of previous days which brought only a sense of people's littleness to my weary mind. I've felt good all day, to-day, and I hasten to tell you about it. I send the nice letter so you can read it.

10.

Some charming people, celebrities in letters, have called on me or written me, congratulating me on my book. They acted as if they had been waiting for years to see me do something good and as if they took a sort of personal pride in me now that I had actually tried to see what I can do. I never imagined people of national and international fame could be so interested in a humble beginner in their own branch of work. It is wonderful-beautiful..

II. DEAREST L. A young woman in Nevada writes me that she is coming East to be my private secretary, and adds that if I say her nay to this proposition she will go as a missionary to the Japanese! Why this dire threat, I wonder? Does she think I am opposed to the evangelization of Japan? They say women writers whose incomes are supposed to be good, frequently have offers of marriage from unknown admirers. I wonder if this is next in store for me. I must tell you a funny thing. Yesterday I was in company with some famous authors and the conversation turned on autographs and the nuisance their hunters are to the men and women of the pen. Several authors confessed, weakly, to a slavish accession to these demands. I always fear to say no," said one man, a poet by the way, “for fear I am diminishing the number of my purchasers by one." Finally one bright Southern woman told a story of Emerson and Hawthorne and Alcott, discussing this very problem long ago in the palmy days of Concord. Hawthorne was disposed to resent the incursions on his privacy, of course. So were they all, in fact. But the question was, what to do with the stamps sent for reply. Hawthorne's conscience pricked against the appropriation of those stamps. Emerson said he always threw autograph-hunters' letters away without

answering them. "Yes," says the Apollo of Wayside, "but what do you do with the stamps?" "Stamps?" says the mild Concord sage, Stamps? Why, that's where I get all my postage!

12.

66

Yes, as you say, I'm rather enjoying fame just now. I haven't arrived at that stage occupied by most of the very famous ones I've met or heard about, the stage wherein nearly all enjoyment of present fame is spoiled by a haunting fear of a time when fame shall be no more. Poor Stevenson had this horror in such pitiful degree-hadn't he? And most great writers and artists of every kind have lived more or less in its shadow. It is so incomprehensible to hear a man whose hold on literature is as secure, by all accounts, as Burns's or Walter Scott's, refer plaintively to the probable brevity of his "little hour upon the stage” .. I haven't come to that yet. My martyrdom of fame may never carry me that far my fame is too little. I must needs climb farther before I fear a fall.

So I am enjoying

myself, in spite of petty annoyances and a few great ones. There is one thing about fame, great or small, which I've found out entirely to my satisfaction, though, and that is that it isn't worth the candle as a substitute for other things-only as a supplement to them. I can see just what husks fame and applause could be to the heart-hungry and the soul-starved. Perhaps this has been the martyrdom of fame to many. The laurel has come when there was no one by to share in the rejoicing— no one nearer or dearer than that most faraway of solaces, the admiring world. I am so glad some little of the joy of doing and pleasing came to me in my youth and when I have you to share all things with

Did I tell you how many persons, on hearing of my impending marriage, have deplored it and me as extremely foolish? Ah! how I can laugh at them who, never having got even to my tiny height, do not know that altitudes are dreary company for one, especially

a woman.

I

The Christmas Debtor.

T is a great mercy that nature is inexorable, visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, and sometimes vice versa, with such ruthless certainty. If she were not, what would become of this earth and its population! If crime, and drunkenness, and laziness, and the perpetual chase after pleasure did not lead in the long run to destruction or extinction how much worse the world would be than it is; how much blacker its prospects than they are. It is right and necessary that the victories of life should be to the strong, the active, the persistent, and the industrious. It is right and necessary that the weak, and the idle, and vicious should go under. We must approve Nature's methods, but recognizing the immense power behind them, and the certainty that the work intrusted to them will be constantly and thoroughly done, however slowly, we may well leave it to her. Our affair in this world is to lighten Nature's work of destroying the unfit, not by doing it for her, but by making it, so far as we can, unnecessary. Her task is to exterminate the characterless and the bad; ours to make character grow where it was lacking, and make exterminations needless.

To encourage us in this sort of well-doing we have the knowledge that the whole community of fit and unfit is bound together by ties so close and strong that no one can wholly escape from the consequences of his neighbor's mischief. If the unfit get the upper hand, the consequences fall upon the evil and the good. If too great a proportion of the community becomes rotten, the whole social fabric goes down. If ignorance and vice rule, wisdom and virtue cannot escape the outcome. Just as soon, therefore, as any person is conscious that under existing conditions he is able to take care of himself, it

becomes his business, as he would avoid the wrath to come for himself and his descendants, to take care of others; laboring for the diffusion of righteousness and the strengthening of human character. Alas for him if he says: "I have made my way. I can take care of myself. My brother has had an equal opportunity. Let him reap what he has sown." Who made him the man he is? Did he make himself? Doubtless he had a hand in it, but did he choose his own parents, and select his own physical and moral inheritance? How can any seeing man who makes tolerable work of living, take much credit for his own success? He looks back on his course. He finds something in him which made him capable of self-control and persistence; some saving grace of discernment that taught him to turn back where his fellow went on, to go on where his fellow loitered. Here necessity coerced him when his will was still weak and the temptations of ease were strong upon him. His fellow who could stop, did stop, and got no farther. He was foolish in his day; is still foolish on occasion, still makes blunders, but where his folly is troublesome, his fellow's folly is ruinous; where his blunders teach him something, his fellow seems to learn nothing from mistakes. It seems not to occur to many men of reasonable probity to be grateful that they have sense enough to be honest; but what true occasion for thankfulness that is! Men are so strange in their dishonesties. The thefts of poor creatures ill-born and worse brought up, whose breeding and training leads naturally to crime, one can understand; but what of those cases that constantly transpire, of intelligent persons, to all appearance well-born, and trained in good company and by approved methods, who betray their trusts, rob their clients or their employers, and fall with a crash that spreads

consternation in the communities that knew them? Such cases are fit to make thoughtful men who are still honest shake in their shoes, and be grateful to Heaven that no insidious rot seems to have destroyed the fibre of their integrity.

Nature will destroy. Man's work is to restrain, to correct, to repair. In every dead thing Nature straightway develops means of removal When life goes out of the body, the body itself soon disappears. When character is dead, alcohol and lust, hate, jealousy, idleness, or violence rush in to kill the body. If character does not survive and increase in the earth, neither will man thrive and multiply there. Nature will do her part. She will dispose of the morally dead as she does of the physically dead. Our work is to supplement her labor by striving constantly to swell the proportion of mankind that is fit to live and do the world's work. That we do when we promote true religion, sound education, and good government, and procure the enforcement of just laws which protect human

life and property and freedom, and defend society from its enemies. If we are of comparatively sound minds and bodies, and may reasonably hope to make our journey through life without moral disaster, it is not all, not nearly all, an exploit of our own. The bigger part of it is debt, owed to our forebears and to God, and to be paid to the world and those who come after us. If we are not paying that debt we have no reason to take pride in our honesty. If we do not feel that we owe it, then truly it is not so large as it might be, for we are not especially creditable products of civilization.

We do owe it. To further peace on earth and give constant and practical evidence of good will to men is not munificence on our part, but mere part payment of what we owe. It is a debt we cannot neglect with impunity. To pay it intelligently is to help ourselves as well as others. To neglect it is to invite sure reprisals, which, even if we seem to escape them ourselves, can be depended on to search out our posterity.

THE COLLECTION OF PORTRAITS IN

in the City Hall and to repair and regild their frames. One of these experts, Mr. Albert Abendschein, on three different occasions restored or cleaned some twenty or thirty of these canvases. At the same time an official list was prepared by Mr. Henry W. Hedenkamp, from the scanty material available furnished by the canvases themselves, and was published in the report of the Department of Public Works for the quarter ending June 30, 1891. This appears to be the latest official catalogue, and of this one copy was fortunately discovered amongst the dusty archives of the department. Most of the paintings are

lettered on the frames, though the information thus conveyed is frequently defective or misleading. A catalogue is also given in the Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York, prepared by John Hardy, clerk of the Common Council, 1870. This was the last of these manuals. Since that date, to find any record of the doings of the city fathers, it is necessary to look through the long and very unsatisfactorily indexed reports of their proceedings, appoint ment of, as a Commissioner of Deeds." "to grade crossings," "to pave with granite blocks," "to place watering troughs in front of,"" to authorize the Irish flag to

avail.'" He adds that he does not feel like going through the reports page by page, without at least knowing the name of the donor. The only record which Wilson had found was a paragraph in "The Picture of New York and Strangers' Guide to the Commercial Metropolis of the United States," published by A. T. Goodrich in 1827: "A portrait of this distinguished navigator is in the City Hall, painted in 1592, when he was

tion of the Hudson, now in the office of the Consulting Engineer in the Tract Building on Nassau Street, which it gives to Count Pulaski. In witness whereof you may see his name in large letters on the frame. With regard to this old portrait, Wilson, in the Memorial History of New York, says, "Of the oil painting of Hendrik Hudson in the Governor's Room in the City Hall, there is unfortunately no satisfactory account obtainable. In 1868, David T. Valentine, then clerk of the Common Council, wrote to General Meredith Read: I have examined the indexes to the proceedings as far back as 1730, under every imaginable head that would be likely to lead to the information desired, but without

not seem that these ever been there.

twenty-three years of

age. He is represented with a frill round his neck, and holding a compass in his hand; he has a youthful and very interesting appearance. It was deposited by an ancient Dutch family, and is of undoubted originality." But the steel engraving of the portrait which Wilson gives in his first volume, and which is no nearer the original than steel engravings usually are, and the original itself, do not answer this description at all with the exception of the frill and the "interesting appearance." Neither hands nor compass are visible, and dark as is the lower part of the painting now, it does appendages could have

The youthful and interesting appearance, the frill and the compass held in the right hand, are to be found in the handsome young "Columbus" turning his eyes on the spectator, now in the Water Register's office in the Tract Building. With regard to the Hudson portrait Mr. Abendschein testifies that he found the words "Count Pulaski" in very small gold letters in one corner, in the manner of an artist's signature, and that he showed this name to Commissioner Gilroy in the presence of Comptroller Myers. On the back of the Columbus is an official label giving this information: "This Picture is a Copy