is the spreading of many and various branches. If you are a willow, don't attempt to be a pine, and if the Lord made you to grow like an elm don't pattern yourself after a scrub oak. The rebuke "what will people say?" should never be applied to the waywardness of a child. Teach it rather to ask: "How will my own self-respect stand this test?" Such training will evolve something rarer in the way of development than a candle-mold or a yard-stick.

XXXVI.

TWO TYPES.

How full the streets are, to be sure! Where do all the folks come from and where do they stop? Surely there are not roofs enough to cover the steady stream of humanity that courses through the thoroughfares from dawn to night time. To one who walks much to and fro in the town there comes a rare chance to study human types. Books hold nothing within their covers so grotesque and so pathetic, so inexplicable and so queer as the folks that jostle one another on the streets! There is the precise female who nips along in a little apologetic way, as though there was an impropriety in the very act of locomotion for which she would fain atone. From the crown of her head to her boot tips she is proper, stupid and decorous, but too much of her company would prove to endurance what sultry weather proves to cream. In fact, I think if I were told I had to live with some of the women I meet on the streets, I would fall on my hat pin, as the old Romans did upon their swords, as the pleasanter alternative. There is nothing more charming than a bright woman, but she must be superior to her own environments and be able to talk and think about other things than a correct code of etiquette, her costumes and her domestic concerns.

There is a man I sometimes encounter on the street between whom and myself there looms a day of bitter reckoning. He wears rubbers if the day is at all moist, and next to ear muffs, galoshes on an able bodied man goad me to fury. If the Lord made you a man, be a man and not a molly-coddle. Soup without meat, bread without salt, pie-crust without a filling, slack-baked dough, all these are prototypes of the man without endurance or sufficient stamina to stand getting his delicate feet dashed with dew, or his shell-like ears nipped by frost.

XXXVII.

A DREAM GARDEN.

Country living is delightful, but, like all other blessings, it has its alternates of shadow. I used to sit here by my window last April and gloat over the prospects for the vegetable garden a tramp laid out and seeded for me in the early spring. What luscious peas were going to clamber over the trellis along about the middle of July! What golden squashes were going to nestle in the little hollows! What lusty corn was going to stride the hillocks! What colonies of beans and beds of lettuce should fill the spaces, like stars in the wake of a triumphant moon, and how odorous the breath of the healthful onion should be upon the midsummer air! But listen. No Assyrian ever yet came down upon the fold as my neighbor's chickens have descended upon the fair territory of my garden. As for shooing a chicken off, my dear, when its gigantic intellect is set upon scratching up a seeded bed, you might as well attempt to wave back a thunderstorm with a fan.

I have undertaken several difficult things in my life, but never one so hopeless as convincing a calm and resolute hen that she is an intruder. I spent one glad summer trying to keep a brood out of a geranium bed, and had typhoid fever all the fall just from overwork and worry. But say there had been no chickens to "wear the heart and waste the body," how about potato bugs, and caterpillars and huge and gruesome slugs? I never go out to sprinkle the sad pea vines or pick the drooping lettuce but what I resolve myself into a magnet to lure the early vegetable-devouring reptile from its lair. Large 7 by 9 caterpillars and zebra-striped ladybugs disport themselves on neck and ankle until I flee the scene.

XXXVIII.

ANYTHING WORSE THAN A BLUE-JAY? HARDLY!

If there is anything worse than a blue-jay, name it. Perhaps a mannish woman, with a shrill voice and a waspish tongue, is as bad, but she can't be worse. There are something less than a hundred of these feathered hornets dwelling in the grove that surrounds my house, and they began before sunrise to call names and fight clamorous battles. One of them starts the row by crying something in the ear of a neighbor, which sounds like a challenge blown through a fish horn. At this the insulted neighbor flops down off the tree where he lives, and says naughty words very thick and very fast. Then five or six old ladies poke their heads over the sides of their nests and call "Police!" A squad of bluecoats comes tearing ever the border and attacks the original culprit. He whips out his fish horn and summons a general uprising. Very soon there is a battle royal, to which the old ladies add zest by squeaking out dire threats in shrill falsetto voices pitched at high "C." This keeps up until somebody arises and declaims from my open window, dancing meanwhile in helpless rage, to see how futile is the voice of august man when blue-jays hold the floor. Talk about the English sparrow! It is a mild-mannered little gentleman compared to the noisy jay. Its politeness and amiability are Chesterfieldan beside the behavior of its handsomely attired but boorish neighbor. And as for fighting, why, I verily believe a bluejay in good condition could "do up" John L. Sullivan so quickly the gentle pugilist would never know what struck him.

XXXIX.

GOOD HEALTH A BLESSING.

What roses are with worms in the bud, such are women without health. There can be no beauty in unwholesomeness, there can be nothing attractive in a delicate pallor caused by the disregard of hygiene, or in a willowy figure, the result of lacing. If I could now and then thread some particular bead on an electric wire that should tingle and thrill wherever it touched, or write in a streak of zig-zag light across the sky, I might, perhaps, compel attention to what I have to say. There are certain laws of health which, if they only might be regarded, would make us all as beautiful in outward seeming as we strive to be, no doubt, in spirit. Ever so pure and lovely a soul in an unhealthy body is like a bird trying to thrive and sing in an ill-kept cage, or a flower blooming with a blight set deep within its withering petals. You or I can serve neither heaven nor mankind worthily if we disregard the laws of health, and bear about with us a frail and poorly nurtured body. There are "shut in" spirits, to be sure, captives from birth to pain, the record of whose patient endurance of suffering sweetens the world in which they live, as a rose shut within a dull and prosy book imparts to its pages a fragrance born of summer and heaven; but such lives are the exception. The true destiny of the sons and daughters of earth is to grow within the garden of life as a sapling rather than as a sickly weed, developing timber rather than pith, and yielding finally to death, the sharp-axed old woodman, as the tree falls, to pass onward to new opportunities of power and service. The tree does not decay where it stands, nor does it often fall because its core is honeycombed by disease. It is cut down in the meridian of its strength, because somewhere on distant seas a new ship is to be launched and needs a stalwart mainmast, or a home is to be builded that needs the fiber of strong and steadfast timber. So, I think, with men and women, there would not be so much unsightly growing old, with waning power and wasted faculties, if we attended more strictly to the laws of health, and when death came to us at last it should only be because there was need of good timber further