fruit-trees begin to show; the blood is HE love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wild-oats, drifted about the world and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground and stay there. To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch their renewal of life-this The night has a thousand eyes, And the day but one, Yet the light of the bright world With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one, -Francis W. Bourdillon is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do. When Cicero writes of the pleasures of old age, that of agriculture is chief among them s sounds. Hoeing in the garden on a bright, soft May day, when you are not obliged to, is nearly equal to the delight of going trouting › so Blessed be agriculture!-if one does not have too much of it. All literature is fragrant with it, in a gentlemanly way. At the foot of the charming, olive-covered hills of Tivoli, Horace had a sunny farm: it was in sight of Hadrian's villa, who did landscape-gardening on an extensive scale, and probably did not get half as much comfort from it as Horace did from his more simply tilled acres. We trust that Horace did a little hoeing and farming himself, and that his verse is not all fraudulent sentiment. In order to enjoy agriculture you do not want too much of it, and you want to be poor enough to have a little inducement to work moderately yourself. Hoe while it is Spring and enjoy the best anticipations. It is not much matter if things do not turn out well. To dig in the mellow soil-to dig moderately, for all pleasure should be taken sparingly-is a great thing. One gets strength out of the ground as often as one touches it with a hoe. Antæus was no doubt an agriculturist; and such a prize-fighter as Hercules could n't do anything with him till he got him to lay down his spade and quit the soil. It is not simply potatoes and beets and corn and cucumbers that one raises in his well-hoed garden; it is the average of human life. There is life in the ground; have committed the Golden Rule it goes into the seeds; and it also, when it is stirred up, goes into the man who stirs it. The hot sun on his back as he bends to his shovel and hoe, or contemplatively rakes the warm and fragrant loam, is better than much medicine. The buds are coming out on the bushes round about; the blossoms of the E -Charles Dudley Warner. to memory; let us now commit it to life We have preached Brotherhood for centuries; we now need to find a material basis for brotherhood. Government must be made the organ of Fraternity-a working-form for comrade-love. Think on this-work for this. -Edwin Markham. those odd moments? Thomas A. Edison, for instance, was hammering away at a telegraph-key when he was telegraph-operator on a small salary. He did n't neglect the by-product, the odd moments. He thought, and planned, and tried between messages. And he worked out, as a by-product of his telegraph job, all the inventions that And this I hate-not men, nor flag nor But only War with its wild, grinning God strike it till its eyes be blind as N these days, much of the And all its members tremble with Oh, let it hear in its death agony And on its head Descend the venomed curses of its sons Had dyed the daisies red. (Concluded on next page) If Mr. Armour neglected making the hair rope, or selling the pigtails, it would make a big difference in his dividends The point for the reader is this: The individual man does not manufacture, as a rule. But we are, all of us, dealers in time Time is the one thing we possess. Our success depends upon the use of our time, and its by-product, the odd moment Each of us has a regular day's work that he does in a routine, more or less mechanical, way. He does his clerking, his writing, his typewriting, or whatever it may be, so many hours per day. And that ends it. But what about the by-product, the odd moments? Do you know that the men that have made great successes in this world are the men that have used wisely have given him millions, and given to the inhabitants of the world thousands of millions' worth of dollars in new ideas. Benjamin Franklin in his story of his life shows an endless number of such efforts along the lines using the odd moments. In a hundred different ways he managed to make the extra hours useful and productive. What a man does in his odd moments is "Letting well enough alone" is a foolish Every minute that you save by making Think of the odd quarter of an hour in the morning before breakfast, the odd half-hour after breakfast, remember the chance to read, or figure, or think with concentration on your own career, that comes now and again in the day. All ot these opportunities are the by-products of your daily existence. leading theology. Do not feed children on a maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them Nature. Let their souls drink in all that is pure and sweet. Rear them, if possible, amid pleasant surroundings. If they come into the world with souls groping in darkness, let them see and feel the light. Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of an after All these I hate-war and its panoply, The toil of peasants through the burdened years, Use them, and you may find what many The legacy of long disease that preys Until it shrivel with its votaries That nevermore Its dreadful call of murder may be heard; From blood-drenched shore to shore! HAT is the good of prescribing to art the roads that it must follow To do so is to doubt art, which develops normally according to the laws of Nature, and must be exclusively occupied in responding to human needs. Art has always shown itself faithful to Nature, and has marched with social progress. The ideal of beauty can not perish in a healthy society; we must then give liberty to art, and leave her to herself. Have confidence in her; she will reach her end, and if she strays from the way she will soon reach it again; society itself will be the guide. No single artist, not Shakespeare himself, can prescribe to art her roads and aims.-Dostoievski. world. Never was a absorbs the sunshine and the dew. -Luther Burbank. BOVE the indistinguishable roar of the many feet I feel the presence of the sun, of the immense forces of the universe, and beyond these the sense of the eternal now, of the immortal. Full aware that all has failed, yet, side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now. Something to shape this million-handed labor to an end and outcome, leaving accumulated sunshine and flowers to those who shall succeed. It must be dragged forth by might of thought from the immense forces of the universe.-Richard Jeffries. There is a chord in every heart that has a sigh in it if touched aright.-Ouida. HERE is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when At the organ-grinder goes his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that leap The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below the beasts of the field.-Jack London. HEN we succeed in adjusting our airily, weaving rhythms never taught in social structure in such a way as to dancing school. I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and color, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth and rags. But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away. They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them. You may look for them in vain among the generation of grown-ups. Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a girl. The crowd closes in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more than parody with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls dance on. enable us to solve social questions as fast as they become really pressing, they will no longer force their way into the theater. Had Ibsen, for instance, had any reason to believe that the abuses to which he called attention in his prose plays would have been adequately attended to without his interference, he would no doubt have gladly left them alone. The same exigency drove William Morris in England from his tapestries, his epics, and his masterpieces of printing, to try and bring his fellow-citizens to their senses by the summary process of shouting at them in the streets and in Trafalgar Square. John Ruskin's writing began with Modern Painters, Carlyle began with literary studies of German culture and the like; both were driven to become revolutionary pamphleteers. If people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must. -George Bernard Shaw. VERY one now believes that there is in a man an animating, ruling, characteristic essence, or spirit, which is himself. This spirit, dull or bright, petty or grand, pure or foul, looks out of the eyes, sounds in the voice, and appears in the manners of each individual. It is what we call personality. -Chas. W. Eliot. Sleep hath its own world, a boundary between the things misnamed death and existence.-Byron. Reason is the life of the law.-Coke. DON'T know what I would do if I had only "two minutes to live," or what message I should give to the world. If I really thought I had only that time to live, I should like to take time to think up a fine and noble message so that my last words might have the dignity of those we have read about, which prob ably were n't last words at all. However, I think if I had the power to do what I wish to do for humanity, I would give to every person the ability to put himself into the place of every other person in the world. In this way he would have that education, that culture which comes of the highest quality of imagination, and that quality, I take it, has been most perfectly exemplified in the poets and saviors of the race, in that they were So he died for his faith. That is fine, In his death he bore witness at last As a martyr to the truth. For a wish or a whim— All the truth that he dreamt, And the world with contempt. Then we'll talk of the life that he lived. "Life and Death," by Ernest Crosby able to feel and suffer what others were feeling and suffering, and when we come to a time when we realize just what the other fellow is suffering we will be moved by the desire to help him, and when we are moved by the desire to help him we come to a time when we see that this help must be administered intelligently, and ultimately we realize that it is the denial of equality, the denial of liberty, political and economic, in the world which is the cause of most of its suffering. If we had a world made up of people possessing this quality of imagination, this kind of culture, we would soon do away with the causes of involuntary poverty, and to do away with involuntary poverty would mean to do away with practically all the crime and vice awhile longerwith our broken purposes of good, with our idle endeavors against evil-suffer us awhile longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns to us, our sun and comforter, call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts -eager to labor-eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion-and it the day be marked for sorrow-strong to endure it." An Evening Prayer," by Robert Louis Stevenson. HEN I would beget content and increase confidence in the power and wisdom and providence of Almighty God, I will walk the meadows by some gliding stream, and there contemplate the lilies that take no care, and those very many other little living creatures that are not only created, but fed (man knows not how) by the goodness of the God of Nature, and therefore trust in Him.-Izaak Walton. |