ignore the God-given law to "be fruitful and multiply." Regardless of the affected horror of anaemic prudes and ancient wall-flowers, the woman of to-day insists upon being recognized as a vital force—is even beginning to comprehend that, refine it as you will, differentiate it as you may, it is the same vital force which fills the cradle that sways the scepter. As she aspires to share with man the regency of this world, she will scarce thank Carpenter and Maxwell for a premise from which the conclusion must be inevitably drawn that, as a world-power, she must ever rank with eunuchs—that she is here solely by man's volition and despite her implied protest. We must understand woman before presuming to measure her passions or estimate her powers; and it is well to remember that after some sixty centuries of interested scrutiny she remains very much a mystery—to eminent physicians as well as others. Her mind seems to bewilder the psychologists no less than her body puzzles the physiologists—both find the factual impossible and the self-evident absurd. Dr. Maxwell has discovered, however, that comparatively few women marry men whom they would select were they free to inspect the entire human penfold and make a choice of a mate. Now if he will conjoin that fact to this other, equally self-evident, that with the average woman desire is the fruitage of which love is the flower, perchance he will find a valid explanation of what Carpenter calls her sexual passivity. Man is a born polygamist, but woman is not naturally polyandrous. This statement—which I have made hitherto to the consternation of the godly and at imminent danger of being prosecuted for heresy—is substantiated by the fact that with man desire usually precedes love, while the latter is not its necessary sequence; but with the normal woman love must act as pilot for passion—so much is she our moral superior. Every woman is a day-dreamer and a worshiper. During girlhood she pictures to herself some perfect man—some impossible demigod—who is to drift within the little circle of her life and make her the proudest of women, the happiest of wives. In grace or beauty, in genius or bravery—or all these attributes—he is to be the paragon, to tower like Saul above his brethren. Her husband is to be a man of whom she will be intensely proud, herself the envy of her sex. If this be not correct let some old mother in Israel answer. Happy for the daydreamer if her fairy prince, or somewhat her fond imaginings can accept as such, lays heart and fortune at her feet; sorrowful indeed if he come not, worse if he materialize and have eyes only for others. If she be so fortunate as to wed the one man in all the world whom she would have chosen had such choice been vouchsafed her by kind Heaven, o'ermastering love will sweep her through all the heavens a sensuous fancy ever feigned; but the chances are that her idol lives only in the ghostly realm of dreams, else goes elsewhere to wive, and she marries not whom she would but whom she must— wedlock, thanks to her mistaken training, being the end and aim of her existence. Instead of an idol to adore, she secures some foolish eidolon whom she can scarce respect, and through days of disgust and nights of agony strives to "do her duty," to conceal from the world her disappointment. Thus is blood that might have been a sirocco to stir the soul of an anchorite, transformed into an icy mist—the Paphian Venus lies crushed, degraded, cold, amid the reeds of Pan. But this mesalliance, this mating with Davus the detested instead of with Oedipus the adored, is not the only cause of indifference. The health of American wives, their muliebrity or womanly power, is sapped in various ways. Millions of them are overworked, all the virility ground out of them in the brutal treadmill of existence; and it not infrequently happens that they are the wives of men in easy circumstances, who are too fat- headed to realize that those womanly attributes which so charm the sterner sex cannot long withstand continual drudgery. One is tempted to believe that such men married to save the expense of hiring a housekeeper, that they hoped by sleeping with their laundress to avoid wash bills. Take the great middle class of America (which is the social and moral cream of the country) and you will find that, as a rule, the men have abundant leisure in which to recuperate from the exhaustion of labor, and are robust as Jove's Phoenician bull, while their wives slave from early morn till dewy eve and present the faded, "washed-out" appearance that bespeaks the work which is never done and the worry which ends only with death. If you will look closely you will detect traces of tight corsets and other sartorial enginery with which Dame Fashion attempts to eliminate the little life which continual cooking, washing and pot- walloping has left—for woman, though her heart be broken, her spirit crushed and her viscera a chaos, still clings to her vanity, will "follow the fashions" though they lead to a funeral. Such is your Idalian Aphrodite ten years after marriage, when to her matured charms the beauty of her girlhood should be as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine. And this wan, suffering creature, with a drug- shop on her pantry shelves and more "female complaints" than were known to the father of medicine, is expected to comfort the couch of Caesar! Nor is this all. As the struggle for existence grows harder (as it has been doing in America for some decades) and the necessity for "keeping up appearances" more imperative, ever greater precautions are taken to prevent family increase. So widespread is this evil that you can scarce pick up a paper without finding some abortion nostrum advertised. Scan the next paper that comes into your home and see if the virtues of some tansy, penny-royal or other foeticidal compound be not therein set forth. Were these crime promoters not extensively sold the murderous scoundrels who manufacture them could not annually expend vast sums of money without "public educators" for their exploitation. These advertisements frequently suggest the crime; that is their intent; hence publishers who insert them are the co- partners of abortionists and share both the iniquity and the cash. But even this costly advertising does not indicate the extent of the evil, for by far the greater part of those married women who desire to avoid maternity are their own practitioners—paying the penalty with premature age, impotency and pain. As a rule the mother of a large family is a healthy woman with vigor unimpaired, while others of her age having few children or none are the semi-invalids who denounce their husbands to the doctor. The practice of avoiding marital responsibility is frequently condemned by the medical press, even by the pulpit; but while M.D.'s and D.D.'s make a specialty of both gynecology and gyneolatry, neither seem to understand the spirit in which these sins against hygienics are committed. Doubtless a few fashionable butterflies avoid motherhood for selfish reasons; but these are unimportant exceptions to the rule. If a woman does not love her husband she may not care to bear him children; but maternal instinct usually dominates this desire. If she does love him, and his financial resources be limited, she hesitates to increase his responsibilities. The social standing of a family in this artificial age is measured chiefly by the faithfulness with which it follows fashion's decrees; and as every child, by enhancing expense makes service of this modern Moloch more difficult, the unborn innocents are slain. She considers the educational and other advantages that will accrue to the children already born, and unselfishly—if sinfully—sacrifices herself. It is an evil that will scarce be eliminated by the dehortations of homilists who see no deeper than the surface. Dr. Maxwell and his lady lecturer are certainly mistaken in the assumption that American husbands do not consider the welfare of their wives when in a delicate condition, and it is a mistake that must be classed either as criminal negligence or calumny. I opine that the lady lecturer aforesaid is a sour old maid—that if she ever becomes a wife and mother she will learn somewhat of the caprices of her sex subsequent to conception that will materially modify her complaint. Reasoning by analogy from the inferior order of animals to man hagled more than one enthusiastic physiologist into serious error. The medical profession is continually alarming the country. It has been but a little while since men were assured that they were poisoning their babies by kissing them, and now they are flatly told that their wives regard the nuptial couch with aversion. Havana cigars give a fellow the "tobacco heart," plug exhausts the saliva necessary to digestion, and bourbon whiskey burns his stomach full of blowholes. Beer makes him bilious, tea and coffee knock out his nerves, while plum-pudding gives him dyspepsia, grape pie appendicitis and hot biscuits undermine his general health. Emotional preaching afflicts him with "jerks," golf has a tendency to paresis, the round dance infects him with philogyny and bicycling deforms his face. We might just as well be dead and with Lucifer as believe these doctors, for life wouldn't be half worth the living if we heeded their laws. My brethren of the loaded capsule and sociable stethoscope are evidently off their equipoise. Babies flourish much better on the kiss micrococcus than on the slipper bacillus, few women will live with impotent husbands, and nearly every centenarian is a collocation of bad habits that, by all the laws of Hippocrates, should have buried him at the halfway house. It may seem unchivalrous to say so, but it is a stubborn fact nevertheless, and merits the consideration of Dr. Maxwell, that more men are misled by lustful women than maids betrayed by designing men. In fact, no man—at least no civilized man—makes improper advances to a woman unless he receives some encouragement, being deterred both by chivalrous sentiment and respect for the persuasive shotgun. Despite the picture drawn by the lady lecturer and others of the horrors of married life, I opine that the woman who captures a sure-enough man who isn't negotiating simply for a cook and chambermaid, and who can be depended upon to play Romeo to her Juliet for sixty years or so, should be in no unseemly haste to break into that heaven where Hymen is given the marble heart, and the matron who breaks into the game with seven obedient husbands to her credit has no advantage over the old maid who never swallowed a pillow while watching a man clad only in a single garment and a cerulean halo of profanity, making frantic swipes under the bureau for a missing collar- button.

* * * HYPNOTIC POWER OF HER.

I have received a letter from Tyler, Texas, propounding the following fateful conundrum: "Can Woman Hypnotize Man?" My correspondent adds that "by answering, the ICONOCLAST will confer a favor on the people of Tyler, decide a bet and settle a vexatious question."

The affirmative scoops the stakes—wins dead easy, and world without end. The man who puts his doubloons on the negative either never saw a woman until after she was dead, or didn't know what ailed him when under her hypnotic influence. Perhaps he imagined that he had a chronic case of yellow jaundice, was threatened with paresis or had been inadvertently struck by lightning. Perhaps he's under the mystic spell of some "wily Vivien" even now, and laying foolish wagers in his mesmeric sleep. "Can woman hypnotize man? "Well, I should snigger. She can hypnotize anything that wears pants, from the prince at his gilded poker game, to the peasant scattering worm poison in the lowly cotton patch and revolving in his think tank the tenets of Populism; and I'm not sure but the clothing store dummies and their brother dudes are simply the physical wrecks and mental ruins of her hypnotic medicine. She hypnotizes because she can't help it. She's built that way. The Tyler savants are 'way behind the times. They are plunging into the shoreless realm of psychology in search of information that was trite in antediluvian times. They are trying to determine whether man is a free moral agent in matters matrimonial, when the sire of Solomon had made answer, and Lillian Russell's multitudinous husbands settled the "vexatious question" forever and for aye. But perhaps Tyler has been too busy raising politicians to keep pace with the psychological procession. Eve hypnotized Adam and made him cast away the empire of the earth for a scrubby apple, and ever since her fair daughters have been making men imitate their remote forefather's folly.

Woman does not "operate" as do the professional he- hypnotists. Instead of giving you a bright button or brand- new dime to look at, she puts her dimples in evidence— maelstroms of love in a sea of beauty. She dazzles you for a moment with the dreamy splendor of her eyes, then studies the toe of a boot that would raise a Kansas corn- crop for Trilby or supply Cinderella with bunions. She looks down to blush and she looks up to sigh—catches you "a- comin' an' goin' "—and you're gone! You realize that the linchpin is slipping out of your logic, but you let 'er slip. You suspect that your judgment has taken unto itself wings, and that you couldn't tell whether you're a red-licker Democrat or a hard-cider Prohibitionist; but you don't care. You simply bid farewell to every fear and give the "operator" your undivided attention. She plays with a skilled hand on all your senses, until the last one of them "passes in music out of sight" and leaves you a mental bankrupt. She makes you drunken with the music of her voice and maddens you with the low, sweet melody of her skirts. She permits you, quite accidentally, of course, to catch a glimpse of an ankle turned for an angel, and, as she bends forward to chastise you with her fan, your vagrant gaze rests for a fleeting moment on alabaster hemispheres rising in a billowy sea of lace, like Aphrodite cradled in old ocean's foam. You are now far advanced in the hypnotic trance, and very fond of it as far as you've got. Her every posture is a living picture, her slightest movement a sensuous symphony, her breath upon your cheek a perfumed air to waft you to the dreamy but dangerous land of the lotus-eaters. You drift nearer, and ever nearer, like a moth revolving in narrowing circles around an incandescent light, until you find yourself alone with her in some cozy nook, the world forgetting if not by your creditors forgot. Being naturally industrious, you seek employment, and she gives you her hand to hold. Of course, she could hold it herself, but the occupation pleases you, and she doesn't mind. Besides, you make more rapid progress into the realm of irresponsibility by taking care of it for her occasionally. You conceive that what is worth doing at all is worth doing well, and freeze to that little fragment of pulsing snow like a farmer to his Waterbury in a camp-meeting crowd. She rewards your devotion to duty by a gentle pressure, and a magnetic thrill starts at your finger tips and goes through your system like an applejack toddy, until it makes your toes tingle, then starts on its return trip, gathering volume as it travels, until it becomes a tidal wave that envelops all your world. You are now uncertain whether you have hit the lottery for the capital prize or been nominated for justice of the peace. You have lost your identity, and should you chance to meet yourself in the middle of the road would need an introduction. The larger the supply of brains you sat into the game with, the less you have left. You begin to talk incoherently, and lay the premise for a breach of promise case. You sip the hand-made nectar from the rosy slot in her face, harrow the Parisian peach bloom on her cheek with your scrubbing-brush mustache, reduce the circumference of her health-corset with your manly arm, and your hypnotism is complete. Right there the last faint adumbration of responsibility ends and complete mental aberration begins. You sigh like a furnace and write sonnets to your mistress' eyebrow—you cut fantastic capers before high Heaven for the divertisement of those who don't yet know how it is themselves. The "operator" may break the spell by marrying you, in which case you will return by easy stages to the normal and again become a sane man and useful member of society; but if she lets you down with the "sister" racket, your nervous system is pretty apt to sour. When a woman loses her hypnotic power she either straddles a bike, becomes a religious crank or seeks surcease for her sorrow among the female suffragists.

* * * VICTOR HUGO'S IMMORTALITY.

Philadelphia's school board has barred Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" from the list of books to be used in the high school in the teaching of French, as a book not fit for girls. What would not one give for a diagram of the heads of these educators? It must be a nasty mind which can find anything immoral in that book as a whole. One may take a chapter out here and there, and show it to be broad and coarse, divorced from the context, but the whole effect of the book is moral. The mind of the man who can say that "Les Miserables" will not tend as a whole to make a girl more womanly, a boy more manly, must be poisoned by the miasma from a filthy heart. What and who in it are immoral? Not Valjean! Not Fantine even, nor Cosette! Not Marius! Not Javert, the detective! Is the chapter on Cambronne's surrender the offending fragment of the great literary masterpiece? That chapter is the sublimity of disgust! There never was anyone hurt spiritually or morally by the great French masterpiece of fiction. The man who can say the book is defiling, would draw defilement from the fount of Castaly. The Philadelphia school board has declared itself an aggregation of asses. "Les Miserables" is the greatest poem of divine humanity that this world has known since Shakespeare wrote "Lear." But I suppose "Lear," too, is immoral. I suppose everything is immoral, from "Oedipus, the Tyrant," to Hall Caine's "Christian," that teaches that men are born of woman, and that love will have its way, even unto all bitterness. It is eminently fitting that "Les Miserables" should be condemned as immoral in the most immoral city in the United States. A Philadelphian may be depended upon to see immorality in one of Raphael's Madonnas.—St. Louis Mirror.

My esteemed contemporary should bottle up its indignation, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by lambasting idiots, by criticizing cretins. Editor Reedy is but casting his pearls before swine—is talking to people who, having eyes see not, having ears hear not, and whose cerebra are filled with sawdust. They are like unto a lot of sheep that follow the master ram, not because they comprehend or care whither he is going, but because they smell him, and point their proboscidi in his direction as naturally as the needle lines the pole. It was Jean Paul—was it not?—who discovered that if a cane be held horizontally before the lead ram of a flock, compelling him to saltate, then removed, the thousandth ewe lamb will jump at that point just as did the pioneer. So it is with a pietistical and puristical people—they will follow some stupid old bellwether because utterly incapable of independent thought, of individual ratiocination. When "Les Miserables" first appeared some literary Columbus made the remarkable discovery that it was a French book, that it was shot full of "slang," the expressive patois of the race, that it was liberally spiced with argot, the vernacular of vagabonds. Hugo's immortal masterpiece has not yet recovered from this discovery—the thousandth ewe lamb is still blithely saltating over the blackthorn. It is as useless to contend against the purist fad as against the holiness fake. Like a plague of army worms or epidemic of epizootic, it must run its course. Preternicety of expression, an affectation of euphemism, has in every age and clime evidenced moral degeneration and mental decay. When people emasculate their minds, they redouble their corporeal devotion at the shrine of Priapus, for nature preserves the equipoise. Every writer of virility is now voted obscene, every man who strikes sledge-hammer blows at brutal wrong intrenched in prescriptive right is denounced as immoral. "Les Miserables" not fit for young ladies' reading!—and this the epocha of the New Woman, of the single standard of mind and morals. While woman is insisting that she is every way man's equal, entitled to share with him the wardship of this world, Detroit is putting bloomers on the statues of Dian, Boston refusing the Bacchante, Waco draping the marble figure of a child exhibited at her cotton palace, Anthony Comstock having cataleptic convulsions, "Les Miserables" excluded from Philadelphia high schools and the ICONOCLAST denounced by certain bewhiskered old he-virgins as obscene! And so it goes. This world is becoming so awfully nice that it's infernally nawsty. It sees evil in everything because its point of view is that of the pimp. Its mind is a foul sewer whose exhalations coat even the Rose of Sharon with slime. A writer may no longer call a spade a spade; he must cautiously refer to it as an agricultural implement lest he shock the supersensitiveness of hedonists and call down upon his head the Anathema Maranatha of men infinitely worse than Oscar Wilde. What the Mirror means by "Cambronne's surrender" I cannot imagine, unless Editor Reedy was indulging in grim irony. I present extracts from the account of Cambronne, which he suspects may have given the pietistical Quakers a pain. It is the finale of Hugo's matchless word-painting of the Battle of Waterloo:

"A few squares of the guard, standing motionless in the swash of the rout, like rocks in running water, held out till night. They awaited the double shadow of night and death, and let them surround them. Each regiment, isolated from the others, and no longer connected with the army, which was broken on all sides, died where it stood. The gloomy squares, deserted, conquered and terrible, struggled formidably with death, for Ulm, Wagram, Jena and Friedland were dying in it. When twilight set in at nine in the evening, one square still remained at the foot of the plateau of Mont St. Jean. In this mournful valley, at the foot of the slope scaled by the cuirassiers, now inundated by the English masses, beneath the converging fire of the hostile and victorious artillery, under a fearful hailstorm of projectiles, this square still resisted. It was commanded by an obscure officer by the name of Cambronne. At each volley the square still diminished, but continued to reply to the canister with musketry fire, and each moment contracted its four walls. Fugitives in the distance, stopping at moments to draw breath, listened in the darkness to this gloomy diminishing thunder. When this legion had become only a handful, when their colors were but a rag, when their ammunition was exhausted, and muskets were clubbed, and when the pile of corpses was greater than the living group, the victors felt a species of sacred awe, and the English artillery ceased firing. It was a sort of respite; these combatants had around them an army of specters, outlines of mounted men, the black profile of guns, and the white sky visible through the wheels; the colossal death's head which heroes ever glimpse in the smoke of battle, advanced and looked at them. They could hear in the twilight gloom that the guns were being loaded; the lighted matches, resembling the eyes of a tiger in the night, formed a circle round their heads. The linstocks of the English batteries approached the guns, and at this moment an English general, Colville according to some, Maitland according to others, holding the supreme moment suspended over the heads of these men, shouted to them, 'Brave Frenchmen, surrender!' Cambronne answered, 'Merde.' To Cambronne's exclamation, an English voice replied, 'Fire!' The batteries flashed, the hillside trembled, from all these throats of brass came a last eruption of grape, a vast cloud of smoke vaguely whitened by the rising moon rolled up, and when the smoke had been dissipated, there was nothing. The dreaded remnant was annihilated, the guard was dead. The four walls of the living redoubt lay low, with here and there a scarcely perceptible quiver among the corpses. Thus the French legions, grander than those of Rome, expired on Mont St. Jean, on the earth sodden with rain and blood."

Hugo quite needlessly apologized for quoting the Frenchman's laconic reply to the summons to surrender. He was writing history, and no milk-and-water euphemism could have expressed Cambronne's defiance and contempt. Of course John Bull pitilessly shot to death that heroic fragment of the Old Guard, which forgot in its supreme hour that while foolhardiness may be magnificent, it is not war. I would have put a cordon of soldiers about that pathetic remnant of Napoleon's greatness and held it there to this good day rather than have plowed it down as a farmer plows jimson weeds into a pile of compost; but John Bull is not built that way—is impregnated with the chivalry of Baylor. Cambronne's reply is the only objectionable word in the entire work, and certain it might be pardoned in a scrap of history by people whose press and pulpit have apotheosized "Trilby," Du Maurier's supposititious prostitute. I presume that the Philadelphia school board is about on an intellectual and moral parity with the trustees of Baylor—haven't the remotest idea whether merde means maggots or moonshine. Victor Hugo was a lord in the aristocracy of intellect; his masterpiece is nature's faithful mirror. Ame de boue should be branded with a hot iron on the hickory-nut head of every creature whom its perusal does not benefit. His description of the Battle of Waterloo is to "Ben-Hur's" chariot race what Mount Aetna in eruption is to a glow worm. It transcends the loftiest flights of Shakespeare. Before it even "The Wondrous Tales of Troy" pales its ineffectual fires. It casts the shadow of its genius upon Bulwer's "Pompeii" as the wing of the condor shades the crow. Byron's "sound of revelry by night" is the throbbing of a snare drum drowned in Hugo's thunders of Mont St. Jean. Danton's rage sinks to an inaudible whisper, and even Aeschylus shrivels before that cataclysm of Promethean fire; that celestial monsoon. It stirs the heart like the rustle of a silken gonfalon dipped in gore, like the whistle of rifle-balls, like the rhythmic dissonance of a battery slinging shrapnel from the heights of Gettysburg into the ragged legions of General Lee. I have counseled my contemporary to be calm; but by Heaven! it does stir my soul into mutiny to see a lot of intellectual pismires, who have secured positions of trust because of their political pull in the Tenderloin, hurling their petty scorn at Victor Hugo. It were like Carlyle's "critic fly" complacently rubbing its hinder legs and giving its opinion of the Parthenon, like aesop's vindictive snail besliming the masterpiece of Phidias, like a Baylor professor lecturing on the poetry of Lord Byron. Every writer of eminence since the days of Moses has had to run the gauntlet of these slight people's impotent wrath. While slandering the prophets of progress and religion they have vented their foul rheum on all the gods of literature. Kansas, I am told, put a man in the penitentiary for sending through the mails biblical texts printed on postal cards. Speaking of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," Carlyle says:

" 'Meister,' it appears is a vulgar work; no gentleman, we hear in certain circles, could have written it; few real gentlemen, it is insinuated, can like to read it; no real lady, unless possessed of considerable courage should profess having read it at all!"

And yet "Wilhelm Meister" changed the whole current of European literature—the work was practically committed to memory by the noblest men and women of the world. We hear the venerated Queen of Prussia repeating from it in her cruel exile,

"Wer nie sein Brod mit Thranen ass, Wer nicht die Kummervollen Nachte Auf Seinem Bette weinend sass, Der Kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Machte."

Let the Philadelphia school board and the Baylorian managers construe it if they can.

"Udi vura udorini udiri cicova cilti mora Udorini talti hollna u ede caimoni mora"

What? I guess "nit." The idea of keeping "Les Miserables" away from the ladies!—just as though there could be found in the whole country a sixteen-year-old maid with any pretensions to intelligence who hasn't wept over little Cosette, been in love with Enjolras and "doted on" Gavroche and Jean Valjean! So ultra nice has the world become that we must skip the Canticles. Shakespeare's plays must now be clapper-clawed to make them palatable. Alexander Pope's philosophic rhyme must be deleted with dashes. Walt Whitman's poetry is too strong for the average stomach. But we continue to fire into the bosoms of our families the daily press with its specialization of Hogan's Alley and the Yellow Kid, reeking with its burden of ads. of abortion recipes and syphilitic nostrums—even take our wives and daughters to the Tabernacle to be told by Sam Jones that if they don't think he has backbone he'll "pull up his shirt-tail and show 'em!" Byron was vigorously denounced by the vindictive Miss Nancys of his day, but scornfully replied:

"I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flatter'd its rank breath nor bow'd To its idolatries a patient knee."

There seems to be nothing left that we may safely read except Watts' Hymns, Talmage's sermons and the pathetic story of Mary's Little Lamb—a promising diet truly, upon which to rear intellectual titans. The remarkable thing about this purist fad is that all the Podsnaps wear pants—the ladies are not on tenter-hooks all the time lest something be said or written that will "bring a blush to the cheek of a young person." It is the he-virgins, the bearded women who are ever on the watch lest young femininity become impregnated with an idea. This country's got a bad case of malus pudor—and needs an heroic dose of double-action liver pills.

* * * THE SCIENCE OF KISSING.

I note that a Britisher named Prof. Bridger has been infringing my copyright by proclaiming, as an original discovery, that kissing is an excellent tonic and will cure dyspepsia. When the o'erbusy bacteriologists first announced that osculation was a dangerous pastime, that divers and sundry varieties of bacteria hopped blithely back and forth engendering disease and death, I undertook a series of experiments solely in the interest of science. Being a Baptist Preacher and making camp-meetings my specialty, I had unusual opportunity for investigation, for those of our faith are strict constructionists of the biblical law to "greet one another with a kiss." I succeeded in demonstrating before the end of the tenting season that osculation, when practiced with reasonable discretion and unfaltering industry, is an infallible antidote for at least half the ills that human flesh is heir to. The reason the doctors arrived at different conclusions is that they kissed indiscriminately and reasoned inductively. They found on casting up the account that bad breath and face powder, the sour milk-bottle of youth and the chilling frost of age, comprised six-sevenths of the sum total. Under such conditions there was nothing to do but establish a quarantine. I pointed out, as Prof. Bridger has since done, that a health microbe as well as a disease bacillus nidificates on the osculatory apparatus, and added that failure to absorb a sufficient quantity of these hygiologic germs into the system causes old maids to look jaundiced and bachelors to die sooner than benedicts. Kisses, when selected with due care and taken on the installment plan, will not only restore a misplaced appetite, but are especially beneficial in cases of hay fever, as they banish that tired feeling, tone up the liver, invigorate the heart, and make the blood to sing through the system like a giant jewsharp. I found by patient experiment that the health microbe becomes active at fifteen, reaches maturity at twenty, begins to lose its vigor at forty, and is quite useless as a tonic when, as someone has tersely expressed it, a woman's kisses begin to "taste of her teeth." Thin bluish lips produce very few health germs, and those scarce worth the harvesting; but a full red mouth with Cupid curves at the corners, will yield enormously if the crop be properly cultivated. I did not discover whether the blonde or brunette variety is entitled to precedence in medical science, but incline to the opinion that a judicious admixture is most advisable from a therapeutical standpoint. Great care should be taken when collecting the germs not to crush them by violent collision or blow them away with a loud explosion that sounds like hitting an empty sugar hogshead with a green hide. The practice still prevailing in many parts of this country of chasing a young woman ever the furniture and around the barn like an amateur cowboy trying to rope a maverick, rounding her up in the presence of a dozen people, unscrewing her neck and planting almost any place a kiss that sounds like a muley cow pulling her hind foot out of a black-waxy mud hole, and which jars the putty off the window panes, possesses no more curative powers than hitting a flitch of bacon with the back of your hand. I prithee, avoid it; when a girl runs from a kiss you may take it for granted either that the germ crop is not ripe or you are poaching on somebody else's preserves. The best results can be obtained about the midnight hour, when the dew is on the rose, the jasmine bud drunken with its own perfume and the mock- bird trilling a last good night to his drowsy mate. You entice your best girl into the garden to watch Venus' flaming orb hanging like the Kohinoor pendant from the crescent moon. You pause beneath the great gnarled live oak, its myriad leaves rustling softly as the wings of seraphs. Don't be in a hurry, and for God's sake, don't gab—in such a night silence is the acme of eloquence. "In such a night Troilus mounted the Trojan walls and sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents where Cressid lay." She watches the fireflies respiring in phosphorescent flame amid the clover blooms, while you watch her and twine a spray of honeysuckle in her hair. Your clumsy fingers unloose the guards and her fragrant tresses, caught up by the cool night wind, float about your face. Somehow her hand gets tangled up with yours, and after a spasmodic flutter there remains a willing prisoner. The fireflies have failed to interest her and she is studying the stars. You move your shoulder forward to give her head a rest and get hold of her other hand. Be patient; when she wants you to kiss her she'll find means to make it manifest, and a maid worth kissing despises a forward man. She looks very beautiful with her face upturned in the moonlight; but don't say a word about it, for there's a little of the poseur about all the daughters of Eve. She withdraws her eyes from the stars, slowly turns them dreamily upon yours, and you note that they are filled with astral fire. They roam idly over the shadowy garden, then close as beneath a weight of weariness. Her head rests more heavily against your shoulder and her bosom trembles with a half-audible sigh. There is now really no occasion for further delay. Do not swoop down upon the health germs like a hungry hen-hawk on a green gosling, but incline your head gently until your carefully deodorized breath is upon her lips—there pause, for the essence of enjoyment is in anticipation. The man who gulps down a glass of old wine without first inhaling its oenanthic and feasting his eyes upon its ruddy splendors, is simply a sot. Wait until you have noted the dark lashes lying upon the cheek of sun-flushed snow, "the charm of married brows," the throat of alabaster, the dimple in her chin, the wine-tint of her half-parted lips with their glint of pearl—wait until her eyes half-open, look inquiringly into yours, and close again, then cincture her gently but firmly with one arm, support her chin with the other hand, and give the health germs ample time to change their home. A kiss to have any scientific value, should last one minute and seven seconds by Shrewsbury clock, and be repeated seven times, not in swift succession, but with the usual interval between wine at a symposiac. Byron did these things differently, but the author of "Don Juan" is not a safe example for young folks to follow. He pictures Mars lying with his head in the lap of Venus,

"Feeding on thy sweet cheek, while thy lips are With lava-kisses melting while they burn, Shower'd on his eyelids, brow and mouth as from an urn."

That may be eminently satisfactory to Mars, but scarce proper for Venus. It is exciting, but not scientific. It suggests charity children gorging themselves with plum- pudding, rather than poetic natures drunken with beauty; and fragrance, swooning 'neath the sweetness of a duet sung by their own chaste souls. The dyspeptic who cannot recover by following my prescription deserves to die. The pessimist whom it doesn't make look at life through rose- tinted glasses, should be excluded from human society. The hypochondriac whom it doesn't help ought to be hanged. There is not a human ill—unless it be hypocrisy— for which nature does not provide a remedy, and I recommend the health germ which builds its nest on lovely woman's lips as worth more than the whole materia medica. I don't know whether it will raise the dead, but I've always doubted the story that Egypt kissed the cold lips of her Roman Antony—have suspected it would have brought me back to life and love had I been dead a month. The unscientific catch-as-catch-can kiss has no more beneficial effect than slapping yourself in the face with a raw beef- steak. It is but a slight improvement on the civilization of Ashantee, where a man proposes marriage by knocking his Dulcina down with a club and dragging her through the backwoods' pasture by the hair of her head; but kisses properly taken—beneath the stars and among the roses—are the perennial fount of youth for which Ponce de Leon sailed far seas in a vain search for the blessed Bimini.

* * * THE NEW SOUTH.

One of the cardinal faults of the American character is a propensity to brag. Brother Jonathan's egotism long since passed into a proverb. In no section of this land of the alleged free and home of the ism does the blowhard blow longer and louder than in the South. We are the people, the nonpareil; there are none like us beneath the sun! From the empyrean we look down upon common humanity, talk turgid and swell up with the vain glory of a young turkey-cock with his first tail feathers! It were well for us to cease our foolish boasting and con well the stern lessons taught at the cannon's mouth. The first and greatest of these is that only by honest labor, by earnest endeavor, can a people become truly great. The war swept away the curse that was our weakness, negro slavery. It broke in upon our old exclusiveness, shattered the foolish caste that held us in iron thrall, made labor respectable and progress possible. It brought energetic Northern people among us to teach us that the way to greatness lies through the workshop,—to incite us to shake of our indolence and enter the race for preferment. Grant's red- throated batteries did more than break the shackles from the wrists of the blacks; they tore the cursed fetters of caste and custom from the minds of the whites,—a nobler emancipation. They set the heart of southern chivalry to beating with a truer, a stronger life. In the mad tempest of battle the New South was born; the crash of arms was the groans of maternity, the deluge of blood her baptismal rite. From the ashes of desolate homes and ruined cities she sprang phoenix-like, and is now mounting the empyrean with strong and steady wing. The emancipation proclamation was a bow of promise that never again while the world stands and the heavens endure will North and South meet in battle shock; that the greatness of the one shall become the proud heritage of the other; that the grandest section of the American Union shall yet, with God's blessing, produce the greatest people that ever adorned the earth.

The war is long past. We fought and lost. Our triumphant foe extended to us a brother's hand, accorded us the honor due a brave and spirited people. That we should suffer reconstruction pains was to have been expected. That they were unnecessarily severe was due chiefly to the greed of a clique of politicians; partly also to the fact that the North misunderstood us and our black wards, even as we persist in misunderstanding the "Yankee." But no gibbet rose in that storm-swept waste; our very leaders now occupy positions of honor and trust under the flag they defied. Let us not requite the generosity of our erstwhile foes by an attempt to tarnish their well-earned laurels. Rather let us praise and emulate them—strive with them in a nobler field than that of war. When the North and South blend in one homogeneous people, as blend they must, when the blood of the stern Puritan mingles with that of the dashing Cavalier, then indeed will be a nation and a people at which the world will stand agaze; for Northern vigor wedded to Southern blood will

"Strike within the pulses like a god's, To push us forward through a life of shocks, Dangers and deeds, until endurance grows Sinew'd with action, and the full grown will, Circled through all experience, pure law, Commeasure perfect freedom."

* * * DOGMATISM THE MOTHER OF DOUBT. A WORSHIP FOR THE WORLD.

"Church Unification" has long been the dream of many earnest souls, who regret to see the various denominations wasting energy warring upon each other that should be brought to bear on the legions of Lucifer; but even the most sanguine must admit there is little prospect of their dreams becoming more tangible—at least for some ages yet. The bloody chasm which Luther and his co-laborers opened will not be bridged during the lifetime of the present generation, and human wisdom is not competent to formulate a "creed," to devise a "doctrine," upon which the Protestant world will consent to unite. The present tendency is not toward church unification, but greater and more sharply defined division. Instead of dogmatic controversy dying away it is becoming more general; "heterodoxy" is being hunted with a keener zest than for years, and doctrinal disputation has become well-nigh as virulent as the polemics of partisan politics.

In the meantime a majority of mankind in highly civilized countries remain away from church—take no thought of the future or seek truth in science rather than revelation. Dogmatism is the fruitful mother of Doubt. By assuming to know too much of God's great plan; by demanding too abject obedience to his fiats; by attempting to stifle honest inquiry and seal the lips of living scholars with the dicta of dead scholastics, by standing ever ready to brand as blasphemers all who presume to question or dare to differ, the church has driven millions of Godfearing men into passive indifference or overt opposition, and the number is rapidly increasing. The church does not realize how stupendous this army really is. Not every man who regards the church as but a pretender proclaims that fact on the housetops. It is not "good policy," and policy is the distinguishing characteristic of this day and age. Church people are very sensitive to criticism of their creed (perhaps the mother of a malformed or vicious child could tell why), and most men have loved ones or patrons who are trying to find a little comfort among the husks of an iron-bound orthodoxy. If any devout dogmatizer really desires to learn how general is this attitude of nonreceptivity of the orthodox religion, let him assume the role of a scoffer; then he will hear the truth from men's lips; for while the doubter may yield passive assent to the prevalent orthodoxy, the earnest believer is not apt to enact the role of Peter without compulsion. Instead of conquering the world, the church is rapidly losing what it has hitherto gained. True, it still retains a semblance of vigor and prosperity; but, like many a great political structure, its brilliancy is born of decay. It is no longer the dominating factor in social life, the heart and soul of civilization, but an annex—increasing in magnificence as wealth increases and mankind can afford to expend more for ostentation and fashionable diversion.

It is noticeable that the less attention the minister pays to creeds, the less dogmatism he indulges in, the more popular he becomes with the people, the more eagerly they flock to hear him. The world does not care to listen to prosy lectures on foreordination and the terrors of Tartarus, because its reason rejects such cruel creeds; it takes little interest in the question whether Christ was dipped or sprinkled by the gentleman in the camel's-hair cutaway, because it cannot, for the life of it, see that it makes any difference; it does not want to be worried with jejune speculations anent the Trinity, because it considers one God quite sufficient if it can but find him; does not want to hear much about the miracles, because it considers it a matter of absolute indifference whether they are true or not. But just the same, the great world is heart-hungry for real knowledge of the All-Father, eager to embrace any faith that does no violence to its reason, to grasp at any tangible thread of hope of a happy life with loved ones beyond the tomb's dark portals.

Prof. James T. Bixby, in a powerful plea for truth-seekers, quoted approvingly the words of an eminent ecclesiastic of the church of England who characterized the present age as "preeminently the age of doubt." Another writer says that Europe is turning in despair toward Nirvana. The almost unprecedented success of Hartman's "Philosophy of the Unconscious"—which is little more or less that Buddhism—gives a strong color of truth to the startling assertion. While Europe is sending missionaries to the Ganges, India is planting the black pessimism of Gautama on the Rhine and the Seine! Nineteen centuries of dogmatizing, to end in an "age of doubt" and a cry for the oblivion of Nirvana! Clearly there is something wrong, for doubt and a desire for annihilation is not the normal condition of the human mind. A belief in God, that the universe is the result of design, is inherent in man. It is not a belief that must be implanted and tenderly nursed; it is one that manifests itself in the lowest form of savage life of which we have cognizance—one that is well-nigh impossible to crush out—and complementing this belief, in most instances, is the hope of immortality. No cataclysm of crime into which man can plunge is able to eradicate his belief that he is the creature of a supernatural power and intelligence. The tendency of scientific research is to strengthen it by making more manifest the wondrous works of God. It is doubtful if the belief in man's divine origin was ever entirely obliterated from any human mind—if there ever was or will be an "atheist." Many men believe themselves such; but if they will carefully examine their position, they will usually find that they have been carried to this extreme by a powerful revulsion from incredible dogmatism, and that they can only maintain it by a continual and unnatural effort—by a persistent outrage upon that very intelligence of which they boast. The moment they cease to act on the defensive they begin to drift back under the divine spell; to pay homage, conscious or unconscious, to the All-Father.

Those who deny the inspiration of the Bible are, for the most part, but doubting Thomases who ask to see the nail- prints in the hands of their risen Lord; who are disposed to question him, not because they are irreligious, but because they want the Truth, and they know for a verity that it is the truth.

Is it not possible to found a church in which may be gathered the millions who cannot swallow the miracles, the incarnation, the plenary inspiration of the Bible, and other non-essential husks that enshroud the Christian cultus; where that religion which exists, conscious or unconscious, in their nature, may find room for expansion; where honest inquiry may be prosecuted, doubts freely and fairly discussed and perhaps dispelled; where all Truth, whether found in the Bible or the Koran, the Law of Mana or the Zend-Avesta, science or philosophy, may be eagerly seized and carefully treasured? If it were possible to thus bring together and utilize the vast amount of religious energy which lies without the pale of all present churches, unrecognized by the most, warred upon by the many; if it were possible to gather all believers in God together where they may strengthen their faith by communion and worship; extend their knowledge by research in every field, spiritual and material, secular and religious, what a mighty recruit would thus be added to those powers that are working for the world's salvation!

Let me briefly sketch such a church as I would like to be a member of—such as I imagine millions of others who are not, will never be members of existent communions, would worship in with pleasure. Its chief "essential" should be belief in God—not the God of the Jews, Mohammedans or Christians, but the God of everything, animate and inanimate in the whole broad universe; the God of Justice and Wisdom, Truth and Love; the God seen in the face of every noble woman and honest man, heard in every truth, felt in every holy aspiration. Everyone believing in the existence of such a God—and I doubt if any do not—should be eligible for membership, no matter what their theories regarding his personality, plans and powers. Truth should be sought assiduously, and welcomed wherever found. We should not attempt to make it fit a preconceived theory, but to make the theory conform to it. Science should be the handmaid of the church, philosophy its helpful brother; but its ecumenical council, its court of last resort, should be the religious instinct inherent in man—that perception so fine, so subtle, that all attempts to weave it into words to clothe it so that the eye may perceive and the reason handle it, have signally failed; which logic has hammered at with all her ballistae and battering-rams for thirty centuries or more in vain; which, above all things else, binds the human race in one great brotherhood, has supplied the missing links in every cult, bridged its laches, surmounted its incongruities, comprised its inexpugnable fortress upon which the high flood-tide of worldly wisdom beats in vain.

Its body doctrine should be Love of God, Charity for man, Truth, Honor, Purity. In these are comprised "the whole Hebrew Decalogue, with Solon's and Lycurgus' Constitutions, Justinian's Pandects, the Code Napoleon and all codes, catechisms, divinities, moralities whatsoever, that man has hitherto devised (and enforced with altar-fire and gallows-ropes) for his social guidance." They embrace all that is blessed and beautiful, gracious and great in every sect, science and philosophy known to man. These are "points of doctrine" upon which there can be no dissension; Buddhist and Mohammedan, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Calvinist, philosopher and "free-thinker," will all approve.

Regarding what provision the Lord will make for us hereafter, the plenary or partial inspiration of the Bible, the evidential value of the miracles, the divinity of Christ, and kindred subjects, every communicant may properly be left free to exercise his individual judgment. To formulate a cast-iron article of faith upon any or all these questions would be to enter the realm of dogmatics, to add one more voice to the ecclesiastical wrangle that is filling the earth and heaven and hades with its unprofitable din—to found a sect instead of a world-embracing church devoted to the simple worship of God and the inculcation of morals. To many a religion without a future-life annex may appear as unfinished as a building without a roof; as ephemeral, as unstable as one put together without nails or mortar; but such forget that future reward and punishment was no part of the early Hebrew cult—that the doctrine of man's immortality is but a late and apparently a Gentile graft; that the Buddhist religion, which has held the souls of countless millions in thrall, teaches complete extinction of the ego as the greatest good. Man does not embrace religion "for what there is in it"; does not worship because God possesses the power to reward and punish, any more than he stands entranced by the glory of the sunrise because the rays of the Day-god will ripen his cotton and corn. He pays involuntary homage to the Higher Power, as he does to men of genius who benefit him but indirectly, to women of great beauty whom he never hopes to possess.

We may safely trust our future to the same great Power to whom we owe the present. It is of far more importance that we make the most possible of this life than that we have fixed convictions anent the next. It is safe to assume that had the great God intended we should know for a surety what awaits us beyond Death's dark river, He would have made it so manifest that diversity of opinion would be impossible; that had he intended we should each and all accept Christ as a divinity, He would have driven stronger pegs upon which the doubting Thomases of this late day could hang their faith; that had He intended the Bible should stand for all time as His infallible word, it would not have been intrusted for so many centuries to the care of fallible men; that had He intended we should each and all believe the miracles, He would have made better provision for their authentication—or built our heads on a different plan. Belief in immortality is a very comforting doctrine—for such as hope to dodge hell-pains—and is so general, so prone to manifest itself, where the mind of man has not been persistently trained in an opposite direction, that we may almost call it a religious instinct, which is but a vulgarism for a divine and direct revelation of God; therefore, it should not be discouraged in our new world- church, but given every opportunity for expansion. No one should be excluded, however, if he fail to find evidence, within or without, to sustain the theory.

Such a church would embrace all others as the ocean- stream of the ancients encompassed and fed every sea. It would be the tie that would bind all in unity. It should welcome to its pulpit all ministers of whatsoever denomination who desire to treat the worship of God from a nonsectarian standpoint or read a homily calculated to strengthen the morals of mankind. Its hymns should be songs of praise to that God who made us the greatest in His visible creation; its prayers should be thanks for past mercies and petitions that He will make our brightest dreams of life eternal beyond the skies a blessed reality— that having brought us so near His bright effulgence in- create for Time, He will gather us to His loving bosom for all Eternity.

Such is the church in which I hope one day to see the whole world gathered—a church whose paeans of praise to the great God would drown dogmatic dialecties as the swelling notes of an organ drown the fretful complaining of a child.

AN UNPROFITABLE CONTROVERSY.

Mr. Gladstone and Prof. Huxley have been warmly debating the story of the swine, the devil and the deep sea. What an occupation for two of the master spirits of the age! Is it any wonder that young men, contemplating such polemics, should turn away from revealed religion altogether?

Fortunately the religious world is no longer convulsed from center to circumference by such disputations. The day has gone by when the whole fabric of the Christian religion could be shaken to its foundation by the discovery of an error in biblical chronology, or the impossibility of a large whale swallowing a small prophet. Gradually the worship of the Creator is grounding itself on general principles and Christian apologetics is slowly but surely mounting above the particularists, spreading & broader opinion, leaving to the antiquary and the zoilist the inaccuracies and inconsistencies of tradition.

All friends of the Faith should hasten this movement. Really, it matters not whether the Gadarenes, whose swine were drowned, were Jews or Gentiles; whether Christ did or did not east out devils, raise the dead or cause the blind to see. It matters not whether Joseph or the Holy Spirit was his immediate father. Are we not all sons of the Most High God, and is not the advent of each and all as much a mystery as though we were begotten without an earthly father, spoken into existence, or sprang like Minerva from the brow of Jove? Why should the world stand agaze for nineteen centuries at one miracle, when sixty, full as great, as incomprehensible, are happening every minute? If God is the author of us all, is it more wonderful that He should create us in one way than in another? Was it necessary that the All-Father should change the order of generation to prove His existence, or that Christ should enter the world in an uncommon manner to establish His claim to preeminence among the sons of God?

It is altogether immaterial how Christ came into the world. Sufficient it is for us to know that he came and brought with him hope for sorrowing millions. That He was of God it required no preternatural birth, no wondrous miracles to establish. It was not the healing He brought to the flesh, but the comfort he administered to the spirit that stamped him Divine.

Is it possible that in this world of sorrow, sin and death, where millions are stretching out their hands to Heaven and praying for a sign that the loved ones who have crossed the dark river are safe in the bosom of the Great All-Father; where millions more are going down to death in an agony of doubt and fear, that Prof. Huxley and Mr. Gladstone— science and religion—can find no grander work to do than dispute about the ownership of a herd of swine drowned nineteen centuries ago? When churchmen decline to engage in acrimonious disputation regarding non-essentials, either with non-churchmen or each other; when the churches no longer insist that this or that dogma must be observed or accepted as a prerequisite to salvation; when they study the spirit of revelation more and the letter less; when they admit that all religions that have brought comfort to humanity were Divine, and seek light wherever it is to be found, whether in the Bible or the Vedas, ethnic philosophy or science the occupation of the Paines and Ingersolls will be forever gone and religion command the respect of all mankind.

In union there is strength, in disunion weakness. If this world is ever to be "christianized" the different denominations must learn that they are not natural enemies, but allies,—differently organized corps, differently uniformed divisions of one great army. Instead of wasting their strength warring upon each other, in repelling atheistical assaults upon outworks that are a source of weakness and should be abandoned, they must swing into line, shoulder to shoulder, each with its own particular oriflamme and shibboleth, if it will, and present a solid front to the common enemy, which is not the doubter of particular dogmas, but that Evil of which is born sorrow, shame and death. When the different divisions of the church which acknowledges Christ as its head, become mutually supporting and its officers distinguish the real battle from the hasty firing of frightened pickets, then and not till then will the banner of Christianity float triumphant over a world redeemed; then will the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of Man be known upon the earth.

* * * GARTERS AND AMEN GROANS.

On one page of the Houston Post for Sunday, December 12, I find several columns devoted to "Our Boys and Girls," on the next the following advertisement prominently displayed by a Houston haberdasher:

"Our Ladies' Garter Department: We can give you an All- Silk Garter for 50c. with nice buckles with such reading on them as 'Private Grounds,' 'Stop, Mamma is Coming,' 'Look Quick,' 'Good Night, Call Again,' 'I Am a Warm Baby,' 'Take Off Your Things,' etc."

The paper contains the usual Sunday morning quota of church notices, religious news and editorial moralizing— constituting a delectable olla-podrida calculated to turn the stomach of a self-respecting yaller dog. Doubtless many purveyors of garters keep in stock those peculiarly adapted to the trade of the "tenderloin"; but this is the first time that I have seen such truck advertised in any paper permitted to pass through the mails or enter the homes of respectable people. Imagine a Houston parson rising from family prayers on Sunday morning and placing in the hands of his young daughter a "great moral daily" which sets forth in display type that, for the small sum of fifty cents, she can secure a pair of silken garters that warn the great he-world that she's "a warm baby," and bid it "look quick" at her shapely legs! Think of a modest old mother in Israel watching the face of her youthful son as he learns for the first time of garters that invite him to "take off your things"! Fine Sabbath morning reading that for the so- called Christian people of Harris county! Such an "ad." would forever damn even the Nashville Banner, or show in the feculent columns of the Kansas City Star like a splotch of soot on the marble face of Raphael's Madonna. The Police Gazette and Sunday Sun are debarred from the mails, yet neither ever contained aught one-half so horrible. We keep the "Decameron" and Daudet's eroticisms under lock and key; yet they are only "suggestive," while this is frankly feculent, a brazen bid for bawdry. Should the ICONOCLAST publish such a thing it would be promptly denounced from ten thousand pulpits as a pander to pruriency; yet against the iniquity of the Daily Chippie Chaser, alias the Houston Post, not one preacher has raised his voice in protest! Why? Because the dirty rag does not attack their religious dogma—does not strike at their bread and butter! The shortest route to the heart of the average parson is through his pocket—hit him there and you raise a howl that startles high Heaven. Print his church notices, report his foolish little sermons, kneel with him in prayer, slander agnostics and atheists, serve the ICONOCLAST as the foul yahoos did Gulliver, flip a plugged nickel into the contribution box, and you may safely flaunt the patois of the nymph du pave in the fair face of every honest girl between Cape Cod and the Golden Gate. And as it is with the average preacher so it is with the bulk of his parishioners. The Post introduces the language of the prostitute into the parlors of its patrons. It boasts a boys' and: girls' club—"The Happyhammers"—of more than six-hundred members, and to these children it carries the first knowledge of sexual perversity, gives them their initial lesson in social sin. Were this the paper's first offense we might attribute it to the carelessness or stupidity of a clerk in its counting-room and the incompetence of its business; manager; but it is an old, a shameless, a persistent sinner against all life's decencies and proprieties. Its "personal column" was for years the most revolting thing known to yaller journalism. Its counting-room was an assignation post-office. The paper was the recognized organ of "Happy Hollow," the Hell's Half Acre of Houston. It was a pander to all the worst passions that run riot in the "tenderloin," a procurer of young girls to glut the lust of godless libertines. Its sign was the ligniyoni, its ideal the almighty dollar. Through its feculent columns Muckle- mouthed Meg and Doll Tearsheet made assignations with forks-of-the-creeks fools, while blear-eyed bummers and rotten-livered rounders requested respectable women to meet them at unfrequented places and wear camp-meeting lingerie. The ICONOCLAST compelled its unrespected contemporary to purify its "personal column"—and this service to society has never been forgiven by the bench- legged hydrocephalous grand panjandrum of that paper. The Post next proceeded to publish a directory of Houston's red-light district, giving names and addresses of the "madames," the number of their "boarders" and the condition of the merchandise thrown upon the market. All that was necessary to make the Post's Bawdy-house Guide complete was the addition of rate- cards. On that little bit of journalistic "enterprise" the ICONOCLAST put a kibosh also, much to the satisfaction of every decent family in Harris county. Now the fecular sheet has found a new road to infamy—is advertising garters fit only to adorn the crummy underpinning of negro prostitutes. It does seem that the Post will do anything for a dollar— except be decent. Owing to the mental perversity of its management, respectability is for it impossible. It is a social leper, a journalistic pariah. It is devoid of political principle as a thieving tomcat of conscience. It has no more stability than a bad smell in a simoon. It has deified and damned every statesman by turn. It has been on every possible side of every public question, and wept bitter tears of regret because further change of policy were impossible. It is a perfect maelstrom of misinformation, the avatar of impudence, the incarnation of infamy—a social cesspool whose malodor spreads contagion like the rank breath of the gila-monster or the shade of a upas tree. Yet its editor, I am told, aspires to the lieutenant-governorship of Texas. Verily, he's "got his gall." He will indeed be "a warm baby" if elevated to that inconsiderable office and permitted to monkey with the scepter while the governor is doing the elegant elsewhere. Texas may certainly consider herself fortunate if he does not pawn the fasces of power and blow in the proceeds of the erstwhile John Bell's variety joint. Should he do so, he will probably be permitted to "take off his things." The Post "ad." is worse than that of holy John Wanamaker, who once announced in the Philadelphia papers that "Parisian thoughts are sewn in our underwear." With such lingerie I should imagine that "call again" garters would be the proper caper. Such a combination would suggest the patent medicine certificate of the happy husband who joyfully testified that "My wife was so nervous that I could not sleep with her, but after taking two bottles of your remarkable, etc., she has so far recovered that anybody can sleep with her." Just what effect the "Parisian thought" underwear of holy John Wanamaker had upon the preeminently respectable people of Philadelphia I shall not assume to say, but I should consider such goods contraband of war when found on a Sunday-school bargain counter. Imagine the result of introducing "Parisian thoughts" into the unbleached muslin lingerie of a lot of single-standard-of-morals old maids! There's really no telling for what Harrison's professional Sunday school superintendent is responsible. He's a rank conspirator against the Seventh Commandment. The Post should be abated as an incorrigible nuisance—it is a standing menace to the morality of the community. It has never been a legitimate journal. Its chief sources of revenue have been fake voting contests and unclean "ads." that range in sphacelation from abortion pills to garters for prostitutes. What this country seems to need is a press censorship. The second-rate newspapers are mistaking liberty for license. The dogma that public opinion can be depended upon to correct the evil is an "iridescent dream"—the public will stand almost anything so long as its religious theses and political confessions of faith are let alone. Men claiming to be quasi-decent, if not altogether respectable, will carry home day after day and suffer to be read by their young daughters such a paper as the Houston Post—with its "w. y. o. d.," and "take off your things" advertisements, its puffs of abortion pills and syphilitic panaceas—who would have a conniption fit and fall in it should a copy of Bob Ingersoll's eloquent lecture on Abraham Lincoln creep into their library. The stench of such a paper creeps abroad like the malodor of a cloaca, beslimes the senses like the noxious exhalations of an open sewer. How in God's name men can be found so debased as to work on such a sheet is beyond my comprehension. I once undertook to hold down its editorial page; but soon "got sore at myself," cursed everything connected therewith, from the pink-haired president of the company to the peewee business manager, got out, purified myself and have been sick at the stomach ever since. Should a man lay a copy of the foul sheet on my parlor table, I'd blow his head off with a shotgun. All that I now see of the paper is the clippings sent me by disgusted Houstonians, and I take those out behind the barn to read— then bury them lest they poison the hogs. I regard my temporary connection with the sheet much as Jean Valjean must his tramp through the Parisian sewers. It is a ten- legged nightmare, an infamy that I can never outlive. I strove manfully to make the foul thing respectable, but the Augean stables proved too much for my pitchfork. I managed to occasionally inject into the sphacelated sheet a quasi-intelligent idea, to disguise its feculence with a breath of sentiment that by contrast seemed an air from Araby the blest; but the stupid ignorance and dollar-worshiping of the management soon dragged it back into the noisome depths of hopeless nescience and subter-brutish degradation. Poor old Houston! A morning newspaper should be a city's crown of glory, an intellectual Aurora ushering in the new- born day; but in Houston's case her chief newspaper is a sorrow's crown of sorrow, her inexpungeable badge of shame.

LIFE AND DEATH.

In a city beyond far seas there dwelt a Youth who claimed not land nor gold, yet wealthier was than sceptered sovereign, richer far than fancy ever feigned. The great round earth, the sun, the moon and all the stars that flame like fireflies in the silken web of night were his, because garnered in the salvatory of his soul. And the beaded dew upon the morning-glories, the crimson tints of dawn, Iris' bended bow and all the cloth-of-gold and robes of purple that mark the royal pathway of the descending sun; the perfume of all the flowers, the bulbul's sensuous song, and every flowing line that marks woman's perfect form he hoarded in his heart and gloated over as a miser does his gain. And the Youth was in love with Life and held her to his heart as God's most gracious gift. Ah, beautiful was she, with her trustful eyes of blue, and hair of tangled sunbeams blown about a brow of alabaster, arms of ivory and bust whose rounded loveliness were a pulsing pillow where ever dreamed Desire—beautiful beyond compare, and sweet as odors blown across the brine from the island- valley of Avalon, mad'ning as Lydian music, in which swoons the soul of youth while all the passion in the blood beats time in delirious ecstasy. And Youth and Life built fair castles in the air, with turrets of sapphire and gates of beaten gold, wherein they dreamed the days away on a bed of thornless roses, drained the chalice of the honeysuckle, ate the lotus-bud and thought of naught in all the world but love. Of this soft dalliance was born a son, and Life cried with falling tears, "Now I am shamed!" "Nay," said the Youth, "for I will hide our child within my heart and none shall know." And Life laughed and kissed the boy, and called him Ambition, and hid him in the secret recesses of her lover's heart, and gayly went and came as though her fair breasts had never burgeoned with a wealth of liquid pearl. But the child was restless within its prison house and beat against the walls, and grew day by day, and fought with teeth and nails, until the Youth cried out in agony. And Life said mockingly: "Hast not room enough within thy heart for one poor child to range— that heart which holds the earth, the sun and stars? Cast forth the foolish rubbish—the rainbow and the flowers, the incense and the summer sea. Make room, make room for thine and mine—though naught else doth remain." He cast them forth with fond regret, and Ambition grew and filled his heart and strove with all his strength. The Youth looked no more upon the fair field flowers, but thought only of the victor's wreath; he heard no melody but fame's shrill trumpet rising ever louder on the blast, and saw no beauty but in Minerva's laureled brow; the cool sylvan path became a blinding mountain trail, his hours of dalliance days of toil and nights of agony. The hidden son had become master of the sire, and all the host of Heaven melted into a single star which poured its baleful fire into his face the treacherous star of Hope. And so he strove with augmenting strength, his goal the highest, his guerdon the immortelles. But oft he fell, and cursed his folly for having left the flowery vale to beat against the barren mountain rocks; but Life upbraided him, and with her soft breath fanned the paling star to brighter flame—the star behind which lay the throne. And Death followed them, shadowy, indistinct, like a spirit wrapt in mist. And Life mocked at Death, crying: "Behold the envious strumpet doth follow, to despoil me of mine own! Faugh! How uncanny and how cold! What lover would hang upon those ashen lips? Her bosom is marble, and in her stony heart there flames no fire. With her Ambition perishes and the Star of Hope forever fades. Her house is a ghastly tomb, her bed the granite rock, her lover childless, for her womb is barren." And the Youth, glancing with a shudder at the figure in the mist, drew close to Life and echoed her words with trembling lip, "How uncanny and how cold!" Thus fared he on through many a toilsome year, to where no shadow falls to East or West—to manhood's glorious noon. He looked at the towering heights before him with undaunted eye, measuring his strength against the walls of stone. He glanced back, and a chill swept over him, for he was standing far up on the mountainside, he was in a barren desert whose level waste stretched back to the pathetic tomb where Love was left to starve and sweet Content lay festering in her shroud. "Fool," cried Life, "why looked ye back like wife of ancient Lot? Now are ye indeed undone!" The voice was harsh and shrill, and starting as from an uneasy dream, he looked on Life with wide-open eyes and soul that understood. He found her far less fair than in the heydey of his youth, when he reveled in her voluptuous charms and loved her well. Her face was hard and stern as that of some hag from Hell; the sunlight had faded from her hair, the cestus of red roses become a poisonous serpent, her fragrant breath a consuming flame, her robe of glory, a sackcloth suit, begrimed with ashes, torn by thorns and stained with blood. "Thou hast changed, O Life!" he cried in horror. "Not so," she said; "the change is thine. In youth you saw me not, but only dreamed you saw. She you loved was a creature of your vain imaginings; I am Life, mother of that scurvy brat, Ambition." She pointed upward, saying: "Behold, thy star is gone, and the shining goal hangs pathless in the heavens. When the sun hath reached the zenith it must descend. Henceforth your path leads downward, for every hour will sap your lusty strength, and every step be weaker than the last, until you sink into senility. Come, my love, you do not know me yet; behold me as I am!" She cast aside her soiled and ragged robe and stood revealed in all her hideousness—a thing of horror. Her breasts distilled a poisonous dew, around her gaunt limbs aspics crawled, her eyes were fierce and hollow, and in one bony hand she held a scroll on which was writ the record of her frauds and follies, her sin and shame. "Come," she cried mockingly, "let us on together. You may caress me as in the days of old, and I will answer with a curse. Hold me to your heart and I will wither it with my breath of flame. Praise me, and I will requite you with dishonor and crown you with the grewsome chaplets of grief. Fool! Thou hast striven for a prismatic bubble bursting on the crest of a receding wave. Why scorned you gold and lands to grasp at castles in the air? Why dreamed of the Dimiurgus when desiring harlots beckoned thee? Why dealt with open hand and unsuspecting heart when thrown 'mid a world of thieves? Hadst thou been content and not aspired to rise above the grossness, the falsehood and the folly which is Life, I would have loved thee well and deceived thee with a painted beauty to the end—my foul breasts would have been to thee ever a fragrant bed of flowers. You have invaded Life's mysteries, the penalty whereof is pain. You have looked upon the past; behold the future!" He looked, and saw a tortuous path winding downward through bogs and poisonous fens and bitter pools. In the far distance an old man, tottering beneath his weight of years, stood leaning on a staff, reading a riddle propounded by a sullen sphinx, and striving with failing intellect to understand—"Cui Bono?" Near by was an open grave, beside which an angel of mercy stood and beckoned him. "Thou hast tarried long, my lover," she said in a low sweet voice that was the distant note of aeolian harp, or summer zephyr soughing through the pines. With a cry of gladness he cast himself into her cool arms; she touched his tired eyes with her soft white hands, she pressed a kiss upon his lips that drained his breath in an expiring gasp of pleasure all passionless, and, cradled upon her bosom like a weary child, he fell asleep. The burden and its bearer, hallowed by a pale glory as of St. Elmo's fire sank into the open grave, yet the sphinx sat stolidly holding the painted riddle in his stony hand—"Cui Bono?" But there was none to answer; the path faded like the phosphorescent track of a ship in midnight waters, and all was dark. He turned fiercely to Life, a question on his lip, but ere he could utter it she had answered, with a bitter shrug: "The angel with the pitying eyes; the beauteous one?" My rival, Death—so uncanny and so cold! All who love me leave me for this sorceress, and she holds them 'neath the magic of her spell forevermore. But what care I? I do take the grain and give to her the husk; I drink the wine and leave the lees. Mine the bursting bud, hers the withered flower. Go to her and thou wilt. I have slain Ambition and blotted thy foolish ignis fatuus from the firmament. For thee the very sun henceforth is cold, the moon a monstrous wheel of blood, the stars but aged eyes winking back their tears as they look upon thy broken altars and ruined fanes, the grass grown green above the ashes of thy dead. Go; I want thee not, for thou hast seen me as I am. I am for the red wine and wild revel, where 'in Folly's cup still laughs the bubble Joy'—for the idle day-dream and the sensuous dance, the fond kiss of foolish Love and the velvet couch of Lust." Then Death came and stood near him, beautiful with a beauty all spirituelle, a world of pity in her eyes. But he shrank from her with a shudder, seeing which she said: "Am I indeed so cold—I, who warm the universe? Is the bosom of Mercy to be feared and the breath of peace despised? What is Life that she should mock me?—this hideous harlot whose kisses poison and whose words betray? Is she not the mother of all ills? Behold her demoniac brood: Hate and Horror, Discord and Disease, Pride and Pain! she is the creature of Time, the slave of Space. She is the bastard spawn of Heat and Moisture— was engendered 'mid the unclean ooze of miasmic swamps, in the womb of noisome fens. And I? I am empress of all that is, or was, or can ever be. Come dwell with me, and all the earth shall be thy home, thy period eternity. Would'st live again? Then will I make of thy clustering locks grasses to wave in the cool meadows green, of thine eyes fair daisies that nod in the dewy dawn, of thy heart a great blush rose worn between the breasts of beauty, of thy body an oak to defy the elements, of thy blood a wave breaking in slumbrous thunder upon a beach of gold, of thy breath the jasmine's perfume, of thy restless spirit the levin brand that crashes in thunder peal above the storm. Why press the cruel thorn into thy heart, the iron into thy soul? Thus do I clasp thee to a bosom ever true, and shield thee from the slings and arrows of the world. Thy hot heart beats faint and ever fainter 'gainst its pulseless pillow, until it ceases with a sigh, and thou art mine and eternal peace is thine."

* * * THE GARDEN OF THE GODS.

Much has been written of Texas by immigration boomers, "able editors" and others, with an eye single to the almighty dollar. Its healthfulness, delightful climate, undeveloped resources, churches, schools, etc., have been expatiated upon times without number, but little has been said of its transcendent beauty. The average "able editor" is not a very aesthetic animal. He has an eye for the beautiful, 'tis true; but his tastes are of the earth earthy.

A half-page display ad. with wood-cut portrait of a chamber- set occupying the foreground and the clare-obscure worked up with various sizes and styles of black type, possesses far more charm for him than does the deep blue of our Southern sky, whose mighty concave seems to reach to Infinity's uttermost verge; a two-story brick livery stable or laundry is to him far more interesting than the splendors of the Day-god rising from the ocean's blue; an eighty-cent dollar with its lying legend more beautiful in his eyes than even Austin's violet crown bathed in the radiance of the morning or arched with twilight's dome of fretted gold. The "able editor" cares naught for purple hills, unless they contain mineral; for broad champaigns unless the soil be good; for flashing brooks unless they can be made to turn a millwheel or water a cow.

The "able editor" takes it for granted that everybody is as grossly materialistic as himself,—care not whether the sky above their heads is blue or black so long as the soil beneath their feet is fertile; whether the landscape be pleasant or forbidding so long as it will yield them creature comforts. Perhaps he is very nearly right. The fact that millions will make their homes beneath leaden skies, amid scenes of desolation, while there is room and to spare in our sunny Southland, is not without its significance,— indicates plainly that man has not yet progressed far into that spiritual kingdom where the soul must be fed as well as the stomach; where sunlight is more necessary than sauer-kraut, where beauty furnishes forth more delights than beer.

Still there must be a few people in this gain-grabbing world not altogether indifferent to the beauties of nature; to whom the gold of the evening sky is more precious than that wrung with infinite toil from the bowels of the earth; to whom the purple of the hills is more pleasing than the crustacean dyes of ancient Tyre; the flashing of clear waters more delightful than the gleam of diamonds; the autumn's rainbow tints more inspiring than the dull red heart of the ruby. To have such a home in Texas were like a sojourn in that pleasant paradise where our primal parents first tasted terrestrial delights. No Alps or Apennines burst from Texas' broad bosom and rear their cold, dead peaks mile above mile into heaven's mighty vault; no Vesuvius belches his lurid, angry flame at the stars like a colossal cannon worked by Titans at war with the Heavenly Hierarchy; no Niagara churns its green waters into rainbow- tinted foam. The grandeur of Texas is not that of destruction and desolation; its beauties are not those which thrill the heart with awe, but fill it with adoration and sweet content. Not dark and dreary mountains riven by the bolts of angry Jove; not gloomy Walpurgis gorges where devils dance and witches shriek; not the savage thunder of the avalanche, but the sun-kissed valley of Cashmere, the purple hills of the lotus eaters' land, the pastoral beauties of Tempe's delightful vale. Here is repeated a thousand times that suburban home which Horace sang; here the coast where Odysseus, "the much-enduring man," cast anchor and declared he would no longer roam; here the Elysian fields "far beyond the sunset"; here the valley of Avilion lies