positions of such obloquy that I have wept with mortification. Several years ago, I appeared before a school-board to protest against the retention of an old school-teacher. I made my statement before he entered. I recounted in as mild language as I could the objections to him, held not only by me, but by two long-suffering generations. He taught his pupils nothing, his discipline was an alternation of lax indulgence and severest cruelty. For years he had been ruining the minds of those under his care.

Called upon to speak in his own defense, the old man appeared. He was a noble-looking old man, and his white hair pleaded for him before he opened his lips in his remarkable speech. He pictured the inborn rascality of the small boy, he reminded those present of their youth, of the hot lead they had poured into key-holes, of the Bedlam which they had created with hatpins stuck into cracks and loudly twanged. He recalled to their minds the 'putty-blowers,' with whose ammunition the walls and ceiling of his school-room were plastered; he said that every missile had struck his heart! He reminded them that a small boy's relatives are often helpless before his invention; he asked them to contemplate the situation of a man shut up for forty years with fifty small boys! He said that he was old, that he could learn no new profession, that - Abruptly he sat down, his head in his hands.

Dismiss him? They reinstated him and advanced his salary. Is it strange that my reforming zeal suffered a blight from which it has never recovered?

The complaints which I have addressed to those from whom I had a right to expect sympathy have met no more kindly reception. Do I find fault with the organist who ends an impressive religious service with variations

on 'Believe me if all those endearing young charms,'-I am told by my friends that it is a great pity that I allow my æsthetic sense to spoil my spiritual enjoyment, that I am the only one at all disturbed, and, finally, that if I had practiced as I should, I might be seated at the console playing Bach fugues to my own satisfaction. It would be a waste of words to insist that my æsthetic enjoyment is to be reckoned with, and that it is not my business to play Bach fugues.

Do I call attention to the delectable items in the Boonetown column of our weekly paper, I am accused of being 'superior.' Henceforth, therefore, the Boonetonian's cow may ‘over-eat herself,' his son may 'break his one leg,' his daughter may be 'dressed in cream' on her wedding-day, and I shall chuckle thereat alone. It will be hard to keep my best stories to myself, to refrain from telling of my neighbor, who, when arrested, 'proved himself a lullabye,' or of my schoolmate who, wishing to bid her friends farewell, shouted a loud 'Averdupois' across the street. But never again, if I succeed in training myself to silence, shall I have to hear that these poor people do the best they can, that they are good fathers and mothers and sons and daughters, and that they go to church with praiseworthy regularity.

Nor do I mean to bottle up within me all these just complaints. I know a man who for thirty years endured the meanness of a business associate. Then, suddenly, he lost the temper which he had treasured so carefully. He turned the key in the door of his office, imprisoning with himself and the offender half a dozen other men.

torrent of righteous indignation. It was amazing to hear how he remembered every peccadillo in the long line of the evil-doer's sins. Trained in the Bible, he called his enemy Jeshurun who had waxed fat and kicked, he called him Ananias, he said he was a cumberer of the ground, a sojourner from Sodom.

One would have thought that, having accomplished what was a service to the community and what must have been a great relief to himself, this reformer would have been improved in health and spirits. But he suffered a slight stroke and was ill for days, while the object of his Jeremiad cared not a rap.

This, therefore, is the last of my protests. Uttered one by one, they have proved idle; the organist still plays 'Believe me if all those endearing young charms,' my Minnie still goes about with her mouth open.

Treas

ured, they are even less efficacious, and they are likely to be harmful to one's self, as my friend's experience proves. His method especially I shall try to avoid, since, approve of this world as little as I may, I do not wish to be banished from it by a stroke of apoplexy..

WOMEN'S HONOR1

SUPPOSE men had formerly been the property of their wives, and suppose they were still widely regarded as ornamental and delightful, but not to be taken seriously. Suppose we arrayed ourselves as did the courtiers at the time of Charles the Second and were engaged in occupations similar to theirs. Or suppose we men wore corsets and tight skirts and high French

1 A paper in the November Atlantic entitled, 'Honor Among Women,' by Elisabeth Woodbridge, was the origin of this discussion. - THE EDITORS.

heels and long hair. The mere thought of a dozen men sitting about a table, arrayed and shirred up as women are, leads inevitably to the conclusion that within an hour they would be involved in a riot. Just why they would punch one another's heads we may not be able to tell, but we are sure they would.

Suppose that the literature of no more than fifty years ago referred to us constantly as frail and delicate creatures, that the traditions which favored us most were those exalting our loyalty and faithfulness to the wives that possess us, and that it were urged upon every man, always to lean upon his wife because she will guard and defend him. Or suppose our occupations were restricted to those employments which have heretofore been available' to women, in any of these events our vision might be rather narrow and our sense of honor might be a little attenuated.

Now, far be it from me to decry the songs and poems and beatitudes of the charm of women and all the hurrahs of language that admiration inspires. It is a joy to sing them, and a delight to write them. And of love in its great and deep meaning we are speaking not at all. That abides as a constant benediction upon humanity, and is greater than knowledge or science or wisdom. Of all the things the woman-soul offers for it and of her sacrifices, and of all the things the man-soul offers for it and of his sacrifices, we need not even whisper. Throughout the ages women have held faithfully to the gospel of love. and have taught it by example, in spite of cruelty and scorn. But concerning honor, and what is honor's due, the advice to women that one finds in literature seems so generally based upon the presumption that they are of a sort with defective or delinquent children, that a readjustment of dogma seems timely.

Of course, there is Otto Weininger's theory that the absolute female is merely an automaton of flesh and blood, without judgment or capacity, and that whatever merit of intelligence a woman may have is due to the modicum of male that is inherent in her. Conversely the absolute male is the Uebermensch who has all the gifts of mind and soul. It is hardly necessary to say that he further maintained that there is no absolute male or absolute female known. The theory squares very well with a great deal that may be found in literature, and even in current opinion. It operates well as a working hypothesis in some families; but the very opposite view, that all intelligence emanates from the female and that the 'male is not to be relied upon in any way, works equally well in others. Instances of the successful operation of both hypotheses are of such frequent occurrence, and are so well known to all of us, that it would require the faith of a closed mind to assume either of them to be true.

Every reason possible has been given to women to believe themselves fools, and there are many who follow the arguments. In like manner, when a majority of men were serfs they learned that they should look to their lord in all things; and it is fair to presume that in consequence of this many of them did; that they became dependent in spirit and that their sense of honor was rudimentary.

Without attempting to define honor, we know that a glorified and impassioned loyalty to what one believes to be right is included in the expression. It also seems to involve character, and this has always been a possession of both men and women. From a fine, strong character we may expect honor irrespective of sex or condition. For this reason it would hardly appear that the whole ground is covered by the

history of the evolution of honor as a group-instinct. Character is not a group-instinct; it is, one might almost say, a structural quality; and it is so closely allied to honor, that honor, like character, would seem to be in part a matter of breeding.

Of course, in discussing Women's Honor we may speedily become so tangled up that, as somebody has said, our only safety will lie in statistics; but in a big way it does not appear that honor is a matter of sex. It seems, at least to the writer, to be rather a matter of character. Now it may be that women have less character than men, but it would hardly be fair to assert it until some statistician has computed the exact average of all the women and all the men living at one time.

UTCUNQUE VENTUS

THERE is no goddess but the Dryad, and every woman is her prophet. We who go down to the streams in rough clothes and wading boots need have no qualms if, from the bridge, we are viewed by those wearing fine linen and carrying parasols; and though we stand waist-deep in the roadside growth, knapsack on shoulder, as the automobile passes, we may meet without flinching the stare of goggled eyes. For we are of the fashion, and we and they know it. Far, indeed, have we come from the day when Miss Austen's ladies, not having shoes to encounter the remains of a white frost, turned back to the house; far, indeed, from the anxieties of her Emma, to whom a country mile proved too much for solitary female walking. The ideal of womanhood has for more than a century been gathering self-reliance and strength. Nervous endurance the heroine always possessed; the tears and trials of Clarissa or Amanda would have sorely overtaxed any mere Man of Feeling.

But under the tutelage of Scott she developed her physical frame by outdoor exercise; and the successor of Diana Vernon and Anne of Geierstein, though no adept in horsemanship and the scaling of precipices, inherited a hardiness of constitution which Cooks might emulate and Amundsens adore.

Through the pages of Augusta Evans the leading lady toiled and suffered without remission. She was no passive and liquid prey to the arts of a later Lovelace; although the walls of piety and domesticity had again risen round her, the Christianity of her conduct was both militant and muscular. No mere hero, however granite his lips or satanically sneering his laugh, could shake her insistence upon right religious and political principles; and few were the heroes who could mate her either in physical asceticism or intellectual athletics. Hebrew and comparative theology were her evening relaxation. She ate nothing, slept rarely, took no exercise, never smiled, invariably looked wan but exquisite, and spent all the time not required for repelling her suitors in the production of a prose so mournfully grand as to bring tears to the eyes of the best New York society.

But this state of things could not last. Confinement indoors, after the taste of liberty which the Author of Waverley had permitted, was not to be long endured. Moreover, the constant use of the Encyclopædia, the Dictionary, and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, palled upon the growing heroine; and perhaps an aggressive and spotless isolation irked a creature supposedly gregarious. Round the card swung the wind of fancy, and off with the inkstand blew the learning, the proud reserve, and alas! the morals of the leading lady. She was no more to be found stooping wearily over her manuscript or uttering profound reflection in her lonely observatory. She

continued, it is true, to sit up all night; but across the noisy pages of the story floated the smoke of her cigarette; and her forte was neither purity, piety, nor philology, only an unreasoning, reprehensible devotion to the hero.

It was an attitude which even unskilled labor could quickly assume, for the accessories demanded no deep study. A little French, a fondness for horses and music, a smattering of the jargon of the studio, a visiting acquaintance with the manners of the underworld; these and a hardy endurance of either privation or neglect, so it be for love's sake, sufficed. The scene might be set in Algiers or Devonshire, Paris or Munich; but its general. features were much the same, with wine, women, and song, smoke and goodcomradeship, shabby velvet jackets or gorgeous uniforms, paint-brushes, swords, horses, and fiddles; all crossed by the shadow of a mystery or a renunciation such as no gentleman's library could be without, and all redolent of youth, ardor, generosity, lawlessness. In short, Bohemia; and in those seacoast havens the heroine's craft rocked gayly.

But the wind of fancy has again changed. The land of fiction, which we chart and re-chart, has further shifted its boundaries. The sign, 'Here have you Bohemia,' is no longer pinned over the cabaret of smoke and absinthe, the attic of the easel, and the table heaped with papers; it hangs at the entrance to the forest trail. And it is a poor heroine who cannot follow; as Mr. Chainmail said to the Rev. Dr. Folliott, it is no disqualification for sylvan minstrelsy not to know an oak from a burdock. We will talk no more of flagons of ale in the Devonshire inns, of franc bottles of wine in the Boul' Miche; we will not linger even in the salon where dukes and dignitaries court the notice of a humble but brilliant

lady-companion. It is but to push back the volumes of heraldry and history, the atlases and dictionaries of argot, and run over the new vocabulary. One has no difficult task; one has only to discourse of the murmuring pines, the bird-enchanted hills, the silence of the moors, the stir of lulling rivers, above all of the open road. The open road, specialists aver, possesses greater powers of temptation than did the closed door of Bluebeard or of Maeterlinck. Everything calls down it, from the day-star to the daisy; and its practical merit, as compared with the highroad of Mr. Pickwick and the stage-coach, is that on it one arrives not. One walks perpetually therein, uplifted, palpitant, yet meeting no adventure, no mystery - but the mystery of nature.

For the inexperienced heroine who has hastily exchanged her paintingdress for khaki, this meeting of nothing is a boon indeed. With meetings there come incidents, emotions; one must gather knowledge to report of such

doings. But with a mere handful of phrases one may go far on the new trail. Take no thought for an expensive journey or the purchase of an outfit; to capture that impression one need not confer with distances. The call of the wild may echo as freshly over a roll-top desk as ever did Roland's horn along the vale of Roncesvalles; and the summons of the daystar was very likely heard by one who wrote beside a seven-coil radiator, to the ground tone of the Elevated. Man triumphs over circumstance, woman also.

Do you fancy that I sit upon the rockered porch of a ten-dollar-a-week summer hotel? You err; I am a solitary in the pines. I may to the material eye wear a white duck skirt and wait at the postoffice for the evening mail; but my astral body, in khaki and gaiters, is kneeling by the roadside fire over which I cook my vagabond meal. And my blanket lies by me, and the stars await the dark.