We cannot see the natural world through the books or the eyes of others. All this talk about "babbling brooks" is a stereotyped humbug. Brooks never "babble." To babble is to be unintelligent and imperfect of tongue. But when the brooks speak, they utter lessons of beauty that the dullest ear can understand. We have wandered from the Androscoggin in Maine to the Tombigbee in Alabama, and we never found a brook, that "babbled." The people babble who talk about them, not knowing what a brook is. We have heard about the nightingale and the morning lark till we tire of them. Catch for your next prayer meeting talk a chewink or a brown thresher. It is high time that we hoist our church windows, especially those over the pulpit, and let in some fresh air from the fields and mountains.



CHAPTER XXVII.

CHRISTMAS BELLS.

The sexton often goes into the tower on a sad errand. He gives a strong pull at the rope, and forth from the tower goes a dismal sound that makes the heart sink. But he can now go up the old stairs with a lithe step and pull quick and sharp, waking up all the echoes of cavern and hill with Christmas bells. The days of joy have come, days of reunion, days of congratulation. "Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy that shall be to all people."

First, let the bells ring at the birth of Jesus! Mary watching, the camels moaning, the shepherds rousing up, the angels hovering, all Bethlehem stirring. What a night! Out of its black wing is plucked the pen from which to write the brightest songs of earth and the richest doxologies of heaven. Let camel or ox stabled that night in Bethlehem, after the burden-bearing of the day, stand and look at Him who is to carry the burdens of the world. Put back the straw and hear the first cry of Him who is come to assuage the lamentation of all ages.

Christmas bells ring out the peace of nations! We want on our standards less of the lion and eagle and more of the dove. Let all the cannon be dismounted, and the war horses change their gorgeous caparisons for plough harness. Let us have fewer bullets and more bread. Life is too precious to dash it out against the brick casements. The first Peace Society was born in the clouds, and its resolution was passed unanimously by angelic voices, "Peace on earth, good-will to men."

Christmas bells ring in family reunions! The rail trains crowded with children coming home. The poultry, fed as never since they were born, stand wondering at the farmer's generosity. The markets are full of massacred barnyards. The great table will be spread and crowded with two, or three, or four generations. Plant the fork astride the breast bone, and with skillful twitch, that we could never learn, give to all the hungry lookers-on a specimen of holiday anatomy. Mary is disposed to soar, give her the wing. The boy is fond of music, give him the drum stick. The minister is dining with you, give him the parson's nose. May the joy reach from grandfather, who is so dreadful old he can hardly find the way to his plate, down to the baby in the high chair with one smart pull of the table cloth upsetting the gravy into the cranberry. Send from your table a liberal portion to the table of the poor, some of the white meat as well as the dark, not confining your generosity to gizzards and scraps. Do not, as in some families, keep a plate and chair for those who are dead and gone. Your holiday feast would be but poor fare for them; they are at a better banquet in the skies.

Let the whole land be full of chime and carol. Let bells, silver and brazen, take their sweetest voice, and all the towers of Christendom rain music.

We wish all our friends a merry Christmas. Let them hang up their stockings; and if Santa Claus has any room for us in his sleigh, we will get in and ride down their chimney, upsetting all over the hearth a thousand good wishes.



CHAPTER XXVIII.

POOR PREACHING.

There never was a time when in all denominations of Christians there was so much attractive sermonizing as to-day. Princeton, and Middletown, and Rochester, and New Brunswick, are sending into the ministry a large number of sharp, earnest, consecrated men. Stupidity, after being regularly ordained, is found to be no more acceptable to the people than before, and the title of Doctorate cannot any longer be substituted for brains. Perhaps, however, there may get to be a surfeit of fine discourses. Indeed, we have so many appliances for making bright and incisive preachers that we do not know but that after a while, when we want a sleepy discourse as an anodyne, we shall have to go to the ends of the earth to find one; and dull sermons may be at a premium, congregations of limited means not being able to afford them at all; and so we shall have to fall back on chloral or morphine.

Are we not, therefore, doing a humanitarian work when we give to congregations some rules by which, if they want it, they may always have poor preaching?

First. Keep your minister poor. There is nothing more ruinous than to pay a pastor too much salary. Let every board of trustees look over their books and see if they have erred in this direction; and if so, let them cut down the minister's wages. There are churches which pay their pastors eight hundred dollars per annum. What these good men do with so much money we cannot imagine. Our ministers must be taken in. If by occasional fasting for a day our Puritan fathers in New England became so good, what might we not expect of our ministers if we kept them in perpetual fast? No doubt their spiritual capacity would enlarge in proportion to their shrinkage at the waistcoat. The average salary of ministers in the United States is about six hundred dollars. Perhaps by some spiritual pile-driver we might send it down to five hundred dollars; and then the millennium, for the lion by that time would be so hungry he would let the lamb lie down inside of him. We would suggest a very economical plan: give your spiritual adviser a smaller income, and make it up by a donation visit. When everything else fails to keep him properly humble, that succeeds. We speak from experience. Fourteen years ago we had one, and it has been a means of grace to us ever since.

Secondly. For securing poor preaching, wait on your pastor with frequent committees. Let three men some morning tie their horses at the dominie's gate, and go in and tell him how to preach, and pray, and visit. Tell him all the disagreeable things said about him for six months, and what a great man his predecessor was, how much plainer his wife dressed, and how much better his children behaved. Pastoral committees are not like the small-pox—you can have them more than once; they are more like the mumps, which you may have first on one side and then on the other. If, after a man has had the advantage of being manipulated by three church committees, he has any pride or spirit left, better give him up as incorrigible.

Thirdly. To secure poor preaching, keep the minister on the trot. Scold him when he comes to see you because he did not come before, and tell him how often you were visited by the former pastor. Oh, that blessed predecessor! Strange they did not hold on to the angel when they had him. Keep your minister going. Expect him to respond to every whistle. Have him at all the tea parties and "the raisings." Stand him in the draught of the door at the funeral—a frequent way of declaring a pulpit vacant. Keep him busy all the week in out-door miscellaneous work; and if at the end of that time he cannot preach a weak discourse, send for us, and we will show him how to do it. Of course there are exceptions to all rules; but if the plan of treatment we have proposed be carried out, we do not see that any church in city or country need long be in want of poor preaching.



CHAPTER XXIX.

SHELVES A MAN'S INDEX.

In Chelsea, a suburb of London, and on a narrow street, with not even a house in front, but, instead thereof, a long range of brick wall, is the house of Thomas Carlyle. You go through a narrow hall and turn to the left, and are in the literary workshop where some of the strongest thunderbolts of the world have been forged. The two front windows have on them scant curtains of reddish calico, hung at the top of the lower sash, so as not to keep the sun from looking down, but to hinder the street from looking in.

The room has a lounge covered with the same material, and of construction such as you would find in the plainest house among the mountains. It looks as if it had been made by an author not accustomed to saw or hammer, and in the interstices of mental work. On the wall are a few wood-cuts in plain frames or pinned against the wall; also a photograph of Mr. Carlyle taken one day, as his family told us, when he had a violent toothache and could attend to nothing else, it is his favorite picture, though it gives him a face more than ordinarily severe and troubled.

In long shelves, unpainted and unsheltered by glass or door, is the library of the world-renowned thinker. The books are worn, as though he had bought them to read. Many of them are uncommon books, the titles of which we never saw before. American literature is almost ignored, while Germany monopolizes many of the spaces. We noticed the absence of theological works, save those of Thomas Chalmers, whose name and genius he well-nigh worshiped. The carpets are old and worn and faded—not because he cannot afford better, but because he would have his home a perpetual protest against the world's sham. It is a place not calculated to give inspiration to a writer. No easy chairs, no soft divans, no wealth of upholstery, but simply a place to work and stay. Never having heard a word about it, it was nevertheless just such a place as we expected.

We had there confirmed our former theory of a man's study as only a part of himself, or a piece of tight-fitting clothing. It is the shell of the tortoise, just made to fit the tortoise's back. Thomas Carlyle could have no other kind of a workshop. What would he do with a damask-covered table, or a gilded inkstand, or an upholstered window? Starting with the idea that the intellect is all and the body naught but an adjunct or appendage, he will show that the former can live and thrive without any approval of the latter. He will give the intellect all costly stimulus, and send the body supperless to bed. Thomas Carlyle taken as a premise, this shabby room is the inevitable conclusion. Behold the principle.

We have a poetic friend. The backs of his books are scrolled and transfigured. A vase of japonicas, even in mid-winter, adorns his writing desk. The hot-house is as important to him as the air. There are soft engravings on the wall. This study-chair was made out of the twisted roots of a banyan. A dog, sleek-skinned, lies on the mat, and gets up as you come in. There stand in vermilion all the poets from Homer to Tennyson. Here and there are chamois heads and pressed seaweed. He writes on gilt-edged paper with a gold pen and handle twisted with a serpent. His inkstand is a mystery of beauty which unskilled hands dare not touch, lest the ink spring at him from some of the open mouths, or sprinkle on him from the bronze wings, or with some unexpected squirt dash into his eyes the blackness of darkness.

We have a very precise friend. Everything is in severe order. Finding his door-knob in the dark, you could reason out the position of stove, and chair, and table; and placing an arrow at the back of the book on one end of the shelf, it would fly to the other end, equally grazing all the bindings. It is ten years since John Milton, or Robert Southey, or Sir William Hamilton have been out of their places, and that was when an ignoramus broke into the study. The volumes of the encyclopedias never change places. Manuscripts unblotted, and free from interlineation, and labeled. The spittoon knows its place in the corner, as if treated by tobacco chewers with oft indignity. You could go into that study with your eyes shut, turn around, and without feeling for the chair throw yourself back with perfect confidence that the furniture would catch you. No better does a hat fit his head, or shoe his foot, or the glove his hand, than the study fits his whole nature.

We have a facetious friend. You pick off the corner of his writing table "Noctes Ambrosianae" or the London "Punch." His chair is wide, so that he can easily roll off on the floor when he wants a good time at laughing. His inkstand is a monkey, with the variations. His study-cap would upset a judge's risibilities. Scrap books with droll caricatures and facetiae. An odd stove, exciting your wonder as to where the coal is put in or the poker thrust for a shaking. All the works of Douglass Jerrold, and Sydney Smith, and Sterne, the scalawag ecclesiastic. India-rubber faces capable of being squashed into anything. Puzzles that you cannot untangle. The four walls covered with cuts and engravings sheared from weekly pictorials and recklessly taken from parlor table books. Prints that put men and women into hopeless satire.

We have a friend of many peculiarities. Entering his house, you find nothing in the place where you expected it. "Don Quixote," with, all its windmills mixed up with "Dr. Dick on the Sacraments," Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog," and "Charnock on the Attributes." Passing across the room, you stumble against the manuscript of his last lecture, or put your foot in a piece of pie that has fallen off the end of the writing table. You mistake his essay on the "Copernican System" for blotting paper. Many of his books are bereft of the binding; and in attempting to replace the covers, Hudibras gets the cover which belongs to "Barnes on the Acts of the Apostles." An earthquake in the room would be more apt to improve than to unsettle. There are marks where the inkstand became unstable and made a handwriting on the wall that even Daniel could not have interpreted. If, some fatal day, the wife or housekeeper come in, while the occupant is absent, to "clear up," a damage is done that requires weeks to repair. For many days the question is, "Where is my pen? Who has the concordance? What on earth has become of the dictionary? Where is the paper cutter?" Work is impeded, patience lost, engagements are broken, because it was not understood that the study is a part of the student's life, and that you might as well try to change the knuckles to the inside of the hand, or to set the eyes in the middle of the forehead, as to make the man of whom we speak keep his pen on the rack, or his books off the floor, or the blotting paper straight in the portfolio.

The study is a part of the mental development. Don't blame a man for the style of his literary apartments any more than you would for the color of his hair or the shape of his nose. If Hobbes carries his study with him, and his pen and his inkstand in the top of his cane, so let him carry them. If Lamartine can best compose while walking his park, paper and pencil in hand, so let him ramble. If Robert Hall thinks easiest when lying flat on his back, let him be prostrate. If Lamasius writes best surrounded by children, let loose on him the whole nursery. Don't criticise Charles Dickens because he threw all his study windows wide open and the shades up. It may fade the carpet, but it will pour sunshine into the hearts of a million readers. If Thomas Carlyle chose to call around an ink-spattered table Goethe, and Schiller, and Jean Paul Frederick Richter, and dissect the shams of the world with a plain goose-quill, so be it. The horns of an ox's head are not more certainly a part of the ox than Thomas Carlyle's study and all its appointments are a part of Thomas Carlyle.

The gazelle will have soft fur, and the lion a shaggy hide, and the sanctum sanctorum is the student's cuticle.



CHAPTER XXX.

BEHAVIOR AT CHURCH.

Around the door of country meeting-houses it has always been the custom for the people to gather before and after church for social intercourse and the shaking of hands. Perhaps because we, ourselves, were born in the country and had never got over it, the custom pleases us. In the cities we arrive the last moment before service and go away the first moment after. We act as though the church were a rail-car, into which we go when the time for starting arrives, and we get out again as soon as the depot of the Doxology is reached. We protest against this business way of doing things. Shake hands when the benediction is pronounced with those who sat before and those who sat behind you. Meet the people in the aisle, and give them Christian salutation. Postponement of the dining hour for fifteen minutes will damage neither you nor the dinner. That is the moment to say a comforting word to the man or woman in trouble. The sermon was preached to the people in general; it is your place to apply it to the individual heart.

The church aisle may be made the road to heaven. Many a man who was unaffected by what the minister said has been captured for God by the Christian word of an unpretending layman on the way out.

You may call it personal magnetism, or natural cordiality, but there are some Christians who have such an ardent way of shaking hands after meeting that it amounts to a benediction. Such greeting is not made with the left hand. The left hand is good for a great many things, for instance to hold a fork or twist a curl, but it was never made to shake hands with, unless you have lost the use of the right. Nor is it done by the tips of the fingers laid loosely in the palm of another. Nor is it done with a glove on. Gloves are good to keep out the cold and make one look well, but have them so they can easily be removed, as they should be, for they are non-conductors of Christian magnetism. Make bare the hand. Place it in the palm of your friend. Clench the fingers across the back part of the hand you grip. Then let all the animation of your heart rush to the shoulder, and from there to the elbow, and then through the fore arm and through the wrist, till your friend gets the whole charge of gospel electricity.

In Paul's time he told the Christians to greet each other with a holy kiss. We are glad the custom has been dropped, for there are many good people who would not want to kiss us, as we would not want to kiss them. Very attractive persons would find the supply greater than the demand. But let us have a substitute suited to our age and land. Let it be good, hearty, enthusiastic, Christian hand-shaking.

Governor Wiseman, our grave friend at tea, broke in upon us at this moment and said: I am not fond of indiscriminate hand-shaking, and so am not especially troubled by the lack of cordiality on the part of church-goers. But I am sometimes very much annoyed on Sabbaths with the habit of some good people in church. It may be foolish in me; but when the wind blows from the east, it takes but little to disturb me.

There are some of the best Christian people who do not know how to carry themselves in religious assemblage. They never laugh. They never applaud. They never hiss. Yet, notwithstanding, are disturbers of public worship.

There is, for instance, the coughing brigade. If any individual right ought to be maintained at all hazards, it is the right of coughing. There are times when you must cough. There is an irresistible tickling in the throat which demands audible demonstration. It is moved, seconded and unanimously carried that those who have irritated windpipes be heard. But there are ways with hand or handkerchief of breaking the repercussion. A smothered cough is dignified and acceptable if you have nothing better to offer. But how many audiences have had their peace sacrificed by unrestrained expulsion of air through the glottis! After a sudden change in the weather, there is a fearful charge made by the coughing brigade. They open their mouths wide, and make the arches ring with the racket. They begin with a faint "Ahem!" and gradually rise and fall through all the scale of dissonance, as much as to say: "Hear, all ye good people! I have a cold! I have a bad cold! I have an awful bad cold! Hear how it racks me, tears me, torments me. It seems as if my diaphragm must be split. I took this awful bad cold the other night. I added to it last Sunday. Hear how it goes off! There it is again. Oh dear me! If I only had 'Brown's troches,' or the syrup of squills, or a mustard plaster, or a woolen stocking turned wrong side out around my neck!" Brethren and sisters who took cold by sitting in the same draught join the clamor, and it is glottis to glottis, and laryngitis to laryngitis, and a chorus of scrapings and explosions which make the service hideous for a preacher of sensitive nerves.

We have seen people under the pulpit coughing with their mouth so far open we have been tempted to jump into it. There are some persons who have a convenient ecclesiastical cough. It does not trouble them ordinarily; but when in church you get them thoroughly cornered with some practical truth, they smother the end of the sentences with a favorite paroxysm. There is a man in our church who is apt to be taken with one of these fits just as the contribution box comes to him, and cannot seem to get his breath again till he hears the pennies rattling in the box behind him. Cough by all means, but put on the brakes when you come to the down grade, or send the racket through at least one fold of your pocket-handkerchief.

Governor Wiseman went on further to say that the habits of the pulpit sometimes annoyed him as much as the habits of the pew. The Governor said: I cannot bear the "preliminaries" of religious service.

By common consent the exercises in the churches going before the sermon are called "preliminaries." The dictionary says that a "preliminary" is that which precedes the main business. We do not think the sermon ought to be considered the main business. When a pastor at the beginning of the first prayer says "O God!" he has entered upon the most important duty of the service. We would not depreciate the sermon, but we plead for more attention to the "preliminaries." If a minister cannot get the attention of the people for prayer or Bible reading, it is his own fault. Much of the interest of a service depends upon how it is launched.

The "preliminaries" are, for the most part, the time in which people in church examine their neighbors' clothes. Milliners and tailors get the advantage of the first three-quarters of an hour. The "preliminaries" are the time to scrutinize the fresco, and look round to see who is there, and get yourself generally fixed.

This idea is fostered by home elocutionary professors who would have the minister take the earlier exercises of the occasion to get his voice in tune. You must not speak out at first. It is to be a private interview between you and heaven. The people will listen to the low grumble, and think it must be very good if they could only hear it. As for ourselves, we refuse to put down our head in public prayer until we find out whether or not we are going to be able to hear. Though you preach like an angel, you will not say anything more important than that letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, or that Psalm of David which you have just now read to the backs of the heads of the congregation. Laymen and ministers, speak out! The opening exercises were not instituted to clear your voice, but to save souls. If need be, squeeze a lemon and eat "Brown's troches" for the sake of your voice before you go to church; but once there, make your first sentence resonant and mighty for God. An hour and a half is short time anyhow to get five hundred or five thousand people ready for heaven. It is thought classic and elegant to have a delicate utterance, and that loud tones are vulgar. But we never heard of people being converted by anything they could not hear. It is said that on the Mount of Olives Christ opened His mouth and taught them, by which we conclude He spake out distinctly. God has given most Christians plenty of lungs, but they are too lazy to use them. There are in the churches old people hard of hearing who, if the exercises be not clear and emphatic, get no advantage save that of looking at the blessed minister.

People say in apology for their inaudible tones: "It is not the thunder that kills, but the lightning." True enough; but I think that God thinks well of the thunder or He would not use so much of it. First of all, make the people hear the prayer and the chapter. If you want to hold up at all, let it be on the sermon and the notices. Let the pulpit and all the pews feel that there are no "preliminaries."



CHAPTER XXXI.

MASCULINE AND FEMININE.

There are men who suppose they have all the annoyances. They say it is the store that ruffles the disposition; but if they could only stay at home as do their wives, and sisters, and daughters, they would be, all the time, sweet and fair as a white pond lily. Let some of the masculine lecturers on placidity of temper try for one week the cares of the household and the family. Let the man sleep with a baby on one arm all night, and one ear open to the children with the whooping-cough in the adjoining apartment. Let him see the tray of crockery and the cook fall down stairs, and nothing saved but the pieces. Let the pump give out on a wash-day, and the stove pipe, when too hot for handling, get dislocated. Let the pudding come out of the stove stiff as a poker. Let the gossiping gabbler of next door come in and tell all the disagreeable things that neighbors have been saying. Let the lungs be worn out by staying indoors without fresh air, and the needle be threaded with nerves exhausted. After one week's household annoyances, he would conclude that Wall street is heaven and the clatter of the Stock Exchange rich as Beethoven's symphony.

We think Mary of Bethany a little to blame for not helping Martha get the dinner. If women sympathize with men in the troubles of store and field, let the men also sympathize with the women in the troubles of housekeeping. Many a housewife has died of her annoyances. A bar of soap may become a murderous weapon. The poor cooking stove has sometimes been the slow fire on which the wife has been roasted. In the day when Latimer and Ridley are honored before the universe as the martyrs of the fire, we do not think the Lord will forget the long line of wives, mothers, daughters and sisters who have been the martyrs of the kitchen.

Accompanying masculine criticism of woman's temper goes the popular criticism of woman's dress.

A convention has recently been held in Vineland, attended by the women who are opposed to extravagance in dress. They propose, not only by formal resolution, but by personal example, to teach the world lessons of economy by wearing less adornment and dragging fewer yards of silk.

We wish them all success, although we would have more confidence in the movement if so many of the delegates had not worn bloomer dress. Moses makes war upon that style of apparel in Deuteronomy xxii. 5: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto man." Nevertheless we favor every effort to stop the extravagant use of dry goods and millinery.

We have, however, no sympathy with the implication that women are worse than men in this respect. Men wear all they can without interfering with their locomotion, but man is such an awkward creature he cannot find any place on his body to hang a great many fineries. He could not get round in Wall street with eight or ten flounces, and a big-handled parasol, and a mountain of back hair. Men wear less than women, not because they are more moral, but because they cannot stand it. As it is, many of our young men are padded to a superlative degree, and have corns and bunions on every separate toe from wearing shoes too tight.

Neither have we any sympathy with the implication that the present is worse than the past in matters of dress. Compare the fashion plates of the seventeenth century with the fashion plates of the nineteenth, and you decide in favor of our day. The women of Isaiah's time beat anything now. Do we have the kangaroo fashion Isaiah speaks of—the daughters who walked with "stretched forth necks?" Talk of hoops! Isaiah speaks of women with "round tires like the moon." Do we have hot irons for curling our hair? Isaiah speaks of "wimples and crisping pins." Do we sometimes wear glasses astride our nose, not because we are near-sighted, but for beautification? Isaiah speaks of the "glasses, and the earrings, and the nose jewels." The dress of to-day is far more sensible than that of a hundred or a thousand years ago.

But the largest room in the world is room for improvement, and we would cheer on those who would attempt reformation either in male or female attire. Meanwhile, we rejoice that so many of the pearls, and emeralds, and amethysts, and diamonds of the world are coming in the possession of Christian women. Who knows but that the spirit of ancient consecration may some day come upon them, and it shall again be as it was in the time of Moses, that for the prosperity of the house of the Lord the women may bring their bracelets, and earrings, and tablets and jewels? The precious stones of earth will never have their proper place till they are set around the Pearl of Great Price.



CHAPTER XXXII.

LITERARY FELONY.

We have recently seen many elaborate discussions as to whether plagiarism is virtuous or criminal—in other words, whether writers may steal. If a minister can find a sermon better than any one he can make, why not preach it? If an author can find a paragraph for his book better than any he can himself manufacture, why not appropriate it?

That sounds well. But why not go further and ask, if a woman find a set of furs better than she has in her wardrobe, why not take them? If a man find that his neighbor has a cow full Alderney, while he has in his own yard only a scrawny runt, why not drive home the Alderney? Theft is taking anything that does not belong to you, whether it be sheep, oxen, hats, coats or literary material.

Without attempting to point put the line that divides the lawful appropriation of another's ideas from the appropriation of another's phraseology, we have only to say that a literary man always knows when he is stealing. Whether found out or not, the process is belittling, and a man is through it blasted for this world and damaged for the next one. The ass in the fable wanted to die because he was beaten so much, but after death they changed his hide into a drum-head, and thus he was beaten more than ever. So the plagiarist is so vile a cheat that there is not much chance for him, living or dead. A minister who hopes to do good with each burglary will no more be a successful ambassador to men than a foreign minister despatched by our government to-day would succeed if he presented himself at the court of St. James with the credentials that he stole from the archives of those illustrious ex-ministers, James Buchanan or Benjamin Franklin.

What every minister needs is a fresh message that day from the Lord. We would sell cheap all our parchments of licensure to preach. God gives his ministers a license every Sabbath and a new message. He sends none of us out so mentally poor that we have nothing to furnish but a cold hash of other people's sermons. Our haystack is large enough for all the sheep that come round it, and there is no need of our taking a single forkful from any other barrack. By all means use all the books you can get at, but devour them, chew them fine and digest them, till they become a part of the blood and bone of your own nature. There is no harm in delivering an oration or sermon belonging to some one else provided you so announce it. Quotation marks are cheap, and let us not be afraid to use them. Do you know why "quotation" marks are made up of four commas, two at the head of the paragraph adopted and two at the close of it? Those four commas mean that you should stop four times before you steal anything.

If there were no question of morals involved, plagiarism is nevertheless most perilous. There are a great many constables out for the arrest of such defrauders. That stolen paragraph that you think will never be recognized has been committed to memory by that old lady with green goggles in the front pew. That very same brilliant passage you have just pronounced was delivered by the clergyman who preached in that pulpit the Sabbath before: two thieves met in one hen-roost. All we know of Doctor Hayward of Queen Elizabeth's time is that he purloined from Tacitus. Be dishonest once in this respect, and when you do really say something original and good the world will cry out, "Yes, very fine! I always did like Joseph Addison!"

Sermons are successful not according to the head involved in them, but according to the heart implied, and no one can feel aright while preaching a literary dishonesty. Let us be content to wear our own coat, though the nap on it is not quite as well looking, to ride on our own horse, though he do not gallop as gracefully and will "break up" when others are passing. There is a work for us all to do, and God gives us just the best tools to do it. What folly to be hankering after our neighbor's chalk line and gimlet!



CHAPTER XXXIII.

LITERARY ABSTINENCE.

It is as much an art not to read as to read. With what pains, and thumps, and whacks at school we first learned the way to put words together!

We did not mind so much being whipped by the schoolmaster for not knowing how to read our lesson, but to have to go out ourselves and cut the hickory switch with which the chastisement was to be inflicted seemed to us then, as it does now, a great injustice.

Notwithstanding all our hard work in learning to read we find it quite as hard now to learn how not to read. There are innumerable books and newspapers from which one had better abstain.

There are but very few newspapers which it is safe to read all through, though we know of one that it is best to peruse from beginning to end, but modesty forbids us stating which one that is. In this day readers need as never before to carry a sieve.

It requires some heroism to say you have not read such and such a book. Your friend gives you a stare which implies your literary inferiority. Do not, in order to answer the question affirmatively, wade through indiscriminate slush.

We have to say that three-fourths of the novels of the day are a mental depletion to those who read them. The man who makes wholesale denunciation of notion pitches overboard "Pilgrim's Progress" and the parables of our Lord. But the fact is that some of the publishing houses that once were cautious about the moral tone of their books have become reckless about every thing but the number of copies sold. It is all the same to them whether the package they send out be corn starch, jujube paste or hellebore. They wrap up fifty copies and mark them C.O.D. But if the expressman, according to that mark, should collect on delivery all the curses that shall come on the head of the publishing house which printed them, he would break down his wagon and kill his horses with the load. Let parents and guardians be especially watchful. Have a quarantine at your front door for all books and newspapers. Let the health doctor go abroad and see whether there is any sickness there before you let it come to wharfage.

Whether young or old, be cautious about what you read in the newspapers. You cannot day after day go through three columns of murder trial without being a worse man than when you began. While you are trying to find out whether Stokes was lying in wait for Fisk, Satan is lying in wait for you. Skip that half page of divorce case. Keep out of the mud. The Burdell and Sickles cases, through the unclean reading they afforded to millions of people long ago, led their thousands into abandoned lives and pitched them off the edge of a lost eternity. With so much healthful literature of all sorts, there is no excuse for bringing your minds in contact with evil. If there were a famine, there might be some reason for eating garbage, but the land is full of bread. When we may, with our families, sit around the clean warm fire-hearth of Christian knowledge, why go hunting in the ash barrels for cinders?



CHAPTER XXXIV.

SHORT OR LONG PASTORATES.

The question is being discussed in many journals, "How long ought a minister to stay in one place?" Clergymen and laymen and editors are wagging tongue and pen on the subject—a most practical question and easy to answer. Let a minister stay in a place till he gets done—that is, when he has nothing more to say or do.

Some ministers are such ardent students of the Bible and of men, they are after a twenty-five years' residence in a parish so full of things that ought to be said, that their resignation would be a calamity. Others get through in three months and ought to go; but it takes an earthquake to get them away. They must be moved on by committees, and pelted with resolutions, stuck through with the needles of the ladies' sewing society, and advised by neighboring ministers, and hauled up before presbyteries and consociations; and after they have killed the church and killed themselves, the pastoral relation is dissolved.

We knew of a man who got a unanimous call. He wore the finest pair of gaiters that ever went into that pulpit; and when he took up the Psalm book to give out the song, it was the perfection of gracefulness. His tongue was dipped in "balm of a thousand flowers," and it was like the roll of one of Beethoven's symphonies to hear him read the hardest Bible names, Jechonias, Zerubbabel and Tiglath-pileser. It was worth all the salary paid him to see the way he lifted his pocket-handkerchief to his eyelids.

But that brother, without knowing it, got through in six weeks. He had sold out his entire stock of goods, and ought to have shut up shop. Congregations enjoy flowers and well-folded pocket-handkerchiefs for occasional desserts, but do not like them for a regular meal. The most urbane elder was sent to the minister to intimate that the Lord was probably calling him to some other field, but the elder was baffled by the graciousness of his pastor, and unable to discharge his mission, and after he had for an hour hemmed and hawed, backed out.

Next, a woman with a very sharp tongue was sent to talk to the minister's wife. The war-cloud thickened, the pickets were driven in, and then a skirmish, and after a while all the batteries were opened, and each side said that the other side lied, and the minister dropped his pocket-handkerchief and showed his claws as long as those of Nebuchadnezzar after he had been three years eating grass like an ox. We admire long pastorates when it is agreeable to both parties, we know ministers who boast they have been thirty years in one place, though all the world knows they have been there twenty-nine years too long. Their congregations are patiently waiting their removal to a higher latitude. Meanwhile, those churches are like a man with chronic rheumatism, very quiet—not because they admire rheumatism, but because there is no use kicking with a swollen foot, since it would hurt them more than the object assaulted.

If a pastorate can be maintained only through conflict or ecclesiastical tyranny, it might better be abandoned. There are many ministers who go away from their settlements before they ought, but we think there are quite as many who do not go soon enough. A husband might just as well try to keep his wife by choking her to death with a marriage ring as a minister to try to keep a church's love by ecclesiastical violence. Study the best time to quit.



CHAPTER XXXV.

AN EDITOR'S CHIP-BASKET.

On our way out the newspaper rooms we stumbled over the basket in which is deposited the literary material we cannot use. The basket upset and surprised us with its contents. On the top were some things that looked like fifteen or twenty poems. People outside have no idea of the amount of rhyme that comes to a printing office. The fact is that at some period in every one's life he writes "poetry." His existence depends upon it. We wrote ten or fifteen verses ourselves once. Had we not written them just then and there, we might not be here. They were in long metre, and "Old Hundred" would have fitted them grandly.

Many people are seized with the poetic spasm when they are sick, and their lines are apt to begin with.

"O mortality! how frail art thou!"

Others on Sabbath afternoons write Sabbath-school hymns, adding to the batch of infinite nonsense that the children are compelled to swallow. For others a beautiful curl is a corkscrew pulling out canto after canto. Nine-tenths of the rhyme that comes to a printing office cannot be used. You hear a rough tear of paper, and you look around to see the managing editor adding to the responsibilities of his chip-basket. What a way that is to treat incipient Tennysons and Longfellows!

Next to the poetic effusions tumble out treatises on "constitutional law" heavy enough to break the basket. We have noticed that after a man has got so dull he can get no one willing to hear him he takes to profound exposition. Out from the same chip-basket rolls a great pile of announcements that people want put among the editorials, so as to save the expense of the advertising column. They tell us the article they wish recommended will have a highly beneficial effect upon the Church and world. It is a religious churn, or a moral horse-rake, or a consecrated fly trap. They almost get us crying over their new kind of grindstone, and we put the letter down on the table while we get out our pocket-handkerchief, when our assistant takes hold the document and gives it a ruthless rip, and pitches it into the chip-basket.

Next in the pile of torn and upset things is the speech of some one on the momentous occasion of the presentation of a gold-headed cane, or silver pitcher, or brass kettle for making preserves. It was "unexpected," a "surprise" and "undeserved," and would "long be cherished." "Great applause, and not a dry eye in the house," etc., etc. But there is not much room in a paper for speeches. In this country everybody speaks.

An American is in his normal condition when he is making a speech. He is born with "fellow-citizens" in his mouth, and closes his earthly life by saying, "One word more, and I have done." Speeches being so common, newspaper readers do not want a large supply, and so many of these utterances, intended to be immortal, drop into oblivion through that inexhaustible reservoir, the editorial chip-basket.

But there is a hovering of pathos over this wreck of matter. Some of these wasted things were written for bread by intelligent wives with drunken husbands trying to support their families with the pen. Over that mutilated manuscript some weary man toiled until daybreak. How we wish we could have printed what they wrote! Alas for the necessity that disappoints the literary struggle of so many women and men, when it is ten dollars for that article or children gone supperless to bed!

Let no one enter the field of literature for the purpose of "making a living" unless as a very last resort. There are thousands of persons to-day starving to death with a steel pen in their hand. The story of Grub street and poets living on thin soup is being repeated all over this land, although the modern cases are not so conspicuous. Poverty is no more agreeable because classical and set in hexameters. The hungry author cannot breakfast on "odes to summer." On this, cold day how many of the literati are shivering! Martyrs have perished in the fire, but more persons have perished for lack of fire. Let no editor through hypercriticism of contributed articles add to this educated suffering.

What is that we hear in the next room? It is the roar of a big fire as it consumes unavailable literary material—epics, sonnets, homilies, tractates, compilations, circulars, dissertations. Some of them were obscure, and make a great deal of smoke. Some of them were merry, and crackle. All of them have ended their mission and gone down, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.



CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE MANHOOD OF SERVICE.

At the Crawford House, White Mountains, we noticed, one summer, unusual intelligence and courtesy on the part of those who served the tables. We found out that many of them were students from the colleges and seminaries—young men and women who had taken this mode of replenishing their purses and getting the benefit of mountain air. We felt like applauding them. We have admiration for those who can be independent of the oppressive conventionalities of society. May not all of us practically adopt the Christian theory that any work is honorable that is useful? The slaves of an ignominious pride, how many kill themselves earning a living! We have tens of thousands of women in our cities, sitting in cold rooms, stabbing their life out with their needles, coughing their lungs into tubercles and suffering the horrors of the social inquisition, for whom there waits plenty of healthy, happy homes in the country, if they could only, like these sons and daughters of Dartmouth and Northampton, consent to serve. We wish some one would explain to us how a sewing machine is any more respectable than a churn, or a yard stick is better than a pitchfork. We want a new Declaration of Independence, signed by all the laboring classes. There is plenty of work for all kinds of people, if they were not too proud to do it. Though the country is covered with people who can find nothing to do, we would be willing to open a bureau to-morrow, warranting to give to all the unemployed of the land occupation, if they would only consent to do what might be assigned them. We believe anything is more honorable than idleness.

During very hard times two Italian artists called at our country home, asking if we did not want some sketching done, and they unrolled some elegant pictures, showing their fine capacity. We told them we had no desire for sketches, but we had a cistern to clean, and would pay them well for doing it. Off went their coats, and in a few hours the work was done and their wages awarded. How much more honorable for them to do what they could get to do rather than to wait for more adapted employment!

Why did not the girls of Northampton spend their summers embroidering slippers or hemming handkerchiefs, and thus keep at work unobserved and more popular? Because they were not fools. They said: "Let us go up and see Mount Adams, and the Profile, and Mount Washington. We shall have to work only five hours a day, and all the time we will be gathering health and inspiration." Young men, those are the girls to seek when you want a wife, rather than the wheezing victims of ruinous work chosen because it is more popular. About the last thing we would want to marry is a medicine-chest. Why did not the students of Dartmouth, during their vacation, teach school? First, because teaching is a science, and they did not want to do three months of damage to the children of the common school. Secondly, because they wanted freedom from books as man makes them, and opportunity to open the ponderous tome of boulder and strata as God printed them. Churches and scientific institutions, these will be the men to call—brawny and independent, rather than the bilious, short-breathed, nerveless graduates who, too proud to take healthful recreation, tumble, at commencement day, into the lap of society so many Greek roots.



CHAPTER XXXVII.

BALKY PEOPLE.

Passing along a country road quite recently, we found a man, a horse and wagon in trouble. The vehicle was slight and the road was good, but the horse refused to draw, and his driver was in a bad predicament. He had already destroyed his whip in applying inducements to progress in travel. He had pulled the horse's ears with a sharp string. He had backed him into the ditch. He had built a fire of straw underneath him, the only result a smashed dash-board. The chief effect of the violences and cruelties applied was to increase the divergency of feeling between the brute and his master. We said to the besweated and outraged actor in the scene that the best thing for him to do was to let his horse stand for a while unwhipped and uncoaxed, setting some one to watch him while he, the driver, went away to cool off. We learned that the plan worked admirably; that the cold air, and the appetite for oats, and the solitude of the road, favorable for contemplation, had made the horse move for adjournment to some other place and time; and when the driver came up, he had but to take up the reins, and the beast, erst so obstinate, dashed down the road at a perilous speed.

There is not as much difference between horses and men as you might suppose. The road between mind and equine instinct is short and soon traveled. The horse is sometimes superior to his rider. If anything is good and admirable in proportion as it answers the end of its being, then the horse that bends into its traces before a Fourth avenue car is better than its blaspheming driver. He who cannot manage a horse cannot manage a man.

We know of pastors who have balky parishioners. When any important move is to take place, and all the other horses of the team are willing to draw, they lay themselves back in the harness.

First the pastor pats the obstreperous elder or deacon on the neck and tells him how much he thinks of him. This only makes him shake his mane and grind his bit. He will die first before he consents to such a movement. Next, he is pulled by the ear, with a good many sharp insinuations as to his motives for holding back. Fires of indignation are built under him for the purpose of consuming his balkiness. He is whipped with the scourge of public opinion, but this only makes him kick fiercely and lie harder in the breeching-straps. He is backed down into the ditch of scorn and contempt, but still is not willing to draw an ounce. O foolish minister, trying in that way to manage a balky parishioner! Let him alone. Go on and leave him there. Pay less attention to the horse that balks, and give more oats to those that pull. Leave him out in the cold. Some day you will come back and find him glad to start. At your first advance he will arch his neck, paw his hoof, bend into the bit, stiffen the traces and dash on. We have the same prescription for balky horses and men: for a little while let them alone.



CHAPTER XXXVIII.

ANONYMOUS LETTERS.

In boyhood days we were impressed with the fertility of a certain author whose name so often appeared in the spelling books and readers, styled Anon. He seemed to write more than Isaac Watts, or Shakespeare, or Blair. In the index, and scattered throughout all our books, was the name of Anon. He appeared in all styles of poetry and prose and dialogue. We wondered where he lived, what his age was, and how he looked, it was not until quite late in boyhood that we learned that Anon was an abbreviation for anonymous, and that he was sometimes the best saint and at other times the most extraordinary villain.

After centuries of correspondence old Anonymous is as fertile of thought and brain and stratagem as ever, and will probably keep on writing till the last fire burns up his pen and cracks to pieces his ink bottle. Anonymous letters sometimes have a mission of kindness and gratitude and good cheer. Genuine modesty may sometimes hide the name of an epistolary author or authoress. It may be a "God bless you" from some one who thinks herself hardly in a position to address you. It may be the discovery of a plot for your damage, in which the revelator does not care to take the responsibility of a witness. It may be any one of a thousand things that mean frankness and delicacy and honor and Christian principle. We have received anonymous letters which we have put away among our most sacred archives.

But we suppose every one chiefly associates the idea of anonymous communications with everything cowardly and base. There are in all neighborhoods perfidious, sneaking, dastardly, filthy, calumnious, vermin-infested wretches, spewed up from perdition, whose joy it is to write letters with fictitious signatures. Sometimes they take the shape of a valentine, the fourteenth of February being a great outlet for this obscene spawn. If your nose be long, or your limbs slender, or your waist thick around, they will be pictorially presented. Sometimes they take the form of a delicate threat that if you do not thus or so there will be a funeral at your house, yourself the chief object of interest. Sometimes they will be denunciatory of your friends. Once being called to preside at a meeting for the relief of the sewing women of Philadelphia, and having been called in the opening speech to say something about oppressive contractors, we received some twenty anonymous letters, the purport of which was that it would be unsafe for us to go out of doors after dark. Three months after moving to Brooklyn we preached a sermon reviewing one of the sins of the city, and anonymous letters came saying that we would not last six months in the city of churches.

Sometimes the anonymous crime takes the form of a newspaper article; and if the matter be pursued, the editor-in-chief puts it off on the managing editor, and the managing editor upon the book critic, and the book critic upon the reporter.

Whether Adam or Eve or the serpent was the most to be blamed for the disappearance of the fair apple of reputation is uncertain; the only thing you can be sure of is that the apple is gone. No honest man will ever write a thing for a newspaper, in editorial or any other column, that he would be ashamed to sign with the Christian name that his mother had him baptized with. They who go skulking about under the editorial "we," unwilling to acknowledge their identity, are more fit for Delaware whipping-posts than the position of public educators. It is high time that such hounds were muzzled.

Let every young man know that when he is tempted to pen anything which requires him to disguise his handwriting he is in fearful danger. You despoil your own nature by such procedure more than you can damage any one else. Bowie-knife and dagger are more honorable than an anonymous pen sharpened for defamation of character. Better try putting strychnine in the flour barrel. Better mix ratsbane in the jelly cake. That behavior would be more elegant and Christian.

After much observation we have fixed upon this plan: If any one writes us in defamation of another, we adopt the opposite theory. If the letter says that the assaulted one lies, we take it as eulogistic of his veracity; or that he is unchaste, we set him down as pure; or fraudulent, we are seized with a desire to make him our executor. We do so on logical and unmistakable grounds. A defamatory letter is from the devil or his satellites. The devil hates only the good. The devil hates Mr. A; ergo, Mr. A is good.

Much of the work of the day of judgment will be with the authors of anonymous letters. The majority of other crimes against society were found out, but these creatures so disguised their handwriting in the main text of the letter, or so willfully misspelled the direction on the envelope, and put it in such a distant post-office, and looked so innocent when you met them, that it shall be for the most part a dead secret till the books are opened; and when that is done, we do not think these abandoned souls will wait to have their condemnation read, but, ashamed to meet the announcement, will leap pell-mell into the pit, crying, "We wrote them."

If, since the world stood, there have been composed and sent off by mail or private postmen 1,600,378 anonymous letters derogatory of character, then 1,600,378 were vicious and damnable. If you are compelled to choose between writing a letter with false signature vitriolic of any man's integrity or any woman's honor on the one hand, and the writing a letter with a red-hot nail dipped in adder's poison on a sheet woven of leper scales, choose the latter. It were healthier, nobler, and could better endure the test of man's review and God's scrutiny.



CHAPTER XXXIX.

BRAWN OR BRAIN.

Governor Wiseman (our oracular friend who talked in the style of an oration) was with us this evening at the tea-table, and we were mentioning the fact that about thirty colleges last summer in the United States contested for the championship in boat-racing. About two hundred thousand young ladies could not sleep nights, so anxious were they to know whether Yale or Williams would be the winner. The newspapers gave three and four columns to the particulars, the telegraph wires thrilled the victory to all parts of the land. Some of the religions papers condemned the whole affair, enlarging upon the strained wrists, broken blood-vessels and barbaric animalism of men who ought to have been rowing their race with the Binomial Theorem for one oar and Kames' Elements of Criticism for the other.

For the most part, we sympathized with the boys, and confess that at our hotel we kept careful watch of the bulletin to see whose boat came in ahead. We are disposed to applaud anything that will give our young men muscular development. Students have such a tendency to lounge, and mope, and chew, and eat almond-nuts at midnight, and read novels after they go to bed, the candlestick set up on Webster's dictionary or the Bible, that we prize anything that makes them cautious about their health, as they must be if they would enter the list of contestants. How many of our country boys enter the freshman class of college in robust health, which lasts them about a twelvemonth; then in the sophomore they lose their liver; in the junior they lose their stomach; in the senior they lose their back bone; graduating skeletons, more fit for an anatomical museum than the bar or pulpit.

"Midnight oil," so much eulogized, is the poorest kind of kerosene. Where hard study kills one student, bad habits kill a hundred. Kirk White, while at Cambridge, wrote beautiful hymns; but if he had gone to bed at ten o'clock that night instead of three o'clock the next morning, he would have been of more service to the world and a healthier example to all collegians. Much of the learning of the day is morbid, and much of the religion bilious. We want, first of all, a clean heart, and next a strong stomach. Falling from grace is often chargeable to derangement of gastric juices. Oar and bat may become salutary weapons.

But, after all, there was something wrong about those summer boat-races. A student with a stout arm, and great girth, and full chest, and nothing else, is not at all admirable. Mind and body need to be driven tandem, the body for the wheel horse and the intellect the leader. We want what is now proposed in some directions—a grand collegiate literary race. Let the mental contest be on the same week with the muscular. Let Yale and Harvard and Williams and Princeton and Dartmouth see who has the champion among scholars. Let there be a Waterloo in belles-lettres and rhetoric and mathematics and philosophy. Let us see whether the students of Doctors McCosh, or Porter, or Campbell, or Smith are most worthy to wear the belt. About twelve o'clock at noon let the literary flotilla start prow and prow, oar-lock and oar-lock. Let Helicon empty its waters to swell the river of knowledge on which they row. Right foot on right rib of the boat, and left foot on the left rib—bend into it, my hearties, bend!—and our craft come out four lengths ahead.

Give the brain a chance as well as the arm. Do not let the animal eat up the soul. Let the body be the well-fashioned hulk, and the mind the white sails, all hoisted, everything, from flying jib to spanker, bearing on toward the harbor of glorious achievement. When that boat starts, we want to be on the bank to cheer, and after sundown help fill the air with sky-rockets.

"By the way," I said, "Governor Wiseman, do you not think that we need more out-door exercise, and that contact with the natural world would have a cheering tendency? Governor, do you ever have the blues?"

The governor, putting his knife across the plate and throwing his spectacles up on his forehead, replied:

Almost every nature, however sprightly, sometimes will drop into a minor key, or a subdued mood that in common parlance is recognized as "the blues." There may be no adverse causes at work, but somehow the bells of the soul stop ringing, and you feel like sitting quiet, and you strike off fifty per cent from all your worldly and spiritual prospects. The immediate cause may be a northeast wind, or a balky liver, or an enlarged spleen, or pickled oysters at twelve o'clock the night before.

In such depressed state no one can afford to sit for an hour. First of all let him get up and go out of doors. Fresh air, and the faces of cheerful men, and pleasant women, and frolicsome children, will in fifteen minutes kill moping. The first moment your friend strikes the keyboard of your soul it will ring music. A hen might as well try on populous Broadway to hatch out a feathery group as for a man to successfully brood over his ills in lively society. Do not go for relief among those who feel as badly as you do. Let not toothache, and rheumatism, and hypochondria go to see toothache, rheumatism and hypochondria. On one block in Brooklyn live a doctor, an undertaker and a clergyman. That is not the row for a nervous man to walk on, lest he soon need all three. Throw back all the shutters of your soul and let the sunlight of genial faces shine in.

Besides that, why sit ye here with the blues, ye favored sons and daughters of men? Shone upon by such stars, and breathed on by such air, and sung to by so many pleasant sounds, you ought not to be seen moping. Especially if light from the better world strikes its aurora through your night sky, ought you be cheerful. You can afford to have a rough luncheon by the way if it is soon to end amid the banqueters in white. Sailing toward such a blessed port, do not have your flag at half mast. Leave to those who take too much wine "the gloomy raven tapping at the chamber door, on the night's Plutonian shore," and give us the robin red-breast and the chaffinch. Let some one with a strong voice give out the long-metre doxology, and the whole world "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow."

"But do you not suppose, Governor Wiseman, that every man has his irritated days?"

Yes, yes, responded the governor. There are times when everything seems to go wrong. From seven o'clock a.m. till ten p.m. affairs are in a twist. You rise in the morning, and the room is cold, and a button is off, and the breakfast is tough, and the stove smokes, and the pipes burst, and you start down the street nettled from head to foot. All day long things are adverse. Insinuations, petty losses, meanness on the part of customers. The ink bottle upsets and spoils the carpet. Some one gives a wrong turn to the damper, and the gas escapes. An agent comes in determined to insure your life, when it is already insured for more than it is worth, and you are afraid some one will knock you on the head to get the price of your policy; but he sticks to you, showing you pictures of old Time and the hour-glass, and Death's scythe and a skeleton, making it quite certain that you will die before your time unless you take out papers in his company. Besides this, you have a cold in your head, and a grain of dirt in your eye, and you are a walking uneasiness. The day is out of joint, and no surgeon can set it.

The probability is that if you would look at the weather-vane you would find that the wind is northeast, and you might remember that you have lost much sleep lately. It might happen to be that you are out of joint instead of the day. Be careful and not write many letters while you are in that irritated mood. You will pen some things that you will be sorry for afterward.

Let us remember that these spiked nettles of life are part of our discipline. Life would get nauseating if it were all honey. That table would be poorly set that had on it nothing but treacle. We need a little vinegar, mustard, pepper and horse-radish that brings the tears even when we do not feel pathetic. If this world were all smoothness, we would never be ready for emigration to a higher and better. Blustering March and weeping April prepare us for shining May. This world is a poor hitching post. Instead of tying fast on the cold mountains, we had better whip up and hasten on toward the warm inn where our good friends are looking out of the window, watching to see us come up.

Interrupting the governor at this point, we asked him if he did not think that rowing, ball playing and other athletic exercises might be made an antidote to the morbid religion that is sometimes manifest. The governor replied:

No doubt much of the Christian character of the day lacks in swarthiness and power. It is gentle enough, and active enough, and well meaning enough, but is wanting in moral muscle. It can sweetly sing at a prayer meeting, and smile graciously when it is the right time to smile, and makes an excellent nurse to pour out with steady hand a few drops of peppermint for a child that feels disturbances under the waistband, but has no qualification for the robust Christian work that is demanded.

One reason for this is the ineffable softness of much of what is called Christian literature. The attempt is to bring us up on tracts made up of thin exhortations and goodish maxims. A nerveless treatise on commerce or science in that style would be crumpled up by the first merchant and thrown into his waste-basket. Religious twaddle is of no more use than worldly twaddle. If a man has nothing to say, he had better keep his pen wiped and his tongue still. There needs an infusion of strong Anglo-Saxon into religious literature, and a brawnier manliness and more impatience with insipidity, though it be prayerful and sanctimonious. He who stands with irksome repetitions asking people to "Come to Jesus," while he gives no strong common-sense reason why they should come, drives back the souls of men. If, with all the thrilling realities of eternity at hand, a man has nothing to write which can gather up and master the thoughts and feelings of men, his writing and speaking are a slander on the religion which he wishes to eulogize.

Morbidity in religion might be partially cured by more out-door exercise. There are some duties we can perform better on our feet than on our knees. If we carry the grace of God with us down into every-day practical Christian work, we will get more spiritual strength in five minutes than by ten hours of kneeling. If Daniel had not served God save when three times a day he worshiped toward the temple, the lions would have surely eaten him up. The school of Christ is as much out-of-doors as in-doors. Hard, rough work for God will develop an athletic soul. Religion will not conquer either the admiration or the affections of men by effeminacy, but by strength. Because the heart is soft is no reason why the head should be soft. The spirit of genuine religion is a spirit of great power. When Christ rides in apocalyptic vision, it is not on a weak and stupid beast, but on a horse—emblem of majesty and strength: "And he went forth conquering and to conquer."



CHAPTER XL.

WARM-WEATHER RELIGION.

It takes more grace to be an earnest and useful Christian in summer than in any other season. The very destitute, through lack of fuel and thick clothing, may find the winter the trying season, but those comfortably circumstanced find summer the Thermopylae that tests their Christian courage and endurance.

The spring is suggestive of God and heaven and a resurrection day. That eye must be blind that does not see God's footstep in the new grass, and hear His voice in the call of the swallow at the eaves. In the white blossoms of the orchards we find suggestion of those whose robes have been made white in the blood of the Lamb. A May morning is a door opening into heaven.

So autumn mothers a great many moral and religious suggestions. The season of corn husking, the gorgeous woods that are becoming the catafalque of the dead year, remind the dullest of his own fading and departure.

But summer fatigues and weakens, and no man keeps his soul in as desirable a frame unless by positive resolution and especial implorations. Pulpit and pew often get stupid together, and ardent devotion is adjourned until September.

But who can afford to lose two months out of each year, when the years are so short and so few? He who stops religious growth in July and August will require the next six months to get over it. Nay, he never recovers. At the season when the fields are most full of leafage and life let us not be lethargic and stupid.

Let us remember that iniquity does not cease in summer-time. She never takes a vacation. The devil never leaves town. The child of want, living up that dark alley, has not so much fresh air nor sees as many flowers as in winter-time. In cold weather the frost blossoms on her window pane, and the snow falls in wreaths in the alley. God pity the wretchedness that pants and sweats and festers and dies on the hot pavements and in the suffocating cellars of the town!

Let us remember that our exit from this world will more probably be in the summer than in any other season, and we cannot afford to die at a time when we are least alert and worshipful. At mid-summer the average of departures is larger than in cool weather. The sun-strokes, the dysenteries, the fevers, the choleras, have affinity for July and August. On the edge of summer Death stands whetting his scythe for a great harvest. We are most careful to have our doors locked, and our windows fastened, and our "burglar alarm" set at times when thieves are most busy, and at a season of the year when diseases are most active in their burglaries of life we need to be ready.

Our charge, therefore, is, make no adjournment of your religion till cool weather. Whether you stay in town, or seek the farm house, or the sea-shore, or the mountains, be faithful in prayer, in Bible reading and in attendance upon Christian ordinances. He who throws away two months of life wastes that for which many a dying sinner would have been willing to give all his possessions when he found that the harvest was past and the summer was ended.

The thermometer to-day has stood at a high mark. The heat has been fierce. As far as possible people have kept within doors or walked on the shady side of the street. But we can have but a faint idea of what the people suffer crossing a desert or in a tropical clime. The head faints, the tongue swells and deathly sickness comes upon the whole body when long exposed to the summer sun. I see a whole caravan pressing on through the hot sands. "Oh," say the camel-drivers, "for water and shade!" At last they see an elevation against the sky. They revive at the eight and push on. That which they saw proves to be a great rock, and camels and drivers throw themselves down under the long shadow. Isaiah, who lived and wrote in a scorching climate, draws his figure from what he had seen and felt when he represents God as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

Many people have found this world a desert-march. They go half consumed of trouble all their days. But glory be to God! we are not turned out on a desert to die. Here is the long, cool, certain, refreshing shadow of the Lord.

A tree, when in full leafage, drops a great deal of refreshment; but in a little while the sun strikes through, and you keep shifting your position, until, after a while, the sun is set at such a point that you have no shade at all. But go in the heart of some great rock, such as you see in Yosemite or the Alps, and there is everlasting shadow. There has been thick shade there for six thousand years, and will be for the next six thousand. So our divine Rock, once covering us, always covers us. The same yesterday, to-day and for ever! always good, always kind, always sympathetic! You often hold a sunshade over your head passing along the road or a street; but after a while your arm gets tired, and the very effort to create the shadow makes you weary. But the rock in the mountains, with fingers of everlasting stone, holds its own shadow. So God's sympathy needs no holding up from us. Though we are too weak from sickness or trouble to do anything but lie down, over us He stretches the shadow of His benediction.

It is our misfortune that we mistake God's shadow for the night. If a man come and stand between you and the sun, his shadow falls upon you. So God sometimes comes and stands between us and worldly successes, and His shadow falls upon us, and we wrongly think that it is night. As a father in a garden stoops down to kiss his child the shadow of his body falls upon it; and so many of the dark misfortunes of our life are not God going away from us, but our heavenly Father stooping down to give us the kiss of His infinite and everlasting love. It is the shadow of a sheltering Rock, and not of a devouring lion.

Instead of standing right out in the blistering noon-day sun of earthly trial and trouble, come under the Rock. You may drive into it the longest caravan of disasters. Room for the suffering, heated, sunstruck, dying, of all generations, in the shadow of the great Rock:

"Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee."



CHAPTER XLI.

HIDING EGGS FOR EASTER.

Those who were so unfortunate as to have been born and brought up in the city know nothing about that chapter in a boy's history of which I speak.

About a month before Easter there comes to the farmhouse a scarcity of eggs. The farmer's wife begins to abuse the weasels and the cats as the probable cause of the paucity. The feline tribe are assaulted with many a harsh "Scat!" on the suspicion of their fondness for omelets in the raw. Custards fail from the table. The Dominick hens are denounced as not worth their mush. Meanwhile, the boys stand round the corner in a broad grin at what is the discomfiture of the rest of the family.

The truth must be told that the boys, in anticipation of Easter, have, in some hole in the mow or some barrel in the wagon-house, been hiding eggs. If the youngsters understand their business, they will compromise the matter, and see that at least a small supply goes to the house every day. Too great greed on the part of the boy will discover the whole plot, and the charge will be made: "De Witt, I believe you are hiding the eggs!" Forthwith the boy is collared and compelled to disgorge his possessions.

Now, there is nothing more trying to a boy than, after great care in accumulating these shelly resources, to have to place them in a basket and bring them forth to the light two weeks before Easter. Boys, therefore, manage with skill and dexterity. At this season of the year you see them lurking much about the hayrick and the hay-loft. You see them crawling out from stacks of straw and walking away rapidly with their hands behind them. They look very innocent, for I have noticed that the look of innocence in boys is proportioned to the amount of mischief with which they are stuffed. They seem to be determined to risk their lives on mow-poles where the hay lies thin. They come out from under the stable floor in a despicable state of toilet, and cannot give any excuse for their depreciation of apparel. Hens flutter off the nest with an unusual squawk, for the boys cannot wait any longer for the slow process of laying, and hens have no business to stand in the way of Easter. The most tedious hours of my boyhood were spent in waiting for a hen to get off her nest. No use to scare her off, for then she will get mad, and just as like as not take the egg with her. Indeed, I think the boy is excusable for his haste if his brother has a dozen eggs and he has only eleven.

At this season of the year the hens are melancholy. They want to hatch, but how can they? They have the requisite disposition, and the capacity, and the feathers, and the nest, and everything but the eggs. With that deficit, they sometimes sit obstinately and defy the boy's approaches. Many a boy has felt the sharp bill of old Dominick strike the back of his hand, inflicting a wound that would have roused up the whole farmhouse to see what was the matter had it not been that the boy wanted to excite no suspicion as to the nature of his expedition. Immediately over the hen's head comes the boy's cap, and there is a scatteration of feathers all over the hay-mow, and the boy is victor.

But at last the evening before Easter comes. While the old people are on the piazza the children come in with the accumulated treasures of many weeks, and put down the baskets. Eggs large and small, white-shelled and brown, Cochin-Chinas and Brahmapooters. The character of the hens is vindicated. The cat may now lie in the sun without being kicked by false suspicions. The surprised exclamation of parents more than compensates the boys for the strategy of long concealment. The meanest thing in the world is for father and mother not to look surprised in such circumstances.

It sometimes happens that, in the agitation of bringing the eggs into the household harbor, the boy drops the hat or the basket, and the whole enterprise is shipwrecked. From our own experience, it is very difficult to pick up eggs after you have once dropped them. You have found the same experience in after life. Your hens laid a whole nestful of golden eggs on Wall street. You had gathered them up. You were bringing them in. You expected a world of congratulations, but just the day before the consummation, something adverse ran against you, and you dropped the basket, and the eggs broke. Wise man were you if, instead of sitting down to cry or attempting to gather up the spilled yolks, you built new nests and invited a new laying.

It is sometimes found on Easter morning that the eggs have been kept too long. The boy's intentions were good enough, but the enterprise had been too protracted, and the casting out of the dozen was sudden and precipitate. Indeed, that is the trouble with some older boys I wot of. They keep their money, or their brain, or their influence hidden till it rots. They are not willing to come forth day by day on a humble mission, doing what little good they may, but are keeping themselves hidden till some great Easter-day of triumph, and then they will astonish the Church and the world; but they find that faculties too long hidden are faculties ruined. Better for an egg to have succeeded in making one plain cake for a poor man's table than to have failed in making a banquet for the House of Lords.

That was a glad time when on Easter morning the eggs went into the saucepan, and came out striped, and spotted, and blue, and yellow, and the entire digestive capacity of the children was tested. You have never had anything so good to eat since. You found the eggs. You hid them. They were your contribution to the table. Since then you have seen eggs scrambled, eggs poached, eggs in omelet, eggs boiled, eggs done on one side and eggs in a nog, but you shall never find anything like the flavor of that Easter morning in boyhood.

Alas for the boys in town! Easter comes to them on stilts, and they buy their eggs out of the store. There is no room for a boy to swing round. There is no good place in town to fly a kite, or trundle a hoop, or even shout without people's throwing up the window to see who is killed. The holidays are robbed of half their life because some wiseacre will persist in telling him who Santa Claus is, while yet he is hanging up his first pair of stockings. Here the boy pays half a dollar for a bottle of perfume as big as his finger, when out of town, for nothing but the trouble of breathing it, he may smell a country full of new-mown hay and wild honeysuckle. In a painted bath-tub he takes his Saturday bath careful lest he hit his head against the spigot, while in the meadow-brook the boys plunge in wild glee, and pluck up health and long life from the pebbly bottom. Oh, the joy in the spring day, when, after long teasing of mother to let you take off your shoes, you dash out on the cool grass barefoot, or down the road, the dust curling about the instep in warm enjoyment, and, henceforth, for months, there shall be no shoes to tie or blacken.

Let us send the boys out into the country every year for an airing. If their grandfather and grandmother be yet alive, they will give them a good time. They will learn in a little while the mysteries of the hay-mow, how to drive oxen and how to keep Easter. They will take the old people back to the time when you yourself were a boy. There will be for the grandson an extra cake in each oven. And grandfather and grandmother will sit and watch the prodigy, and wonder if any other family ever had such grandchildren. It will be a good thing when the evenings are short, and the old folks' eyesight is somewhat dim, if you can set up in their house for a little while one or two of these lights of childhood. For the time the aches and pains of old age will be gone, and they will feel as lithe and merry as when sixty years ago they themselves rummaged hayrick, and mow and wagon-house, hiding eggs for Easter.



CHAPTER XLII.

SINK OR SWIM.

We entered the ministry with a mortal horror of extemporaneous speaking. Each week we wrote two sermons and a lecture all out, from the text to the amen. We did not dare to give out the notice of a prayer-meeting unless it was on paper. We were a slave to manuscript, and the chains were galling; and three months more of such work would have put us in the graveyard. We resolved on emancipation. The Sunday night was approaching when we expected to make violent rebellion against this bondage of pen and paper. We had an essay about ten minutes long on some Christian subject, which we proposed to preach as an introduction to the sermon, resolved, at the close of that brief composition, to launch out on the great sea of extemporaneousness.

It so happened that the coming Sabbath night Was to be eventful in the village. The trustees of the church had been building a gasometer back of the church, and the night I speak of the building was for the first time to be lighted in the modern way. The church was, of course, crowded—not so much to hear the preacher as to see how the gas would burn. Many were unbelieving, and said that there would be an explosion, or a big fire, or that in the midst of the service the lights would go out. Several brethren disposed to hang on to old customs declared that candles and oil were the only fit material for lighting a church, and they denounced the innovation as indicative of vanity on the part of the new-comers. They used oil in the ancient temple, and it was that which ran down on Aaron's beard, and anything that was good enough for the whiskers of an old-time priest was good enough for a country meeting-house. These sticklers for the oil were present that night, hoping—and I think some of them secretly praying—that the gas might go out.

With our ten-minute manuscript we went into the pulpit, all in a tremor. Although the gas did not burn as brightly as its friends had hoped, still it was bright enough to show the people the perspiration that stood in beads on our forehead. We began our discourse, and every sentence gave us the feeling that we were one step nearer the gallows. We spoke very slowly, so as to make the ten-minute notes last fifteen minutes. During the preachment of the brief manuscript we concluded that we had never been called to the ministry. We were in a hot bath of excitement. People noticed our trepidation, and supposed it was because we were afraid the gas would go out. Alas! our fear was that it would not go out. As we came toward the close of our brief we joined the anti-gas party, and prayed that before we came to the last written line something would burst, and leave us in the darkness. Indeed, we discovered an encouraging flicker amid the burners, which gave us the hope that the brief which lay before us would be long enough for all practical purposes, and that the hour of execution might be postponed to some other night. As we came to the sentence next to the last the lights fell down to half their size, and we could just manage to see the audience as they were floating away from our vision. We said to ourselves, "Why can't these lights be obliging, and go out entirely?" The wish was gratified. As we finished the last line of our brief, and stood on the verge of rhetorical destruction, the last glimmer of light was extinguished. "It is impossible to proceed," we cried out; "receive the benediction!"

We crawled down the pulpit in a state of exhilaration; we never before saw such handsome darkness. The odor of the escaping gas was to us like "gales from Araby." Did a frightened young man ever have such fortunate deliverance? The providence was probably intended to humble the trustees, yet the scared preacher took advantage of it.

But after we got home we saw the wickedness of being in such dread. As the Lord got us out of that predicament, we resolved never again to be cornered in one similar. Forthwith the thralldom was broken, we hope never again to be felt. How demeaning that a man with a message from the Lord Almighty should be dependent upon paper-mills and gasometers! Paper is a non-conductor of gospel electricity. If a man have a five-thousand-dollar bill of goods to sell a customer, he does not go up to the purchaser and say, "I have some remarks to make to you about these goods, but just wait till I get out my manuscript." Before he got through reading the argument the customer would be in the next door, making purchases from another house.

What cowardice! Because a few critical hearers sit with lead-pencils out to mark down the inaccuracies of extemporaneousness, shall the pulpit cower? If these critics do not repent, they will go to hell, and take their lead-pencils with them. While the great congregation are ready to take the bread hot out of the oven shall the minister be crippled in his work because the village doctor or lawyer sits carping before him? To please a few learned ninnies a thousand ministers sit writing sermons on Saturday night till near the break of day, their heads hot, their feet cold, and their nerves a-twitch. Sermons born on Saturday night are apt to have the rickets. Instead of cramping our chests over writing-desks, and being the slaves of the pen, let us attend to our physical health, that we may have more pulpit independence.

It would be a grand thing if every minister felt strong enough in body to thrash any man in his audience improperly behaving, but always kept back from such assault by the fact that it would be wrong to do so. There is a good deal of heart and head in our theology, but not enough liver and backbone. We need a more stalwart Christian character, more roast beef rare, and less calf's-foot jelly. This will make the pulpit more bold and the pew more manly.

Which thoughts came to us this week as we visited again the village church aforesaid, and preached out of the same old Bible in which, years ago, we laid the ten-minute manuscript, and we looked upon the same lights that once behaved so badly. But we found it had been snowing since the time we lived there, and heads that then were black are white now, and some of the eyes which looked up to us that memorable night when the gasometer failed us, thirteen years ago, are closed now, and for them all earthly lights have gone out for ever.