This is the list of articles the editor wishes to secure, having known and used them for from two to forty years; some were used by her mother before her. They are things you can buy anywhere or order by mail.

A TOILET PREPARATION: Used by mother and self. A COURTPLASTER: Used from infancy, perfect. SOMETHING SIMILAR TO ABOVE, Most excellent. A SILVER CLEANER: Very satisfactory. SEVEN KINDS OF SOAP—and such like—all good. A BREAKFAST FOOD: Used unvaryingly for nine years. SIX OTHER BREAKFAST FOODS: All first-rate. ONE VARIETY OF SOUPS: Absolutely good. FOUR OTHER FOOD-MAKERS: Safe to recommend. FOUR KINDS OF COCOA: All very good. A HAIRBRUSH: A real delight—if you have hair. MY TYPEWRITER: I would have this kind. A PEN: All my books were written with this pen. A VOICE TABLOID: A blessing to a speaker. A TOOTHPASTE: The best out of many. PERFECTION IN HAIRPINS. TWO KINDS OF UNDERWEAR: Good ones. TWO KINDS OF HOSIERY: They wear well. A HOUSEHOLD COMFORT AND TIME-SAVER. A MATTRESS: Continuously satisfactory. BOOKCASES: The kind you want. A MUSIC MACHINE: Or how to keep the boys at home. FIVE FOOD ARTICLES: Long valued. A DRESS SHIELD: That can be trusted. SOMETHING BETTER THAN WHALEBONE. TWO KINDS OF SKIRT-BINDING: Always reliable. THE BEST OF CRACKERS. FOUNTAIN PEN THAT NEVER LEAKS.

These are "preferred stock." More may be tried and found worthy; but these have been used long and continuously—just because they were good.

If this list could be filled out at reasonable rates, it would form a very useful little collection, to seller and buyer. And to

THE FORERUNNER CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN'S MAGAZINE CHARLTON CO., 67 WALL ST., NEW YORK



[Advertisement]

C A L E N D U L A

CHILDREN CEASE TO CRY FOR IT.

This is a gratuitous advertisement, benefitting

a) The Child; whose pain stops;

b) The Mother; who doesn't have to hear him cry;

c) The Nearest Druggist—a little.

CALENDULA is a good standard old drug—made of marigolds—in the materia medica. You buy a little bottle of tincture of calendula, and keep it on the shelf. Nobody will drink it by mistake—it doesn't taste good.

Presently Johnny falls down hard—he was running—he fell on a gritty place—his poor little knee is scraped raw. And he howls, how he howls! square-mouthed and inconsolable.

Then you hastily get a half a tea-cupful of water, a little warm if you have it, and put in a few drops of calendula. Wet a soft clean rag in it, bind it softly on the wound, keep it wet—and the pain stops.

Many many times has this quieted my infant anguish; also have I used it as a grown up. The effect is the same.

C A L E N D U L A TAKES THE PAIN FROM A R A W W O U N D



THE FORERUNNER

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE

BY

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AUTHOR, OWNER & PUBLISHER

1.00 A YEAR .10 A COPY

Volume 1. No. 4 FEBRUARY, 1910 Copyright for 1910 C. P. Gilman

There is one large obstacle to woman suffrage which has nothing to do with sex. Men, the governing class, hesitate in extending equal political responsibility and power to their domestic servants. Do you wonder?



TWO PRAYERS

Only for these I pray, Pray with assurance strong: Light to discover the way, Power to follow it long.

Let me have light to see, Light to be sure and know, When the road is clear to me Willingly I go.

Let me have Power to do, Power of the brain and nerve, Though the task is heavy and new Willingly I will serve.

My prayers are lesser than three, Nothing I pray but two; Let me have light to see, Let me have power to do.



AN OFFENDER

"Where's Harry?" was Mr. Gortlandt's first question.

"He's gone to the country, to mother. It was so hot this last day or two, I've sent him out, with Miss Colton. I'm going Saturday. Sit down."

"I miss him," said her visitor, "more than I thought I could. I've learned more in these seven years than I thought there was to know. Or in the last two perhaps, since I've found you again."

She looked at him with a little still smile, but there was a puzzled expression behind it, as of one whose mind was not made up.

They sat in the wide window of a top floor apartment, awning-shaded. A fresh breeze blew in upon them, and the city dust blew in upon them also, lying sandy on the broad sill.

She made little wavy lines in it with one finger—

"These windows ought to be shut tight, I suppose, and the blinds, and the curtains. Then we should be cleaner."

"As to furniture," he agreed, "but not as to our lungs."

"I don't know about that," she said; "we get plenty of air—but see what's in it."

"A city is a dirty place at the best; but Mary—I didn't come to consider the ethics of the dust—how much longer must I wait?" he asked, after a little pause. "Isn't two years courting, re-courting—enough? Haven't I learned my lesson yet?"

"Some of it, I think," she admitted, "but not all."

"What more do you ask?" he pursued earnestly. "Can't we come to a definite understanding? You'll be chasing off again in a few days; it's blessed luck that brought you to town just now, and that I happened to be here too."

"I don't how about the luck," said she. "It was business that brought me. I never was in town before when it was so hot."

"Why don't you go to a hotel? This apartment is right under the roof, gets the sun all day."

"It gets the breeze too, and sunlight is good. No, I'm better off in the apartment, with Harry. It was very convenient of the Grants to be away, and let me have it."

"How does Hal stand the weather?"

"Pretty well. But he was getting rather fretful, so I sent him off two hours ago. I do hope he won't run away from Miss Colton again. She's as nervous as I am about him."

"Don't you think he is fond of me?" asked the man. "I've got to catch up, you see. He can't help being mine—half mine," he hastily added, seeing a hint of denial in her look.

"Why yes, he seems fond of you, he is fond of you," she conceded. "I hope he always will be, and I believe you are beginning to love him."

"A pretty strong beginning, Mary," said the man. "Of course I don't pretend to have cared much at first, but now!—why he's so handsome, and quick, and such a good little duffer; and so affectionate! When he gives a jump and gets his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist and 'hugs me all over' as he calls it, I almost feel as if I was a mother! I can't say more than that, can I?"

"No, you certainly can't say more than that. I believe you, I'm not questioning," for he looked up sharply at her tone.

"I've never had much to do with children, you see," he went on slowly, "no little brothers or sisters, and then only— What astonishes me is how good they feel in your arms! The little fellow's body is so firm and sinewy—he wriggles like a fish—a big fish that you're trying to hold with both hands."

The mother smiled tenderly. She knew the feel of the little body so well! From the soft pink helplessness, the little head falling so naturally into the hollow of the arm or neck, the fumbling little hands; then the gradual gain in size and strength, till now she held that eager bounding little body, almost strong enough to get away from her—but not wanting to. He still loved to nestle up to "Muzz," and was but newly and partially won by this unaccustomed father.

"It's seven years Mary! That makes a man all over, they say. I'm sure it has made me over. I'm an older man—and I think, wiser. I've repented, I've outgrown my folly and seen the justice of my punishment. I don't blame you an atom for divorcing me—I think you did right, and I respect you for it. The biggest lesson I've learned is to love you! I can see—now—that I didn't before.

Her face hardened as she looked at him. "No, you didn't, Harry, you certainly didn't, nor the child— When I think of what I was when you married me! Of my proud health!—"

"You are not hurt!" he cried. "I don't mean that you haven't been hurt, I could kill myself when I think of how I made you suffer! But you are a finer woman now than you were then; sweeter, stronger, wiser, and more beautiful. When I found you again in Liverpool two years ago it was a revelation. Now see—I don't even ask you to forgive me! I ask you to try me again and let me prove I can make it up to you and the boy!"

"It's not easy for me to forgive," she answered slowly— "I'm not of the forgiving nature. But there is a good deal of reason in your position. You were my husband, you are Hal's father, there's no escaping that."

"Perhaps, if you will let the rest of my life make up for that time of my Godforsaken meanness, you won't want to escape it, Mary! See—I have followed you about for two years. I accepted your terms, you did not promise me anything, but for the child's sake I might try once more, try only as one of many, to see if I could win you—again. And I love you now a hundred times better than I did when I married you!"

She fanned herself slowly with a large soft fan, and looked out across the flickering roofs. Below them lay the highly respectable street on which the house technically fronted, and the broad, crowded, roaring avenue which it really overlooked.

The rattle of many drays and more delivery wagons rose up to them. An unusual jangle drowned his words just then and she smilingly interpreted "that's railroad iron—or girders, I can tell lots of them now. About four A. M. there is a string of huge milk wagons. But the worst is the cars. Hear that now—that's a flat wheel. How do you like it?"

"Mary—why do you bring up these cars again when I'm trying my best to show you my whole heart? Don't put things like that between us!"

"But they are between us, Henry, all the time. I hear you tell me you love me, and I don't doubt you do in a way; yes, as well as you can, very much indeed!—I know. But when it comes to this car question; when I talk to you of these juggernauts of yours; you are no more willing to do the right thing than you were when I first knew you."

Mr. Cortlandt's face hardened. He drew himself up from the eager position in which he had leaned forward, and evidently hesitated for a moment as to his words.

In spite of his love for this woman, who, as he justly said, was far more beautiful and winsome than the strong, angular, over-conscientious girl he had married, neglected and shamed, his feelings as a business man were strong within him.

"My dear—I am not personally responsible for the condition of these cars."

"You are President of the Company. You hold controlling shares of the stock. It was your vote that turned down the last improvement proposition."

He looked at her sharply.

"I'm afraid someone has been prejudicing you against me Mary. You have more technical information than seems likely to have reached you by accident."

"It's not prejudice, but it is information; and Mr. Graham did tell me, if that's what you mean. But he cares. You know how hard the Settlement has worked to get the Company to make the streets safer for children—and you wouldn't do a thing."

Mr. Cortlandt hesitated. It would never do to pile business details on his suit for a love once lost and not yet regained.

"You make it hard for me Mary," he said. "Hard because it is difficult to explain large business questions to a—to anyone not accustomed to them. I cannot swing the affairs of a great corporation for personal ends, even to please you."

"That is not the point," she said quickly.

He flushed, and hastily substituted "Even to suit the noblest humanitarian feelings."

"Why not?" said she.

"Because that is not what street cars are run for," he pursued patiently. "But why must we talk of this? It seems to put you so far away. And you have given me no answer."

"I am sorry, but I am not ready yet."

"Is it Hugh Graham?" he demanded. The hot color leaped to her face, but she met his eyes steadily. "I am much interested in Mr. Graham," she said, "and in the noble work he is doing. I think I should really be happier with him than with you. We care for the same things, he calls out the best in me. But I have made no decision in his favor yet, nor in yours. Both of you have a certain appeal to my heart, both to my duty. With you the personal need, with him the hope of greater service. But—you are the father of the child, and that gives you a great claim. I have not decided."

The man looked relieved, and again drew his chair a little closer. The sharp clangor of the cars rose between the,.

"You think I dragged in this car question," she said. "Really, I did it because it is that sort of thing which does most to keep us apart, and—I would like to remove it."

He leaned forward, playing with her big fan. "Let's remove it by all means!" he said.

She looked at his bent head, the dark hair growing somewhat thin on top, almost tenderly.

"If I could feel that you were truly on the right side, that you considered your work as social service, that you tried to run your cars to carry people—not to kill them!—If you could change your ground here I think—almost—" she stopped, smiling up at him, her fan in her lap, her firm delicate white hands eagerly clasped; then went on,

"Don't you care at all for the lives lost every day in this great city—under your cars?"

"It cannot be helped, my dear. Our men are as careful as men can be. But these swarming children will play in the streets—"

"Where else can they play!" she interjected.

"And they get right in front of the cars. We are very sorry; we pay out thousands of dollars in damages: but it cannot be helped!"

She leaned back in her chair and her face grew cold.

"You speak as if you never heard of such things as fenders," she said.

"We have fenders!—almost every car—"

"Fenders! Do you call that piece of rat-trap a fender! Henry Cortlandt! We were in Liverpool when this subject first came up between us! They have fenders there that fend and no murder list!"

"Conditions are different there," said he with an enforced quiet. "Our pavement is different."

"Our children are not so different, are they?" she demanded. "Our mothers are made of the same stuff I suppose?"

"You speak at if I wanted to kill them! As if I liked to!"

"I thought at first it would hurt you as it did me," she said warmly. "I turned to you with real hope when we met in Liverpool. I was glad to think I knew you, and I had not been glad of that for long! I thought you would care, would do things."

Do what he would, his mouth set hard in its accustomed lines. "Those English fender are not practicable in this country, Mary. They have been tried."

"When? Where? By whom?" she threw at him. "I have read about it, and heard about it. I know there was an effort to get them adopted, and that they were refused. They cost more than this kind!" and she pointed disdainfully at the rattling bit of stub-toed slat-work in front of a passing car.

"Do you expect me to make a revolution in the street car system of America—to please you? Do you make it a condition? Perhaps I can accomplish it. Is it a bargain? Come—"

"No," she said slowly. "I'm not making bargains. I'm only wishing, as I have wished so often in years past—that you were a different kind of man—"

"What kind do you want me to be?"

"I want you to be—I wish you were—a man who cared to give perfect service to his country, in his business."

"Perhaps I can be yet. I can try. If I had you to help me, with your pure ideals, and the boy to keep my heart open for the children. I don't know much about these things, but I can learn. I can read, you can tell me what to read. We could study together. And in my position perhaps, I could really be of some service after all."

"Perhaps?" She watched him, the strong rather heavy face, the attractive smile, the eyes that interested and compelled. He was an able, masterful man. He surely loved her now. She could feel a power over him that her short miserable marriage had never given her; and her girlhood's attraction toward him reasserted itself.

A new noise rose about them, a dissonant mingled merry outcry, made into a level roaring sound by their height above the street.

"That's when the school up here lets out," she said. "We hear it every day. Just see the crowds of them!"

They leaned on the broad sill and watched the many-colored torrent of juveniles pouring past.

"One day it was different," she said. "A strange jarring shrillness in it, a peculiar sound. I looked out, and there was a fight going on; two boys tumbling about from one side of the street to the other, with a moving ring around them, a big crowd, all roaring in one key."

"You get a birdseye view of life in these streets, don't you. Can you make out that little chap with the red hair down there?"

"No—we are both near-sighted, you know. I can't distinguish faces at this distance. Can you?"

"Not very clearly," he said. "But what a swarm they are!"

"Come away," said she, "I can't bear to look at them. So many children in that stony street, and those cars going up and down like roaring lions!"

They drew back into the big sunny room, and she seated herself at the piano and turned over loose sheets of music.

He watched her with a look of intensest admiration, she was so tall, so nobly formed, her soft rich gown flowed and followed as she walked, her white throat rose round and royal from broad smooth shoulders.

He was beside her; he took away the music, laid it out of reach, possessed himself of her hands.

"Give them back to me, Mary," he pleaded. "Come to me and help me to be a better man! Help me to be a good father. I need you!"

She looked at him almost pleadingly. His eyes, his voice, his hands,—they had their old-time charm for her. Yet he had only said "Perhaps"—and he might study, might learn.

He asked her to help him, but he did not say "I will do this"—only "I may."

In the steady bright June sunshine, in the sifting dust of a city corner, in the dissonant, confused noise of the traffic below, they stood and looked at one another.

His eyes brightened and deepened as he watched her changing color. Softly he drew her towards him. "Even if you do not love me now, you shall in time, you shall, my darling!"

But she drew back from him with a frightened start, a look of terror.

"What has happened!" she cried. "It's so still!"

They both rushed to the window. The avenue immediately below them was as empty as midnight, and as silent. A great stillness widened and spread for the moment around one vacant motionless open car. Without passenger, driver, or conductor, it stood alone in the glaring space; and then, with a gasp of horror, they both saw.

Right under their eyes, headed towards them, under the middle of the long car—a little child.

He was quite still, lying face downward, dirty and tumbled, with helpless arms thrown wide, the great car holding him down like a mouse in a trap.

Then people came rushing.

She turned away, choking, her hands to her eyes.

"Oh!" she cried, "Oh! It's a child, a little child!"

"Steady, Mary, steady!" said he, "the child's dead. It's all over. He's quite dead. He never knew what hit him." But his own voice trembled.

She made a mighty effort to control herself, and he tried to take her in his arms, to comfort her, but she sprang away from him with fierce energy.

"Very well!" she said. "You are right! The child is dead. We can not save him. No one can save him. Now come back—come here to the window—and see what follows. I want to see with my own eyes—and have you see—what is done when your cars commit murder! Child murder!"

She held up her watch. "It's 12:10 now," she said.

She dragged him back to the window, and so evident was the struggle with which she controlled herself, so intense her agonized excitement, that he dared not leave her.

"Look!" she cried. "Look! See the them crowd now!"

The first horrified rush away from the instrument of death was followed by the usual surging multitude.

From every direction people gathered thickly in astonishing numbers, hustling and pushing about the quiet form upon the ground; held so flat between iron rails and iron wheels, so great a weight on so small a body! The car, still empty, rose like an island from the pushing sea of heads. Men and women cried excited directions. They tried with swarming impotent hands to lift the huge mass of wood and iron off the small broken thing beneath it, so small that it did not raise the crushing weight from the ground.

A whole line of excited men seized the side rail and strove to lift the car by it, lifting only the rail.

The crowd grew momently, women weeping, children struggling to see, men pushing each other, policemen's helmets rising among them. And still the great car stood there, on the body of the child.

"Is there no means of lifting these monsters?" she demanded. "After they have done it, can't they even get off."

He moistened his lips to answer.

"There is a jacking crew," he said. "They will be here presently."

"Presently!" she cried. "Presently! Couldn't these monsters use their own power to lift themselves somehow? not even that?"

He said nothing.

More policemen came, and made a scant space around the little body, covering it with a dark cloth. The motorman was rescued from many would be avengers, and carried off under guard.

"Ten minutes," said she looking at her watch. "Ten minutes and it isn't even off him yet!" and she caught her breath in a great sob.

Then she turned on the man at her side: "Suppose his mother is in that crowd! She may be! Their children go to this school, they live all about below here, she can't even get in to see! And if she could, if she knew it was her child, she can't get him out!"

Her voice rose to a cry.

"Don't, Mary," said he, hoarsely. "It's—it's horrible! Don't make it worse!"

She kept her eyes on her watch-face, counting the minutes She looked down at the crowd shudderingly, and said over and over, under breath, "A little child! A little soft child!"

It was twelve minutes and a-half before the jacking crew drove up, with their tools. It was a long time yet before they did their work, and that crushed and soiled little body was borne to a near-by area grating and laid there, wrapped in its dingy shroud, and guarded by a policeman.

It was a full half hour before the ambulance arrived to take it away.

She drew back then and crouched sobbing by the sofa. "O the poor mother! God help his mother!"

He sat tense and white for a while; and when she grew quieter he spoke.

"You were right, Mary. I—naturally, I never—visualized it! It is horrible! I am going to have those fenders on every car of the four systems!"

She said nothing. He spoke again.

"I hate to leave you feeling so, Dear. Must I go?"

She raised a face that was years older, but did not look at him.

"You must go. And you must never come back. I cannot bear to see your face again!"

And she turned from him, shuddering.



BEFORE WARM FEBRUARY WINDS

Before warm February winds Arouse an April dream— Or sudden rifts of azure sky Suggest the bluebird's gleam;

Before the reddening woods awake, Before the brooks are free— Here where all things are sold and hired, The driven months we see.

Wither along our snow-soiled streets, Or under glass endure, Fruits of the days that have not come, Exotic—premature.

I hear in raw, unwelcome dawns The sordid sparrows sing, And in the florist's windows watch The forced and purchased spring.



KITCHEN-MINDEDNESS

It is physically possible to see through a knot-hole. If the eye be near enough, and the board be movable, one can, with patient rotation, see the universe in spots, through a knot-hole. Such a purview is limited of necessity, and while suitable to the microscope, is not congenial to the study of life in general.

When those who would save the forests of America began their work, the burden of effort lay in so stimulating and stretching the mental vision of our people, that they could see wider than their own immediate acreage, deeper than their own immediate profit, further than their own immediate time. Some such struggle was no doubt gone through, when that far-seeing iconoclast of early times strove to prove to the greedy hunter that more food was to be attained by breeding cattle than by killing them all at once; that meat kept better when alive. What mental labor, what arduous conflict between that prehistoric ant and grasshopper!

Steadily up the ages the mind of man has had to stretch, and sturdily has he resisted the process. That protoplasmic substance of the brain, used so much and understood so little, astonishes us no less by its infinite capacity for new extension, for endless fluent combination, than by its leaden immobility. Here are some, open-minded, sensitive and hospitable to new impressions; and here are others, an innumerable majority, preferring always to know only what they have known, to think only what they have thought before. The distinction does not seem innate. A normal child provided with proper stimulus, responds with ever fresh interest as field after field of new fact and new idea opens before him.

Twenty years later that same child has lost this capacity, has become dull, inert, conventional, conservative, contented. Upon his growing mind have been imposed in long succeeding years, the iron limitations of his "elders and betters"; only in the rarest of cases has he the mental strength to resist these influences and "think new," think for himself.

Here we all are, living together in relations as complex as the pattern of some mighty tapestry; each of us, seeing only his own part in it, considering the pattern from the point of view of a stitch. This attitude is exquisitely expressed by the reply of a dull student to the earnest teacher who strove to arouse in him some spontaneous opinion on human conduct. With enthusiasm and dramatic force, this instructor exhibited the career of Nero,—showed his list of crimes natural and unnatural, personal and political; his indecency, and cruelty, demanding what should be said of the monster. The student, spurred by questions, some-what fretfully responded, "He never did anything to me!"

Consciousness is of varying range. We know its gradual development, its narrow field in childhood, its permanent restriction in idiocy. We know how it may be developed, even in animals, how we have added to the dog's field of consciousness a deep and passionate interest in his master's life; how a well-befriended cat becomes desperately uneasy, when the family begins to pack for a journey. We know personally the difference between our range of thought at one age, and at another; how one's consciousness may include wider and wider fields of knowledge, longer ranges of time, deeper causal relations; and how the same object, viewed by different minds, may arouse in one as it were, a square inch, and in the other a square mile of consciousness. Those of us, who have the larger area under cultivation,—who are accustomed to think of human life as age-long, world-wide, and in motion, learn to see human conduct, not as something in neat detachable strata, like a pile of plates, but as having long roots and longer branches, and requiring careful handling to alter.

To these, studying the world's affairs, clear lines of causal sequence present themselves. Is it a thousand cases of typhoid? They trace the fever to its lair as one would hunt a tiger; they point out every step of its course; they call on the citizens to rise and fight the enemy, to save their lives. Do the citizens do it? Not they. Individually they suffer and die. Individually they grieve and mourn, bury,their dead (when they should cremate them), and pay the doctor and the undertaker. Hundreds of dollars they pay as individuals to nurses, doctors, graveyard men, and monument makers. If, collectively they would put up a tenth of the sum to ensure a pure water and milk supply, they would save not only hundreds for themselves, but thousands and millions for those after them.—to say nothing of grief!

But they look at life through a knot-hole. They see their own personal affairs as things of sky-shadowing importance, and those same affairs, taken collectively, become as remote and uninteresting as the Milky Way.

Now in the mere labor of intellectual comprehension our average citizen of common-school education is able to see that where so much tuberculous milk is fed into so many babies, that such a proportion will surely die. He sees, but it does interest him. Show him tubercular bacilli from the autopsy of his dead baby, show him the same in the bottle of milk reposing in his refrigerator, and show him the man who put them there—and you may get results.

He could see the larger facts, but only feel the smaller ones. It is a limitation of consciousness.

All workers for human advance know this. Whatever the cause upheld, those who work for it find everywhere the same difficulty; they have to stretch the minds, to stimulate the consciousness, to arouse the interest of their hearers, so that they will take action for the common good.

In one field it is easy, that of public danger from war. The reason is clear. Wars are carried on by men, and men have reacted to conflict stimuli collectively, for so many ages, that it is a race habit with them. Only in the last extreme of terror is this habit broken, and the battle turns to rout, with every man for himself. Then comes the officer and strives to rekindle that common consciousness without which is no human victory.

In the economic world our habits of organization are not so old. We have fought in company since we fought at all, as humans; but we have worked, for the most part alone. The comradeship of shop and factory is of yesterday, compared to the solitary spindle, loom and forge of earlier centuries. Yet in that comradeship wherever found, comes the new consciousness, that recognizes common danger or common gain, and substitutes the army for the mob, the victory for the rout.

This effect is so strong, so clear, so quick in appearance, that even with one poor century or two of economic combination, we ought to find much better results than we do. Where the common interest is as clear as day, where the common strength is so irresistible, where the loss and the danger lie so wholly in isolation, one wonders over and over at the lack of comprehension which keeps us so helplessly apart.

We can see the immense activities of the nation, the multiplication of national wealth, power, and progress,—the saving of life, the elimination of disease, the development of art and science, of beauty and of health and glorious living that we might have, but we cannot feel these things. Therefore we do not act.

Can there be still among us some general cause, acting on everyone, which mysteriously checks out progress, which makes us "penny-wise and pound-foolish," makes us "save at the spigot and spend at the bung-hole," which continually intensifies our consciousness of personal interest and continually prevents the recognition of social interests?

It may seem almost grotesque to make so heavy a complaint as this, and then to put forward as chief offender our old companion the kitchen.

Briefly the charge is this: that in the private kitchen, we maintain in our civilization an economic institution as old as house-building, almost as old as the use of fire. The results of this surviving rudiment of a remote past are many. The one presented here is the effect of the kitchen on the mind.

The condition is practically universal. For each house a kitchen. Be it the merest hut, the smallest tenement, one room; wherever the family is found, there is the kitchen. For each man there is a cook. In the great majority of cases the man's wife is his cook, and as she must spend most of her time in the kitchen, there must be her little ones also. In fifteen-sixteenths of American families, the children are thus reared,—by cooks in kitchens.

We, in our fatuous acceptance of race habits, have ceaselessly perpetuated this kitchen-bred population, and even defended it as an educational influence of no mean importance. "Children brought up by their mothers in the kitchen," we say, "early acquire knowledge and skill in various occupations; they see things done, and learn how to do them themselves."

This seems to the superficial listener like good sense. He never looks below the allegation for the evidence. He sees that daily observation, and practice should develop knowledge and skill, and fails to inquire further to see if it does.

Surely if all children were brought up in blacksmith shops, it would make them good blacksmiths; if they were brought up in dental parlors they would become good dentists!

Waiving the desirability of a form of training calculated to turn out an unvarying population of cooks, let us see if this daily association with the maternal house-servant in her workshop does educate as stated. On this point one clear comment has been made: "If kitchen life is such good training to mind and hand, why is it that so few of us are willing to follow the kitchen trades when we are grown? and why is it that competence in the kitchen is so rare?" This is a most practical observation. If fifteen-sixteenths of our women followed incessantly the occupation of shoemaking, and brought up their children in the shoe shop, we should hardly claim great educational advantages for that arrangement. If we did, would it not be disappointing to find that the trade of shoemaking was universally disliked and despised, and that good shoemakers were hard to find at any price?

Yet this is precisely the case in hand. Our kitchen-bred children, boy and girl alike, prefer almost any other trade, and when we wish to secure competent workers in the kitchen we find them extremely scarce.

Moreover, in its own special activities, the private kitchen makes no advance. Advance comes to it from outside; from the wider and more progressive professionalism of its various industries; specialized and socialized one by one. But, left to itself, domestic cook hands down to domestic cook the recipes of female ancestors, occasionally added to by obliging friends. It is endless repetition, but not progress.

The purpose of this discussion, however, is not to show the inefficacy of this ancient workshop, as a means of carrying on that great art, science, handicraft, and business—the preparation of food; but to point out the effect of the kitchen on the human mind.

The one dominant note of kitchen work is personality. Its products are all prepared for home consumption only. Its provisions are all secured and its processes directed with a view to pleasing a small group. It does not and cannot consider the general questions of hygiene, of nutrition, of the chemistry of improved processes of preparation, and the immense and pressing problems of pure food.

The kitchen mind, focussed continually upon close personal concerns, limited in time, in means, in capacity, and in mechanical convenience, can consider only; a, what the family likes; b, what the family can afford; and, c, what the cook can accomplish.

The most perfect type of organization we have is the military. Military success depends most absolutely on the commissary and sanitary departments. "An army travels on its belly," is the famous dictum.

Is there any difference in this respect between soldiers and other people? Are we not all gasteropods whether singly or in regiments? Is not the health and strength of the productive workers of the world, at least as valuable as that of the cumbrous forces of destruction?

In our last little war, and in the big one before that, disease killed more than sword and steel. We lament this—in armies. We prefer to keep our soldiers healthy that they may fight more strongly, and die more efficaciously, and this sick list is pure waste.

Is it any less waste in private life? Can we easily afford the loss in money—annual billions; the loss in strength, the loss in intellect, the loss in love, that falls on us so heavily from year to year? Study the record of man's fight with disease. See how the specialists devoting not only lifetimes, but the accumulating succession of lifetimes to the study of causes, cures and preventions, announce to us at last, "thus and thus are you made sick. Thus may you be cured, and thus may you so live as to be well."

See then the sanitary work of an aroused public; a truth is discovered; a truth is announced; a law is made; the law is enforced—a disease is conquered.

This is vividly shown in the work of our Government against pleuro-pneumonia—in cattle. The Federal Government, furnishing information and funds, and cooperating with the various States, attacked that disease, and stamped it out completely.

There is an effort now to rouse our government to fight the White Plague, in people as well as in cattle. And, as always, the difficulty is to stir and stretch and rouse our kitchen minds, to make us see things in common instead of individually. The men whose cattle had pleuro-pneumonia, kept them in herds, and lost them in herds, losing much money thereby. Many men were so afflicted. Therefore these many men got together, and, using the machinery of the State, they together destroyed their enemy. Cattle-raising is a business, a social industry.

But child-raising, husband-feeding, the care of the lives and health of all our families, is a domestic industry, in the management of the kitchen mind.

it has been shown recently that 72 per cent. of the cattle in New York State are tuberculous. This does not kill them quickly like pleuro-pneumonia. They live and may be sold. They live and may give milk. It has been shown recently (as stated in our unimpeachable daily press), that in some of the milk sold in New York City, there were more germs to the cubic millimeter, than in the same amount of sewage!

This milk, and most of the milk in all our cities, goes into the kitchen; the blind, brainless, family-feeding kitchen, and from there is given us to drink.

What protest rises from the kitchens of New York, or Chicago, or any city? What mass-meeting of angry women, presenting to their legislators the horrible facts of strong men poisoned and babies slain by this or any other abomination in the food supply?

A young man writes a novel exhibiting the badness of our meat supply. Men become excited. Men take action. Men legislate. The great meat industries stagger under the shock, recover, and go on smiling. Before this meanwhile, and afterwards, the meat went into out kitchens and we ate it.

Being kitchen-minded we cannot see that health is a public concern; that the feeding of our people is one of the most vital factors in their health, and that the private kitchen with its private cook is not able to keep the public well.

Ask the physician, the sanitary expert. He will tell you that the great advance in sanitary science is in its battle with the filth diseases; and that we die worse than ever from food diseases.

In fighting the filth diseases we have the public forces to work with; compulsory systems of sewage and drainage, quarantine, isolation hospitals, and all the other maneuvers by which an enlightened public protects itself.

But who shall say what a child shall eat, or a man or woman? Is it not wholly their own affair?

We cry out upon our women for the falling birth rate;—why not say something about the death rate of their babies? The average family must have four, merely to maintain a stationary population, said Grant Allen; "two to replace themselves and two to die." The doctor will tell you that they die mostly of what are called "preventable diseases" and that those diseases are mainly of the alimentary canal.

Kitchen-fed are we all, and those of us who survive it, who become immune to it, cry loudly of its excellence! If we could once see outside of these ancient limits, once figure to ourselves the vision of a healthy world, and the noble duty of making it,—then we should no longer be kitchen-minded.

Our narrowness of vision, our petty self-interest, does not end its injuries with our bodily health. Its leaden limitation is felt in all the economic field.

Not a business have we in the world but needs to be considered as a matter of public service; needs to be studied, helped, restricted, generally managed for the public good. Not a business in the world but is crippled and distorted by the childish self-interest of its promoters. Kitchen-bred men born of kitchen-bred mothers are we, and inevitably must we consider the main duty of life to be the service of our own body. What else does the child see his mother do, but work, work, work to cover the family table with food three times a day, and clear up afterward? What else can he grow up to do but work, work, work, to provide the wherewithal for another woman to do the same?

A million women are making bread as their mothers made it. How many women are trying to lift the standard of bread-making for their country? How many even know the difference in nutriment and digestibility between one bread and another?

They do not think "bread," but only "my bread." Their view of the staff of life is kitchen-minded. When our kitchen trades become world trades, when we are fed, not by the most ignorant, but by the wisest; when personal whims and painfully acquired habits give place to the light of science, and the fruit of wide experience; when, instead of dragging duty or sordid compulsion, we have wisdom and art to feed us; the change will be far greater than that of improved health. It will be a great and valuable advance even there. We shall become healthy, clean-fleshed people, intelligent eaters, each generation improving in strength and beauty, but we shall be helped in wider ways than that. We shall have the enlarged mental capacity that comes of a wider area of work and responsibility. We shall have in each man and woman the habitual power of organization, the daily recognition of mutual service and world-duty.

When the world comes out of the kitchen for good and all, and for that primitive little shop is substituted the cool glittering laboratory, wherein the needs of bodily replenishment are fully and beautifully met, it will give to the growing child a different background for his thought processes. At last we shall mark the great division between production, which is the social function, and consumption which is personal.

As we now emerge from the warm and greasy confines of our ancient cookshop, we begin to see with new eyes its true place as an economic factor. We are learning the unbridled waste of it; how it costs struggling humanity about forty-three per cent. of its productive labor, and two-thirds of its living expenses; how it does not conserve the very end for which we uphold it,—the health of the family; how it leaves us helpless before the adulterators of food, the purveyors of impure milk, diseased meat, and all unpleasantness. We are beginning to see how, most dangerous of all, it works against our economic progress, by perpetuating a primitive selfishness.

Public interest grows in public service. Self-interest is maintained by self-service. We can neither rightly estimate social gain, nor rightly condemn social evil, because we are so soddenly habituated to consider only personal gain, personal good and personal evil; because we are kitchen-minded.



TWO STORKS

Two storks were nesting.

He was a young stork—and narrow-minded. Before he married he had consorted mainly with striplings of his own kind, and had given no thought to the ladies, either maid or matron.

After he married his attention was concentrated upon his All-Satisfying Wife; upon that Triumph of Art, Labor, and Love—their Nest, and upon those Special Creations—their Children. Deeply was he moved by the marvellous instincts and processes of motherhood. Love, reverence, intense admiration, rose in his heart for Her of the Well-built Nest; Her of the Gleaming Treasure of Smooth Eggs; Her of the Patient Brooding Breast, the Warming Wings, the downy wide-mouthed Group of Little Ones.

Assiduously he labored to help her build the nest, to help her feed the young; proud of his impassioned activity in her and their behalf; devoutly he performed his share of the brooding, while she hunted in her turn. When he was o-wing he thought continually of Her as one with the Brood—His Brood. When he was on the nest he thought all the more of Her, who sat there so long, so lovingly, to such noble ends.

The happy days flew by, fair Spring—sweet Summer—gentle Autumn. The young ones grew larger and larger; it was more and more work to keep their lengthening, widening beaks shut in contentment. Both parents flew far afield to feed them.

Then the days grew shorter, the sky greyer, the wind colder; there was less hunting and small success. In his dreams he began to see sunshine, broad, burning sunshine day after day; skies of limitless blue; dark, deep, yet full of fire; and stretches of bright water, shallow, warm, fringed with tall reeds and rushes, teeming with fat frogs.

They were in her dreams too, but he did not know that.

He stretched his wings and flew farther every day; but his wings were not satisfied. In his dreams came a sense of vast heights and boundless spaces of the earth streaming away beneath him; black water and white land, grey water and brown land, blue water and green land, all flowing backward from day to day, while the cold lessened and the warmth grew.

He felt the empty sparkling nights, stars far above, quivering, burning; stars far below, quivering more in the dark water; and felt his great wings wide, strong, all sufficient, carrying him on and on!

This was in her dreams too, but he did not know that.

"It is time to Go!" he cried one day. "They are coming! It is upon us! Yes—I must Go! Goodbye my wife! Goodbye my children!" For the Passion of Wings was upon him.

She too was stirred to the heart. "Yes! It is time to Go! To Go!" she cried. "I am ready! Come!"

He was shocked; grieved; astonished. "Why, my Dear!" he said. "How preposterous! You cannot go on the Great Flight! Your wings are for brooding tender little ones! Your body is for the Wonder of the Gleaming Treasure!—not for days and nights of ceaseless soaring! You cannot go!"

She did not heed him. She spread her wide wings and swept and circled far and high above—as, in truth, she had been doing for many days, though he had not noticed it.

She dropped to the ridge-pole beside him where he was still muttering objections. "Is it not glorious!" she cried. "Come! They are nearly ready!"

"You unnatural Mother!" he burst forth. "You have forgotten the Order of Nature! You have forgotten your Children! Your lovely precious tender helpless Little Ones!" And he wept—for his highest ideals were shattered.

But the Precious Little Ones stood in a row on the ridge-pole and flapped their strong young wings in high derision. They were as big as he was, nearly; for as a matter of fact he was but a Young Stork himself.

Then the air was beaten white with a thousand wings, it was like snow and silver and seafoam, there was a flashing whirlwind, a hurricane of wild joy and then the Army of the Sky spread wide in due array and streamed Southward.

Full of remembered joy and more joyous hope, finding the high sunlight better than her dreams, she swept away to the far summerland; and her children, mad with the happiness of the First Flight, swept beside her.

"But you are a Mother!" he panted, as he caught up with them.

"Yes!" she cried, joyously, "but I was a Stork before I was A Mother! and afterward!—and All the Time!"

And the Storks were Flying.



WHAT DIANTHA DID

CHAPTER IV.

A CRYING NEED

"Lovest thou me?" said the Fair Ladye; And the Lover he said, "Yea!" "Then climb this tree—for my sake," said she, "And climb it every day!" So from dawn till dark he abrazed the bark And wore his clothes away; Till, "What has this tree to do with thee?" The Lover at last did say.

It was a poor dinner. Cold in the first place, because Isabel would wait to thoroughly wash her long artistic hands; and put on another dress. She hated the smell of cooking in her garments; hated it worse on her white fingers; and now to look at the graceful erect figure, the round throat with the silver necklace about it, the soft smooth hair, silver-filletted, the negative beauty of the dove-colored gown, specially designed for home evenings, one would never dream she had set the table so well—and cooked the steak so abominably.

Isabel was never a cook. In the many servantless gaps of domestic life in Orchardina, there was always a strained atmosphere in the Porne household.

"Dear," said Mr. Porne, "might I petition to have the steak less cooked? I know you don't like to do it, so why not shorten the process?"

"I'm sorry," she answered, "I always forget about the steak from one time to the next."

"Yet we've had it three times this week, my dear."

"I thought you liked it better than anything," she with marked gentleness. "I'll get you other things—oftener."

"It's a shame you should have this to do, Isabel. I never meant you should cook for me. Indeed I didn't dream you cared so little about it."

"And I never dreamed you cared so much about it," she replied, still with repression. "I'm not complaining, am I? I'm only sorry you should be disappointed in me."

"It's not you, dear girl! You're all right! It's just this everlasting bother. Can't you get anybody that will stay?"

I can't seem to get anybody on any terms, so far. I'm going again, to-morrow. Cheer up, dear—the baby keeps well—that's the main thing."

He sat on the rose-bowered porch and smoked while she cleared the table. At first he had tried to help her on these occasions, but their methods were dissimilar and she frankly told him she preferred to do it alone.

So she slipped off the silk and put on the gingham again, washed the dishes with the labored accuracy of a trained mind doing unfamiliar work, made the bread, redressed at last, and joined him about nine o'clock.

"It's too late to go anywhere, I suppose?" he ventured.

"Yes—and I'm too tired. Besides—we can't leave Eddie alone."

"O yes—I forget. Of course we can't."

His hand stole out to take hers. "I am sorry, dear. It's awfully rough on you women out here. How do they all stand it?"

"Most of them stand it much better than I do, Ned. You see they don't want to be doing anything else."

"Yes. That's the mischief of it!" he agreed; and she looked at him in the clear moonlight, wondering exactly what he thought the mischief was.

"Shall we go in and read a bit?" he offered; but she thought not.

"I'm too tired, I'm afraid. And Eddie'll wake up as soon as we begin."

So they sat awhile enjoying the soft silence, and the rich flower scents about them, till Eddie did wake presently, and Isabel went upstairs.

She slept little that night, lying quite still, listening to her husband's regular breathing so near her, and the lighter sound from the crib. "I am a very happy woman," she told herself resolutely; but there was no outpouring sense of love and joy. She knew she was happy, but by no means felt it. So she stared at the moon shadows and thought it over.

She had planned the little house herself, with such love, such hope, such tender happy care! Not her first work, which won high praise in the school in Paris, not the prize-winning plan for the library, now gracing Orchardina's prettiest square, was as dear to her as this most womanly task—the making of a home.

It was the library success which brought her here, fresh from her foreign studies, and Orchardina accepted with western cordiality the youth and beauty of the young architect, though a bit surprised at first that "I. H. Wright" was an Isabel. In her further work of overseeing the construction of that library, she had met Edgar Porne, one of the numerous eager young real estate men of that region, who showed a liberal enthusiasm for the general capacity of women in the professions, and a much warmer feeling for the personal attractions of this one.

Together they chose the lot on pepper-shaded Inez Avenue; together they watched the rising of the concrete walls and planned the garden walks and seats, and the tiny precious pool in the far corner. He was so sympathetic! so admiring! He took as much pride in the big "drawing room" on the third floor as she did herself. "Architecture is such fine work to do at home!" they had both agreed. "Here you have your north light—your big table—plenty of room for work! You will grow famouser and famouser," he had lovingly insisted. And she had answered, "I fear I shall be too contented, dear, to want to be famous."

That was only some year and a-half ago,—but Isabel, lying there by her sleeping husband and sleeping child, was stark awake and only by assertion happy. She was thinking, persistently, of dust. She loved a delicate cleanliness. Her art was a precise one, her studio a workshop of white paper and fine pointed hard pencils, her painting the mechanical perfection of an even wash of color. And she saw, through the floors and walls and the darkness, the dust in the little shaded parlor—two days' dust at least, and Orchardina is very dusty!—dust in the dining-room gathered since yesterday—the dust in the kitchen—she would not count time there, and the dust—here she counted it inexorably—the dust of eight days in her great, light workroom upstairs. Eight days since she had found time to go up there.

Lying there, wide-eyed and motionless, she stood outside in thought and looked at the house—as she used to look at it with him, before they were married. Then, it had roused every blessed hope and dream of wedded joy—it seemed a casket of uncounted treasures. Now, in this dreary mood, it seemed not only a mere workshop, but one of alien tasks, continuous, impossible, like those set for the Imprisoned Princess by bad fairies in the old tales. In thought she entered the well-proportioned door—the Gate of Happiness—and a musty smell greeted her—she had forgotten to throw out those flowers! She turned to the parlor—no, the piano keys were gritty, one had to clean them twice a day to keep that room as she liked it.

From room to room she flitted, in her mind, trying to recall the exquisite things they meant to her when she had planned them; and each one now opened glaring and blank, as a place to work in—and the work undone.

"If I were an abler woman!" she breathed. And then her common sense and common honesty made her reply to herself: "I am able enough—in my own work! Nobody can do everything. I don't believe Edgar'd do it any better than I do.—He don't have to!—and then such a wave of bitterness rushed over her that she was afraid, and reached out one hand to touch the crib—the other to her husband.

He awakened instantly. "What is it, Dear?" he asked. "Too tired to sleep, you poor darling? But you do love me a little, don't you?"

"O yes!" she answered. "I do. Of course I do! I'm just tired, I guess. Goodnight, Sweetheart."

She was late in getting to sleep and late in waking.

When he finally sat down to the hurriedly spread breakfast-table, Mr. Porne, long coffeeless, found it a bit difficult to keep his temper. Isabel was a little stiff, bringing in dishes and cups, and paying no attention to the sounds of wailing from above.

"Well if you won't I will!" burst forth the father at last, and ran upstairs, returning presently with a fine boy of some eleven months, who ceased to bawl in these familiar arms, and contented himself, for the moment, with a teaspoon.

"Aren't you going to feed him?" asked Mr. Porne, with forced patience.

"It isn't time yet," she announced wearily. "He has to have his bath first."

"Well," with a patience evidently forced farther, "isn't it time to feed me?"

"I'm very sorry," she said. "The oatmeal is burned again. You'll have to eat cornflakes. And—the cream is sour—the ice didn't come—or at least, perhaps I was out when it came—and then I forgot it. . . . . I had to go to the employment agency in the morning! . . . . I'm sorry I'm so—so incompetent."

"So am I," he commented drily. "Are there any crackers for instance? And how about coffee?"

She brought the coffee, such as it was, and a can of condensed milk. Also crackers, and fruit. She took the baby and sat silent.

"Shall I come home to lunch?" he asked.

"Perhaps you'd better not," she replied coldly.

"Is there to be any dinner?"

"Dinner will be ready at six-thirty, if I have to get it myself."

"If you have to get it yourself I'll allow for seven-thirty," said he, trying to be cheerful, though she seemed little pleased by it. "Now don't take it so hard, Ellie. You are a first-class architect, anyhow—one can't be everything. We'll get another girl in time. This is just the common lot out here. All the women have the same trouble."

"Most women seem better able to meet it!" she burst forth. "It's not my trade! I'm willing to work, I like to work, but I can't bear housework! I can't seem to learn it at all! And the servants will not do it properly!"

"Perhaps they know your limitations, and take advantage of them! But cheer up, dear. It's no killing matter. Order by phone, don't forget the ice, and I'll try to get home early and help. Don't cry, dear girl, I love you, even if you aren't a good cook! And you love me, don't you?"

He kissed her till she had to smile back at him and give him a loving hug; but after he had gone, the gloom settled upon her spirits once more. She bathed the baby, fed him, put him to sleep; and came back to the table. The screen door had been left ajar and the house was buzzing with flies, hot, with a week's accumulating disorder. The bread she made last night in fear and trembling, was hanging fatly over the pans; perhaps sour already. She clapped it into the oven and turned on the heat.

Then she stood, undetermined, looking about that messy kitchen while the big flies bumped and buzzed on the windows, settled on every dish, and swung in giddy circles in the middle of the room. Turning swiftly she shut the door on them. The dining-room was nearly as bad. She began to put the cups and plates together for removal; but set her tray down suddenly and went into the comparative coolness of the parlor, closing the dining-room door behind her.

She was quite tired enough to cry after several nights of broken rest and days of constant discomfort and irritation; but a sense of rising anger kept the tears back.

"Of course I love him!" she said to herself aloud but softly, remembering the baby, "And no doubt he loves me! I'm glad to be his wife! I'm glad to be a mother to his child! I'm glad I married him! But—this is not what he offered! And it's not what I undertook! He hasn't had to change his business!"

She marched up and down the scant space, and then stopped short and laughed drily, continuing her smothered soliloquy.

"'Do you love me?' they ask, and, 'I will make you happy!' they say; and you get married—and after that it's Housework!"

"They don't say, 'Will you be my Cook?' 'Will you be my Chamber maid?' 'Will you give up a good clean well-paid business that you love—that has big hope and power and beauty in it—and come and keep house for me?'"

"Love him? I'd be in Paris this minute if I didn't! What has 'love' to do with dust and grease and flies!"

Then she did drop on the small sofa and cry tempestuously for a little while; but soon arose, fiercely ashamed of her weakness, and faced the day; thinking of the old lady who had so much to do she couldn't think what to first—so she sat down and made a pincushion.

Then—where to begin!

"Eddie will sleep till half-past ten—if I'm lucky. It's now nearly half-past nine," she meditated aloud. "If I do the upstairs work I might wake him. I mustn't forget the bread, the dishes, the parlor—O those flies! Well—I'll clear the table first!"

Stepping softly, and handling the dishes with slow care, she cleaned the breakfast table and darkened the dining-room, flapping out some of the flies with a towel. Then she essayed the parlor, dusting and arranging with undecided steps. "It ought to be swept," she admitted to herself; "I can't do it—there isn't time. I'll make it dark—"

"I'd rather plan a dozen houses!" she fiercely muttered, as she fussed about. "Yes—I'd rather build 'em—than to keep one clean!"

Then were her hopes dashed by a rising wail from above. She sat quite still awhile, hoping against hope that he would sleep again; but he wouldn't. So she brought him down in full cry.

In her low chair by the window she held him and produced bright and jingling objects from the tall workbasket that stood near by, sighing again as she glanced at its accumulated mending.

Master Eddy grew calm and happy in her arms, but showed a growing interest in the pleasing materials produced for his amusement, and a desire for closer acquaintance. Then a penetrating odor filled the air, and with a sudden "O dear!" she rose, put the baby on the sofa, and started toward the kitchen.

At this moment the doorbell rang.

Mrs. Porne stopped in her tracks and looked at the door. It remained opaque and immovable. She looked at the baby—who jiggled his spools and crowed. Then she flew to the oven and dragged forth the bread, not much burned after all. Then she opened the door.

A nice looking young woman stood before her, in a plain travelling suit, holding a cheap dress-suit case in one hand and a denim "roll-bag" in the other, who met her with a cheerful inquiring smile.

"Are you Mrs. Edgar Porne?" she asked.

"I am," answered that lady, somewhat shortly, her hand on the doorknob, her ear on the baby, her nose still remorsefully in the kitchen, her eyes fixed sternly on her visitor the while; as she wondered whether it was literature, cosmetics, or medicine.

She was about to add that she didn't want anything, when the young lady produced a card from the Rev. Benjamin A. Miner, Mrs. Porne's particularly revered minister, and stated that she had heard there was a vacancy in her kitchen and she would like the place.

"Introducing Mrs. D. Bell, well known to friends of mine."

"I don't know—" said Mrs. Porne, reading the card without in the least grasping what it said. "I—"

Just then there was a dull falling sound followed by a sharp rising one, and she rushed into the parlor without more words.

When she could hear and be heard again, she found Mrs. Bell seated in the shadowy little hall, serene and cool. "I called on Mr. Miner yesterday when I arrived," said she, "with letters of introduction from my former minister, told him what I wanted to do, and asked him if he could suggest anyone in immediate need of help in this line. He said he had called here recently, and believed you were looking for someone. Here is the letter I showed him," and she handed Mrs. Porne a most friendly and appreciative recommendation of Miss D. Bell by a minister in Jopalez, Inca Co., stating that the bearer was fully qualified to do all kinds of housework, experienced, honest, kind, had worked seven years in one place, and only left it hoping to do better in Southern California.

Backed by her own pastor's approval this seemed to Mrs. Porne fully sufficient. The look of the girl pleased her, though suspiciously above her station in manner; service of any sort was scarce and high in Orchardina, and she had been an agelong week without any. "When can you come?" she asked.

"I can stop now if you like," said the stranger. "This is my baggage. But we must arrange terms first. If you like to try me I will come this week from noon to-day to noon next Friday, for seven dollars, and then if you are satisfied with my work we can make further arrangements. I do not do laundry work, of course, and don't undertake to have any care of the baby."

"I take care of my baby myself!" said Mrs. Porne, thinking the new girl was presuming, though her manner was most gently respectful. But a week was not long, she was well recommended, and the immediate pressure in that kitchen where the harvest was so ripe and the laborers so few—"Well—you may try the week," she said. "I'll show you your room. And what is your name?"

"Miss Bell."



LITTLE LEAFY BROTHERS

Little, leafy brothers! You can feel Warmth o' the sun, Cool sap-streams run, The slow, soft, nuzzling creep Of roots sent deep, And a close-anchored flowing In winds smooth-blowing. And in the Spring! the Spring! When the stars sing— The world's love in you grows Into the rose!

Little hairy brothers! You can feel The kind sun too; Winds play with you, Water is live delight; In your swift flight Of wings or leaping feet Life rushes sweet— And in the Spring! the Spring! When the stars sing— The world's love stirs you first To wild, sweet thirst, Mad combat glorious, and so To what you know Of love in living. Yes, to you first came The joy past name Of interchange—the small mouth pressed To the warm, willing breast.

But O! the human brothers! We can feel All, all below These small ones know; Earth fair and good, The bubbling flood Of life a-growing—in us multiplied As man spreads wide; Not into leaves alone, Nor flesh and bone, But roof and wall and wheel Of stone and steel; Soft foliage and gorgeous bloom Of humming loom; And fruit of joy o'er-burdened heart Poured forth in Art! We can not only leap in the sun, Wrestle and run, But know the music-measured beat Of dancing feet, The interplay of hands—we hold Delight of doing, myriad-fold. Joy of the rose, we know— To bloom—to grow!— Joy of the beast we prove— To strive—to move! And in the Spring! the Spring! When the stars sing, Wide gladness of all living men Comes back again, A conscious universe at rest In one's own breast! The world's love! Wholly ours; Through breathing flowers, Through all the living tumult of the wood, In us made good; Through centuries that rise and fall— We hold it all! The world's love! Given music, fit To carry it. The world's love! Given words at last, to speak, Though yet so weak. The world's love! Given hands that hold so much, Lips that may touch! The worlds's love! Sweet!—it lies In your dear eyes!



OUR ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE; or, THE MAN-MADE WORLD

IV.

MEN AND ART.

Among the many counts in which women have been proven inferior to men in human development is the oft-heard charge that there are no great women artists. Where one or two are proudly exhibited in evidence, they are either pooh-poohed as not very great, or held to be the trifling exceptions which do but prove the rule.

Defenders of women generally make the mistake of over-estimating their performances, instead of accepting, and explaining, the visible facts. What are the facts as to the relation of men and women to art? And what, in especial, has been the effect upon art of a solely masculine expression?

When we look for the beginnings of art, we find ourselves in a period of crude decoration of the person and of personal belongings. Tattooing, for instance, is an early form of decorative art, still in practice among certain classes, even in advanced people. Most boys, if they are in contact with this early art, admire it, and wish to adorn themselves therewith; some do so—to later mortification. Early personal decoration consisted largely in direct mutilation of the body, and the hanging upon it, or fastening to it, of decorative objects. This we see among savages still, in its gross and primitive forms monopolized by men, then shared by women, and, in our time, left almost wholly to them. In personal decoration today, women are still near the savage. The "artists" developed in this field of art are the tonsorial, the sartorial, and all those specialized adorners of the body commonly known as "beauty doctors."

Here, as in other cases, the greatest artists are men. The greatest milliners, the greatest dressmakers and tailors, the greatest hairdressers, and the masters and designers in all our decorative toilettes and accessories, are men. Women, in this as in so many other lines, consume rather than produce. They carry the major part of personal decoration today; but the decorator is the man. In the decoration of objects, woman, as the originator of primitive industry, originated also the primitive arts; and in the pottery, basketry, leatherwork, needlework, weaving, with all beadwork, dyeing and embroideries of ancient peoples we see the work of the woman decorator. Much of this is strong and beautiful, but its time is long past. The art which is part of industry, natural, simple, spontaneous, making beauty in every object of use, adding pleasure to labor and to life, is not Art with a large A, the Art which requires Artists, among whom are so few women of note.

Art as a profession, and the Artist as a professional, came later; and by that time women had left the freedom and power of the matriarchate and become slaves in varying degree. The women who were idle pets in harems, or the women who worked hard as servants, were alike cut off from the joy of making things. Where constructive work remained to them, art remained, in its early decorative form. Men, in the proprietary family, restricting the natural industry of women to personal service, cut off their art with their industry, and by so much impoverished the world.

There is no more conspicuously pathetic proof of the aborted development of women than this commonplace—their lack of a civilized art sense. Not only in the childish and savage display upon their bodies, but in the pitiful products they hang upon the walls of the home, is seen the arrest in normal growth.

After ages of culture, in which men have developed Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music and the Drama, we find women in their primitive environment making flowers of wax, and hair, and worsted; doing mottoes of perforated cardboard, making crazy quilts and mats and "tidies"—as if they lived in a long past age, or belonged to a lower race.

This, as part of the general injury to women dating from the beginning of our androcentric culture, reacts heavily upon the world at large. Men, specializing, giving their lives to the continuous pursuit of one line of service, have lifted our standard in aesthetic culture, as they have in other matters; but by refusing the same growth to women, they have not only weakened and reduced the output, but ruined the market as it were, hopelessly and permanently kept down the level of taste.

Among the many sides of this great question, some so terrible, some so pathetic, some so utterly absurd, this particular phase of life is especially easy to study and understand, and has its own elements of amusement. Men, holding women at the level of domestic service, going on themselves to lonely heights of achievement, have found their efforts hampered and their attainments rendered barren and unsatisfactory by the amazing indifference of the world at large. As the world at large consists half of women, and wholly of their children, it would seem patent to the meanest understanding that the women must be allowed to rise in order to lift the world. But such has not been the method—heretofore.

We have spoken so far in this chapter of the effect of men on art through their interference with the art of women. There are other sides to the question. Let us consider once more the essential characteristics of maleness, and see how they have affected art, keeping always in mind the triune distinction between masculine, feminine and human. Perhaps we shall best see this difference by considering what the development of art might have been on purely human terms.

The human creature, as such, naturally delights in construction, and adds decoration to construction as naturally. The cook, making little regular patterns around the edge of the pie, does so from a purely human instinct, the innate eye-pleasure in regularity, symmetry, repetition, and alternation. Had this natural social instinct grown unchecked in us, it would have manifested itself in a certain proportion of specialists—artists of all sorts—and an accompanying development of appreciation on the part of the rest of us. Such is the case in primitive art; the maker of beauty is upheld and rewarded by a popular appreciation of her work—or his.

Had this condition remained, we should find a general level of artistic expression and appreciation far higher than we see now. Take the one field of textile art, for instance: that wide and fluent medium of expression, the making of varied fabrics, the fashioning of garments and the decoration of them—all this is human work and human pleasure. It should have led us to a condition where every human being was a pleasure to the eye, appropriately and beautifully clothed.

Our real condition in this field is too patent to need emphasis; the stiff, black ugliness of our men's attire; the irritating variegated folly of our women's; the way in which we spoil the beauty and shame the dignity of childhood by modes of dress.

In normal human growth, our houses would be a pleasure to the eye; our furniture and utensils, all our social products, would blossom into beauty as naturally as they still do in those low stages of social evolution where our major errors have not yet borne full fruit.

Applied art in all its forms is a human function, common to every one to some degree, either in production or appreciation, or both. "Pure art," as an ideal, is also human; and the single-hearted devotion of the true artist to this ideal is one of the highest forms of the social sacrifice. Of all the thousand ways by which humanity is specialized for inter-service, none is more exquisite than this; the evolution of the social Eye, or Ear, or Voice, the development of those whose work is wholly for others, and to whom the appreciation of others is as the bread of life. This we should have in a properly developed community; the pleasure of applied art in the making and using of everything we have; and then the high joy of the Great Artist, and the noble work thereof, spread far and wide.

What do we find?

Applied art at a very low level; small joy either for the maker or the user. Pure art, a fine-spun specialty, a process carried on by an elect few who openly despise the unappreciative many. Art has become an occult profession requiring a long special education even to enjoy, and evolving a jargon of criticism which becomes more esoteric yearly.

Let us now see what part in this undesirable outcome is due to our Androcentric Culture.

As soon as the male of our species assumed the exclusive right to perform all social functions, he necessarily brought to that performance the advantages—and disadvantages—of maleness, of those dominant characteristics, desire, combat, self-expression.

Desire has overweighted art in many visible forms; it is prominent in painting and music, almost monopolizes fiction, and has pitifully degraded dancing.

Combat is not so easily expressed in art, where even competition is on a high plane; but the last element is the main evil, self-expression. This impulse is inherently and ineradicably masculine. It rests on that most basic of distinctions between the sexes, the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the universe. In the very nature of the sperm-cell and the germ-cell we find this difference: the one attracts, gathers, draws in; the other repels, scatters, pushes out. That projective impulse is seen in the male nature everywhere; the constant urge toward expression, to all boasting and display. This spirit, like all things masculine, is perfectly right and admirable in its place.

It is the duty of the male, as a male, to vary; bursting forth in a thousand changing modifications—the female, selecting, may so incorporate beneficial changes in the race. It is his duty to thus express himself—an essentially masculine duty; but masculinity is one thing, and art is another. Neither the masculine nor the feminine has any place in art—Art is Human.

It is not in any faintest degree allied to the personal processes of reproduction; but is a social process, a most distinctive social process, quite above the plane of sex. The true artist transcends his sex, or her sex. If this is not the case, the art suffers.

Dancing is an early, and a beautiful art; direct expression of emotion through the body; beginning in subhuman type, among male birds, as the bower-bird of New Guinea, and the dancing crane, who swing and caper before their mates. Among early peoples we find it a common form of social expression in tribal dances of all sorts, religious, military, and other. Later it becomes a more explicit form of celebration, as among the Greeks; in whose exquisite personal culture dancing and music held high place.

But under the progressive effects of purely masculine dominance we find the broader human elements of dancing left out, and the sex-element more and more emphasized. As practiced by men alone dancing has become a mere display of physical agility, a form of exhibition common to all males. As practiced by men and women together we have our social dances, so lacking in all the varied beauty of posture and expression, so steadily becoming a pleasant form of dalliance.

As practiced by women alone we have one of the clearest proofs of the degrading effect of masculine dominance:—the dancing girl. In the frank sensualism of the Orient, this personage is admired and enjoyed on her merits. We, more sophisticated in this matter, joke shamefacedly about "the bald-headed row," and occasionally burst forth in shrill scandal over some dinner party where ladies clad in a veil and a bracelet dance on the table. Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found—the female capering and prancing before the male. It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers. That we, as a race, present this pitiful spectacle, a natural art wrested to unnatural ends, a noble art degraded to ignoble ends, has one clear cause.

Architecture, in its own nature, is least affected by that same cause. The human needs secured by it, are so human, so unescapably human, that we find less trace of excessive masculinity than in other arts. It meets our social demands, it expresses in lasting form our social feeling, up to the highest; and it has been injured not so much by an excess of masculinity as by a lack of femininity.

The most universal architectural expression is in the home; the home is essentially a place for the woman and the child; yet the needs of woman and child are not expressed in our domestic architecture. The home is built on lines of ancient precedent, mainly as an industrial form; the kitchen is its working centre rather than the nursery.

Each man wishes his home to preserve and seclude his woman, his little harem of one; and in it she is to labor for his comfort or to manifest his ability to maintain her in idleness. The house is the physical expression of the limitations of women; and as such it fills the world with a small drab ugliness. A dwelling house is rarely a beautiful object. In order to be such, it should truly express simple and natural relations; or grow in larger beauty as our lives develop.

The deadlock for architectural progress, the low level of our general taste, the everlasting predominance of the commonplace in buildings, is the natural result of the proprietary family and its expression in this form.

In sculpture we have a noble art forcing itself into some service through many limitations. Its check, as far as it comes under this line of study, has been indicated in our last chapter; the degradation of the human body, the vicious standards of sex-consciousness enforced under the name of modesty, the covered ugliness, which we do not recognize, all this is a deadly injury to free high work in sculpture.

With a nobly equal womanhood, stalwart and athletic; with the high standards of beauty and of decorum which we can never have without free womanhood; we should show a different product in this great art.

An interesting note in passing is this: when we seek to express socially our noblest, ideas, Truth; Justice; Liberty; we use the woman's body as the highest human type. But in doing this, the artist, true to humanity and not biassed by sex, gives us a strong, grand figure, beautiful indeed, but never decorated. Fancy Liberty in ruffles and frills, with rings in her ears—or nose.

Music is injured by a one-sided handling, partly in the excess of the one dominant masculine passion, partly by the general presence of egoism; that tendency to self-expression instead of social expression, which so disfigures our art; and this is true also of poetry.

Miles and miles of poetry consist of the ceaseless outcry of the male for the female, which is by no means so overwhelming as a feature of human life as he imagines it; and other miles express his other feelings, with that ingenuous lack of reticence which is at its base essentially masculine. Having a pain, the poet must needs pour it forth, that his woe be shared and sympathized with.

As more and more women writers flock into the field there is room for fine historic study of the difference in sex feeling, and the gradual emergence of the human note.

Literature, and in especial the art of fiction, is so large a field for this study that it will have a chapter to itself; this one but touching on these various forms; and indicating lines of observation.

That best known form of art which to my mind needs no qualifying description—painting—is also a wide field; and cannot be done full justice to within these limits. The effect upon it of too much masculinity is not so much in choice of subject as in method and spirit. The artist sees beauty of form and color where the ordinary observer does not; and paints the old and ugly with as much enthusiasm as the young and beautiful—sometimes. If there is in some an over-emphasis of feminine attractions it is counterbalanced in others by a far broader line of work.

But the main evils of a too masculine art lie in the emphasis laid on self-expression. The artist, passionately conscious of how he feels, strives to make other people aware of these sensations. This is now so generally accepted by critics, so seriously advanced by painters, that what is called "the art world" accepts it as established.

If a man paints the sea, it is not to make you see and feel as a sight of that same ocean would, but to make you see and feel how he, personally, was affected by it; a matter surely of the narrowest importance. The ultra-masculine artist, extremely sensitive, necessarily, and full of the natural urge to expression of the sex, uses the medium of art as ingenuously as the partridge-cock uses his wings in drumming on the log; or the bull moose stamps and bellows; not narrowly as a mate call, but as a form of expression of his personal sensations.

The higher the artist the more human he is, the broader his vision, the more he sees for humanity, and expresses for humanity, and the less personal, the less ultra-masculine, is his expression.



COMMENT AND REVIEW

The literary output of the ancient Hebrews must have been great, since we are told by their critical philosopher, "Of the making of many books there is no end."

There must have been some limit, however, because their books were hand made, and not everyone could do it. Since the printing press relieved this mechanical restriction, and educational facilities made reading and writing come, if not by nature, at least with general compulsion, the making of books has increased to the present output—which would have made the ancient philosopher blush for his premature complaint.

In this, as in all social functions, we have the normal and the abnormal growth before us; but so far we have not learned to divide them. There is no harm at all in having anybody and everybody write books if they choose, any more than in having anybody and everybody talk if they choose. Literature is only preserved speech.

Freedom of speech is dear to our hearts; it is an easy privilege, and costs little—to the speaker. People are free to talk, privately and publicly, and free to write, privately and publicly.

The harm comes, in this as in other processes, by the door of economic interest. It is not the desire to write which crowds our market so disadvantageously; it is the desire to sell.

Though a fair capacity in the art of literature were even more general than to-day, if our social conditions were normal only a certain proportion of us would naturally prefer that form of expression. Our literary output is abnormally increased by two influences; the hereditary and inculcated idea of superiority in this profession, and the emoluments thereof. These last are greatly over-estimated, as, in truth, is the first also.

There is nothing essentially more worthy in the art of saying things than in the art of doing things. The basic merit in literature, as in speech, lies in the thing said. This the makers of many books have utterly forgotten. "She's a beautiful talker!" we might say of someone. "It's perfectly lovely! Such language! Such expression! It's a joy to hear her!"

Then an unenthusiastic person might rudely inquire, "Yes—but what does she say?"

Talking is not fancy-work. It is not an exhibition of skill in the use of the vocal chords, in knowledge of grammar and rhetoric. Speech is developed in our race as a medium of transmission of thought and feelings. The greater or less ease and proficiency with which we elaborate the function should always be held subordinate to the real use. Literature is to be similarly judged by its initial purpose, the preservation and transmission of ideas and feelings. Even the picture-work of fiction must carry a certain content of ideas, else it cannot be read; it does not, as the children say, "make sense."

Now take up your current magazine—the largest medium of literary expression to-day—and consider it from this point of view.

The modern magazine is a distinctly new product. When the slow, thick stream of book-making first began to spread and filter out through the new channels of periodic publication, a magazine was a serious literary production. The word "magazine" implies an armory, a storehouse, a collection of valuable pieces of literature. Now we need a new word for the thing. It has become a more and more fluent and varied mouthpiece of popular expression. It is a halfway-house between the newspaper and the book. The older, higher-priced, more impressive of them, keep up, or try to keep up, the standards of the past; but the world of to-day is by no means so much interested in "beautiful letters" as in the fresh current of knowledge and feeling belonging to our times.

Articles about flying machines may or may not be "literature" but they are small doses of information highly desirable to persons who have not time enough, nor money enough, to read books.

If you have time, you can go to the libraries. If you have money, you can order from your dealer.

If you have only ten cents—no, fifteen, it takes in these days of prosperity—you can with that purchase a deal of valuable and interesting matter, coming on fresh every month—or week.

Sweeping aside all the "instructive" articles as hopelessly without the lofty pale of literature, we have left an overwhelming mass of fiction. This, too, is ruthlessly condemned by the austere upholder of high standards. This, too, is not literature.

What is literature?

Literature, in the esoteric sense of lofty criticism, is a form of writing which, like the higher mathematics, must be free from any taint of utility. Pure literature must perforce be a form of expression, but must not condescend to express anything.

To write with the narrow and vulgar purpose of saying something, is to be cut off hopelessly from the elect few who produce literature. This attitude of sublime superiority as an art is responsible for our general scorn of what we call,

"The Novel With a Purpose."

Have any of us fairly faced the alternative? Are we content to accept delightedly the "Novel Without a Purpose"?

Do you remember the Peterkin Papers? How Solomon John, the second son, thought he would like to write a book? How Agammemnon, the oldest son, and Elizabeth Eliza, the sister, and the Little Boys, in their beloved rubber boots, as also the parents, were all mightily impressed with the ambition of Solomon John? How a table was secured, and placed in the proper light? How a chair was brought, paper was procured, and pens and ink? How finally all was ready, and the entire family stood about in rapt admiration to see Solomon John begin?

He drew the paper before him; he selected a pen; he dipped it in the ink and poised it before him.

Then he looked from one to another, and an expression of pained surprise spread over his features.

"Why," said Solomon John, "I have nothing to say!"

(I quote from memory, not having the classics at hand.)

There was great disappointment in the Peterkin family, and the project was given up. But why so? Solomon John need not have been so easily discouraged. He was in the exact position to produce literature—pure, high, legitimate literature—the Novel Without a Purpose.

In the effort to preserve the purity of the Pierian Springs, those guardians of this noble art, who arbitrate in the "standard magazines," condemn and exclude what they define as "controversial literature."

Suppose someone comes along with a story advocating euthanasia, showing with all the force of the art of fiction the slow, hideous suffering of some helpless cancer patient or the like, the blessed release that might be humanly given; showing it so as to make an indelible impression—this story is refused as "controversial," as being written with a purpose.

Yet the same magazine will print a story no better written, showing the magnificent heroism of the man who slowly dies in year-long torment, helpless himself and steady drain on everyone about him, virtuously refusing to shorten his torments—and theirs.

What is a controversy? A discussion, surely. It has two sides.

Why isn't a story upholding one side of a controversy as controversial as a story upholding the other side?

Is it only a coincidence that magazines of large circulation and established reputation so consistently maintain that side of the controversy already popularly held as right?

Time passes. Minds develop. New knowledge comes. People's ideas and feelings change—some people's. These new ideas and feelings seek expression ion the natural forms—speech and literature, as is legitimate and right.

But the canons of taste and judgement say No.

The ideas and feelings of the peoples of past times found expression in this way, and are preserved in literature. But our ideas and feelings, so seeking expression, do not make literature.

It is not the first time that the canons were wrong. Straight down the road of historic progress, from the dim old days we can hardly see, into the increasing glare of the calcium-lighted present, there have always stood the Priesthood of the Past, making human progress into an obstacle race.



PERSONAL PROBLEMS

QUERY: "I am a woman of about forty; my children are pretty well grown up; my home does not take all my time. I could do some work in the world, but I do not know what to do. Can you advise me?"

QUERY: "I appreciate the need of women's working, and am free to do so, but cannot make up my mind what work to undertake. It is very easy for you people with 'a mission' and talents, but what is an ordinary woman to do?"

ANSWER: These two questions belong together, and may be answered together. Neither of the questioners seem to be driven by necessity, which simplifies matters a good deal.

Work has to be done for two real reasons. One is the service of humanity, of society, which cannot exist without our functional activity. Work is social service.

The other is personal development. One cannot be fully human without this functional social activity.

In choosing work, there are two governing factors always, and generally the third one of pressing necessity. Of the two, one is personal fitness—the instinctive choice of those who are highly specialized in some one line. This makes decision easy, but does not always make it easy to get the work. You may be divinely ordained to fiddle—but if no one wants to hear you, you are badly off. The other is far more general; it is the social demand—the call of the work that needs doing.

If you are able to work, free to work, and not hampered by a rigid personal bent, just look about and see what other people need. Study your country, town, village, your environment, near or distant; and take hold of some social need, whether it is a better school board or the preservation of our forests. So long as the earth or the people on it need service, there is work for all of us.



PLAY-TIME

A WALK WALK WALK

I.

I once went out for a walk, walk, walk, For a walk beside the sea; And all I carried for to eat, eat, eat, Was a jar of ginger snaps so sweet, And a jug of ginger tea.

For I am fond of cinnamon pie, And peppermint pudding, too; And I dearly love to bake, bake, bake, A mighty mass of mustard cake, And nutmeg beer to brew.

II.

And all I carried for drink, drink, drink, That long and weary way, Was a dozen little glasses Of boiled molasses On a Cochin China tray.

For I am fond of the sugar of the grape, And the sugar of the maple tree; But I always eat The sugar of the beet When I'm in company.

III.

And all I carried for to read, read, read, For a half an hour or so, Was Milman's Rome, and Grote on Greece, And the works of Dumas, pere et fils, And the poems of Longfellow.

For I am fond of the Hunting of the Snark, And the Romaunt of the Rose; And I never go to bed Without Webster at my head And Worcester at my toes.



ODE TO A FOOL

"Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly."—Prov. 17th, 12th.

Singular insect! Here I watch thee spin Upon my pin; And know that thou hast not the least idea I have thee here. Strange is thy nature! For thou mayst be slain Once and again; Dismembered, tortured, torn with tortures hot— Yet know it not! As well pour hate and scorn upon the dead As on thy head. While I discuss thee here I plainly see Thee sneer at me.

Marvellous creature! What mysterious power In idle hour Arranged the mighty elements whence came Thy iron frame! In every item of thy outward plan So like a man! But men are mortal, dying every day, And thou dost stay. The nations rise and die with passing rule, But thou, O Fool! Livedst when drunken Noah asleeping lay, Livest to-day.

Invulnerable Fool! Thy mind Is deaf and blind; Impervious to sense of taste and smell And touch as well. Thought from without may vainly seek to press Thy consciousness; Man's hard-won knowledge which the ages pile But makes thee smile; Thy vast sagacity and blatant din Come from within; Thy voice doth fill the world from year to year, Helpless we hear.

Wisdom and wit 'gainst thee have no avail; O Fool—All Hail!



THE FORERUNNER

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE

BY

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AUTHOR, OWNER & PUBLISHER

1.00 A YEAR .10 A COPY

Volume 1. No. 5 MARCH, 1910 Copyright for 1910 C. P. Gilman

How many a useless stone we find Swallowed in that capacious, blind, Faith-swollen gullet, our ancestral mind!



THE SANDS

It runs—it runs—the hourglass turning; Dark sands glooming, bright sands burning; I turn—and turn—with heavy or hopeful hands; So must I turn as long as the Voice commands; But I lose all count of the hours for watching the sliding sands.