nor 
 there; I was rejoicing that, as a mere insect 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 101 
 
 without brains, I am not called upon to pre- 
 tend to know what I don't know. I would 
 rather be a sincere devil's darning-needle 
 than a foolish virgin shining in the best so- 
 ciety on the strength of borrowed oil." 
 
 " You 're always giving thanks for doubtful 
 mercies," I suggested spitefully. There is 
 something so exasperating in the appearance 
 of a devil's darning-needle putting on airs. 
 " The other day you were jubilating because 
 you had no soul, and yet, to the ordinary 
 judgment, there is nothing so very enviable 
 in the lot of a creature with neither mind 
 nor soul." 
 
 " I said," he remarked loftily, " and I stand 
 to it, that if I were unfortunate enough to 
 possess a soul I should have to spend my 
 whole time ' saving ' it. As it is, I am at lib- 
 erty to do something more useful." With 
 the words he swung himself airily away, pass- 
 ing with apparent heedlessness as he did so 
 through the meshes of a cobweb in which 
 a struggling fly had just been entangled, and 
 restoring the poor insect to life and liberty. 
 
 Generally speaking, my daimon does not 
 
102 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 put himself very strongly in evidence when 
 I have callers of my own sex. He knows 
 their tricks and their manners, their consti- 
 tutional tendency to scream at the approach 
 of a harmless insect, as if he were a midnight 
 invader with a dark lantern instead of an in- 
 nocent devil's darning-needle clad in his cus- 
 tomary suit of solemn black. 
 
 Frequently, however, I am grieved to know 
 that he is perched on some point of vantage 
 near by, looking at the weary countenance 
 of my visitor, and listening while she explains 
 that she has been waiting for weeks to snatch 
 an opportunity to pay this call, but one duty 
 follows another so rapidly in modern life that 
 one never gets time to do what one most 
 desires. 
 
 " What are these duties that they all wear 
 themselves out with ? " my officious daimon 
 inquires when the caller has departed. " Why 
 is every one of them afflicted with * that tired 
 feeling ' ? Did n't you tell me that the wo- 
 man who just went away had a small family 
 and a comfortable income, and did n't ' do her 
 own work,' as the phrase is ? " 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 103 
 
 " Well," I explained, " when she does n't 
 do her own work she does some other per- 
 son's. They all do. There are the demands 
 of housekeeping, the demands of the family, 
 the social demands, entertainments to get up 
 for the support of all kinds of benevolences, 
 for the current expenses of the church — " 
 
 "Then," this troublesome insect interrupted 
 rudely, " the home is really an incubus and 
 not a joy, and all the stuff I have heard you 
 read aloud on this piazza about the larger 
 life and conscientious giving is impractical 
 nonsense. One really eats and drinks one's 
 way into the kingdom of heaven at twenty- 
 five or fifty cents a ticket, as the case may 
 be. Do you suppose," he went on with in- 
 creasing flippancy, " that when you get there, 
 you will find the angels giving a pink tea for 
 the support of the heavenly choir, or will it 
 be only a musicale ' with local talent ' ? " 
 
 " If you were a human being instead of an 
 irresponsible devil's darning-needle," I assured 
 him severely, " you would know that it is 
 often a serious problem to decide whether it 
 is best to adapt one's work to the world as it 
 
104 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 is, or the world as it should be. Ideal work 
 belongs to an ideal world." 
 
 This sentiment sounded well, and had a 
 practical ring to it, so why should this irri- 
 tating daimon go on to remark musingly, — 
 
 " Of course one can hardly be expected to 
 know the result of experiments which one 
 has never tried ! " 
 
 How can he be so sure that I have never 
 essayed the ideal life ? And even if I have 
 not, — which, of course is a libel, — how does 
 it concern him ? If I were going to main- 
 tain an embodied conscience, do you suppose 
 I would paint it black ? 
 
 I asked him this latter question. " Perhaps 
 you would n't need to," quoth he. 
 
 For an insect who professes such joy in 
 the knowledge that he is soulless, my daimon 
 displays a remarkable degree of interest in 
 everything pertaining to theology. It was 
 only his overweening curiosity on this sub- 
 ject which induced him to linger around the 
 piazza on the day when the Foolish Woman 
 was talking with the Contrary Young Man. 
 Ordinarily he would have disappeared at the 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 105 
 
 first hint of the Foolish Woman's approach, 
 but when I saw him perch on the window 
 cornice and settle down without even a flip 
 of the tail, I knew the topic of conversation 
 must be one of those which command his 
 serious attention. The Man of the World 
 was there, too, I remember, sitting a little 
 apart, alternately reading the newspaper and 
 looking critically at the creases in his trou- 
 sers. When the Man of the World indulges 
 himself in any ethical theories, I feel sure that 
 they have reference to the moral necessity of 
 having one's trousers creased properly, and 
 always wearing the right clothes at the right 
 time of day. If the sun ever was darkened 
 at noonday, — which the Man of the World 
 does not in the least credit, — it was because 
 some vandal had been paying a morning call 
 with the wrong coat on, or dining at an hour 
 when he should have just begun to think 
 about lunch. On this occasion he was, ap- 
 parently, paying no attention to the conver- 
 sation between the Foolish Woman and the 
 Contrary Young Man, which happened to be 
 on the subject of amusements. His soul was 
 
106 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 like a star, and dwelt apart in a world where 
 the thought of correct neckwear assumes its 
 proper importance. 
 
 " I am so glad," the Foolish Woman was 
 saying with that pretty smile which is, accord- 
 ing to Emerson, her excuse for being, " that 
 nowadays nothing is wrong." 
 
 The Contrary Young Man raised his eye- 
 brows inquiringly ; it is one of the disagree- 
 able ways he has. 
 
 The Foolish Woman fell into a charming 
 confusion, — and confusion punctuated with 
 a dimple can be very charming. " Oh," she 
 explained, " of course I did n't exactly mean 
 that — that — nothing is wrong. I meant, 
 don't you see, that I 'm so glad that every- 
 thing is right. It 's so different, you know, 
 from what it used to be when one had to give 
 up all sorts of things if one was religious." 
 
 " ' Renouncing the world, the flesh, and the 
 devil,' they used to call it, I believe," the Con- 
 trary Young Man suggested politely. 
 
 The Foolish Woman pouted, — a pout is 
 becoming to her. " Oh, well, you know well 
 enough what I mean, only you want to be 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 107 
 
 horrid, as usual. When I was a child people 
 used to have all sorts of gloomy notions, about 
 hell, you know, and endless damnation, — 
 really, it seems like swearing just to talk 
 about such things ! — and I used to be 
 frightened to death when I was left alone a 
 minute in the dark. I 'm sure I don't see how 
 anybody can help feeling glad that they 've 
 discovered a nice, cheerful religion instead of 
 those frightful old creeds, and that we don't 
 have to go moping round all the time think- 
 ing about our souls. I should think," the 
 speaker added virtuously, throwing grammar 
 to the winds, " that every unselfish person 
 would be glad that everybody 's going to 
 heaven when they die." . 
 
 " There used to be something said in the 
 Good Book about excluding * dogs and 
 sorcerers and — ' " 
 
 The Foolish Woman raised her finger be- 
 seechingly. " Please don't ! " she pleaded. " I 
 think some of those quotations are just as 
 improper as they can be." 
 
 " I Ve wiped it off the slate," the Young 
 Man assented cheerfully. " I just wanted to 
 
108 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 say, mum, if there 's nothing unspeakable 
 about doing so, that I suppose under the 
 present dispensation all those old categories 
 have been called in." 
 
 " Well, are n't you glad of it ? " the Foolish 
 Woman inquired intelligently. " Do you want 
 to go to the bad place ? " 
 
 There was at this point a murmur, scarcely 
 intelligible, from that part of the piazza where 
 the Man of the World sat, still, to all intents 
 and purposes, absorbed in the contemplation 
 of his nether garments. " To the eye of vulgar 
 Logic, what is man ? An omnivorous Biped 
 that wears Breeches," — that is what one 
 would have expected him to say. What he 
 really did say — with a wink at the Contrary 
 Young Man — was this, — 
 
 " Is thy servant a dog, that you should ask 
 him such questions ? " 
 
 The Foolish Woman looked innocently 
 puzzled. " I don't see what that 's got to do 
 with it." 
 
 11 Nothing at all," the Contrary Young 
 Man assured her. " He was simply putting 
 me in my own category. As for wanting to 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 109 
 
 go to the bad place, I don't know that I am 
 especially anxious for that privilege. What I 
 do want, if anything, is the same freedom of 
 choice in the matter that my forefathers had. 
 I think there ought from the foundation 
 of the world to have been some stability of 
 arrangement about this business ; and after 
 all the preceding generations have been al- 
 lowed a degree of choice about their final 
 destination, I call it a little rough on us, that 
 all property qualifications, educational clauses, 
 and civil service examinations should be abol- 
 ished in our day, and we poor chaps just 
 swooped into heaven without even having 
 had the benefit of trial by jury." 
 
 " I don't feel sure that I understand what 
 you mean," the Foolish Woman remarked, 
 with a reproving air, " but I 'm sure it sounds 
 wicked. You can't possibly want all those 
 awfully frightful old doctrines back, — fore- 
 ordination, and free will, and those old things 
 that nobody ever dreamed of understanding ? " 
 
 " They're simple enough," the Young Man 
 assured her, " if they are only presented in 
 the right light. It's just like this; did you 
 
no PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ever see a man fishing for pickerel ? Well, 
 you know he baits his hook with a live min- 
 now and throws him into the water. The 
 little minnow seems to be swimming gayly 
 about at his own free will, but just the mo- 
 ment he attempts to move out of his appointed 
 course, he begins to realize that there is a 
 hook in his back. That 's just what we find 
 out, you see, when we try to swim against the 
 stream of destiny. We all have hooks in our 
 backs. You can call it by whatever name 
 you like, but that 's the whole business in a 
 nutshell." 
 
 " I won't listen to you another minute," 
 the Foolish Woman protested, rising as she 
 spoke. " You grow positively irreligious. 
 Now there 's Mr. Blank, sitting there so 
 quietly all the while. I 've no doubt he 's 
 thinking of something really worth speak- 
 ing of." 
 
 " I am, indeed," the Man of the World said 
 seriously. " I 'm thinking that I won't keep 
 these trousers. This is the first time I 've had 
 them on, don't you see, and the longer I look 
 at them the more I think there 's something 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY in 
 
 crude about the color. I don't see how a 
 woman ever selects her clothes without going 
 crazy. A man has certain definite rules which 
 guide him to an extent, but a woman has to 
 choose from such a wilderness of styles. My 
 heart aches for you." 
 
 " And well it may," the Foolish Woman 
 was saying as the two walked away from the 
 piazza together. " If it was n't an absolute 
 duty to look as well as one can, I should 
 simply give up the struggle. Sometimes, I 'm 
 positively wild with it ! " 
 
 The daimon flew down from his perch 
 when the pair had disappeared, and lighted 
 on the window sill beside which I sat. 
 
 " It is entirely beyond my comprehension, 
 — this attitude of you human creatures to- 
 ward life ! " he exclaimed. 
 
 " Yes ? " I said tentatively. 
 
 " Either you are immortal beings," he went 
 on, " or you are not." 
 
 " Granted." 
 
 " If you are not, nothing matters, and if 
 you are, everything matters." 
 
 " Exactly." 
 
ii2 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 " And instead of settling the question, or 
 even thinking about it, it would seem, you 
 go on discussing the color of your clothes 
 and wondering what you would better have 
 for dinner ! " Overcome by his emotions, with 
 a tremendous swoop of the tail, the darning- 
 needle wildly circled into the air. 
 
 The Contrary Young Man drew his chair 
 nearer to the open window where I was sitting. 
 
 " Was it Mr. Weller who said that women 
 were ' rum creeters' ? " he inquired. " I don't 
 remember the authority, but I can vouch for 
 the truth of the statement. If a woman must 
 be a fool, though, it is just as well that she 
 should be a pretty fool. I thought I heard 
 you talking to somebody just now." 
 
 " I thank you in the name of my sex for the 
 complimentary tone of your remarks," I said, 
 ignoring his last statement. " If it is the lady 
 who has just gone away to whom you are so 
 gracefully referring, I am not at all sure that 
 she did n't appear quite as well as you did in 
 the conversation which I overheard. I won- 
 der sometimes in which religious denomina- 
 tion you class yourself." 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 113 
 
 " In no religious denomination at all ; I 
 belong to the biggest denomination on earth, 
 — the denomination of civilized heathen. 
 We 're not all just alike, but we are all in the 
 same fold. Some of us really want to know 
 what we 're here for, and some of us don't 
 care. Some of us are interested in our souls, 
 and some in our trousers." 
 
 " Speaking well of the absent does n't seem 
 to be any part of your creed," I suggested at 
 this point. 
 
 The Young Man received this criticism 
 cheerfully. " Good work ! " he commented. 
 " I '11 tell you what church I would really like 
 to join if I could do so with the same cheer- 
 ful confidence in its efficacy which I have 
 seen some of its members display. I took a 
 spin into the country on my wheel the other 
 day and stopped at a farmhouse at noon, as 
 I often do, for a bowl of bread and milk. 
 While I ate, the farmer gave me the benefit 
 of his conversation, and he could talk the 
 bark off a log. He was n't exactly my ideal 
 of a perfect man, and the things in his life 
 he seemed to be proudest of struck me as 
 
ii 4 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 rather shady transactions, but I found that 
 he considered he had a sure thing as far as 
 religion was concerned. He spoke of heaven 
 as if he had paid for a corner lot. 
 
 " ' You seem pretty sure about your stand- 
 ing in the next world,' I said to him. 
 
 " * Well, I don't know why not,' he said. 
 ' I was converted way back in '69.' 
 
 " Now that is just what would suit me, — 
 to get converted once and for all, and then 
 stay so, no matter what little vagaries I 
 might be betrayed into afterwards." 
 
 "And yet, if I remember aright, I heard 
 you a few minutes ago regretting that you 
 were liable to be swooped into heaven, 
 whether you wanted to or not." 
 
 " You did," the Young Man acknowledged ; 
 "but there are moments in a man's history 
 when he realizes that it might make a differ- 
 ence — in his own self-respect, at least — 
 whether he entered the next world with a 
 clean conscience or a dirty one." 
 
 The daimon — who had, as usual, been 
 listening — was all ready to put in his com- 
 ment before the Young Man was fairly out 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 115 
 
 of hearing. " There, but for the grace of 
 God, goes this darning-needle ! " he ex- 
 claimed, jerking his tail toward the visitor's 
 departing form. "When I die, that is the 
 end of me, but if I had been afflicted with a 
 soul — " 
 
 " ' To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,' " 
 I quoted. " That does n't sound so tempting." 
 
 " I shan't care how cold it is, so long as I 
 don't know it. Might be more comfortable 
 than a seat too near the fire ! " 
 
 I left the piazza in disgust — a mere flip- 
 pant devil's darning-needle, whom I could 
 crush with one movement of my foot ! Why 
 should I bear so much impertinence from him ? 
 
 I was even more sadly impressed with the 
 assurance of this mindless insect when he 
 began to criticise man and his place in the 
 universe. 
 
 " I gather from what I have heard on this 
 piazza," he remarked, with his usual thirst 
 for information, " that man vaunts himself as 
 belonging to the highest order of beings, the 
 very top-notch, the flower of evolution and 
 civilization and all the rest." 
 
n6 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 " Certainly," I answered coldly, with the 
 air of one who inquires, " What affair is this 
 of yours ? " 
 
 " And it is because he alone, thus far, has 
 developed moral faculties that he spends so 
 much of his time in fighting with the vari- 
 ous tribes of his order, each superior moral 
 creature endeavoring to exterminate as many 
 other superior moral creatures as possible ? 
 When one member of the brute creation 
 preys upon another, it is, as I understand it, 
 simply the following out of a barbarous natu- 
 ral instinct; when man preys upon his fel- 
 low man it is, on the contrary, a revelation 
 of supreme morality." 
 
 " Many of the wars to which you allude 
 have been wars of principle," I replied se- 
 verely; " our Philippine campaign is a notable 
 example of this. But one can hardly expect 
 you to comprehend principles, since it is im- 
 possible for you to possess them." 
 
 " Much better not to have principles," the 
 darning-needle commented pensively. " So 
 far as my observation goes, it is almost in- 
 variably the people with principles who get 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 117 
 
 into mischief. Look at Russia, now. She 
 could n't live another second without a Peace 
 Congress, and all the time she was getting 
 one of the biggest artnies on the globe ready 
 for mobilization." 
 
 " Certainly ; she wanted to be in a position 
 to enforce her peace principles." 
 
 " Oh," the darning-needle went on in a few 
 minutes, "man 's a great creature ! He comes 
 both to destroy and to fulfill, and he usually 
 accomplishes his fulfillment by destroying. 
 That story of the little boy which somebody 
 told here the other day is a good illustration 
 of the whole subject, it seems to me." 
 
 Now the story of the little boy, which the 
 darning-needle seized so maliciously with 
 which to point his moral, was this : A gentle 
 lady was trying to lead to higher things a 
 dear little round-faced boy of hopelessly de- 
 structive instincts, so she pointed out to him 
 the great golden moon swimming through 
 the summer heavens, and descanted to him 
 on its beauty and the goodness of God in 
 creating it to light the earth. The little van- 
 dal listened unmoved to her most eloquent 
 
n8 PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 periods, and when she had finished an- 
 nounced, — 
 
 " I 'm goin' to bweak that down ! I 'm 
 goin' to take my big tick and bweak that all 
 down out o' the sky ! " A moment later, at- 
 tacked by doubts of his own prowess, he 
 added," If I can't bweak that down, I 'm goin' 
 to get my faver to bweak it down for me ! " 
 
 When I went into the house and slammed 
 the door after me, it was not because I really 
 desired to leave my daimon in the undis- 
 turbed contemplation of man in his alleged 
 favorite occupation of breaking down all the 
 golden moons in the universe, but because 
 I recognized the impossibility of explaining 
 to an insect without reasoning powers that 
 every great question contains within itself 
 such possibilities of expansion that in follow- 
 ing it to its bitter end sense frequently be- 
 comes nonsense, immorality becomes moral- 
 ity, and everything becomes everything else. 
 
 It was the very morning after this annoy- 
 ing conversation that the housemaid came to 
 me. She had been cleansing the piazza floor, 
 actively, as her manner is. 
 
PIAZZA PHILOSOPHY 119 
 
 " Honest to goodness, mum," she an- 
 nounced, " I come jist within one o' troddin' 
 on that ould dar'-needle you make sich a toime 
 about. He don't very often be puttin' himself 
 round under feet, but he 'd got a-thinkin' this 
 mornin' so har-rd that he did n't wanst notice 
 that I was in it — an' there he was, jist timptin' 
 me to shtep on him. 'T would served him 
 right, too — the ould divil ! " 
 
 I asked myself whether I was most glad or 
 sorry that my daimon had thus been preserved 
 to me, and I did not know. Was I not hap- 
 pier before I began to see myself so con- 
 stantly as others see me ? Whether, I queried 
 within myself, 't is nobler in the mind to suf- 
 fer the slings and arrows of outrageous darn- 
 ing-needles, or to take arms — or feet — 
 against impertinent insects, and by opposing, 
 end them ? 
 
 Meanwhile, he is sitting on the arm of a 
 piazza chair at this moment, winking his tail 
 and inviting me to mortal combat. My spirit 
 rises to the challenge. Come, 
 
 Hang out our banners on the outward walls ! 
 
V 
 
 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 THERE was once a time — not so long 
 ago, either, as I would like to induce 
 credulous people to believe — when the three 
 editions of Robert Browning's poems which 
 now find home and welcome in my book- 
 cases would, had I possessed them, have been 
 sealed books to me. 
 
 In those days — already so inconceivable 
 that they seem to recede into a prehistoric 
 vista — it was commonly supposed by readers 
 in my rank and station of enlightenment that 
 a person who made any assured claim to a 
 comprehension of Browning was either a rank 
 pretender or the victim of a special revelation. 
 It was during this period, I remember, that a 
 teacher of English in the public schools said 
 to me rather sadly, — 
 
 " I don't like to tell people that I enjoy 
 
i2 4 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 reading Browning — it makes me appear so 
 conceited." 
 
 Even in that dark era of my existence, 
 however, I did not consider myself so igno- 
 rant of the work of the great poet as my pre- 
 sent confession seems to imply. I was more 
 or less familiar with " The Pied Piper of 
 Hamelin," I had heard the story of the good 
 news that was brought from Ghent to Aix 
 vigorously thundered forth on various decla- 
 matory occasions, and I had read with emotion 
 that " Incident of the French Camp " which 
 Owen Wister makes his Virginian hero criti- 
 cise so cruelly. I should not say, if I were 
 going to state my conception of the situation, 
 that I had been growing up through grada- 
 tions of Longfellow, Lowell, Tennyson, and 
 the rest to the possibility of a comprehension 
 of Browning. The library with which I was 
 most familiar in my youth offered to a child 
 naturally hungry for poetry a noble collection 
 of English authors. Fed from this source I 
 devoured Shakespeare with the avidity which 
 one saves nowadays for the perusal of a popu- 
 lar novel, pored over " Paradise Lost " with the 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 125 
 
 conviction that it was rather sensational read- 
 ing, laid my head upon the lap of earth with 
 Gray, and spouted Collins's Odes to hill and 
 sky in my lonely walks. 
 
 This was princely fare, and I ought to have 
 benefited by it far more than I did, yet, in 
 spite of my limitations, I assimilated some- 
 thing from it all, something that became a 
 part of me, imperishable until I perish. From 
 such a foundation, however ill profited by, 
 one does not " grow up " to other authors, — 
 one simply enlarges one's Olympian temple 
 to make room for new gods, 
 
 A hundred shapes of lucid stone ! 
 All day we built its shrine for each. 
 
 A man asked me once if I had not out- 
 grown Dickens, and I questioned my inner 
 consciousness to know if this were the case. 
 Through long familiarity I had, indeed, 
 ceased to read Dickens, but — outgrown ? 
 Does one outgrow Mr. Micawber, Betsey 
 Trotwood, Mr. Pickwick, and the rest ? Is it 
 not rather that one enlarges the circle of one's 
 friends to find room for them all, every one, 
 the old no less than the new ? Sometimes, 
 
126 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 too, the high gods prove too high, or the son 
 of the carpenter is transformed before our 
 eyes into the King of Men. 
 
 Lucian's parable of the council of the gods 
 and the struggle for precedence is applicable 
 still. The dog-faced monster from Egypt 
 with the great gold nose is, it is true, sooner 
 or later relegated to the background when 
 one learns to estimate comparative values, 
 but he is not banished to outer darkness. All 
 our gods come to stay — and a gold nose 
 counts for something. 
 
 I can remember the exact moment when 
 Robert Browning was first definitely revealed 
 to me as a presiding deity. 
 
 I have always had a tendency to grasp at 
 the pictorial aspect of things, and, as it 
 chances, each of the group of poems which 
 first revealed that poet to me as the friendliest 
 friend of all is pigeon-holed in my mind with 
 a spectacular tag attached to it. 
 
 Thus I entered the Browning country, the 
 real land of faery where Browning is king, 
 through the gate of " Prospice," and the gate 
 was opened to me by a young man. He stood, 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 127 
 
 I remember, while he read the poem aloud, 
 and a slant of sunlight fell full upon his broad 
 brows and his rather nice gray eyes, and even 
 lent a glamour to the exceedingly pointed 
 toes of his patent leather shoes. He liked 
 what he read, and was in earnest about it ; he 
 was not thinking of me, and I very soon 
 ceased thinking of him. 
 
 The peculiar movement of the poem ap- 
 pealed directly to an element always easily 
 aroused in my nature, — the fighting spirit, 
 which may be in my case more bravado than 
 pluck, but which at any rate knows how to 
 appreciate pluck in others. 
 
 I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more, 
 The best and the last ! 
 
 struck a chord that went thrilling on until the 
 quick transition at the end of the poem, when 
 
 the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, 
 
 dwindle and blend and change, to become 
 
 first a peace out of pain, 
 Then a light, then thy breast, 
 O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again, 
 And with God be the rest ! 
 
128 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 There is no touch to which the hearts of 
 men and women so readily thrill with instant 
 response as to this touch of human love, 
 whether it be that of the fighter leaning 
 across the black gulf of death to clasp the 
 beloved one again, or the Blessed Damozel 
 stooping from " the gold bar of heaven," to say, 
 
 I wish that he were come to me, 
 For he will come. 
 
 Every one of us, even those who have de- 
 liberately taken husbands or wives in a series, 
 cherishes in his or her inmost thought the 
 conviction that under different and more 
 favorable circumstances we, too, might have 
 been capable of romantic love and perfect 
 constancy. This unformulated belief in our- 
 selves aids our self-respect immensely, and 
 helps to put a garland — invisible perhaps, 
 but to the eye of faith none the less decora- 
 tive — around the least sentimental existence. 
 
 The motive of the whole poem, too, the 
 courage, the constancy, the devotion, strikes 
 with a bold hand — as Browning always does 
 strike — that keynote of strength which is 
 the dominant note in everything he writes. 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 129 
 
 Weakness is the only thing he conceived it 
 
 possible to fear. Be bold, act a man's part 
 
 and leave the rest, — above all, remember that 
 
 fighting is the best fun in the world, and a 
 
 man who won't fight is not worth his salt. 
 
 Let a man contend to the uttermost 
 For his life's set prize, be it what it will ! 
 
 My next discovery in the Browning country 
 was Rabbi Ben Ezra, a mine of pure gold 
 from which I have been digging nuggets ever 
 since. The personal recollection to which 
 my earlier knowledge of this poem is joined 
 is that of a clergyman with whom I conned 
 it over stanza by stanza, for the purpose, as I 
 recall it, of convincing him that Browning 
 had written some things which compared 
 favorably with the work of his favorite Tenny- 
 son and were not materially harder to under- 
 stand. 
 
 I told him, with that modest confidence in 
 my literary judgments which has always dis- 
 tinguished me, that Tennyson never but once 
 mustered sufficient courage really to "let 
 himself go," and that Maud, which was the 
 outcome of this first and last indulgence, has 
 
i 3 o THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 a hysteric note in it which would have been 
 impossible to Browning. 
 
 " One feels all the time," I criticised confi- 
 dently, " that the 
 
 dreadful hollow behind the little wood 
 
 was a great deal more dreadful than it need 
 have been if the hero of the poem could only 
 have * braced up ' and fulfilled his own long- 
 
 o ' And ah for a man to arise in me, 
 
 That the man I arn may cease to be ! " 
 
 My clerical friend, however, did not believe 
 in any man's right to let himself go, and our 
 sitting ended with a hopeless discrepancy be- 
 tween the lay and the ministerial judgment. 
 
 I have read this poem many times since 
 then, and never without finding in it some- 
 thing strong and stirring, something that gave 
 me fresh courage to be gone 
 
 Once more on my adventure brave and new. 
 
 In many a night of weariness and racking 
 pain I have repeated over and over to myself, 
 that inner self that has power over the phys- 
 ical being, fragments from its battle call,— 
 the bugle call to my retreating courage : — 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 131 
 
 Then welcome each rebuff 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 
 Be our joys three parts pain ! 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 
 Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the 
 throe ! 
 
 It is true, I never did welcome each rebuff, 
 and there was no moment, I suppose, when I 
 would not joyfully have turned earth's rough- 
 ness smooth, but since I must endure the throe 
 whether I grudged it or not, here was some- 
 thing to take hold of, to crystallize around, to 
 serve as a sting to my spiritual weakness. 
 
 If, of all our authors, we are most indebted 
 to him who helps us to hate cowardice, then 
 Robert Browning must be hailed above all 
 others as the prophet of courage, — courage 
 in victory, courage in defeat, the courage of 
 the losing fight no less than the courage of 
 success. One, he was, 
 
 who never turned his back, but marched breast 
 forward, 
 Never doubted clouds would break, 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would 
 triumph, 
 
i 3 2 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake. 
 
 I have never asked, it is true, whether in 
 detail he lived up to what he preached. It 
 does not matter. Most of us are in one 
 way or another born cowards, and what we 
 need more than anything else is to be made 
 properly ashamed of ourselves. Hail, then, 
 Robert Browning, disturber of the peace ! 
 
 While I was still in the grasp of Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra, I was invited to spend an after- 
 noon with a " Reading Circle," which was at 
 that time struggling with the dark mysteries 
 of " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." 
 
 They told me sadly — the members of the 
 Circle — that they had pored over a dozen 
 interpretations of the poem and " did n't un- 
 derstand it yet." 
 
 " Of course I would like to understand 
 what Browning meant by the thing," one 
 reader said candidly, — " that is, if he himself 
 had any idea ' where he was at,' — but I don't 
 see how anybody could like it." 
 
 Having had my attention thus called to 
 Childe Roland, I made a bold charge at his 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 133 
 
 secrets, but very soon made up my mind that 
 I was not under the slightest obligation to 
 understand him. I have trodden that dark 
 way with him many a time, have lost myself 
 upon the barren plain, felt what he felt, 
 looked with despairing eyes on what he saw, 
 and when 
 
 Burningly it came on me all at once 
 This was the place, 
 
 I have always been sure that, after going 
 through so much disagreeableness for the 
 sake of arriving at the Dark Tower, only to 
 find " all the lost adventurers, my peers," on 
 dress parade watching to see what I was 
 going to do about it, I should have blown 
 the horn at all hazards. As I have previously 
 hinted, Browning's chief virtue is that he 
 makes one feel willing to blow horns and 
 wave banners and lead forlorn hopes. 
 
 It was at about this period of my Brown- 
 ing explorations that I began to meet the 
 Greek professor in my morning walks. The 
 springtime had come and the voice of the 
 turtle was heard in the land, — a condition 
 of affairs which made it more possible for 
 
134 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 the human voice to gain an audience. The 
 Greek professor — who had retired from the 
 active duties of his position — now and then 
 joined company with me during our leisurely 
 return from the morning errands which gave 
 us an excuse for being abroad. He had a 
 genuine passion for the classics, and enjoyed 
 rolling out sonorous quotations from his favor- 
 ite authors, although these gems of thought 
 always required translation into English for 
 the instruction of my ignorance. 
 
 One day he asked me rather mournfully 
 if I liked Browning. I acknowledged with 
 cheerful hope that I thought I was going to 
 like him, though I had not yet penetrated 
 very far into the labyrinth of his pages. 
 
 It appeared from the professor's narrative 
 that an enthusiastic young friend " who in the 
 inexperience of youth doubtless flattered him- 
 self that he could comprehend all mysteries " 
 had requested him, the professor, to read 
 " Caliban upon Setebos " — oh, the drawling 
 scorn of accent with which this was spoken ! 
 and he was in process of offering this sacri- 
 fice to friendship. 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 135 
 
 " If you have n't read the gibberish," he sug- 
 gested, " and have time to waste, — as most 
 women do have, — I wish you would see 
 whether you can make head or tail of it. I 
 can't." 
 
 The next time we met I told the professor 
 that I had ventured on Caliban and rather 
 enjoyed the experiment. I spoke more dif- 
 fidently than is my wont. I am generally 
 most positive in regard to subjects I know 
 least about. 
 
 " Enjoyed it ! " the professor exclaimed. 
 " Will you tell me what there is to enjoy about 
 * Caliban upon Setebos ' ? " — the old scornful 
 intonation. 
 
 " Well," I replied, " the same element that 
 appeals to me in all the Browning poems I 
 know, — the daring of it, the boldness with 
 which he puts his finger on the sore spots so 
 many of us are conscious of and think it 
 wicked to mention." 
 
 " Pooh ! " my friend repeated, " ' Caliban 
 upon Setebos ' ! My dear woman, there 's no- 
 thing in it — less than nothing ! Now here 's 
 a little bit that I got from my Greek Calen- 
 
136 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 dar this morning — an epitaph by Leonidas. 
 See what you think of this," and the profes- 
 sor translated for me : — 
 
 A slave was Epictetus, who before you buried lies, 
 And a cripple and a beggar and the favorite of the skies. 
 
 " I like it," I answered, " partly, I think, 
 because it shows the same spirit that draws 
 me toward Browning. 
 
 " The only difference I recognize between 
 the two," the professor remarked in his very 
 softest drawl, " is the difference between words 
 with meaning — much in little — and words 
 without meaning — little in much." 
 
 I no longer meet the professor in my morn- 
 ing walks. He heard one day " the great 
 voice " from those skies 
 
 Where Zeus upon the purple waits, 
 
 and calling last Ave atque Vale ! to those he 
 left behind, he went his way. It may be 
 that in that high Olympus he talks to-day 
 with " Euripides the human " and Catullus 
 the beloved and Browning the brave, and 
 there has learned to know as he is known. 
 From " Caliban upon Setebos " I passed by 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 137 
 
 an easy transition to " Paracelsus." This trans- 
 formation scene was owing to the prophetic 
 guidance of the Woman's Literary Club. 
 The " programme committee " of this organi- 
 zation, knowing well where Genius had her 
 home, had invited me to " prepare a paper " 
 on the latter poem. I did not hesitate for a 
 moment. I had once glanced hastily through 
 the poem, and, being hampered by very little 
 knowledge of its real import, in three days 
 from the time of request I had delivered my- 
 self of an interpretation which solved sat- 
 isfactorily — to my thinking — every vexed 
 problem that the critics had ever raised in re- 
 gard to its meaning. 
 
 I did not hesitate to assert in the most 
 " flat-footed " manner, " Whatever charge of 
 obscurity can be brought against other of 
 Browning's poems, there is nothing obscure 
 in * Paracelsus ' ! " 
 
 It was a great paper. I liked the exordium 
 of it : — 
 
 " It is characteristic of the power and the 
 outreach of Browning's genius that it almost 
 seemed as if he had nothing to learn from 
 
138 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 life. In * Paracelsus,' written by a stripling 
 hardly past the age of boyhood, a young man 
 standing at the threshold of his years, joyous 
 with an Italian affluence of temperament, hav- 
 ing never known the deep experiences, the 
 struggles that are birth pangs of the soul, 
 the disenchantments and failures of life, he 
 paints the dream, the yearning, the bitter 
 comedy, and the tragedy of the human drama 
 as if his genius could foresee the end from the 
 beginning, or as if he had already reached the 
 vantage point of that 
 
 " Last of life for which the first was made." 
 
 I am not much addicted to reading papers 
 in public, — I think, in fact, that I made my 
 debut and my final exit in that capacity on 
 the occasion in question, — and I remember 
 well that the electric light above my head 
 shone with unexampled violence, and the 
 faces of the audience advanced and receded 
 like the waves of the sea. There were tones 
 in my voice, too, which were unrecognizable 
 even to myself. When I had finished, a lady, 
 who was then serving God and her native 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 139 
 
 land by accepting the position of domestic in 
 some needy household, took me kindly by 
 the hand and told me that she liked my 
 piece. Few of my audience seemed to real- 
 ize that they were apathetically letting the 
 opportunity of a lifetime slip by. 
 
 I have never been sorry for my audacity in 
 writing that paper. I got from it for myself 
 much that I did not know how to give to 
 others, — the burden and message of Para- 
 celsus, that strange, complex nature, trying 
 at all the gates of life, striving to live a purely 
 spiritual existence in a human world, forced 
 to recognize one by one the physical and 
 material barriers which made such a life 
 impossible, hampered by the very strength 
 of his own powers, and stooping at last to 
 be bound by the restraints he despised, yet 
 through strength and weakness alike, 
 
 upward tending all, though weak, 
 Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, 
 But dream of him, and guess where he may be, 
 And do their best to climb and get to him. 
 
 It is the same dominant chord of courage. 
 All the battle-cries of all the ages are in it, 
 
i 4 o THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 and the confidence born of all the victories 
 that have been. 
 
 A Browning notion of victory, however, 
 does not with any necessity whatever imply 
 the getting what one wants. It often means 
 just keeping eternally at it, and realizing that 
 surrender is the only defeat : — 
 
 But what if I fail of my purpose here ? 
 It is but to keep the nerves at strain, 
 To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, 
 And baffled, get up and begin again — 
 So the chase takes up one's life, that 's all. 
 
 II 
 
 I am as well aware as any one can be that 
 my Browning explorations are valuable to the 
 world at large only as an indication of the 
 ease with which one can grow rich. As Cap- 
 tain Bunsby would say, "The bearings of 
 this obserwation lies in the application on it." 
 
 If I who am but a woman, neither scholar 
 nor critic, a shallow adventuress going at the 
 quest in mere haphazard fashion, have been 
 able to discover for myself the true elixir, the 
 tonic which the twentieth century most needs, 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 141 
 
 what wealth may not lie in the search for that 
 dominant sex which habitually calls itself 
 " the stronger," the sex of assured intellect 
 and logical mind, and, to speak candidly, the 
 sex that needs the tonic most. 
 
 I may be wrong, — and if so I am willing to 
 acknowledge it to anybody who can convince 
 me of my error, — but my observation goes 
 to show that the average woman of to-day 
 has more ideals than the average man, and 
 is therefore morally stronger. Moreover, no 
 woman is ever allowed to suppose herself in- 
 capable of improvement. We belong to a sex 
 that is continually being lessoned and lec- 
 tured,. One never takes up a newspaper with- 
 out finding in it some admonition in regard 
 to what women should or should not do. On 
 the other hand, while our daily reading fur- 
 nishes much inconsistent criticism of indi- 
 vidual men, the evidence seems to point to 
 the fact that men in the concrete are very 
 well satisfied with themselves as they are. 
 One cannot help feeling that if the entire sex 
 could be lined up, and the question pro- 
 pounded to them, " What 's the matter with 
 
i 4 2 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 man ? M the answer would be one universal 
 roar of " He 's all right ! " 
 
 A woman, once convinced that she has a 
 soul, can seldom be quite easy in ignoring it ; 
 a man feels sure that if he has one it is not his 
 fault, and therefore he feels himself relieved 
 from too great responsibility. The twentieth- 
 century man, however, is not indolent in any 
 sense but an ethical one. Never was there 
 a time when more attention was paid to phys- 
 ical growth and culture, but a tonic whose 
 efficacy must be assured by a more strenuous 
 spiritual life does not especially commend itself 
 to our athlete. He prefers ease of mind and 
 malt extracts. He has " outworn " the old 
 dogmas, seen the folly of ideals, and prefers 
 to confine his attention to the things that 
 really count. If there is another existence to 
 follow this one, its philosophy is simple : — 
 
 Our egress from the world 
 Will be nobody knows where, 
 But if we do well here 
 We shall do well there, — 
 
 therefore, why bother one's self too much 
 about a future which is, at best, problematic ? 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 143 
 
 The human race has not altogether dete- 
 riorated. The twentieth-century man has in 
 him all the heroic possibilities that any man 
 ever had, but he is suffering from that weak- 
 ening of fibre which necessarily accompanies 
 a dearth of convictions. 
 
 The acquisition of wealth, which is the 
 ruling motive of the America of our century, 
 does not constitute an ideal, since an ideal 
 implies some sort of moral earnestness. Ma- 
 terialism, however, is perfectly consistent 
 with great benevolences, generosity without 
 sacrifice and sympathy without abnegation. 
 Indeed, in proportion as we lower the stand- 
 ard of that absolute strength which consti- 
 tutes perfect manhood and womanhood, the 
 more " kind-hearted " we grow, the more we 
 deprecate anything which creates pain or de- 
 mands endurance, the more we send flowers 
 to criminals and sign petitions against the 
 execution of murderers. We cry out against 
 war and send delegates to Peace Congresses, 
 not altogether because this course is " Chris- 
 tian," — though that is how we usually define 
 our feeling, — but partly, too, because, like 
 
i 4 4 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 the child in " Helen's Babies," we object to the 
 sight of anything " bluggy." 
 
 I do not know anything which better illus- 
 trates the deterioration of fibre which is the 
 result of an unstrenuous standard than the 
 attitude of the American people — too large 
 a proportion of them, at least — toward the 
 Cuban war. 
 
 I was too young at the time of our civil 
 conflict to pronounce with any accuracy upon 
 the feeling of the public at large in regard to 
 it, so perhaps I am wrong in imagining, as I 
 always have done, that it was that of heroic 
 acceptance and endurance, and that men and 
 women alike felt that the best blood of a na- 
 tion was not too great a price to pay to settle 
 a moral issue forever and settle it aright. 
 
 Years after, when the bugles of war again 
 sounded for a contest not our own, — a war 
 of generosity to right the wrongs of another 
 and alien people, — the response was just as 
 ready, the deeds of heroism were no less con- 
 spicuous, and for a breathing space while the 
 men of the country were shouting, " Remem- 
 ber the Maine ! " and the women were gath- 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 145 
 
 ering in sewing circles for the manufacture 
 of the flannel night clothing which no self- 
 respecting soldier ever fails to assume before 
 retiring to rest in the trenches, a thrill of the 
 same unquestioning courage swept through 
 the land. 
 
 Scarcely had the echo of the guns of San- 
 tiago died away, however, before the howl 
 began, — the howl of the kind-hearted, the 
 sympathetic, the unstrenuous generation. 
 
 What justification, they asked, has any 
 Christian nation for going to war at all, es- 
 pecially in a quarrel not its own ? 
 
 If, however, to suit his own purposes, Pres- 
 ident McKinley insisted upon war, why did 
 he not select a country possessing a more 
 temperate climate as the scene of battle ? 
 
 If time had been given the soldiers to pro- 
 vide themselves with suitable outfits, could 
 not this delay have been utilized by the gov- 
 ernment for the manufacture of sandwiches 
 in readiness for informal lunches to be served 
 during charges and on the field of battle ? 
 Has not a toiling and much enduring sol- 
 dier a right to expect such common, every-day 
 
i 4 6 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 recognition of his services as a hot dinner, 
 prepared promptly, would represent ? Is the 
 " poor soldier " asking too much when he calls 
 for clean linen and an opportunity to run up 
 a laundry bill ? 
 
 In short, the voice of the people suggested 
 wisely, if we must have war, let us see that 
 it is conducted regularly and in order, with- 
 out bloodshed or confusion. Let physicians 
 be provided to feel the military pulse daily 
 and keep down all unnecessary fever in the 
 veins. 
 
 Hence it happened that while we were 
 taking all our newly acquired heroes down 
 from their pedestals, and our army officers 
 were quarreling over the division of glory, 
 and mothers of volunteers were writing to 
 the newspapers to complain that the tastes 
 of their sons had never been consulted in re- 
 gard to having oatmeal for breakfast, and com- 
 mittees of investigation were diligently smell- 
 ing at all the army stores that remained 
 unused, there were one or two more or less 
 important facts that seemed to escape general 
 cognizance. 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 147 
 
 It has, for instance, sometimes been appre- 
 hended that war is a grim game, not suited 
 to holiday soldiers ; but if the thing at stake 
 is worth the price to be paid, the only decency 
 is to pay it joyfully without doubt or hesita- 
 tion, and having paid, never to repent. Re- 
 pentance, in such a case, is cowardice. 
 
 I remember a certain little boy who came 
 home from school with a black eye and a 
 bleeding nose and a question in his young 
 mind whether he should weep or swagger. 
 Just as his mother's sympathy and first aid 
 to the wounded were beginning to convulse 
 his infant features his father appeared on the 
 scene. 
 
 " Did you have any good reason for fight- 
 ing ? " he asked. 
 
 The budding warrior proclaimed a noble 
 cause for battle. 
 
 " Did you lick the other fellow ? " 
 
 The other fellow had ignominiously bitten 
 the dust. 
 
 " Then," inquired the parent, " what are 
 you whining over ? " 
 
 Every grave on those Cuban hillsides marks 
 
148 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 a sacrifice for human progress, and when one 
 remembers the failures, the futilities, the dis- 
 graces among living men, who can feel that 
 he who in the moment of a supreme impulse 
 offered all, and found his abnegation accepted, 
 did not choose the better part ? 
 
 Life's business being just the terrible choice 
 
 betwixt strength and weakness. 
 
 It is a part of the materialism of modern 
 life and the cowardly theory that life is worth 
 to a man only " what he gets out of it as he 
 goes along," that so many men spend their 
 days in offering continual sacrifices to their 
 bodies. 
 
 When the hero of the popular short story 
 is not eating or drinking, he is smoking. His 
 chronicler flavors his pages with tobacco 
 smoke and punctuates them with cocktails. 
 In joy or sorrow, in the most romantic no 
 less than the most commonplace moments, 
 the hero " lights another cigarette." Emotion 
 unaccompanied by nicotine is something of 
 which he evidently has no conception. 
 
 It is the same, too, with the up-to-date 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 149 
 
 young man in real life. He knows, if he has 
 been properly trained, that while a toothpick 
 should be indulged in only in that spot to 
 which Scripture enjoins us to retire when we 
 are about to pray, a meerschaum pipe is a 
 perfectly well-bred article for public wear, and 
 one which enables him to fulfill agreeably that 
 law of his being which suggests that he should 
 always be putting something in his mouth. 
 
 At a college ball game not long since where, 
 as is usual on such occasions, clouds of incense 
 were rising to the heavens from the male por- 
 tion of the spectators, I amused myself by 
 observing a young man who sat in a carriage 
 near me, and who while the game was in 
 progress smoked a pipe three times and filled 
 in all the intervals with cigars and cigarettes. 
 I knew something about him, and had fre- 
 quently heard him referred to as " a first-rate 
 fellow," but if anybody had asked him if he 
 believed himself capable of a single pure 
 impulse of the soul entirely unmixed with 
 bodily sensations, he would have stared in 
 amazement. 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra's test, 
 
150 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 Thy body at its best, 
 How far can that project thy soul on its lone way ? 
 
 would have struck this young man as a de- 
 cidedly " fresh " inquiry. A certain pictorial 
 advertisement which for a long time held a 
 conspicuous place in the daily newspapers 
 would, however, have appealed to him at once. 
 It depicted a youth with a pipe in his mouth, 
 holding his sweetheart on his knee, and rap- 
 turously exclaiming as he diligently puffed 
 the smoke into her face, " With you and a 
 pipeful of Every Day Smoke I am perfectly 
 happy ! " Old Omar gives us a more poetic 
 version of the same thing : — 
 
 A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou 
 Beside me singing in the Wilderness — 
 Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow ! 
 
 I am not desirous in this essay of discuss- 
 ing the morality of any habit, as such ; I 
 simply wish to emphasize the fact that con- 
 stant self-indulgence of any kind is incom- 
 patible with strength. The Browning tonic 
 which I would like to substitute for the pro- 
 prietary medicines of the age does not inspire 
 any man to be an angel before his time, — 
 
THE BROWNING TONIC 151 
 
 it only stimulates him to be a man and 
 master of himself : — 
 
 A man for aye removed 
 From the developed brute ; a God though in the germ. 
 
 The tonic in question is not an expensive 
 remedy except in the amount of effort re- 
 quired on the part of the patient to render it 
 efficacious, but it is perhaps a little too bracing 
 to be taken in large doses until the spirit of 
 it has begun to steal into one's veins. 
 
 If, for instance, the young man of the ball 
 game should begin before breakfast in the 
 morning with 
 
 What have I on earth to do 
 
 With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly ? 
 
 follow it up at about the time of his after' 
 breakfast pipe with 
 
 I count life just a stuff, 
 To try the soul's strength on, 
 
 manfully swallow an afternoon dose of 
 
 When the fight begins within himself 
 A man 's worth something, 
 
 and substitute for his usual nightcap, 
 
152 THE BROWNING TONIC 
 
 Why comes temptation but for man to meet, 
 And master and make crouch beneath his foot, 
 And so be pedestaled in triumph ? 
 
 he might at first find such a sudden influx 
 of red blood into his veins a little more than 
 his system could bear, but, in due time, if 
 the prescription were persevered in, he might 
 learn to welcome the joy and the strength of 
 the new elixir of life. 
 
 " Don't you get a little weary of hearing 
 life compared to a battle-field ? " the athletic 
 young man inquired when the rhetoric of 
 these prescriptions was discussed in the 
 family circle. 
 
 " Call it a football field, then," I retorted. 
 " If you are going to play at all, one has a 
 perfect right to expect you to get into the 
 game." 
 
VI 
 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 WHY don't you read ? " the hero of a 
 recent novel inquires of the heroine, 
 who is supposed to be a creature of de- 
 light. 
 
 u Read? I hate it!" she cries. "Why 
 should I wade through pages of poetry about 
 nature when I can look out of the window 
 here ? Why waste time on some poet's im- 
 pression of a storm when nearly any week 
 in summer I can stand there and watch the 
 swish of the rain along the mountains ? " 
 
 The novel in question is one of those — 
 somewhat rare in modern annals — whose 
 gentle flow of narrative makes it possible for 
 the reader to pause and consider the status of 
 a heroine who, loving nature and loathing 
 books, is able to look upon the world around 
 her with something of the primal emotion 
 
156 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 which our Mother Eve must have felt when 
 she saw the " pleasant soil " of Paradise stretch 
 green before her wandering eyes, a paradise 
 rich in hope, but untouched by memory ; the 
 emotion which Wordsworth describes as 
 
 a feeling and a love 
 That had no need of a remoter charm 
 By thought supplied, nor any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye. 
 
 I am no heroine, though I would dearly like 
 to be one, and I knew as I mused upon my 
 sister of the novel that I should never be able 
 to imitate her self-sufficiency. All my world 
 of nature is underlaid and permeated by my 
 world of books ; all my world of books is 
 sweet with vernal breezes and interfused with 
 that something, 
 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air 
 And the blue sky. 
 
 It is strange by what process of selection — 
 or election — we choose the scenes and mem- 
 ories that shall stay with us, round which 
 
 with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, 
 Our pastime and our happiness will grow. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 157 
 
 Almost invariably in my life when some 
 epoch-marking book or poem has risen like a 
 new star above my soul's horizon, it has shone 
 forth for me against the background of the 
 visible heavens. From childhood to woman- 
 hood none of the libraries I have loved best 
 have ever been bounded arbitrarily by four 
 walls. They have been places where the 
 morning sunlight brought a double vision, 
 where the world without mingled itself indis- 
 tinguishably with the world within ; above 
 them one mighty arch of sky domed itself 
 over all the continents, and their windows 
 looked alike into the Gardens of Solomon 
 and the Forest of Arden, New England and 
 Arcady. 
 
 II 
 
 The library where I wandered at will in 
 my girlhood days boasted of no costly edi- 
 tions. Most of its standard books had been 
 collected in the early manhood of a struggling 
 young student who loved books and gleaned 
 them where they were most easily accessible. 
 There were many small volumes printed, not 
 
158 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 later than 1828 or 1829, on yellow-edged 
 paper, with pasteboard covers also of a yellow- 
 ish tint. These had been re-covered, for pur- 
 poses of preservation, with strong, coarse gray 
 paper, on whose durability time has made 
 little impression. 
 
 They were convenient in size, light to the 
 hand, and I loved them so well that no other 
 form or binding has ever seemed to me 
 equally desirable. 
 
 It was a west room where the bookcases 
 stood, and from its windows one saw the 
 green Hallowell hills climbing upward toward 
 the setting sun. There, in the old bookcases, 
 they are still, that flock of gray books, like a 
 flight of doves, each bringing its olive branch 
 of greenness and beauty from the teeming 
 world outside. 
 
 My father was a man who had decided 
 ideas about the sort of reading which should 
 be permitted to his children, ideas which in 
 those bygone years of girlhood often con- 
 flicted unpleasantly with my own. Now I 
 wish that there were more such wisely obdu- 
 rate parents. There was a circulating library 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 159 
 
 in my native town, and from time to time 
 books were added to it which obtained great 
 popularity among my schoolmates. Once, I 
 remember, it was " The Barclays of Boston," 
 by Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, that was being 
 passed from one to another and pronounced 
 " perfectly elegant." 
 
 When I pleaded to be allowed to read it 
 my mother broke through her usual rule of 
 non-interference to suggest to my father that 
 there was at least no harm in the book. 
 
 " It is nothing but wishwash," that stern 
 critic declared, "and the people who read 
 wishwash think wishwash." 
 
 It was a golden Saturday afternoon in early 
 summer; no Saturday afternoons in these 
 latter days can be quite so fair as the old 
 ones. There was no school, and though I 
 might not be permitted the joy of acquaint- 
 ance with "The Barclays of Boston," at least 
 the hours were all my own to use at my will. 
 Even one who feels herself the victim of an 
 untoward fate need not go mourning all her 
 days. 
 
 I knew on just what shelf they had their 
 
160 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 home, the four little volumes that had often 
 tempted me. I stood before the bookcase, 
 shut my eyes, and chose. It is so hard to tell 
 of deliberate will just what one does desire. 
 The fates decided in favor of " The Anti- 
 quary," and, volume one in my hand, I sought 
 the old-fashioned garden below the house. 
 
 The " August apple tree " spread out its 
 lower branches into a seat made for readers 
 and dreamers ; it stood close beside the brook 
 that in springtime was a rushing torrent and 
 the rest of the year a slender stream with a 
 liquid gurgle in its note. I knew that brook 
 in its remotest windings ; three gardens back 
 it flowed through the neglected pleasure 
 grounds of what had once been a well-kept 
 estate. Those terraced lawns where weeds 
 tangled with gay flowers in the untended 
 beds, the dark circle of trees among which a 
 moss-grown fountain played, had for me all 
 the charm of an Italian garden, and the brook 
 came to me with a fresh delight for having 
 lingered through that spot of romance. Just 
 beyond our boundary fence, where a little fall 
 of water formed a pool, two bombshells that 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 161 
 
 had been brought from Key West by an old 
 sea captain in the time of the civil war had 
 found a permanent resting-place. They were 
 not likely to explode after so many years of 
 thorough soaking, yet there was always the 
 fearful joy of dreaming that they might. 
 
 Beside this beloved brook, which had in 
 its day served every purpose to which the 
 imagination of childhood could bend it, I 
 perched myself in the old apple tree, opened 
 my book, and in the twinkling of an eye was 
 off and away over the Scottish Border. Here 
 for the first time I encountered the Magician 
 of the North, to me a magician indeed, and 
 the gateway to that land of burns and braes 
 has always in my dreams opened out of the 
 old childhood garden of the singing brook. 
 Edie Ochiltree's blue gown haunts its waters 
 still, the ancient manor house of Knockwin- 
 nock finds a setting among my neighbors 
 neglected terraces, and I know the gloomy 
 hollow where of old dwelt Elspeth of the 
 Craigburnfoot. Recent statistics claim to 
 show that at least 100,000 volumes of Walter 
 Scott's works will be sold during the current 
 
i6 2 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 year. I wish every one of those volumes 
 might be read with as much joy to the reader 
 as they have given and still give to me. 
 
 Beside my desk, as I write, lies a spray of 
 purple heather, crushed and dry, yet purple 
 still. It came to me not long ago from that 
 
 Land of brown heath and shaggy wood 
 Land of the mountain and the flood, 
 
 which my bodily eyes have never seen. But 
 for books that faded blossom would have little 
 significance for me ; by the aid of books it be- 
 comes a thing of magic : — 
 
 Though crushed its purple blossoms, 
 
 Its tender stems turned brown, 
 
 It brings romantic Highlands 
 
 Into prosaic town ; 
 
 The clans are on the border, 
 
 The chiefs are in the fray, 
 
 We 're keen upon their footsteps 
 
 With Walter Scott to-day. 
 
 Above that heather-decked moorland they 
 
 sing, the warbling birds that " break the heart " 
 
 because they 
 
 'mind us o' departed joys, 
 Departed never to return ; 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 163 
 
 the air is astir with the echo of immortal 
 ballads that thrill the pulses still, the cry of 
 loyal hearts to the king over the water. 
 
 Wha '11 be king but Charlie ? 
 they ask, and the wide moorland calls back, — 
 
 Follow thee, follow thee, wha would na' follow thee, 
 King o' the Highland hearts, bonny Prince Charlie ! 
 
 There bonny Kilmeny wanders with the 
 Flower of Yarrow, and David Balfour finds 
 Catriona and the Little Minister ; there, too, 
 the beloved wraith of him who, exiled from 
 the land he loved, dreamed of Scotland, and 
 longed for her, and wrote of her, comes from 
 his tropic mountain grave to tread the heather 
 at last. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There is an old-fashioned New England 
 farmhouse which I used to know well, an un- 
 painted cottage now seldom inhabited, sitting 
 in a green meadow, and staring at the high- 
 road which it fronts through wide, many- 
 paned windows. 
 
 At the back of the house a deep lane bor- 
 
i6 4 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 dered with gnarled old apple trees leads to 
 the pasture half a mile away. A stream runs 
 through the pasture, so wide that one must 
 spring from stepping-stone to stepping-stone 
 in order to cross. A few paces farther on one 
 finds the grove and knows it at once for a 
 place of enchantment. 
 
 There is no undergrowth in that grove; 
 only vernal and mossy sward where the lichen 
 and the sundew and the tiny yellow oxalis 
 weave their embroideries. All the trees are 
 tall and stately growths, and have stories to 
 tell; succeeding generations of birds come 
 back year after year to the same nesting 
 places. It is a place in which to dream nobly, 
 to resolve strongly, to gain new surety that 
 truth and love and loyalty are steadfast reali- 
 ties. One day I found that death and change 
 had entered even that paradise. A giant tree 
 lay just as it fell to earth, with all its crown 
 of foliage wreathing around it. Near the 
 base the ground was strewn with chips, as if 
 drops of lifeblood had fallen there. 
 
 I walked along the mighty trunk of the 
 fallen monarch, and found a seat on its broad 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 165 
 
 bulk just where the branching limbs began to 
 make an airy chamber, whose green roof did 
 not altogether shut out the arch of the sky. 
 
 I held in my hand a book written by one 
 who had in his lifetime intimate acquaintance 
 with all the deities of wave and wind, of star 
 and cloud. If a bird sang in the far tree-tops, 
 I could find him interpreted and glorified 
 in the book; if the stream in its turn sang 
 through the little valley, the book was aware 
 of its crystal flow, and found in it " the force 
 of the ice, the wreathing of the clouds, the 
 gladness of the sky, and the continuance of 
 Time ; " its writer was himself one of those 
 "strange people " of whom this book tells us, 
 who " had other loves than those of wealth, 
 and other interests than those of commerce." 
 He drew all beautiful things of earth and 
 air into his thought "as you trace threads 
 through figures on a silken damask." 
 
 I opened the book and read the reasons 
 why one man loved the things of nature and 
 beauty, and why because of that love the light 
 of morning yet shone for him upon the hills. 
 
 " He took pleasure in them " — so I read 
 
166 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 from the open page — " because he had been 
 bred among English fields and hills ; because 
 the gentleness of a great race was in his heart 
 and its powers of thought in his brain ; be- 
 cause he knew the stories of the Alps and of 
 the cities at their feet ; because he had read 
 the Homeric legends of the clouds, and be- 
 held the gods of dawn and the givers of dew 
 to the fields ; because he knew the faces of 
 the crags and the imagery of the passionate 
 mountains as a man knows the face of his 
 friend ; because he had in him the wonder 
 and sorrow concerning life and death which 
 are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from 
 the days of its first sea-kings ; and also the 
 compassion and the joy that are woven into 
 the innermost fabric of every great imagina- 
 tive spirit born now in countries that have 
 lived by the Christian faith with any courage 
 or truth." 
 
 IV 
 
 If it requires all this to enable one to see 
 the full glory of the morning light upon the 
 hills, it is yet a blessed thing to know that 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 167 
 
 intimations of that light — vague imaginings 
 of what its effulgence may be — are given to 
 those of narrower vision, who are only dimly 
 struggling toward it, 
 
 Moving about in worlds not realized. 
 
 It may be a part of the heaven that "lies 
 about us in our infancy" that children so 
 often seem instinctively to recognize not only 
 what is most beautiful in nature, but also what 
 is most admirable in literature. 
 
 When I turn the pages of the Iliad now, 
 the old Homeric tales are all penetrated with 
 a fresher and more human interest than of 
 old because they are inseparably associated 
 in my memory with the picture of a green 
 lawn where, amid the falling leaves, four little 
 figures — two of them the dearest in the world 
 for me — are valiantly besieging Troy. It is 
 all very real to them. Under the big elm tree 
 Hector parts from Andromache. 
 
 The horsehair plume 
 That grimly nodded from the lofty crest 
 
 of that mighty warrior is a sight to make the 
 beholder weep tears of joy. I hear myself 
 
168 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 told sternly, " If you laugh this time at the 
 death of Patroclus you will have to go into 
 the house ! " 
 
 Near the scene of those funeral obsequies 
 stands a great old apple tree whose arching 
 top forms a fascinating audience room, with 
 low, wide-spreading limbs whereon those who 
 gather to listen may find seats delightfully in- 
 secure. Here it was, within the circle of this 
 New England tree, that the voyages of Ulys- 
 ses found at last a happy ending. The little 
 group who kept time with swinging feet while 
 the " oars of Ithaca " 
 
 All day long clave the silvery foam 
 
 had little patience with Penelope's procrasti- 
 nating methods with her suitors. 
 
 "Why didn't she just tell 'em that she 
 would n't have 'em ? " they inquired scorn- 
 fully; but on that day — it was in apple- 
 blossom time, I remember — when the sad 
 queen, listening, heard the music of the old 
 songs floating up into the chamber where she 
 sat apart, and called in sudden anguish, — 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 169 
 
 Cease, minstrel, cease, and sing some other song ; 
 . . . the sweet words of it have hurt my heart. 
 Others return, the other husbands, but 
 Never for me that sail on the sea-line, 
 Never a sound of oars beneath the moon, 
 Nor sudden step beside me at midnight, 
 Never Ulysses ! — 
 
 on that apple-blossom day we felt very gloomy 
 over Ulysses' tardiness. There were differ- 
 ences of opinion among us as to whether the 
 afflicting old song would most probably have 
 been " The Old Oaken Bucket," or " Home, 
 Sweet Home," or even — who could tell ? — 
 " Way Down upon the Swanee River ; " but 
 whether we believed it to be Greek or Ameri- 
 can mattered little compared with our recog- 
 nition of the fact that it must in some way, 
 however imperfect, be touched with the primal 
 emotions and reflect the eternal soul of things. 
 When that is once understood, Greece and 
 New England become common territory and 
 the minstrels* strain echoes the cry of the 
 heart in all ages. 
 
 Not long ago I asked a grammar-school 
 teacher which one among the short poems 
 her pupils were taught to recite really ap- 
 
170 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 pealed to them most She told me that, when 
 the children were allowed to select for them- 
 selves, the choice almost always fell on that 
 poem of Browning's which begins, — 
 
 Such a starved bank of moss 
 Till, that May-morn, 
 Blue ran the flash across : 
 Violets were born ! 
 
 The three stanzas of this poem are full of 
 subtle meaning; they are condensed, crammed 
 full of implied action, whose processes the 
 reader must supply for himself. The chil- 
 dren, without grasping the subtlety, feel the 
 action and get an uplift from it. They are 
 assisting at the birth of violets and stars, and, 
 as they recite, their voices tremble with the fer- 
 vor of the impulse. 
 
 A certain lonely road where I often drive 
 has its entrance through one of the poorer 
 quarters of the town. In the springtime, when 
 the wild flowers begin to blossom, groups of 
 children from those humble homes may be 
 found all along the way, bending over the 
 new-sprung grass, and filling their hands and 
 hearts with the beauty which is nature s gift 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 171 
 
 to rich and poor alike. Even the smallest tod- 
 dlers are there, their chubby fists painfully- 
 clasped around too rich a store of treasures. 
 
 Once, as I drew near the spot where a clus- 
 ter of these childish faces hung over a bank 
 thick strewn with violets, I heard a musing 
 little voice begin to murmur, — 
 
 Such a starved bank of moss, 
 
 then others took up the strain, until at the 
 end a sounding chorus echoed the tidings 
 of the birth of violets. Emerson rejoices in 
 the man who has 
 
 Loved the woodrose and left it on its stalk, 
 
 but there is another gospel, that of the 
 gathered flower. No matter what was the 
 final fate of those plucked violets, whether 
 they were carefully set in water, or withered 
 where the warm little fingers had idly dropped 
 them, they had fulfilled their mission, — into 
 those starved young lives 
 
 Violets were born ! 
 
 I took with me on one of my drives a poor 
 soul who has always found this world a work- 
 aday spot. I learned anew what I had often 
 
172 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 been taught before, that it is not necessarily 
 safe to judge people prosaic because they are 
 compelled to lead prosaic lives. 
 
 My companion drank in the beauty of 
 earth and sky with the eagerness of one who 
 has long been athirst Presently from the 
 top of a high hill we looked down into a 
 meadow whose green expanse was zigzagged 
 back and forth by the silver windings and 
 doublings of a brook. M For all the world like 
 a silver braidin' pattern on green velvet," 
 commented the voice by my side. I stopped 
 the horse that the eager eyes might satisfy 
 themselves with gazing, and in the stillness 
 the voice of the waters spoke to us from afar. 
 
 " I was thinking of something," my com- 
 panion said, " something I read in a book, but 
 it kind of escapes me. I can't quite get hold 
 of it." 
 
 " What book was it ? " I asked. 
 
 " Well, I seem to have lost the title too. 
 Strange, why I can't remember things. It 's 
 a book about an old sailor, and the cost mark 
 on it was seven dollars and fifty cents. Of 
 course," she explained, " I did n't pay any 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 173 
 
 such price for it. It come to me from a girl 
 that had it for a Christmas present, and when 
 her mother come to read it she put her foot 
 down that 't was the kind of stuff she would n't 
 have in the house. So I was doing some sew- 
 ing for the girl, and she said I could have the 
 book for what I 'd done, and if I 'd call it 
 square she would. It is a curious kind of a 
 story, but sometimes I 've sat up till most 
 morning reading it, when I 'd ought to be abed 
 too. It gets hold of me so I can't leave it." 
 
 " Who wrote the book ? " I inquired, anx- 
 ious to identify this fascinating volume. 
 
 u Well," she replied doubtfully, " I have an 
 idea it was one of Dant's." 
 
 After a time the quotation she was seeking 
 came back to my friend bit by bit, so that be- 
 tween us we were able to piece it together, 
 and this was it : — 
 
 A noise like of a hidden brook 
 In the leafy month of June, 
 That to the sleeping woods all night 
 Singeth a quiet tune. 
 
 It was the Ancient Mariner that had held 
 her with his glittering eye, and she had felt 
 
174 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 his power without being able to analyze the 
 spell. 
 
 11 1 always wanted a chance to read," she 
 said, with a sigh, " and if there wan't so many 
 buttonholes in the world perhaps life would 
 be more worth while, — but, there ! there 's a 
 better world to look forward to, when we get 
 through with this one." 
 
 Yes, poor soul of the starved longings, 
 there must be, there is, a better world to 
 come, and in that world, if one may trust the 
 prophetic vision of the Old Masters, there 
 are no buttonholes ; all the angelic draperies 
 I have ever seen depicted were either tum- 
 bling off altogether or simply hanging by a 
 thread. In that blessed and buttonholeless 
 country may you, a happy Wedding Guest, 
 find all that you have missed here on earth 
 and — if you so desire — sit in some green 
 nook of the Elysian meadows reading the 
 livelong day ! 
 
 There is a certain college library whose 
 delights often woo me, especially during the 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 175 
 
 quiet of the vacation season. Then, in the 
 summer mornings, I not infrequently have the 
 great room to myself, save for the quiet pre- 
 sence of the portraits and busts. 
 
 The sightless Milton, with his hair 
 Around his placid temples curled, 
 
 often speaks to me from his pedestal, and 
 from the shelves the crowding voices of the 
 masters call, but the green slopes and lawns 
 of the campus are so silent that one may hear 
 the trees that grow close to the windows 
 whisper " their green felicity," as if the babble 
 of term time had never known existence and 
 the ancient nymphs and dryads were mur- 
 muring there still. 
 
 It is owing to the relation of this library to 
 the outside world that the silver loop of water 
 with which the Kennebec here bounds the 
 eastern slope takes on such chameleon shapes. 
 
 Now it becomes the Ilissus, on whose 
 banks sit Socrates and Phaedrus " in some 
 quiet spot." The tall tree which Phaedrus 
 has chosen because of its shade is plainly vis- 
 ible from the window. 
 
 " Yes," he tells Socrates, " this is the tree." 
 
176 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 " Yes, indeed," says Socrates, " and a fair 
 and shady resting-place, full of summer 
 sounds and scents ; moreover, there is a 
 sweet breeze, and the grasshoppers chirrup, 
 and the greatest charm of all is the grass, 
 like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My 
 dear Phasdrus, you have been an admirable 
 guide," and then he ceases to " babble of 
 green fields," and returns to that " bait of 
 discourse, by whose spell," he tells Phaedrus, 
 " you may lead me all round Attica and over 
 the wide world." 
 
 Now, as if by magic, the scene changes, 
 and it is Edmund Spenser whom one hears, 
 calling across English meadows, — 
 
 Sweet Themmes, runne softly till I end my song ; 
 
 or, perchance, the echoing sigh of Burns's 
 lament over " bonny Doon," or Wordsworth 
 singing by the banks of Yarrow. 
 
 From the window of this southern alcove, 
 where one sees the full curve of the river as 
 it plunges toward the falls, the shining stream 
 becomes the Rhone as Ruskin saw it " alike 
 through bright day and lulling night, the 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 177 
 
 never-pausing plunge, and never-fading flash, 
 and never-hushing whisper." 
 
 In the golden dusk of twilight comes the 
 fairest metamorphosis of all, for then the 
 great mill that stretches along the eastern 
 river-bank becomes a Venetian palace on the 
 Grand Canal, with myriad lights reflecting in 
 the glancing waters ; there, in the vague dis- 
 tance, looms the shadowy bulk of St. Mark's, 
 and in the little crumbling vestibule room, 
 where the marble doge sleeps under the win- 
 dow, the last shaft of dying light falls full upon 
 his unanswering face. Inside the library the 
 close-filled shelves open out into unending vis- 
 tas. From this upper shelf to which I first raise 
 my eyes, the way leads to an English coun- 
 try house, upon the bowling green of which, 
 " shut off from the garden by a thick yew 
 hedge," my Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim 
 surmount the difficulties of the siege of Na- 
 mur. 
 
 " ' Summer is coming on,' declares Trim ; 
 1 your honor might sit out of doors and give 
 me the nography of the town or citadel your 
 honor was pleased to sit down before, and 
 
178 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 I '11 be shot by your honor upon the glacis of 
 it, if I do not fortify it to your honor's mind.' 
 
 " ' I dare say thou wouldst, Trim,' " my 
 Uncle replies. 
 
 Farther along on the same shelf a row of 
 faded volumes of De Quincey — faded? nay, 
 rather let us say time-mellowed — exhale a 
 breath from the Lake Country where their 
 author lived. On what depths these volumes 
 open, — depths of the visible heavens, depths 
 of the skies of dreams ! 
 
 Here is that exquisite twilight atmosphere 
 through which the child De Quincey views 
 for the first time the pale and silent pomp of 
 Death ; here the midnight skies of London 
 loom with a shadowed radiance over that rare 
 and tender idyl of Oxford Street ; here, " in 
 the broad light of the summer evening," we 
 start from London to carry the news of Tala- 
 vera to the waiting country-side. This is no 
 opium mirage, but aglorious reality. " Dressed 
 in laurels and flowers, oak leaves and ribbons," 
 we thunder along, " kindling at every instant 
 new successions of burning joy," every heart 
 leaping at our approach. The pomp of the 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 179 
 
 night goes with us, the heavens exult above 
 our heads, and when we meet the poor mother 
 whose son's regiment was all but annihilated 
 in the fight, we lift for her no funeral banners, 
 no laurels overshadowing the bloody trench, 
 but we tell her " how these dear children of 
 England, privates and officers, leaped their 
 horses over all obstacles as gayly as hunters 
 to the morning chase," how they rode into the 
 mists of death as children to a mother's knee. 
 
 As we read the story the old thrill leaps 
 into our pulses, — the thrill that woke at our 
 moment of victory. It was not for Talavera, 
 not even, perhaps, for Gettysburg or San 
 Juan, but whether the triumph were a tangible 
 or intangible one, the uplift that came with it 
 marked an instant of supreme emotion, and 
 from that upper shelf in the library bookcase 
 the whole horizon of life widens toward eternal 
 nobleness. 
 
 It was in the alcove where the elm and 
 maple trees stand nearest the window that I 
 chanced for the first time on Casimir Dela- 
 vigne's " Toilette de Constance." It happened 
 on one of those dazzling summer mornings 
 
180 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 when all the landscape seems to sparkle with 
 
 light. The tall trees waved their boughs like 
 
 banners, and the procession of college willows 
 
 marched down the slope toward the shining 
 
 river reaches, as if they celebrated a triumph. 
 
 The story began with all the joy of the gay 
 
 morning. There was the sparkling young 
 
 face in the mirror, decking itself into more 
 
 radiant beauty, impatient for the adjustment of 
 
 the necklace, the ribbon, that should make a 
 
 fair form fairer still. She hastened the maid : 
 
 Vite, Anna, vite ; au miroir 
 Plus vite, Anna ! 
 
 Then the dance music began to throb through 
 
 the measure : — 
 
 L'heure s'avance, 
 Et je vais au bal ce soir 
 Chez l'ambassadeur de France. 
 
 Now Love entered : — 
 
 II y sera ; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main ! 
 En y pensant, a peine je respire ! 
 
 The toilette of Constance was finished. 
 (Hark! how just at that moment through 
 the open alcove window the river plashed a 
 liquid note of joy.) Just one more glance in 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 181 
 
 the mirror — the last! " J'ai l'assurance," she 
 cried, — 
 
 Qu'on va m'adorer ce soir 
 
 Chez l'ambassadeur de France. 
 
 Then — and it seemed almost incredible 
 amidst that laughing pageant of nature which 
 surrounded me as I read — Death entered the 
 scene. Constance, admiring herself, stepped 
 near the hearth ; a flying spark fell on her 
 light robe ; oh, how few those breathless mo- 
 ments till it was all ended ! 
 
 L'horrible feu ronge avec volupte 
 
 Ses bras, son sein, et l'entoure et s'eleve, 
 
 Et sans pitie devore sa beaute', 
 
 Ses dix-huit ans, helas, et son doux reve ! 
 
 That one untranslatable word volupte marked 
 the crisis of the tragedy ; then came the sum- 
 ming up : — 
 
 Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour ! 
 
 On disait, Pauvre Constance ! 
 Et on dansait jusqu'au jour 
 
 Chez l'ambassadeur de France. 
 
 I stood this morning in the same library 
 alcove, and the swaying boughs weaving 
 quaint patterns on the springtime grass moved 
 
182 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 to and fro to that old strain of dance music. 
 The college willows, which have looked down 
 on so many generations of youth, seemed full 
 of the echo, — 
 
 Ses dix-huit ans, helas, et son doux reve ! 
 for in those swift-moving stanzas, without one 
 superfluous word or line, all was there, the 
 philosophy and the tragedy of life. 
 
 When one mounts to the gallery of the 
 library one finds a different world. Here are 
 the curious old memoirs and biographies, the 
 superfluous and unused driftwood of litera- 
 ture, the old editions that have served their 
 time and passed into dignified retirement. 
 In this shady nook dwell Evelina and Pamela, 
 hobnobbing in stilted, ceremonious fashion 
 with Sir Charles Grandison, and looking 
 askance at Miss Edgeworth's heroes and 
 heroines. Odd volumes of the minor poets 
 congregate here, and musty-smelling folios 
 where longfs hold sway. Yet in the midst 
 of these worthies one may chance upon a 
 thumb-marked copy of " Spare Hours," and, 
 opening at random, finds himself suddenly 
 climbing to " high Minchmoor," along the 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 183 
 
 same road where Montrose's troopers once 
 fled. Past the great house of Traquair you go, 
 where the bears of Bradwardine stand senti- 
 nel, and the path you tread is full of the lilt 
 of song : — 
 
 And what saw ye there 
 
 In the bush aboon Traquair, 
 Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed ? 
 
 I heard the cushies croon 
 
 Through the gowden afternoon, 
 And the Quair burn singing down to the vale o' Tweed. 
 
 And so, as you look from the high window, 
 that silver loop of the Kennebec finds another 
 transformation. 
 
 In the dim corner under the stairs, in a 
 quiet, conservative, English-seeming atmo- 
 sphere, long rows of Littell's magazines dwell 
 in the shadow of decorum. He who browses 
 here will enter many Old World homes and 
 become acquainted with the dwellers therein. 
 It was one of these quaint gentlewomen who 
 first read to me — I sat on a Chippendale 
 chair the while, and looked out upon the 
 verdant stretches of an ancestral park — that 
 exquisite poem of Moore's : — 
 
i8 4 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 No wonder, Mary, that thy story 
 Touches all hearts. 
 
 Into that dark library corner she came, poor, 
 
 sinning, beautiful Mary, and lighted all the 
 
 dusk 
 
 with those bright locks of gold 
 
 (So oft the gaze of Bethany). 
 
 Here have I foregathered in the intimacy of 
 home life with the Brownings, the Carlyles, 
 and many another English writer of note, 
 have darned stockings with Mrs. John Taylor 
 of Norwich, and fallen in love with the seventh 
 Lord Shaftesbury in an intimacy which began 
 beside a humble grave in a quiet English 
 churchyard. 
 
 VI 
 
 Standing the other day before the shelves of 
 another alcove in this protean library, I took 
 down one by one the bound volumes of the 
 " Atlantic Monthly " during the war years from 
 1 86 1 to 1865. The time was the 28th of May; 
 another Memorial Day was soon to dawn, 
 and here I found the whole intimate story 
 of the civil war, from the time of " Charles- 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 185 
 
 ton Under Arms " and " Washington as a 
 Camp " to " The Death of Abraham Lin- 
 coln " and the reconstruction period. 
 
 If I sought a garland to lay upon the graves 
 of our unforgotten heroes, what a splendid 
 bouquet of verse lay shut within these pages ! 
 Poems at first hand, fresh-blooming, to be 
 read by eyes that kindled with new and vivid 
 emotions, — 
 
 Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms, 
 To deck our girls for gay delights ! 
 
 — here we begin with a whole shining par- 
 terre of blossoms. Place this deep-hued peony 
 next : — 
 
 The crimson flower of battle blooms 
 And solemn marches fill the nights. 
 
 Now Holmes gathers a handful of starry 
 petals : — 
 
 What flower is this that greets the morn, 
 Its hues from heaven so freshly born ? 
 
 Dew-washed, we find it " where lonely sen- 
 tries tread," and touch its wreathing colors 
 tenderly, — 
 
 The Starry Flower of Liberty. 
 
186 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 Here are the " Biglow Papers " where Lowell 
 
 tells us, 
 
 I, country-born an' bred, know where to find 
 Some blooms to make the season suit the mind, 
 
 and then he showers them upon us, wild 
 
 flowers that never grow tame, 
 
 Half-vent'rin' liverworts in furry coats, 
 Bloodroots whose rolled-up leaves ef you oncurl, 
 Each on 'em 's cradle to a baby-pearl, — 
 
 stout dandelions, snapdragon, touch-me-not, 
 fire-weed, deepening by and by where a scar- 
 let king-cup shines, to 
 
 Wut 's words to them whose faith an' truth 
 
 On War's red techstone rung true metal, 
 Who ventered life an' love an' youth 
 
 For the gret prize o' death in battle ? 
 To him who, deadly hurt, agen 
 
 Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 
 Tippin' with fire the bolt o' men 
 
 That rived the Rebel line asunder ? 
 
 Now wreathe in a long spray of trumpet- 
 flowers : — 
 
 The flags of war like storm-birds fly, 
 The charging trumpets blow, 
 and 
 He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call 
 
 retreat. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 187 
 
 Add a royal fleur-de-lis for the " Washers 
 
 of the Shroud: " — 
 
 Tears may be ours, but proud, for those who win 
 Death's royal purple in the foeman's lines. 
 
 Next a handful of Brownell's tiger-lilies ; 
 cypress and rue for martyred Lincoln, to 
 mark where 
 
 The Dark Flower of Death 
 Blooms in the fadeless fields ; 
 
 then blood-stained chalices from the " Ode to 
 Freedom : " — 
 
 Whiter than moonshine upon snow 
 Her raiment is, but round the hem 
 Crimson-stained. 
 
 Last of all, before we lay our completed 
 garland upon the graves that have been green 
 with the verdure of many a returning spring- 
 time, let us pluck anew Whittier's olive bough 
 of peace fair as when it was first gathered : — 
 
 Ring and swing, 
 Bells of joy ! On morning's wing 
 Send the song of praise abroad ! 
 With a sound of broken chains 
 Tell the nations that He reigns 
 Who alone is God and Lord ! 
 
188 THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 
 
 This memorial wreath, which we have 
 twined leaf by leaf from the printed leaves 
 where it first blossomed, is not one which 
 can be shut within four library walls. Its 
 flowery chain links the green mounds on in- 
 numerable hillsides to the hearts of living 
 men wherever hearts beat for sacrifice and 
 honor. 
 
 VII 
 
 We belong to a nation of " great readers." 
 We devour popular novels with an unfailing 
 appetite and a literary range which extends 
 from the known to the unknown, and does 
 not necessarily discriminate greatly between 
 Mrs. Ward and Bertha M. Clay. 
 
 We are fast becoming an out-of-doors peo- 
 ple. Not only our heroines and heroes of 
 fiction, but our " real folks " sigh continually 
 for " the open." Nature, to many of us, is a 
 deity to be approached with bared head, thick 
 shoes, and rolled-up sleeves ; to be propitiated 
 with golf clubs and fishing rods ; to be enter- 
 tained with athletic sports of varying kinds 
 and degrees ; and in return for our devotion 
 
THE BOOK AND THE PLACE 189 
 
 she bestows on us a hearty appetite for beef- 
 steak, and lends increased zest to a soothing 
 pipe in hours of meditation or stupor. 
 
 We are a practical people, much inclined 
 to believe that there are few things in heaven 
 or earth which cannot be reduced to a scien- 
 tific formula. 
 
 Yet outside this world of superficiality and 
 robustness and " common sense " there is 
 another universe, whose meanings no formu- 
 las can ever express, whose bounds can never 
 be measured by sea or star or space, a world 
 of immortalities that differs from the other as 
 " the consecration and the poet's dream " 
 differ from the multiplication table, and it is 
 as true of this world as of the other that "to 
 him that hath shall be given." 
 
VII 
 
 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE AND 
 JUDGMENT TO COME 
 
CONCERNING TEMPER- 
 ANCE AND JUDGMENT 
 TO COME 
 
 SOME years ago, at a period when I still 
 continued to have an immense appetite 
 for life, I suddenly, and rather unexpectedly 
 to myself, blossomed into a full-fledged re- 
 former or reformeress, whichever you choose 
 to call it. 
 
 I say unexpectedly, and yet, as I look back, 
 I can see that for a long time previous to 
 this apotheosis my habits had been vaguely 
 leading up to it. As a headquarters for 
 tramps, temperance lecturers, Young Men 
 Christians, delegates to Sunday-School Con- 
 ventions, and similar wanderers on the face 
 of the earth, my house had always been " run 
 wide open." There was, undoubtedly, a 
 special mark somewhere about the premises 
 
i 9 4 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 that indicated my husband and myself as 
 the ideal host and hostess alike for wayside 
 wanderers and all creatures with a mission. 
 We took them in, fed them, clothed them, — 
 if necessary, — talked over their special en- 
 thusiasms with them, and sent them upon 
 their meandering way with the hope — when 
 we stopped to think about it at all — that 
 our hospitality had in some way furthered 
 the kingdom of righteousness. 
 
 This complaisance did not, on my part at 
 least, necessarily indicate any really discrim- 
 inating sympathy with the respective missions 
 of my visitors ; it simply meant, in most in- 
 stances, that I possessed an inordinate zest 
 for affairs, for trying experiments and tak- 
 ing chances. The system of moral ethics in 
 which I had been educated was not a com- 
 plicated one. Certain things, so I had been 
 taught, were broadly and indubitably right, 
 and other things were just as conspicuously 
 wrong. Between these domains of good and 
 evil there was a clear line of demarcation 
 whose uncompromising distinctness admitted 
 of no shading off whatever. This was a good 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 195 
 
 working theory, and, it must be admitted, re- 
 sulted in a race of strong, if rather rigid, men 
 and women. It also threw around unformulat- 
 ing spirits like my own an aegis of direction 
 as useful as Matthew Arnold believed the 
 creed of the Established Church to be to un- 
 reasoning souls. Under its guidance we went 
 on cheerfully and blunderingly toward the 
 light. I am often sorry that I ever began 
 to analyze. That code of ethics which de- 
 fined right and wrong with such finality, 
 and comprehended the whole duty of man in 
 always shoving the good onward and stamp- 
 ing out the evil whenever one had the oppor- 
 tunity, was much less difficult to follow out 
 than one that regulates sin by the heredity 
 and environment of the individual, and re- 
 lieves him of responsibility if his skull does 
 not fit accurately over the gray matter be- 
 neath. 
 
 In those happy bygone days when right 
 was right and wrong was wrong I went gayly 
 on my predestined way of assisting everybody 
 to educate the morals of everybody else, un- 
 deterred by any morbid questioning in regard 
 
196 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 to the tenability of my own position. There 
 was, so far as I remember, only one occasion 
 when I actually balked at any duty which was 
 suggested to me. A constitutional amend- 
 ment to the prohibitory law of Maine was, 
 after a strenuous campaign, to be submitted 
 to popular vote. I do not think I knew then, 
 and I am very sure I do not know now, just 
 what the amendment was about, but I know 
 I believed in it, whatever it was, just as I be- 
 lieve in the law itself, and shall believe so 
 long as I have reason to think that every rum- 
 seller in the United States would rejoice to 
 have it repealed. When, however, it was pro- 
 posed as my sacred duty on this momentous 
 occasion to serve hot coffee at the polls, and 
 decorate the brows of doubtful voters with 
 propitiating garlands, my spirit rebelled. I 
 felt sure that, right or wrong, I preferred polls 
 where liquid refreshments were not dealt out, 
 and voters whose brows were decorated only 
 by common sense. 
 
 Yet all these preliminary movements were 
 leading up to the fateful moment of the form- 
 ation of the Woman's Temperance League of 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 197 
 
 Waterville. It is an unfortunate fact that the 
 prohibitory law of Maine is sometimes vio- 
 lated just as the license laws of other States 
 are violated, and some of the prominent men 
 of the town, who were themselves otherwise 
 occupied, suggested to some of the prominent 
 women, who always have leisure to reform 
 things, that the hour for such reformation had 
 struck. 
 
 I was not one of those who signed the call 
 for the meeting which was to inaugurate the 
 new order of things, but I was of the num- 
 ber that promptly answered when the bugle 
 note sounded. Had there been a call to 
 form a society for altering the configura- 
 tion of the earth, there were some of us who 
 would, in those days, have presented our- 
 selves with the same cheerful promptness, 
 sustained not so much by our courage as by 
 our ignorance. 
 
 We were women who thirsted for action ; 
 show us something to be done, and without 
 altogether knowing what, or why, or how, we 
 rallied at the sound of the tocsin. Would we 
 form a league to wipe out intemperance ? 
 
198 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 Certainly. We had no hesitation in under- 
 taking a little task like that. 
 
 March, march, Eskdale and Liddlesdale, 
 
 All the Blue Bonnets are bound for the border ! 
 
 After all, it is by just such unreasoning 
 courage as this that many good works have 
 been accomplished. I wish — stay, do I 
 wish ? — that I were young enough and hope- 
 ful enough to do it all over again. 
 
 It had been promised by the instigators of 
 our league — the care-laden gentlemen who 
 had not time to league themselves — that 
 when we were duly organized they would co- 
 operate by joining in a mass meeting whose 
 utterances should eloquently launch us on 
 our career. While we were assembled in sol- 
 emn conclave in regard to this mass meeting 
 these good men were seized with sudden fore- 
 bodings in regard to their part in such a de- 
 monstration. Was it wise — thus inquired 
 the delegate who hurried to confer with us — 
 to convoke a public meeting without first as- 
 certaining the temper of the community in 
 regard to the object to be accomplished ? 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 199 
 
 Would it not be a politic plan to appoint a 
 committee for circulating a petition among 
 the business men of the town to ascertain 
 whether a majority of them really desired to 
 have the law enforced ? 
 
 This suggestion, had it only been made at 
 an earlier period of the world's history, would 
 have furnished a practical precedent for Moses 
 when he received the Ten Commandments 
 on the Mount. " Would it not be wiser," he 
 would, thus warned, have suggested politely, 
 "if I first take a stroll down the mountain 
 and ascertain what the feeling of the Children 
 of Israel is in regard to having so many com- 
 mandments unloaded on them in one afflict- 
 ing lump ? " 
 
 There is a great deal said about the eman- 
 cipation of the modern woman. My own 
 observation goes to show that there is no 
 amount of foolishness to which she will not 
 lend herself at the instigation of man. In 
 this case our delegate had only to suggest, 
 and we appointed a committee at once to 
 go forth into the highways and byways and 
 ascertain the number of those who had not 
 
200 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 bowed the knee to Baal. So far as I can find 
 out, a man seldom hesitates to sign a petition 
 because it is immoral, — it is only the moral 
 ones which he has a conscience against 
 endorsing hastily. The circumstance of his 
 being fortunate enough to be a reasoning 
 creature, too, furnishes him with a large stock 
 of hesitancies. 
 
 The lawyers did not sign our petition, be- 
 cause the fact that a law was on the statute 
 books constituted in itself sufficient reason for 
 its enforcement; the physicians, as a class, 
 did not care to commit themselves, though 
 one of them assured us that a two or three 
 gallon keg of whiskey or brandy would fur- 
 nish all that was medicinally necessary for 
 the use of the community during a year ; the 
 clergymen without exception, I think, gave 
 us their endorsement, partly because " it is 
 their nature to " endorse such causes, and 
 partly because they are not so constitutionally 
 thirsty as their brethren of the other profes- 
 sions. Some of the storekeepers signed the 
 petition because they thought a strict enforce- 
 ment of the law would help their business, 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 201 
 
 and others declined to sign lest their inter- 
 ests should be injured by enforcement. All 
 sorts of politic considerations and twists and 
 turns of argument came into the matter. 
 One man declined to sign because he did not 
 believe in women as reformers. A woman's 
 place, he said, was at home looking after her 
 husband and her family, and if she had no 
 husband and family it was equally fitting that 
 she should devote herself to minding her own 
 business, whatever it might be. When asked 
 what course a woman might legitimately pur- 
 sue in regard to a drunken husband, this 
 philosopher opined that it was perfectly al- 
 lowable for her to " shut him up." This, he 
 stated candidly, was his wife's method with 
 himself. Whenever he was observed to have 
 vanished from public view for a season we 
 were at liberty to suppose that he was repent- 
 ing his sins in a state of incarceration. 
 
 The canvass, with all its humors, difficul- 
 ties, and disagreeablenesses, — which latter 
 it did not lack, — at last ended, summing up 
 a decided majority of influential voters who 
 were willing the law should be enforced, pro- 
 
202 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 vided it could be done without any undue 
 exertion on their own part. The mass meet- 
 ing was therefore held, and the tide of elo- 
 quence duly poured out. Launched on this 
 wave of plaudits the Woman's Temperance 
 League was supposed to be amply strength- 
 ened and encouraged to be able to pursue 
 what Amy March would have called its " Her- 
 culaneum labors " indefinitely and triumph- 
 antly. 
 
 That this was a woman's campaign was 
 sufficiently indicated by the simplicity, naivete, 
 and directness with which it was conducted. 
 No man would have dared to do some of the 
 things we did, even if he could have brought 
 himself to believe in their efficacy, but to us 
 there seemed but one watchword in leading 
 a forlorn hope : " Up, boys, and at 'em ! " 
 
 There were at that time three weekly 
 newspapers in Waterville. The two Repub- 
 lican journals gave us a half column each of 
 space in which to declare our sentiments and 
 report our progess from week to week. The 
 Democratic paper devoted itself to candid 
 criticism. " The Waterville Woman's Tern- 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 203 
 
 perance League," remarked a contemporary 
 journal, " has rushed into print." 
 
 The local political situation was such that 
 we were allowed great freedom of expression 
 in our utterances. We were voteless, irre- 
 sponsible beings with a propensity for calling 
 a spade a spade so far as it could be done 
 consistently with dignity and self-respect, and 
 many a Waterville citizen went around in 
 those days with an uneasy sense that if any 
 of the coats advertised in our temperance 
 column fitted him, he was at perfect liberty 
 to put it on. The critical Democratic journal 
 said unhandsome things about us, and being 
 but women, we sometimes wept over these 
 compliments o' nights. In the morning, how- 
 ever, we dried our tears and went back to 
 the fighting line again. With all the crude- 
 nesses and the mistakes that can be urged 
 against it, that period of my life is not one I 
 am going to feel meaching about when I 
 come before the final bar of judgment. 
 
 Notwithstanding the unpopularity of our 
 movement, — and with a certain portion of 
 the community it was necessarily unpopular, 
 
2o 4 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 — the membership of our league did not 
 materially decrease, and even the most timid 
 and naturally conservative women among us 
 accepted astounding tasks with astounding 
 courage. There never was an enterprise more 
 fertile in stunts than this one of ours. We 
 sat in the City Liquor Agency, to which 
 source of supply the increasing dryness of 
 the times drove many thirsty souls, and noted 
 the number of quarts of alcohol required by 
 town paupers, Saturday night invalids, and 
 men whose wives had weak backs; we con- 
 fronted the City Fathers to give them a rea- 
 son for the faith that was in us; we raised 
 money by subscription, by entertainments, by 
 breakfasts, dinners, and suppers ; we clothed, 
 fed, and admonished the poor; we wept, we 
 prayed, and, to keep our courage up, some of 
 us laughed a good deal. We made ourselves 
 very unwelcome, very much unappreciated, 
 very much criticised ; and it was, I think, this 
 saving sense of humor which carried us 
 through. I remember serving, with great in- 
 ward reluctance, on various committees, the 
 results to be expected from whose labors 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 205 
 
 must, as it seems to me now, have been purely- 
 ethical, consisting, as in the modern interpre- 
 tation of the virtue of prayer, principally in 
 the beneficial effects on the mind of the per- 
 former. In one instance, which often comes 
 back to me, one of the three leaders of a for- 
 lorn hope was influenced wholly by an unques- 
 tioning sense of the moral necessity of her 
 mission, while the other two were hampered 
 by a somewhat ludicrous vision of its inefficacy. 
 In the remembrance, the humor of the scene 
 outbalances its more serious aspects, — the 
 courteous victim, firmly resolved to be man- 
 nerly though the heavens fell, yet inwardly 
 wishing that women would be contented to at- 
 tend to their own affairs ; the earnest spokes- 
 woman, explaining her mission with the full 
 conviction that only a mutual comprehension 
 was needed to produce a delightful unity of 
 sentiment; and the two doubters, pinching 
 each other in the background, and trying not 
 to ruin the situation by an untimely grin. 
 
 We wished, perhaps, no less sincerely than 
 our companion that the kingdom of heaven 
 might come upon earth, but the belief in the 
 
206 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 immediate efficacy of moral suasion as a 
 practical agent is largely a matter of temper- 
 ament. 
 
 Whether the crusade of the Woman's Tem- 
 perance League accomplished, on the whole, 
 any permanent good, is a question which I 
 have often asked myself. The movement was 
 full of pathetically humorous phases, but it 
 was also heroically sincere. I suppose many 
 efforts which seem futile to us as we look 
 back upon them have an efficacy which we 
 do not realize, because our vision takes in so 
 small a part of the eternal scheme of things. 
 
 There shall never be one lost good ! what was shall 
 
 live as before ; 
 The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound ; 
 What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much 
 
 good more, 
 On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven a perfect 
 
 round. 
 
 When I remember the many mornings of 
 waking to consciousness with a direful sink- 
 ing of the heart at the thought that it was 
 my melancholy duty to go on crusading, — 
 alas, how unfailingly we see the pathos of 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 207 
 
 our own woes! — when, to put selfishness one 
 side, I recall the fortitude of those other 
 women more timid than myself, I sometimes 
 cherish the modest hope that there is at least 
 one unbroken arc laid up in the happy here- 
 after for the warrioresses of the Woman's 
 Temperance League of Waterville. There 
 is no moral reason that I know why Noah 
 should possess the only arc — spell it how 
 you like — upon those heavenly highlands ! 
 
 II 
 
 I think the psychological aspect of the 
 question was first brought home to me during 
 that historic campaign of the Woman's Tem- 
 perance League when I recognized the atti- 
 tude of the old French Canadian women who 
 came to the City Agency on Saturday after- 
 noons for alcohol with which to manufacture 
 the weekly dram of " split " that should trans- 
 form them from grubs into butterflies. To 
 them this longed-for indulgence was neither 
 moral nor immoral ; it was simply a matter 
 of enjoyment The magic draught furnished 
 for them the same element of excitement 
 
208 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 which the theatre, the popular novel, the 
 enthusiasms of football and baseball and 
 other fashionable expedients furnish to better 
 educated people. It was the alleviation that 
 made their starved lives bearable. When they 
 threatened to come with their brooms and 
 sweep out the meddling women who were 
 interfering with the good cheer furnished by 
 the Agency, they too were, in their own esti- 
 mation, leading a crusade for freedom and 
 the rights of the individual. 
 
 It is a safe conclusion in regard to the 
 average man that however logical he may be 
 in mind, he is bound to be more or less irre- 
 sistibly //logical in acts. This is because the 
 intellectual assent is usually biased somewhat 
 by the influence of the human qualification. 
 Each of us recognizes the law in its applica- 
 tion to the other fellow. Hence the reformer 
 who really desires to get at the root of the 
 matter should be a person of active imagina- 
 tion, and an adaptability which enables him 
 to comprehend the standpoint of the individ- 
 ual to be reformed ; above all, he should pos- 
 sess no theories incapable of modification. If 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 209 
 
 he can add to these qualifications a sense of 
 humor, a readiness not to take himself too 
 seriously, and a recognition of the fact that 
 the other man's right and wrong may differ in 
 conception from his right and wrong, he will 
 have an outfit which will materially lighten 
 a thorny path. Thus much I discovered in 
 my own brief career as a reformeress. 
 
 The advantages of a lively imagination 
 and an active interest in other people's affairs 
 I undoubtedly possess. There is in me also, 
 I sadly fear, a suggestion of inherent wick- 
 edness which has always made it easy for 
 sinners to confide their weaknesses to my ear 
 with an unflattering certainty of my compre- 
 hension. During my aforementioned temper- 
 ance campaign one kindly disposed gentle- 
 man, who was at that time recovering from 
 an attack of delirium tremens, came to sit 
 with me for an hour or two, that I might 
 observe with my own eyes the discomforts 
 attendant upon his malady. 
 
 " Do you suppose," he inquired, when we 
 had ended a breathless period of chasing rats 
 around his hat brim, " that any man, espe- 
 
210 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 daily a man of my age, would turn himself 
 into a blooming menagerie if he could help 
 it ? I guess not." 
 
 " What makes you do it, then ? " I asked 
 rather vacuously. 
 
 " I do it now because I have an Appetite 
 for drink, — and you can spell it with a large 
 A, — but when I began the cursed business 
 it was all for fun. Well," my visitor added 
 meditatively, " I 've had fun." 
 
 Another appreciative individual called on 
 me on his way to the railway station, that I 
 might enter intelligently into his motives in 
 taking the Keeley Cure. 
 
 " I ain't going for the purpose of pleasing 
 myself," he declared. " If it was n't for the 
 way my wife feels about it I should n't ever 
 take any Keeley Cures. When people tell you 
 that there ain't any fun in drinking, you just 
 mention to 'em that they don't know. The 
 most fun I 've ever had in my life has been 
 when I had jusj: enough aboard to make me 
 feel good ; an' when I 've heard preachers pro- 
 claiming from the pulpit that there was n't 
 any enjoyment to be derived from the pleas- 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 211 
 
 ures o' the world, I 've been tempted to stand 
 right up in my tracks an' tell 'em to talk 
 about what they understood." 
 
 " The preachers usually qualify it a little. 
 They say there is no true pleasure in these 
 things," I suggested. 
 
 " True fiddlesticks ! " commented my friend 
 derisively. " The fact is," with a sudden 
 change of tone, "my wife 's an awful good 
 woman, and if she wants me to quit spreeing 
 it I 'd ought to be willing to please her, and 
 I am willing. But I 'd never do it to please 
 myself." 
 
 It was at about this period, too, that I was 
 interviewed by a gentleman of sprightly turn 
 of mind, and gifted with great facility for 
 unvarnished narrative. 
 
 " For God's sake," he began without pre- 
 amble, " can't you, 'mongst all the discoveries 
 you 're makin', find something kind o' inno- 
 cent and excitin' to amuse a man like me ? " 
 
 " What would be the nature of it ? " I in- 
 quired, a good deal overwhelmed by the diffi- 
 culties of the task proposed. 
 
 " That 's jest what I don' know," answered 
 
212 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 my interlocutor ; " if I did I should n't be ask- 
 in' you. It 's this way with me, an' I ain't the 
 only one in the same case : I 'm old enough, 
 mebbe you '11 say, to settle down, but I ain't 
 settled down an' I don' know 's I ever shall. 
 There 's plenty of 'em thinks I 'd ought to be 
 contented with goin' to prayer-meetin' once 
 or twice a week, but if there 's any recrea- 
 tion about prayer-meetin's I 've never found 
 it out. I like to read the ' Youth's Compan- 
 ion/ but I can't set at home and do that every 
 night in the week. I want something differ- 
 ent," — warming to his subject, — "if it wan't 
 nothing more than a toboggan slide on the 
 other side of the river." 
 
 " I don't see anything in the way of your 
 tobogganing," I commented rather help- 
 lessly. I seemed to be wholly at a loss for 
 original suggestions. 
 
 " I don't want to toboggan all by myself. 
 I want you to be there and all the rest of 'em 
 standin' in a row at the top o' the hill ; an' 
 then all git on our sleds at the same minute 
 an' slide — slide like the devil ! " 
 
 At this flight of fancy the face of the narra- 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 213 
 
 tor glowed with enthusiasm and poetic inten- 
 sity. In fancy he saw the whole circle of his 
 acquaintance sliding like the — ahem ! and 
 he knew that the realization of that visionary 
 transit would satisfy a long-felt want of his 
 being. I confess that I understood him per- 
 fectly. I, too, had longed to toboggan. In his 
 rude and imperfect dreaming he had uncon- 
 sciously got to the bottom, or, at any rate, 
 one of the bottoms, of the whole matter. 
 
 Starved longings, unrealized desires, over- 
 flowing animal spirits without legitimate out- 
 let, unbalanced natures destitute of training 
 in self-control, impoverished aspirations, — 
 these are what lie at the foundation of the so- 
 cial problem which the reformer has to solve, 
 and no remedy which does not take all these 
 into consideration will ever be permanently 
 efficacious. The would-be reformer should be 
 willing to disabuse himself of prejudices, and 
 cultivate what is known as " an open mind ;" 
 not so open, either, as to interfere with its 
 capability for being violently closed as often 
 as occasion demands. 
 
 When one strips the situation of phrases 
 
214 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 one is forced to acknowledge that there are 
 a great many people who intend to do only 
 what they find pleasure in doing, and who do 
 not recognize any enjoyment in abstract good- 
 ness. " You say," they tell us in effect, " that 
 to be good is to be happy. Prove it." We 
 cannot prove it, at least in any concrete form, 
 and there is no sensible reason why we should 
 desire to prove it, but no doubt we shall go on 
 making the statement until the end of time. 
 
 There is also an increasing number of in- 
 dividuals who, so far from finding recreations, 
 or even comfort and peace, in prayer-meetings, 
 find them only irredeemably dull. If there is 
 a steady decrease in the demand for prayer- 
 meetings and a correspondingly steady in- 
 crease in the appetite for — say, toboggan- 
 sliding, might there not be found, gradually, 
 naturally, and not reprehensibly, some mid- 
 dle ground of interest through which more 
 prayer-meetingers can be induced to con- 
 sider the merits of tobogganing, and more 
 tobogganers drawn into prayer-meetings ? 
 
 It is a tendency of mankind to go on look- 
 ing at subjects from an established stand- 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 215 
 
 point long after the conditions which created 
 that standpoint have become a thing of the 
 past ; and this is especially true in regard to 
 questions of morals. Many people feel at once 
 that to be betrayed into any fresh theory or ad- 
 mission on moral subjects is an inevitable step 
 toward immorality. " He holds liberal views," 
 they say, and shake their pious heads with 
 conscious joy in their own narrowness. Yet 
 to hold liberal views may mean nothing more 
 than to be possessed of a willingness to search 
 for and accept truth. If a great many peo- 
 ple who " want to be angels," or think they 
 do, could have the privilege; if a good many 
 more, who have no angelic leanings whatever, 
 and never will have, could be removed to 
 their appropriate destination ; and if the re- 
 mainder, being persons of penetrable epider- 
 mis, could read their titles clear to stripping 
 moral questions of futilities and dealing with 
 moral conditions as they are, what an im- 
 mense amount of powder might be saved ! 
 
 To say that prayer-meetings are dull is 
 an irreverence, therefore one should never 
 breathe the thought ; to say that people de- 
 
216 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 mand excitement and recreation is to ac- 
 knowledge the frivolity of the race, hence 
 such a craving should never be put forward 
 as representing a genuine need of human 
 nature: yet many prayer-meetings are dull, 
 and a large proportion of mankind do in- 
 sistently demand to be amused ; and since 
 these are self-evident facts, the practical ques- 
 tion arises, What are we going to do about 
 it? 
 
 Our forefathers were a church-going peo- 
 ple, but it does not necessarily follow that 
 they were more innately religious than our 
 own generation. They lived in an age when 
 the stern conditions of existence furnished a 
 continuous undercurrent of excitement, and 
 what was lacking in other ways was more 
 than made up to them by the nerve-thrilling, 
 soul-harrowing amenities of their creeds. 
 They were believers in a tangible hell, and to 
 go to church on Sunday and listen to a sermon 
 which depicted each hearer as dangling over 
 a genuine, red-hot, steam-fitted Inferno, just 
 as a spider sways on a single filament of his 
 web, offered an excitement outbalancing the 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 217 
 
 tensest moment of a football game, or even of 
 a crisis in the stock market. 
 
 The man who drove his plough over a hill- 
 side never so remote, meditating as he toiled 
 on the doctrine that doomed a large propor- 
 tion of the race to everlasting punishment, 
 and made the election of those who should 
 be saved an arbitrary one, dependent upon 
 the whim of a Deity whose caprices must 
 never be criticised, — such a man carried in 
 his lonely bosom a whole volume of inten- 
 sities. The sombre atmosphere of a creed 
 like that was lurid enough to color the most 
 commonplace days and nights, and lend a 
 fearful joy to the barrenest existence. 
 
 When the old-fashioned belief in a con- 
 crete Sheol was taken out of our theology, 
 religion, whatever it may have gained, was 
 shorn of its most fascinating risk. " Man," 
 says Sabatier, " is incurably religious ; " he is 
 also incurably opposed to monotony, and the 
 faith that gets any permanent hold alike upon 
 his intellect and his emotions must be a broad 
 and sane Christianity which — taking into 
 account every rooted instinct of his nature — 
 
218 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 makes the tendencies of both body and soul 
 enter into vigorous and sensible character- 
 building. 
 
 I do not believe that man's amusements 
 will ever drive out his spiritual longings; I 
 do not believe his spiritual longings will ever 
 wholly root out the earthy ones. The mistake 
 lies in the assumption that the two are neces- 
 sarily inimical. 
 
 When we can succeed in developing a race 
 of sane, sound, clean-natured, high-minded 
 men and women, their amusements will take 
 care of themselves ; but until that millennial 
 breed really appears to inherit the earth the 
 demand of my buoyant friend for " something 
 kind o' innocent and excitin' " to amuse men 
 like him is a matter for serious consideration. 
 
 There is a certain sectarian college whose 
 fostering church sends every year an envoy 
 to inquire into the welfare of the institution, 
 and to keep a jealous watch over its interests 
 and those of the denomination. One might 
 imagine such a messenger inquiring ear- 
 nestly: Is this college educating men and 
 women in the broadest sense of the word ? 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 219 
 
 Is it qualifying them to become good citizens, 
 wise heads of families ? Are they clean, trust- 
 worthy, trained to high thoughts ? Have they 
 gained spiritual common sense as well as the 
 learning of the schools ? Above all, do you 
 teach the youth in your charge that most 
 significant truth that " loyalty to God means 
 liberty for man " ? 
 
 This is what one might erroneously sup- 
 pose the scope of such a mission to compre- 
 hend. What the messenger really did demand 
 to be told on a recent visit was this: Has 
 
 President yet succeeded in stamping 
 
 out dancing? 
 
 Yet if it is easy to be narrow, it is also easy 
 to grant too much latitude. He needs must 
 be a wise man, and a philosopher into the 
 bargain, who knows just when to be wide as 
 the universe, and when to stand like a wall. 
 In a world made up of wheels within wheels 
 and ramifications within ramifications, where 
 everything depends on some other thing and 
 the other thing depends on everything else, 
 the difficulty of maintaining a just balance 
 must be acknowledged ; yet in this struggle 
 
220 CONCERNING TEMPERANCE 
 
 for a just balance lies the salvation of the 
 earth. 
 
 We live — to sum up the situation — in 
 a generation that has gone recreation-mad. 
 Outdoor sports and indoor sports fill up our 
 leisure moments, or, in some cases, all our 
 moments. Athletics, golf, tennis, games of 
 all manners and lacking manners rise, flour- 
 ish, and decay. The race horse, the bicycle, 
 and the automobile pursue one another across 
 the stage of action. We play at being intel- 
 lectual, we play at being religious, we play at 
 being " tough," and all three are merged and 
 included in being men and women " of the 
 world." 
 
 Our best educated classes, — and we flatter 
 ourselves that we have the last word in the 
 matter of education, — our wisest classes are 
 not necessarily very wise in the matter of 
 their recreations ; our half-educated brethren 
 and sisters ape the manners of their betters, 
 and a degree lower down in the scale the 
 struggling masses take what they can get in 
 the way of amusement, and take it where 
 they can get it. In all classes, high and low, 
 
AND JUDGMENT TO COME 221 
 
 veneered and unveneered, it is almost univer- 
 sally true that the foundations of appetite are 
 too often laid in the struggle to " have a good 
 time." The instrument of an occasional hilar- 
 ity has an unfortunate tendency to develop 
 into the minister to a quenchless thirst. 
 
 I am always willing to ask questions which 
 I cannot answer, therefore I frankly confess 
 that I do not know just how the balance be- 
 tween the prayer-meeting and the toboggan 
 slide is to be reached ; probably the chasm be- 
 tween the two would seem to me much less 
 abysmal than to some of my stricter brethren. 
 It is a chasm that will never be bridged by 
 prohibitions alone, by persuasions alone, by 
 sacrifice alone. Since in the last resort every 
 thinking creature must work out his own 
 salvation with fear and trembling, to harden 
 him for the contest, to teach him how to 
 grow to the full stature of a man, is the bur- 
 den of the human problem. It is a problem 
 that will never be solved by demanding un- 
 necessary sacrifices, by ignoring vital instincts, 
 by allowing prejudice to usurp the functions 
 of common sense. 
 
VIII 
 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 WHEN book-dusting time comes around, 
 it is always rather a heart-searching 
 season, because every library which has been 
 gradually accumulated by people to whom 
 books have a human interest is full of un- 
 derlying memories. The last time I attacked 
 my bookcases, fired by a periodic recollection 
 that cleanliness is next to godliness, it was 
 my old schoolgirl copy of " Paley's Evidences 
 of Christianity " that opened inadvertently in 
 my hand and served to paralyze my energies. 
 On one of the blank pages at the begin- 
 ning of the book I found a brief written 
 dialogue which, like an elixir of youth, in a 
 breathing space blotted out all the interven- 
 ing years and made me a girl again waiting 
 the bell-stroke for morning recitation in the 
 sunny classroom of the old seminary among 
 the hills. The familiar scene lived again in 
 my memory, — the autumn morning, full of 
 
226 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 color and clear airs, the wide windows open- 
 ing on the wonderful circle of hills, and the 
 boy from Boston handing me, with his bow 
 of unfailing courtesy, the volume, in which 
 he had written in that finished, elegant script 
 which was so characteristic of him, — 
 
 " I hear you have received promotion on 
 the field." 
 
 " For what ? " I wrote in return. 
 
 " From the context one would say it must 
 have been for courage under fire." 
 
 I ought, indeed, to have been very down- 
 cast on that memorable morning, — it was 
 only the joy of nature's pageant and the flood- 
 ing spirits of youth, and, perhaps, the natural 
 resistance of an india-rubbery temperament, 
 that kept me from being so, — for, on the day 
 before, I had succeeded, like Satan, in exalt- 
 ing myself by merit to an exceeding " bad 
 eminence." 
 
 "Once in about so often," as the phrase 
 goes, it was the custom at our seminary to 
 set in motion the machinery destined to 
 culminate later in a season of religious re- 
 vival. 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 227 
 
 On the day in question we had found on 
 assembling at the hour for chapel that such a 
 season was about to be inaugurated. It was 
 my first term at the school, and my first ex- 
 perience in the peculiar reformatory methods 
 employed there. I am constitutionally reluc- 
 tant in regard to making hasty promises, and 
 constitutionally stubborn where I suspect 
 anything like a trap ; hence I remained quies- 
 cent while invitations to rise for prayers fol- 
 lowed each other in rapid succession, each 
 more sweeping than the last ; and when, as a 
 climax to the whole, " all those who desire to 
 be counted with the righteous at the great 
 and awful day of the judgment of God " 
 were requested to manifest their aspirations, 
 I still sat fast, the only sinner in the assem- 
 blage, amidst the horrified glances of the vir- 
 tuous and the audible titters of the frivolous- 
 minded. 
 
 It would not have suited Dr. , the head 
 
 of the institution, a man of much individual- 
 ity of character, to have taken any immedi- 
 ate personal notice of my contumacy, but in 
 the long prayer which followed I waited with 
 
228 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 vivid interest for the petition in which I knew 
 I should be impaled. It came at the very last. 
 In those drawling, sarcastic tones which every 
 student knew well, he added, as an after- 
 thought, " O Lord, I had almost forgotten to 
 beseech thee to have mercy, in spite of her 
 stubbornness, on the young woman who has 
 expressed a desire to be damned ! " 
 
 Our class in Evidences of Christianity was 
 not in all respects a usual one, though the 
 average type of pupil was not lacking. I 
 knew, on that autumn morning, that the con- 
 ventionally pious element — they to whom 
 complexities of temperament were unknown 
 quantities ■ — would wonder at my temerity in 
 daring to face the public eye. I knew, too, 
 that there were in the school many well-be- 
 haved young men and women who were in 
 their hearts rather glad that at last some one 
 had mustered sufficient courage, if not to be 
 sincere, at least not to be /^sincere. For the 
 opinions of the unusual element in our class 
 I did not trouble myself ; I knew that in time 
 I should hear and be interested in them. 
 From the conventional theological student I 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 229 
 
 should be likely to hear also. He was a crea- 
 ture instinct with opinions which he unceas- 
 ingly disseminated. 
 
 The " big minister," as we called the other 
 theologue, whose thoughts were as big as his 
 body, was in the class for business purposes, 
 but he gave as much as he got. The tall 
 young law student was there because he 
 loved the big minister, and also loved all dis- 
 cussion. The boy who sometimes brought 
 snakes in his pocket was there because he 
 had a universally inquiring mind. I was there 
 because my father desired me to be. He had 
 his own notions of what such study might 
 do for me. The boy from Boston was there 
 because I was. He was my " opposite " at 
 table, and to be an opposite at the old Hill 
 seminary was to subscribe to a relation as in- 
 flexible while it lasted as the marriage vow, 
 though it must be acknowledged that the 
 youth in question was of a nature to be bound 
 only of free will. His inflexibility was that of 
 tempered steel. 
 
 He was a merry-hearted scamp, this boy 
 from Boston, a creature full of graceful 
 
230 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 courtesies, full of fascinating contradictions. 
 Sentiment and mischief strove within him 
 mightily for mastery. He knew Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's sonnets by heart, nor did this know- 
 ledge prevent him from enjoying much more 
 questionable literature. Among so many raw, 
 untrained country boys, his graces of person 
 and manner shone resplendent, and the other 
 girls openly envied me the attentions which 
 their less facile squires longed, yet scorned, 
 to pay. 
 
 I remember well the night he asked me to 
 be his opposite. Standing on the stone steps 
 outside the broken alcove window, he seized 
 my hand through the shattered pane, and 
 bowed over it in such inspired oblivion of 
 the circle of admiring girls who stood by in 
 open-mouthed enjoyment of these story-book 
 doings, that, whatever / might have done, he, 
 at least, escaped all suspicion of appearing 
 ridiculous. My room-mate, at hair-brushing 
 time, spoke with much contumely of her own 
 sturdy, red-cheeked opposite, a sterling but 
 awkward fellow. 
 
 " I 'd give all Bert's goodness for a little of 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 231 
 
 Louis's grand air," she said, with true femi- 
 nine disregard for solid values. 
 
 So full of bounding life was he, this boy 
 from Boston, so easily foremost in everything 
 requiring athletic vigor, that one found it 
 hard to credit his frequent and cheerful state- 
 ment that he already bore within his supple 
 frame the seeds of an early doom. 
 
 " I think I '11 be pretty much alive while I 
 am alive," he used to urge suavely in extenu- 
 ation of some unusually flagrant piece of mis- 
 chief, "because my chance is going to be 
 such a limited one." 
 
 The professor who had charge of our theo- 
 logical vagaries was one of the old-fashioned 
 variety, a product of the days of slower intel- 
 lectual development and more moderate am- 
 bitions, when men studied for love of study, 
 and to teach was in itself a sort of distinction. 
 He was a man of strong individuality, big- 
 headed, clear-eyed, of a scrupulous neatness 
 in dress which, while totally disregarding 
 changes of fashion, achieved by its precision 
 a certain degree of elegance. His methods of 
 teaching were as individual as his character. 
 
232 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 On this especial morning the lesson as- 
 signed was a part of the chapter on the mor- 
 ality of the gospel, and dealt distinctively 
 with " the internal evidence of Christianity," 
 but Professor D. opened the recitation with 
 an abrupt question addressed to the boy from 
 Boston, who, elbows on knees, was leaning 
 forward with dark eyes seemingly yearning 
 toward the hills. 
 
 " If you were going to preach a sermon, 
 Mr. R.," — here a ripple of amusement showed 
 itself on the circle of listening faces, — " what 
 text would you choose ? " 
 
 The boy from Boston, still absorbed in 
 the hills, answered with unsmiling prompt- 
 ness, — 
 
 " I would select one short sentence from 
 the poet Simonides : ' It is hard to be good/ " 
 
 " What do you know about the poet Si- 
 monides ? " the professor questioned, still ab- 
 ruptly. 
 
 " Nothing at all," acknowledged the pur- 
 veyor of unexpected bits of erudition, " ex- 
 cept that he was a Greek and apparently 
 knew what he was talking about." 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 233 
 
 " The apostle Paul said something to the 
 same effect, and Job foreshadowed it when 
 he declared, ' Man, that is born of woman, is 
 of few days and full of trouble.' " The pro- 
 fessor's voice was rich in sonorous tones. He 
 enjoyed quoting. "Mr. M.," — turning sud- 
 denly to the congressman's son, — " what text 
 would you choose to preach from ? " 
 
 The congressman's son, as a member of 
 the theology class, was wholly unaccounted 
 for. Nobody pretended to know why he was 
 there. I doubt if he had any definite reason 
 in his own mind. He was an unmothered 
 waif, who had already been judiciously weeded 
 from seven successive schools. The boy from 
 Boston had dubbed him " our gentleman of 
 the seven sins," and the name stuck. He was 
 at present precariously enjoying his eighth 
 and last experiment in school homes. After 
 this, — so rumor said, — in case of one more 
 dismissal, already perilously near, came the 
 deluge. We had all grown rather fond of 
 that clever, dark face of his, and shielded and 
 bolstered him on all possible occasions, dread- 
 ing the final catastrophe of submergence. 
 
234 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 A slow flush mounted through the olive of 
 his cheek as he answered the professor's query. 
 
 " I would preach," he declared, " from the 
 text, * It is hard not to be good.'" 
 
 There was a universal stare. Nobody had 
 ever suspected our gentleman of the seven 
 sins of encountering just this sort of difficulty. 
 
 He grinned a little when he saw our faces. 
 " I don't mean just what you think I do. 
 What I 'm trying to get at is this, — no fellow 
 who 's got any decency in him goes to the 
 dogs without having times when he kicks 
 himself. Perhaps he goes just the same, — 
 most generally I guess he does, — but it don't 
 follow that he 's dead in love with what he 's 
 doing." 
 
 " If he keeps on long enough," the law 
 student commented, " he gets to the place 
 where he don't kick himself any more. A 
 trained nurse who has spent a large part of his 
 time taking care of old men during the last 
 days of their lives told me that as a rule in his 
 experience his irreligious patients met death 
 with more equanimity than the professing 
 Christians." 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 235 
 
 The truly-good theologue looked pained at 
 the turn the recitation was taking. The big 
 minister seemed unusually alert and full of 
 interest. Even in those days he was alive to 
 every subtlest opportunity for divining the 
 souls of men. The professor, noting his in- 
 tent look, answered it with a question, — 
 
 " How would you account for the truth of 
 such a statement, granting it to be true ? " 
 
 " Easily enough. It merely shows the 
 difference between an oversensitive and an 
 undersensitive conscience." 
 
 " Miss B.," — it was my turn now for one 
 of the professor's darting questions, — " if 
 you were going to characterize the ordinary 
 method of presenting the subject of religion 
 to the unconverted, so-called, what form would 
 your comment take ? " 
 
 " I should say," I suggested boldly, " that 
 the subject is usually presented wrong end 
 foremost." 
 
 The pious theologue groaned audibly. 
 Who was I, an acknowledged pagan, that my 
 opinions on religious topics should be even 
 tolerated? At sight of his displeasure the 
 
236 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 professor waxed genial. " How so ? " he in- 
 quired encouragingly. 
 
 " Why," I hesitated, " of course it is a won- 
 derful and beautiful thing to be good, but 
 most of the time people get so mixed up with 
 * Thou shalt nots ' that they forget the heroic 
 side of it. I suppose life is a good deal like 
 this school. We 're awfully tempted to break 
 rules." 
 
 The good theologue took his life in his 
 hands. He had a duty to perform, let the 
 professor trample upon him as he might. " Are 
 we not wasting time ? " he asked, pensively 
 patient. "Were we not to-day to consider 
 the morality of the gospel, a great subject?" 
 
 There was a gleam of blue fire under the 
 professor's heavy brows. " And what is the 
 gospel for, Mr. C, but for the building up of 
 man ? We were to study to-day the internal 
 evidences of Christianity, — a great subject, 
 truly, a strange, subtle subject, the inmost 
 significance of which is not written upon the 
 surface of life, but to be sought for, earnestly 
 and patiently sought out in the hidden re- 
 cesses of the heart and soul. No discussion 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 237 
 
 is a waste of time that may chance to open a 
 window into the soul of a man or woman. I 
 claim that every human creature holds within 
 himself greater possibilities for good than he 
 himself realizes. I believe, sir, in unconscious 
 goodness, intuitive Christianity, and I thank 
 God that I do so believe. It is my business 
 to recognize, to seek out, to develop, such 
 possibilities in my pupils. I find them where 
 you, sir, would never dream of looking for 
 these evidences, but it is not your fault, sir, 
 not your fault so much as your misfortune, 
 that you are constitutionally incapacitated for 
 viewing any subject in its entirety ! " 
 
 At the close of this same week, the week 
 of the foregoing recitation, dawned the longed- 
 for day of the annual " fall walk." 
 
 It mattered little to the hot heart of youth 
 that, though the autumn sun shone, a chill 
 wind rustled the withering scarlet of the trees. 
 No one stayed within doors for so slight a 
 matter as the blowing of the wind on this 
 long-expected day of un trammeled " social- 
 izing," when the sexes might mingle in hila- 
 
238 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 rious and permitted intercourse. When we 
 streamed down the long road toward South 
 Pond, none was left behind. The good theo- 
 logue, suppressed but unsubdued, trudged 
 with the rest, and, in his grudging way, made 
 holiday in his heart. The big minister swung 
 along with mighty stride, followed by the tall 
 law student, still discussing, discussing ever- 
 more. The snake boy gathered in a scanty 
 autumn harvest. The boy from Boston, af- 
 flicted with one of his worst bronchial colds, 
 croaked buoyantly at my right, although the 
 professor in charge, the shepherd of our flock, 
 chose persistently to linger in our company. 
 It was our only unrestricted day for the 
 whole term, yet no one would have supposed 
 from the gallant bearing of my facile opposite 
 that he found the good professor's presence 
 unwelcome. He — the boy from Boston — 
 had missionary relatives whom, one would 
 judge from his ordinary conversation, he did 
 not estimate according to their full excellence. 
 Yet, as it seemed to-day, he had nevertheless 
 taken in at the pores much picturesque in- 
 formation about Burmah. He charmed the 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 239 
 
 attendant professor ; the good theologue un- 
 willingly drew near, drawn in spite of himself ; 
 the big minister joined our group ; the law 
 student, forced to cease arguing, listened to 
 the croaking voice that unfailingly seized the 
 salient point of each situation. We, the un- 
 worthy ones, proceeded on our pondward way 
 haloed and girt about by an assemblage of 
 the good, and once, only once, did I detect 
 an irreverent twinkle in the dark eyes of the 
 boy from Boston. 
 
 When we had reached our destination, and 
 most of our group were participating in a 
 lively scramble for needed firewood, the pro- 
 fessor, watching an agile figure always in the 
 midst of the fray, commented absentmindedly 
 to whomever it might concern : — 
 
 " A fascinating personality — most fasci- 
 nating ! Such life, such courage, such buoy- 
 ancy in spite of discouragements, such un- 
 failing grasp of whatever he touches — but 
 complex, most complex! I hardly know 
 whether to count him most strongly for good 
 — or — or otherwise." 
 
 " Louis ? I count him for good," the candid 
 
240 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 girl pronounced uncompromisingly. She was 
 always ready to answer questions. " He 's the 
 fussiest boy in this school about the way girls 
 should behave." 
 
 " Yes, yes," the professor mused, still in a 
 psychologic mist, " he naturally obscures the 
 feminine judgment." 
 
 It was later in the day, after our dinner 
 had been served, that things came to a climax. 
 Ordinarily my opposite and myself would 
 have been wandering far afield with our free- 
 footed comrades, but on this special occasion 
 that hoarse note in his voice had kept us 
 hovering near the fire, though the anxiety 
 was mine, not his. 
 
 Our camping-ground had been chosen near 
 the outlet, where a strong current swept into 
 the turbulent and rocky stream connecting 
 two ponds. The orphan, who throve on mis- 
 chief, was just now choosing to amuse him- 
 self by poling about on a large, floating log. 
 To awaken disquiet was the orphan's normal 
 air. The fact that he could not swim only 
 gave poignancy to his joy. 
 
 The orphan was a red-haired imp of parts. 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 241 
 
 He had no visible means of support, yet man- 
 aged to exist because we all stayed him with 
 flagons and comforted him with apples. In 
 fact, so universally did we maintain one purse 
 with him that the only care remaining on his 
 mind was that of giving us enough trouble 
 for our money. In the midst of admonitions, 
 instructions, and objurgations he placidly con- 
 tinued to pole, and in the natural excitement 
 of watching him prepare to drown, the little 
 group left on the shore fell to discussing its 
 swimming powers. 
 
 It seemed that our gentleman of the seven 
 sins was a good swimmer, but always subject 
 to violent cramps except in the mildest of 
 summer waters. The boy from Boston loved 
 to swim, but was forbidden " because of his 
 beastly chest." The snake boy could swim 
 six strokes. The candid girl knew how to 
 float. The ever-watchful professor used to 
 swim a little when he was a youngster. The 
 good theologue could swim anywhere, at all 
 times and seasons. 
 
 At this point the page of history and nar- 
 rative suddenly left a blank for illustration. 
 
242 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 The pole slipped, the treacherous log rolled 
 to leeward, and the orphan, with a wild whoop 
 of exultant anguish, disappeared into the 
 flood. The boy from Boston was temporarily 
 absent on a search for more wood ; the good 
 theologue, the expert swimmer, stood rigid 
 on the shore as if violently petrified, but the 
 congressman's son, he to whom chill waters 
 always brought cramps, hesitated not the 
 twinkling of an eye. Coat off, his swift plunge 
 into the rapid water seemed coincident with 
 our next breath. We saw him seize the or- 
 phan's red crest just as it came to the surface, 
 saw him strike out boldly for the shore ; then, 
 while our hearts froze within us, he began to 
 waver and struggle, and had it not been for 
 the boy from Boston, who, tearing off his 
 coat as he ran, plunged in his turn just in 
 time to save the situation, those two white 
 faces would have gone together sweeping 
 down the chill current of death. The last 
 comer, whose agile intelligence seemed always 
 prepared for emergencies, knew where to turn 
 in the search for shallow waters, and it seemed, 
 after all, but the space of one long heartbeat 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 243 
 
 before swift help came, feet flying from all 
 directions, and the three drenched and gasp- 
 ing heroes of the scene were drawn safely on 
 dry land and hustled off to the nearest farm- 
 house, the orphan gurgling and sputtering in 
 a sort of irregular rhythm all the way. 
 
 When the last wild gurgle had faded into 
 silence, the candid girl turned to the theo- 
 logue, who, waking to life once more, seemed 
 to be making tentative experiments in the use 
 of his component parts. 
 
 " What was the matter with you about that 
 time ? " she inquired, with her usual unflinch- 
 ing frankness. 
 
 The theologue looked pale but firm. " I 
 remembered," he said stiffly, " that mine was 
 a consecrated life." 
 
 " Consecrated fiddlestick ! " the candid girl 
 commented with decisive finality. 
 
 Two days after these happenings, when we 
 met for our next regular recitation, the class 
 in Evidences of Christianity presented its 
 full complement of members, and the occa- 
 sion would, perhaps, have proved but an or- 
 
244 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 dinary one, had it not been that the good 
 theologue, who was evidently having diffi- 
 culty with the somewhat lumbering machi- 
 nery which he called a conscience, evinced a 
 determination to discuss past issues. 
 
 " I suppose," he said, addressing the pro- 
 fessor with an air of patient gravity, " from 
 the remarks thrown out by you at our last 
 recitation, that you would consider the in- 
 tuitive acts of unsanctified persons — such 
 acts, for instance, as resulted in the rescue 
 of young Blake on Saturday — as constitut- 
 ing in themselves internal evidence of the 
 existence of what you would tflrm uncon- 
 scious Christianity in the minds of the ac- 
 tors." 
 
 11 It was not my intention, Mr. C," — the 
 professor spoke a little sternly, — " to have 
 referred to this matter in the class, although 
 personally it would give me nothing but plea- 
 sure to do so, because I felt sure that the 
 principal participants in that rescue would 
 very much prefer to escape public mention, 
 but since the subject is forced upon me, I say 
 this : Both those young men, by the intuitive 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 245 
 
 acts to which yotir : re-£er, risked their lives 
 twice over. The one made ' the plunge with 
 the full knowledge that he would probably 
 be seized with fatal cramps, the other was in 
 a physical condition which rendered such an 
 immersion in icy water a deadly peril. I ask 
 you whether you would consider that such 
 sacrifices of self, sanctified or unsanctified, 
 make for ^^righteousness ? " 
 
 Our gentleman of the seven sins interposed 
 gruffly, " There was n't any Christianity or 
 righteousness about the business. There was 
 only one thing to do. - Any fellow would have 
 done it." \ " ' 7 t . r v 
 
 " I jumped in for my health," the boy from 
 Boston declared in a cheerful croak. " Cold 's 
 been better ever since." 
 
 The professor smiled, but his smile was a 
 grave one. " When we consider what might 
 have been the outcome of the accident, young 
 gentlemen, the matter is hardly one for jest- 
 ing, and," turning to the good theologue, " if 
 any member of this class feels disposed to 
 underestimate such intuitive acts as were 
 here displayed, I would ask him to call to 
 
246 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 mind the statement of his Master and mine : 
 1 Greater love hath no man than this, that a 
 man lay down his life for his friends.' " 
 
 With such utterances as these fresh in our 
 minds, we felt it rather a blow when, at the 
 close of the recitation hour, we heard the 
 professor request our gentleman of the seven 
 sins to come to his house that afternoon. 
 
 Owing to his peculiar dignity and the in- 
 fluence which he exerted in the school, it 
 often became the professor's task to prepare 
 victims for the pangs of execution, and we 
 knew, alas ! too well we knew, that the con- 
 gressman's son had been diligently and felo- 
 niously abstracting himself from the " special 
 meetings " which were nightly going on. 
 
 All the afternoon, as the manner of such 
 critical seasons was, parties of anxious youths 
 scouted and reconnoitred in the vicinity of 
 the professor's house, and yet the object of 
 their solicitude appeared not. Finally, as dusk 
 drew on, the snake boy, characteristically 
 ready to obtain information at whatever per- 
 sonal sacrifice, volunteered to conduct a for- 
 lorn hope. " I '11 make an arrant," he said, 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 247 
 
 and having made it, hastened it to its desti- 
 nation. 
 
 It was in that bygone epoch when ama- 
 teur craftsmen all over the country were busy 
 sawing out ornamental shelves and brackets 
 and designing hollywood frames. The pro- 
 fessor, who possessed a very pretty mechan- 
 ical turn, had set up a workshop of his own. 
 Hither, seeing a cheerful light, the snake 
 boy directed his steps. The door stood a 
 trifle ajar, and the seeker after information 
 was able to gratify his curiosity without be- 
 traying his presence. At one end of the 
 bench sat the professor, at the other the con- 
 gressman's son, both busily at work. Ever 
 and anon there came to the cautious lis- 
 tener sounds of amicable conversation, assur- 
 ing himself of which fact, he beat a masterly 
 retreat. 
 
 " It 's all right, fellers. May as well quit 
 watchin\ The professor's jest found a straw- 
 berry mark on ole Seven Sins's arm, and 
 there ain't any talk of an eighth sin this time." 
 
 After this, it became a regular occurrence 
 for the professor and the congressman's son 
 
248 BOOK-DUSTING TIME 
 
 to carve and jig-saw in company on Saturday 
 afternoons, and as a result of this odd copart- 
 nership, more than for any other reason, it 
 chanced that our gentleman of the seven sins 
 never added his crowning offense. 
 
 On book-dusting morning, when I sat with 
 the worn volume of Paley's " Evidences " in 
 my lap, living over the former days, it was as 
 if I had reopened a familiar tale to which the 
 years had added a sequel. 
 
 I know that the beloved professor has long 
 ago finished his work in the world of the act- 
 ual, a world that can ill spare him and his 
 like. I know that the snake boy has made his 
 inquisitiveness tell in the realm of natural 
 history. I know that the candid girl, an ex- 
 cellent wife and mother, is also active in good 
 work in the community where she lives. I 
 know that the tall law student has made 
 his mark in a great city, and that the big 
 minister has never ceased to enlarge his bor- 
 ders. 
 
 What a glorious sermon on immortality 
 was that which I heard him preach ! How 
 
BOOK-DUSTING TIME 249 
 
 wonderfully from the arc of mortal life he 
 drew the circle of eternity ! 
 
 The good theologue, too, is preaching still. 
 I meet him sometimes, grown rotund, and no 
 less self-satisfied than of old. It was our gen- 
 tleman of the seven sins who, several years 
 ago, was elected reform mayor of his city. If 
 one may believe the current newspapers of 
 the time, he " made good." That turning-lathe 
 of the professor's proved the turning point of 
 a life. 
 
 The boy from Boston also made good. He 
 went as buoyantly and light-heartedly to the 
 grave as if death were but a bubble on a 
 foaming cup. It was on a May night that he 
 slipped away into infinity, — there is a story 
 about that, too, — and when I think of the 
 mound in Mount Auburn which I have never 
 seen, I always fancy that the happiest May- 
 time breezes are playing there. 
 
 How the stars shone that night to light 
 him on his way ! and he " greeted the unseen 
 with a cheer." 
 
IX 
 EDUCATION 
 
EDUCATION 
 
 ONCE before, many years ago, I sat down 
 at my desk and wrote the caption " Ed- 
 ucation " large at the head of my page. I was 
 then sixteen years old and I should probably 
 have called that humble sheet of paper my 
 " virgin page " had I found it necessary to 
 give it a local habitation and a name. 
 
 The master spirit who was at that time 
 directing the trials and experiences of the 
 Hallowell high school had the kindly habit 
 of furnishing as a gift the subjects for our 
 fortnightly " compositions ; " delightfully easy, 
 obvious subjects such as " The Pleasures of 
 Memory," " The Advantages of History," and 
 kindred topics suited to the capacity of youth- 
 ful minds. At sixteen, one naturally knows a 
 good deal about the pleasures of memory ; the 
 advantages of history unfold themselves to 
 
254 EDUCATION 
 
 the most casual observer, and Education — 
 with a large E — has already begun to rasp 
 itself in indelible lines upon the tender imagi- 
 nation. 
 
 I am pleased to know, by reference to the 
 battered old " composition book " which lies 
 open before me, that even at that period of 
 soaring ambition, that halcyon period when 
 I " woke in the morning with an appetite 
 that could eat the solar system like a cake," 
 there was something about the all-pervading 
 and all-comprehending nature of this latter 
 topic which made me hesitate. 
 
 " Education is a boundless subject," thus 
 the theme opens, " and, so wide is the field 
 which spreads itself before me, that I hardly 
 know where to begin." Once started, how- 
 ever, all obstacles were triumphantly swept 
 away and the whole question brought to such 
 a triumphant conclusion that I have never, 
 until this fateful morning, felt it necessary to 
 tackle it again. Alas, I know beforehand just 
 how lamely, illogically, and inconsistently I 
 am going to conduct this second excursion 
 into that spreading field ! 
 
EDUCATION 255 
 
 My past reticence, fortunately, has not been 
 shared by other writers, better qualified to 
 pursue the problems of education into their 
 fastnesses than I can ever hope to be, and I 
 have read their pregnant and instructive 
 pages with deep and ever-growing interest. 
 The meaning of the word, the methods of 
 interpreting that meaning, who shall be edu- 
 cated, when, where, how, and why it shall be 
 done, the question of discrimination between 
 sexes, between classes, between tweedledum 
 and tweedledee, all these, variously and elo- 
 quently and interminably set forth, have 
 passed in an endless phantasmagoria before 
 my mental vision only to leave my stubborn 
 mind set like a rock on one conclusion : The 
 wisdom of educating every living creature, 
 man, woman, child, fish, flesh, fowl, to the 
 limit of individual capacity; and to this con- 
 clusion I should add the conviction that there 
 is no danger whatever that any creature will 
 ever know — really and absolutely know — 
 too much. 
 
 It is true that I have not yet removed the 
 beam from my own eye, but I am still able 
 
256 EDUCATION 
 
 to discover the mote which obscures my 
 brother's vision. I realize — or I dimly dream 
 that I realize — the deficiencies of my own 
 education, but much more plainly I perceive 
 that my cook would be benefited by a know- 
 ledge of the higher mathematics, classical 
 literature, and the philosophy of history. It 
 may be argued that if she possessed these 
 acquirements my kitchen would not contain 
 her, but, even if the scheme of universal edu- 
 cation were carried out, there must still be 
 cooks, and what sane, sanitary, hygienic, aes- 
 thetic, reasoning and reasonable possibilities 
 might be looked for from a race of enlight- 
 ened queens of the kitchen — central suns, 
 around which the whole domestic system 
 must revolve. 
 
 The typical cook of the average New Eng- 
 land town lives, moves, and has her being 
 entrenched behind one axiom of precedent : 
 the thing which, in her experience, has been 
 done, can be done again. After this, the 
 deluge. 
 
 It may be, for instance, that the domestic 
 goddess in question served her first appren- 
 
EDUCATION 257 
 
 ticeship in a family of ten. For the consump- 
 tion of such a family she was in the daily 
 habit of preparing twenty potatoes in one or 
 another form. When, during her subsequent 
 peregrinations, she condescends to minister 
 to my modest home circle of three persons, 
 I sometimes assure myself that if to a know- 
 ledge of elementary arithmetic she could add 
 a thorough understanding of higher algebra, 
 geometry, and trigonometry, and then super- 
 add some slight acquaintance with differential 
 and integral calculus, she might in time be 
 able to discover that if ten persons require 
 twenty potatoes, by the same ratio of allot- 
 ment three persons might be satisfied with 
 six. 
 
 In the present fragmentary state of domestic 
 education, however, the situation is a hopeless 
 one. It is in vain that I present myself peri- 
 odically before the dispenser of vegetables to 
 suggest that but three consumers of potatoes 
 sit at our festal board, that no one of the three 
 is afflicted with an inordinate appetite for 
 that starch-laden esculent, that a wise econ- 
 omy prohibits waste. Arithmetic and politi- 
 
258 EDUCATION 
 
 cal economy are alike thrown away upon one 
 who has but a single formula, unchangeable 
 as the decrees of the Medes and Persians, by 
 which to regulate the conduct of life. 
 
 I suggest six potatoes, a modest and satis- 
 fying half dozen. The arbiter of fate replies, 
 " You see, ma'am, I ve always been accus- 
 tomed to cookin' twenty " — and twenty it is ! 
 
 Hence it comes that there have been few 
 periods during my housekeeping career when 
 I have not been provided with a sufficient 
 number of cold potatoes to answer any sud- 
 den demand upon hospitality. No friend 
 ever needed to pass potatoless from my door. 
 
 Yet if it fell to my lot to prepare a civil 
 service examination for aspiring domestics 
 there is only one point on which I should 
 insist. I would not require any candidate to 
 know beyond a peradventure why Bedred- 
 dan Hassan did or did not put pepper in his 
 cream tarts, but on him whose comprehend- 
 ing soul could grasp the idea that the prob- 
 lem of satisfactorily adding pepper to cream 
 tarts need not be an insoluble one, I would 
 without hesitation confer a degree. 
 
EDUCATION 259 
 
 Pepper tarts do not appeal to me, but the 
 instinctive realization that to genius all things 
 are possible does appeal. It opens flowery 
 visions of a domestic possessing no fixed 
 standards on the subject of potatoes, an " ex- 
 pedientful " person to whom the mixing of a 
 cake with three eggs when the recipe calls for 
 four would not present insurmountable diffi- 
 culties. 
 
 It is true that no amount of education will 
 cause wings to sprout on those who are born 
 absolutely wingless, but the most unpro- 
 mising grub may conceal within its ugly 
 breast the possibility of transformation, and 
 surely no harm can result from seeking every- 
 where the hidden spark of divinity. Imagi- 
 nation helps to season the soup and decorate 
 the salad, and one may weave the banquets 
 of Lucullus, Nero's roses dropping from the 
 ceiling, the magic pitcher from which Baucis 
 and Philemon drew their never-failing fount, 
 John the Baptist's locusts and wild honey, 
 Charles Lamb's roast pig, the red wine which 
 Omar's nightingale cries unto the rose, and 
 that draught of clear water from the well of 
 
2 6o EDUCATION 
 
 Beth-lehem for which David thirsted, into 
 a background that expands the narrowest 
 kitchen wall into a vista of memory and 
 romance. 
 
 II 
 
 We have become so accustomed to shout- 
 ing at the top of our lungs the assertion that 
 this is an age of progress that most of us 
 have come to an unquestioning belief in the 
 reality of what we announce. It is, indeed, 
 true that there never were so many schools, 
 so many colleges, so many facilities for doing 
 special work, such opportunities for learning 
 made easy as exist in our day ; but the test of 
 what any system of education is doing for its 
 age lies rather in what it has accomplished 
 for the mass than for the individual. 
 
 If the progress of the last century has 
 given us better domestic service, better me- 
 chanics, better teachers, more thorough and 
 practical scholars, better and wiser all-round 
 men and women than those who played their 
 part in former generations, if the trend of the 
 race has been genuinely upward, then it must 
 
EDUCATION 261 
 
 be acknowledged that we can with clear con- 
 sciences continue to vociferate our claims to 
 advancement. 
 
 I hope I am neither a pessimist nor a cynic 
 in regard to the achievements of latter-day 
 civilization ; I am ready, as a rule, to hurrah 
 for my own side, but I am not prepared to 
 profess an unqualified surety that the progress 
 of the last century has been wholly in the 
 right direction. 
 
 In this matter of domestic service, for ex- 
 ample, it would not be a difficult business to 
 collect a sheaf of testimonies from house- 
 keepers who are able to remember the 
 changes of the last fifty years, certifying that 
 the thrifty, capable, and reliable " hired girl," 
 with whose virtues and usefulness so many 
 New England households have in former 
 days been happily familiar, no longer exists 
 except in infrequent and sporadic instances. 
 
 The younger class of girls who, under the 
 old regime, went out to service, now employ 
 themselves in the shops, factories, and similar 
 establishments where their time, after working 
 hours, is their own. Like Yankee Doodle 
 
262 EDUCATION 
 
 they have " put feathers in their caps " and to 
 this adornment have added whatever stands, 
 in the vogue of the day, for the " rings on 
 their fingers and bells on their toes " of 
 Mother Goose memory. They know the 
 sweets of independence and the proud, if 
 imaginary, satisfaction of being " just as good 
 as anybody." The domestic ranks in the New 
 England towns of to-day are largely recruited 
 from a wandering tribe of more mature wo- 
 men who vary the serial of matrimony by 
 divergences into the field of " working out." 
 Some of them belong to the variety known 
 as " grass widows," some of them have either 
 just " got a bill " or are just about to get a 
 bill from their husbands, some have hus- 
 bands who appear spasmodically and then 
 pass once more into obscuration. During the 
 intervals of these interrupted romances the 
 heroines of them bestow a somewhat inter- 
 mittent and perfunctory attention on house- 
 holds whose need is so urgent that the 
 members therefore are willing to suffer and 
 be strong. 
 
 " I don't need to work out," one of these 
 
EDUCATION 263 
 
 culinary heroines was wont to murmur pen- 
 sively; "ever since I parted from William 
 there 's been plenty o' men willin' to marry 
 me any mornin' before breakfast," — and this 
 statement represents the strongest kind of 
 willingness, since many a man who could 
 easily be beguiled into wedding after supper 
 would in the clearness of morning judgment 
 hesitate about delivering himself over to the 
 chains of Hymen ! 
 
 The old-fashioned semi-patriarchal system 
 which permitted the " help " to become an 
 integral part of the family, presents many ob- 
 jectional features, yet the natural and logical 
 result of such relations between employer 
 and employed was to secure a better and 
 more intelligent class of service. 
 
 There was a certain neat, spare, gauntly 
 decorous, middle-aged woman who, during my 
 girlhood, always spent a part of each year 
 " helping out " in our crowded household, 
 whose memory retains for me an abiding fas- 
 cination. She exemplified a type which had 
 in those days many representatives, a type of 
 woman strong both in mind and body, with 
 
264 EDUCATION 
 
 an untutored intelligence born of necessity 
 and experience. These women were apt to 
 be sharp-cornered, full of individuality, inci- 
 sive of speech and act, — a surface ungracious- 
 ness which did not long conceal a repressed 
 sweetness of nature, often the outgrowth of 
 deep and conscientious religious feeling. It 
 was always a gala day to me when " Aunt 
 Sophia" came to abide with us. It meant 
 that there would be things doing, fresh 
 interests added to life, interests more or less 
 piquantly flavored with the new-comer's in- 
 dividuality. Aunt Sophia's sharp sayings, 
 her idiomatic stories gathered from experi- 
 ences in many households, the very unex- 
 pectedness of her standpoints, all helped to 
 flavor the commonplaceness of daily living ; 
 and though I have spoken of her and her 
 class as creatures of untutored intelligence, 
 in comparison with many of the flippant and 
 shallow beings who inhabit our kitchens 
 to-day these old-fashioned domestics were 
 admirably educated. Sophia drew her intel- 
 lectual sustenance from a fount of classical 
 English, pure and richly varied literature, 
 
EDUCATION 265 
 
 and deep spiritual information. She read 
 her Bible as eagerly as her prototype of to- 
 day reads Bertha M. Clay's novels, and from 
 it she gained the knowledge of those mys- 
 teries which God has hidden " from ages and 
 generations," but makes manifest unto his 
 saints. 
 
 It often seems to me that the world of my 
 girlhood was a simpler, more dignified, more 
 genuine world than that to which our age of 
 progress has advanced us to-day. It was a 
 striving world then as now, a faulty, narrow- 
 minded world, yet many of its common people 
 were less radically common than the same 
 class of the present generation, simply because 
 they were more diligent students of the Bible, 
 because they built and founded themselves 
 more broadly on the influences and inspira- 
 tions of that wonderful classic. 
 
 It may be that in my recollections I some- 
 what idealize the virtues of that former gen- 
 eration, but I do not idealize the simple 
 homes which made no pretense of being 
 what they were not, the homes where a nar- 
 row income was not a thing to be ashamed 
 
266 EDUCATION 
 
 of, where thrift and economy were held as 
 praiseworthy virtues, where a good many 
 daily joys were somehow compatible with a 
 rather strenuous notion that life was duty. 
 
 I have said, and I repeat, that I would be 
 willing to educate every human and inhuman 
 creature up the limit of what is to be known ; 
 but if a man cannot know all about Confucius 
 and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Darwin, 
 the Zend Avesta and the Nibelungenlied, if 
 his literary and ethical study is to be limited 
 to the assimilation of the contents of one 
 volume, I would place in his hands that one 
 which in Scotland used piously to be referred 
 to as " the Book " and feel that, after all, I 
 had given him material for a liberal education. 
 He might search its pages for the building 
 up of creeds, for the confirmation of prejudice, 
 for the foundation of dogma ; but if he contin- 
 ued to search with any right-minded desire to 
 discover the truth of things, in spite of creeds, 
 in spite of prejudices, in spite of dogmas, 
 he would find himself broadening and sweet- 
 ening, and breathing the air of purer hori- 
 zons. 
 
EDUCATION 267 
 
 It is rather the fashion nowadays to pride 
 one's self on knowing little about the Bible, 
 just as it is the fashion for men to shake their 
 heads with dissimulated pride while they 
 aver that they do not profess to be religious. 
 Many people seem to feel that to disclaim all 
 pretensions to the knowledge of any but the 
 material side of life, serves in some mysteri- 
 ous fashion to rid them of moral responsi- 
 bility. There are some men who apparently 
 have the idea that to mention the name of 
 God, except by way of oath or adjuration, is 
 an uncalled-for exhibition of pious priggish- 
 ness; yet the most untutored pagan, how- 
 ever primitive his creed may be, who is so far 
 from being ashamed of his religion that he 
 would rather be ashamed of not possessing 
 one, has a deeper hold on the foundation 
 structure of all education than such men as 
 these. He at least recognizes something 
 which binds him morally, however mistaken 
 his conception of morals may be, and the 
 recognition of moral boundaries is the cor- 
 ner stone of the highest civilization. 
 
268 EDUCATION 
 
 III 
 
 A group of bright young fellows discussed 
 in my presence not long ago the accepted 
 standpoint, according to twentieth-century 
 ideals, from which a man should pursue his 
 chosen profession. From this conversation 
 it appeared that the aim in view was to secure 
 the largest possible income in the shortest 
 possible time. 
 
 Talent, application, strenuous work, all had 
 their value in the struggle, as enabling the 
 aspirant more speedily to obtain recognition 
 in an up-to-date generation which gives prizes 
 only to the concrete. 
 
 As I listened I learned that a political ca- 
 reer is a mistake because, unless a man gets 
 hold of, and is willing to profit by, a graft of 
 some description, his honors bring him more 
 outlay than income. The judge's bench is 
 tabooed for the truly ambitious because of the 
 straitened salary which restricts its emolu- 
 ment. To accept a position, however flatter- 
 ing, in any branch of the teaching profession, 
 is to limit one's chances for making money. 
 
EDUCATION 269 
 
 To enter the ministry is an absurd propo- 
 sition for a man who is capable of gaining a 
 competency in any other profession, since 
 the best-paid clergyman cannot, according to 
 modern standards of wealth, hope to become 
 a rich man. 
 
 I confess that it surprised me to find these 
 clean, well-balanced, carefully trained youths 
 turning their backs so doughtily on the re- 
 cord of past values as estimated by what the 
 ages have found vital enough to preserve, to 
 seek the choicest rewards of life in things 
 that perish with the using. They were young, 
 these prematurely wise boys ; I doubt if any 
 one of their number wholly meant what he 
 said, and some of them, I am very sure, cher- 
 ish in their hearts higher ideals than their 
 careless speech revealed. The significance 
 of their talk lies in its expression of the spirit 
 of the age, a spirit which one finds only too 
 frequently embodied in both the speech and 
 act of older and riper men who have, it would 
 seem, lived long enough and deeply enough 
 to know something about what life can take 
 away as well as what it can give. 
 
270 EDUCATION 
 
 Religion and patriotism and good sense 
 and good government and final profit are all 
 against this sort of thinking which makes 
 only for ultimate rottenness. A cloud of 
 witnesses, giants of the past, who have known 
 alike the life of soul and sense, protest against 
 it. As an expression of the spirit of a cen- 
 tury which claims to have opened the doors 
 of enlightenment to rich and poor alike, such 
 standards are utterly trivial and uneducated. 
 
 I found last year in an old chest, which 
 had been long hidden away in my father's 
 attic, a bundle of letters written to a young 
 man who entered upon student life in Bow- 
 doin College about the year 1830. The young 
 scholar was evidently an open-hearted and 
 versatile-minded fellow, of a temperament 
 which opened to him a large circle of friends. 
 These friends all wrote letters, and as they 
 lived in a day when transportation was diffi- 
 cult and postage high, their epistles were gen- 
 erally lengthy ones. Although the student 
 himself was a struggling youth whose college 
 career was prolonged by the necessity of 
 earning money to pay his expenses, he repre- 
 
EDUCATION 271 
 
 sented a prominent family, well known and 
 much respected throughout the county which 
 is now thickly sown with descendants from its 
 various branches. 
 
 I know from household tradition some- 
 thing about the circle of young friends whose 
 faded letters made up the treasure-trove of 
 the old chest. They, too, were scions of emi- 
 nently worthy families in a day when hard 
 work and struggle were regarded as a neces- 
 sary and to-be-expected portion of everyday 
 life, and when it was no disgrace to acknow- 
 ledge an habitual scarcity of available cash. 
 
 The Bowdoin student was the only college 
 man in his circle, much envied and much 
 felicitated for his position and opportunities. 
 It was universally expected that he would, as 
 a result of much learning, rise to a lofty rank 
 in life; but when his companions set before 
 him examples for his emulation they most 
 frequently selected the triumphs of Webster 
 and Clay, or suggested the name of some 
 eminent divine. To urge him on in mere 
 money-making was far from their thoughts. 
 
 The young men whose letters were thus 
 
272 EDUCATION 
 
 preserved represented varying occupations. 
 One, according to his own definition, was " a 
 wielder of the yardstick," two were post- 
 office clerks, several were teachers of country 
 schools, one a farmer lad who during the 
 winter helped his father to manufacture shin- 
 gles. The young women also taught school, 
 did sewing, or even, in emergency, assisted 
 in housework. 
 
 After the fashion of their century the 
 young creatures poured forth their sentiments, 
 their reflections, their aspirations, without 
 stint. They described sunsets and moon- 
 rises ; they philosophized regarding every- 
 thing that pertained to life ; they referred 
 darkly to hidden griefs ; quoted from Byron, 
 Moore, and kindred poets ; analyzed the pas- 
 sion of love from depths of profound experi- 
 ence ; gave synopses of sermons and political 
 addresses ; and by and by, when these mighty 
 topics had been exhausted, devoted a page or 
 two to local gossip and the discussion of 
 social functions. It was a humble epistle in- 
 deed that did not glitter with classical allu- 
 sions. But through all their commonplaces 
 
EDUCATION 273 
 
 and crudenesses, these letters revealed in 
 strong light the standpoint of aspiration held 
 by the youth of that period, a standpoint 
 based on the conviction that knowledge is 
 power. 
 
 In the evenings, in the odd moments be- 
 tween other avocations, they were all taking 
 courses of study. The young man of the 
 yardstick was translating Cicero and Sallust 
 and studying astronomy ; the post-office clerks 
 were writing lyceum lectures on abstruse 
 topics ; one of the teaching young men was 
 studying moral philosophy and different sys- 
 tems of theology, " not with any idea of en- 
 tering the ministry, but because he had a 
 natural bent for such pursuits ; " the farmer 
 lad was dividing his leisure between church- 
 going, village festivities, " back-lot dances." 
 and reading the English poets and essayists 
 during otherwise unoccupied winter even- 
 ings. 
 
 He tells his correspondent that " making 
 shingles in the sunny corner of the old work- 
 shop is an occupation that lends itself readily 
 to the weaving of many dreams," and as one 
 
274 EDUCATION 
 
 reads the faded sentences one feels how the 
 tides and the yearnings of youth flooded that 
 sunny workshop corner. I remember this 
 writer, the intimate picture of whose daily 
 life is an especially graphic one, as a tall old 
 man of stern face and erect military bearing. 
 As a child I often visited in his home, but I 
 never dreamed of him as capable of such a 
 record of ardent young manhood as his letters 
 reveal. 
 
 The girls were studying too; going to 
 school at the " Academy " between periods 
 of teaching ; " keeping up their Latin " while 
 the teaching was going on. The sewing girl 
 " went on with French whenever she could 
 borrow a dictionary " and rejoiced greatly at 
 unexpectedly securing several odd volumes 
 of Shakespeare. 
 
 In the same paper-covered chest I found 
 also the records of The Franklin Debat- 
 ing Society, formed in 1822 by the printer's 
 boys of a New England town. The member- 
 ship of this society was later augmented by 
 the addition of a number of clerks and me- 
 chanics. 
 
EDUCATION 275 
 
 One of the debaters, who shared in the 
 benefits of this club, says of it in relating the 
 story of his life : — 
 
 " We got leave to occupy the second story 
 of the Old South schoolhouse. We furnished 
 our own wood and lights. We wrote compo- 
 sitions, we declaimed, debated questions of 
 importance and enacted dialogues. Our com- 
 positions were corrected by an educated man. 
 This society, with a succession of members, 
 continued for four or five years, meeting once 
 a week. With two or three exceptions all of 
 us have closed our earthly career, but if none 
 of us ever rose to be great men, not one be- 
 came vicious or dissipated." 
 
 The society records, kept in an eminently 
 neat and businesslike manner, give account 
 of one hundred and eighteen meetings, with 
 debates, addresses, essays, and reports of 
 committees on all sorts of topics, civil, reli- 
 gious, literary, etc. 
 
 I copy a few of the questions for discussion 
 to show what these youths, hardly past the 
 age of boyhood, were voluntarily thinking and 
 talking about : — 
 
276 EDUCATION 
 
 What are the advantages of a free republic 
 over a hereditary kingdom ? 
 
 Should deistical and atheistical writings be 
 prohibited by law ? Answer : No. 
 
 Should imprisonment for debt be abol- 
 ished ? Answer : No. 
 
 Which is most essential in the representa- 
 tive of a free people, integrity or talents? 
 Discussion continued during two meetings ; 
 final answer : Integrity. 
 
 Can any measure be taken to rid America 
 of slaves ? Majority vote : Yes. 
 
 It is interesting to note that the reply to 
 the question : In what capacity is a woman 
 useful ? was indefinitely postponed, also that 
 the votes were divided about evenly in answer- 
 ing the inquiry : Should the sexes receive 
 education in common ? 
 
 The eleventh chapter of the first book of 
 Chronicles is one which I often read because 
 of its epic flavor. It is, indeed, an epic and a 
 lyric in one, this story of David's " mighty 
 men." Thirty of them there were, all cap- 
 tains, all doers of deeds ; but twenty-seven of 
 these heroes, although they had honorable 
 
EDUCATION 277 
 
 mention among the thirty, "attained not to 
 the first three." 
 
 Some of these second-rank men were rather 
 capable fellows — Abishai the brother of Joab, 
 for instance, who lifted up his spear against 
 three hundred and slew them ; Benaiah the 
 son of Jehoiada, too, who slew two lionlike 
 men of Moab : also he went down and slew 
 a lion in a pit in a snowy day. 
 
 " And he slew an Egyptian, a man of great 
 stature, five cubits high; and in the Egyp- 
 tian's hand was a spear like a weaver's beam." 
 
 Benaiah and Abishai were evidently men 
 of aspirations, and so also were those "valiant 
 men of the armies " whose names follow in 
 the list. If their deeds differed from those of 
 the " three mighties " it was rather in kind 
 than in degree of prowess. 
 
 We have vaunted a " Big Four " in the 
 history of our own country and their deeds 
 differed from those of David's First Three in 
 kind and degree also. For this was the story 
 of the three mighty captains : — 
 
 " Now three of the thirty captains went 
 down to the rock to David, into the cave of 
 
278 EDUCATION 
 
 Adullam; and the host of the Philistines 
 encamped in the valley of Rephaim. 
 
 " And David was then in the hold, and the 
 Philistines' garrison was then at Beth-lehem. 
 
 " And David longed, and said, Oh that one 
 would give me drink of the water of the well 
 of Beth-lehem, that is at the gate ! 
 
 " And the three brake through the host 
 of the Philistines, and drew water out of the 
 well of Beth-lehem, that was by the gate, and 
 brought it to David : but David would not 
 drink of it, but poured it out to the Lord, 
 
 " And said, My God forbid it me, that I 
 should do this thing : shall I drink the blood 
 of these men that have put their lives in 
 jeopardy? for with the jeopardy of their 
 lives they brought it. Therefore he would 
 not drink it. These things did these three 
 mightiest." 
 
 According to latter-day standards this epi- 
 sode was very foolishly managed. David was 
 a king, and a rich man. He had flocks and 
 herds, gold, silver, and jewels. He was per- 
 fectly well able to pay the three captains 
 " big money " for risking their lives to gratify 
 
EDUCATION 279 
 
 his longings, and if, knowing the peril, they 
 still chose to jeopardize themselves, that was 
 their own affair. When the adventure was 
 safely ended, the three captains could perhaps 
 have retired on their earnings and purchased 
 for themselves purple and fine linen and 
 horses and chariots and the like, just as we 
 moderns buy changes of raiment and auto- 
 mobiles and steam yachts with the blood 
 money for which we put ourselves in jeopardy. 
 
 As for David, he could have enjoyed his 
 cooling draught with a clear conscience. 
 Why not, since he had made a business con- 
 tract and " delivered the goods " ? There was 
 doubtless water to be had nearer at hand than 
 that of the well of Beth-lehem, but if a man 
 has an especial kind of thirst, he does have 
 it; and having paid for its gratification, to 
 waste the liquor is senseless deprivation. 
 
 It was the Puritan conscience, we are told, 
 which " put rock foundations under this re- 
 public ; " in the minds of some old-fashioned 
 people the belief still obtains that courage 
 and loyalty and self-control and self-sacrifice 
 lie at the foundation of both national and 
 
2 8o EDUCATION 
 
 individual character, and that the nation or 
 the individual who forsakes these ideals will, 
 in spite of all the opportunities and training of 
 schools and colleges and universities, remain 
 radically uneducated. 
 
EUctrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton &* Co. 
 Cambridge, Most., U.S. A. 
 
AUG 24 1905