strong. It belongs preeminently to women, I think. Some of those whom I know will take such a day for an upheaval of closets, some for bureau drawers. Some will use one for going through a desk, or through a wardrobe with its laces. Some who are spinsters, like me, will take it, as girls often do, for sorting out and arranging their different souvenirs. Every old maid's corner is full of them-curious mementos and keepsakes that have lain there for years: pictures of faithful lovers; stories of people with names left off; hints of a tragedy dropped by several people, and which, all at once, as we look them over, we suddenly find fitting together. And tucked away among this driftwood out of others' lives how many of our own half-forgotten possessions we discover: ambitions and purposes long since abandoned as out-of-date; plans of kind deeds which we meant to perform, but for which there was never a convenient moment. Then, the thoughts that were to be our daily companions, but which we were always too busy to take counsel with. What an assortment! Every old spinster has them, I say. They often prove posthumous records. I like to go over mine when a rainy day comes. Then I spread before me a huge portfolio, between the ample pages of which I have slipped various odds and ends. Here, for instance, is a little thing, a mere fragment that I have had for years. A dear old lady gave it to me. This is the story it tells: They were both young. She was of our own people and beautiful. He was in the Prussian army, for everything was Prussian then. They were married, and after that the war with France broke out. This was in the seventies of the century that has gone. When his orders came, he made a galloping detour one night at the head of his cavalry troop, and, riding up the stone-paved street of the little town where he had left his wife, he stopped before her door. She was up-stairs in a room filled with shaded candle-light, their eightday-old baby, which he had never seen, nestled under her arm. He stooped and kissed the mother, and then, with the ardor of a boy, he lifted his first-born, his son, and running with him down-stairs, mounted his horse, and held the baby up before his troop. High over his head he held the child, and each man in the long line of horsemen trailing down the dimly lighted street broke into a cheer. When this baptism into loyalty was over, the young father ran up-stairs again, -he had but the moment, and laying the little fellow by his mother, told her, with another kiss, how soon he would come back-very, very soon, next week perhaps. When he left she could hear the hoofs of the horses clattering over the stones, he at their head, galloping off into the night-off still farther to where a battle was to be fought next day. Straight into the cannon's mouth he rode, they told her afterward, and so saved the day; but even his body was not to be found when the battle was done. No; there is nothing else with which this fragment could fit, unless I knew what became of that baby. Did she, being but a woman, and all alone, know how to make him such a man as his father would have had him? Sometimes I wonder if, from very dread of courage and its cost, she kept the lad a weakling all his life. Not to every mother is given the power so to rear her son that, Theseus-like, he may step into the sandals an heroic father has bequeathed. Next in my portfolio I come across a picture at which I always like to look. It is a picture of two lovers, not young, however, like those we oftenest see. These had been married for forty years, and their anniversary fell on her sixtieth birthday. Her hair, which had been golden and full of curls, had never turned gray. There was still in it a suggestion of the gay abandon of its youth, as there was in the joy one read in her face. The hair had only grown to be a darker shade, as the hair of blonds should grow. To him who loved her this was still a halo round her head. If she were older than when they married, I doubt whether he had ever stopped to think. But she had. For fifteen years at least she had been taking note of changes in herself, having her tea-gowns cut higher and higher in the neck, so that he would not see what she mourned, until now the collars bound her close about the throat. Then, being a 82 throat, a bit of old Venetian lace turned back over the shoulders, and some soft tulle across the bust. I saw her, as I say; but her husband, to whom the dress was to be a surprise, saw her first. While he slept she crept into his room, and taking a chair, drew it up beside the sofa where he lay, seating herself with folded hands. And there, smiling, she waited, without moving, until he waked and saw her and the gown. Sometimes it seems to me that no picture of young lovers was ever half so sweet. And here is still another picture, sent me by some friend. The man and woman in it are old-very old indeed; and he wears knee-breeches, and big buttons on his coat. You cannot see his face, but from the way in which one thin hand falls over the arm of the chair and his feet are placed upon the floor, you know him to have been a gentleman all his life. He sits beside a big four-post bedstead in the twilight, and on its pillow, in a lace cap, there is the face of a woman. You can see hers clearly, and how old and white and very still it is. The man holds the woman's hand. He has always held it in this way of late when in the afternoon she slept, because he has never let her know what it was to be without his hand, as they walked together in their youth, through all the middle years, and into age. But this afternoon, though his grasp had been as close, he had felt her going, and without him-beginning that long journey upon which we must all set out alone. He did not summon any help, expecting to follow himself in a little while, who knows?-for they had always been so near in all they did. It was only after many hours, when night had come, that the great-grandchildren opened the door, worried by a silence that had lasted longer than its wont. When they looked at her and spoke to him, he only lifted his head to say: "Yes, I know; but I wanted to hold her hand and be alone with her for just a little longer." I find that I have a great many of these pictures of old lovers put away, gathered together because I like them, but put away because they would not interest young people. Love, to them, is all a thing of youth, and wide horizons, and sparkling summer skies of dazzling glory. They think that when age comes the fires must have burned out in the heart, leaving nothing. but a bed of ashes. But how can the flames But this! My favorite title,—“One of I found the theme too big for me. I might have caught and given the tragic notes of the woman's story, for every one knows the notes of tragedy. But her radiance! One must have the fires one's self to give radiance, to know that the highest giving is being-as one must be all poet to be lyrical in song. I know now that I shall never write "One of the Gift-Bearers," although I meant to have made that story my best. Next to this title, as I turn the page, I come upon two emblazoned paragraphs like those painted texts it was once the fashion to hang over our beds. One text reads: "The perfect balance in life is found by supplying deficiencies in others. They never find it who are only on the lookout for perfect equalities." The other runs: "Those who are forever seeking for others whose moods will exactly match their own will find it safer to carry their own moods with them." I know just how these two found their way here, the very day and hour, in fact, of their coming. He, as men sometimes will, had lifted his hands over his head and cried out in an agony of despair. The soul of another had failed him: that great nature in which at first he had seemed to find his other self, all his hopes, his aspirations, his great and lofty purposes matched with equal ardor-a nature that, in the great enthusiasm of his young affections, he thought so deep because, like the shallow basin of a fountain, it could reflect whatever of greatness was spread over it, even that of the blue vaults on high. Beautiful and alluring mirrors, these shallow basins, as I know. No wonder he was deceived. Beautiful mirrors in which we who look can read the very secrets of the stars brought down within our reach, but against which we only break our heads and hearts when we try to plunge into them. I think, being like every other spinster with an explanation and a remedy for every woe, that I tried to tell him something of this, insisting that, after all, it was she who might have been defrauded, he having failed to come to her as he had done before their marriage, bringing the same enthusiasms with him; and I suggested that if he brought just as much to her now he might find just as much reflected as he had seen at first. For he was not the only man I had known who, entranced by seeing only his own image filling another's soul, has sometimes, when he tried to see another and a deeper in its stead, been pained by as rude an awaken ing. It is safer to be a Gift-Bearer, I think, than to be too greatly concerned with what other people fail in. Before "That which wins a man will wean him." I have not thought of this for years, nor do I remember why I thought of it then. It might have gone at the end of those other texts I just had in my hands. I will pin it to them when I put it back, as I mean to put everything in a moment, now that the clouds outside are lifting. Perhaps I ought to destroy it. I would send it to a woman whom I know, except for its hopelessness, and nothing that has hopelessness in it ought to live or be sent about among one's friends. Besides, would it help her? Her husband is long since weaned, and by that very devotion of hers to children which had won him to her in his youth. they were married, he found it alluring to watch her caring for her sister's children, neglecting her own pleasures for them. He thought he had never seen so lovely a girl, nor one with so few frivolities—just the woman he wanted as his wife. But when their own babies came, and she was no less devoted to her own, carrying them in her own arms rather than let a nurse have them, her devotion took on a different color in his eyes. For her back rounded under the strain, her figure was ruined, and none of her clothes fitted, which worried him. "Why don't Betty's dresses look like yours?" he once said to a younger sister of hers, a girl who never permitted anything to interfere with the perfection of her toilets. Now, when the wife is in the nursery, he goes out of the house, twitching his shoulders with impatience. Yet this wife is exactly the same person he married, loving the same things which he loved her for loving in those days when he persisted in believing that she was the only woman in the world for him. There, indeed, is the hopelessness of it all: "That which wins a man will wean him." The butterfly nature before marriage and the butterfly nature afterward. Altruistic tendencies in the maiden and altruistic sympathies in the wife. I wish I had not found it here to-day. It is like our coming across those tiny blue kid shoes with the date of the baby's death that we used to see in the old trunks long ago, bringing us back with a sudden shock to knowing how even the sweetest of dreams may end. Yes, the hope lessness of it all! But why the hopelessness, I ask myself, even as I still hold the hopeless sentence in my hands. Of course there is a vulnerable spot in all earthly happiness, else it would not be earthly. But I have never believed that it was meant that we were to prepare only for destruction coming to us through our vulnerable places. I believe that our weaknesses are our opportunities, and our vulnerable spots are often made irritating simply to show us in what quarter our recuperative energies might be directed to most profit. Sometimes I go even farther than this, and believe that our greatest temptations lie along the line of our greatest strength, and not along the line of our greatest frailty. It all depends upon our point of view whether we regard temptations as sent by malignant powers to assail us, or ourselves as sent out by a righteous power to meet them. There is a thought of valor included in the last idea, and of hopefulness in the possibility it suggests of our developing in stature and girth, like the soldiers whom we train to meet a danger. But perhaps there is too little of comfort in it for most people. Growing pains are an affliction when they once begin. Then, too, there are some of us to whom the whole question is confusing, as it must be to that poor friend of mine who clings so persistently to the one supreme virtue by which her husband was won. What more natural for her than to cherish that which he had loved? It was he who taught her the value of that which he now spurns. Certainly it seems to me that if we did understand more clearly what it was to grow, we would at least understand something of the principles of adjustment and of readjustment, and what the constant, unending need of adjustments is among people to whom growth is not naturalnot an unfoldment, as it should be, with the outworn dropping away, as petals from seeds. For if the power of adjustment were acquired, there never would be any insanity or madness. Unhappiness would endure but as a momentary shock, and every conflicting current in married life would be but a blending to make the great streams stronger. It may be, when the necessities for readjustment arise, that we are all thinking too much of what we were and too little of what we want to be. The disappointed married ones, like the faded beauties, seldom. I know, think of anything else. That is why most of them remain so closely tied to their miseries, never far enough away to look them in the face. I know one exception. "We are growing old," this one said to her husband. "Do not let us settle into ways, thinking nothing so important as our symptoms and nothing worth cultivating but our own peculiarities. Since we have to be old people, let us be nice and agreeable old people, the very nicest whom we know." And how enchanting they became, in fact, everybody's children loving them! They had none of their own. This is the woman who once said to me: "If we would all regard the marriages we entered into as we would our professions, bending all our energies to making a success of ours, there would be fewer failures in domestic life." I am glad that I thought of her to-day, for I like things to end cheerfully, especially old age, and more particularly marriages. And I know nothing better able to insure a cheerful ending than that idea of growth which keeps us always to the inner truth of things, so that the ugly and uncomfortable fall away of themselves, and the new and the beautiful are welcomed as an unfoldment. For I think of what the love of the man and woman might mean who understood it, even the love of such a hopeless one as she whose husband is now weaned by that which had won him : how the ideal would carry them on together through the very eternities, lovers always and to the end, like those at whose pictures I looked first to-day, and which I now lay away in my portfolio. Yes, I like things to end cheerfully, and most assuredly a rainy day like this one. The sun is shining, and everywhere outside there is the freshness of an atmosphere washed clear of dust. The streets are filling with people, for men and women who live in town are like robins after a storm : each quits his cover on the instant, and the ground is covered with a moving throng. The CONQUEST ONQUEST of the BY RAY STANNARD BAKER PICTURES BY ERNEST L. BLUMENSCHEIN HERE, at last, was the deep forest. Since dawn we had been climbing the foot-hills of the Cascade Mountains, first on the flat-car of a logging-train running up from Puget Sound, -the air nimble with cold, the sun not yet risen, -twisting around perilous side-hills, across burned slashings thick with colossal stumps, over mountain streams, through stretches of virgin wood, towering and dark, where we ran as in a cañon of verdure; then still more perilously upward on a mountain locomotive, geared for just such gorges and bold climbs as these, past loggingcamps squatting low in the thick, moist undergrowth, the landings piled high with new logs; and then to a still steeper skidway worn with the downward rush of ponderous, shaggy logs. Thus we came to the opening where the axman, the swamper, the barker, the bucker, the sniper, the dogchain tender were at work in the forest, where the donkey-engine, fuming with the spicy, ever-to-be-remembered odor of fresh cedar-smoke, was dragging the logs by resistless steel cable from the unwilling wood. Still upward, through the green ruin of the fresh cutting, the scarred earth where fir and cedar had fallen, the broken and tangled undergrowth, we came at last to the deep forest. Now the head feller lays his hand on the fir, looking up along its mighty bole, a hundred and fifty feet to the first limb. The head feller is without awe in this place LXVI.-12 FOREST -a ruddy young Swede with tobacco in his cheek and holes in his hat. To him a forest is so much merchantable lumber, lath, shingles; a tree, three or four matterof-fact logs, sound or shaky. They call him Chris. "We'll take this feller, Ay tank," he says. "Make 'im fall over dare." It seems irrational that two men alone should attempt such a task, two pygmies with toy axes, a toy saw, a sledge, a bottle of kerosene-oil. For where the ridged and rugged butt of the great fir sets into the earth, it is thirty feet in circumference, a massive column rising two hundred and fifty feet in air. Its very bark is a foot thick; its flesh is solid and hard. Chris and his partner clear away for a space the tangle of wild sweet clover and Oregon grape; then they cut steppingnotches in the bark of the giant. Ten feet above the earth they fasten two springboards, narrow planks on which they now stand perilously balanced, their spiked shoes clinging fast, their double-bladed axes in hand. Even at the height of this enormous prospective stump the tree is over seven feet through. Chris spits on his hands, shifts his tobacco, and takes a nick from the brown bark. Jack follows: the tree stands as firm as the ages, towering to the sky. For hours they swing steadily, the knocking of their axes echoing through the silent forest. A fine drizzle of rain sets in, darkening all the wood; they do not pause, except now and then to wipe their 85 |