her yet"; another had pounded his wife to a horrible jelly with a flat-iron; another held his by force upon a red-hot stove; and the last on the list, a collier, nearly tore his wife in pieces, with the help of a bull-dog, "because she aggerewated him by giving him a leg of veal for his dinner when he'd made up his mind to a pair o' boiled fowls!"

But Ronayne says maliciously that Mrs. Malise has resigned me to obscurity and the fossil period; not because it was hopeless—the winning me—but because, after all, it didn't seem worth while. True I had broken from the ranks, set up in business for myself, and earned my bread for a while—but then how dreadfully ignorant I am. It was bad enough when I didn't know who Margaret Fuller was, and had never read Mill on "Liberty"; but the day I owned to a pocket dictionary, and my unaided helplessness as to double consonants and such vicious words as separate, niece, ascension, and so on, finished the business.

And no wonder. What do you suppose my Mabel will say, grown tall and wise like her father, to a mother who knows more about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table than about the real kings and bygone personages of her own or any other country—a mother puzzled always as to whether it was Alfred the Great or Sir Humphrey Davy who burnt the cakes; a mother loving Glastonbury better than almost any spot of English ground, and believing devoutly that there Joseph of Arimathea planted his staff that became the winter thorn, blossoming at Christmas, "mindful of our Lord"; that there in the church-yard of the first hurdle-built church he and King Arthur and Queen Guinevere all mouldered away to dust; a mother who knew no more than sufficed to wield crayon and brush indifferently, and to love what she loves with her whole heart?

And I'm writing her life, her little life, with all its tiny unfoldings—a story of her being and doings, illustrated profusely with sketches and photographs—writing it for the Mabel of by and by. Will she forget the tenderness that's in every line and stroke when she comes upon such a sinful juxtaposition as this which Ronayne laughed at the other day. "Flanel peticoat?" Yes, "flanel peticoat"; it does look rather queer, but that's only because we're used to the wicked lavishness of the common fashion—and double consonants are only so much crinoline. When I worry sometimes as to what baby'll think of her mother being such a goose, Ronayne says the spelling and all the other stupidities are only piquant, and that he asks of heaven nothing better than a daughter only half as much to his taste as his wife is, which would be very dear of him to think and tell me if he had not rather upset it by admitting that if he had a son who persisted in spelling warm after his mother's eccentric fashion—wharm—he, my husband, would certainly "wharm" that boy—my boy.

And I'd sooner Mabel should laugh even unkindly at her mother's ignorance than ever see her turning over the leaves of a set of books wherein her mother's hand had carefully cut away every allusion to Christian belief, every repetition of God's name—such a set as I saw Mrs. Malise scissoring when I called upon her last.

"These are books that are accumulating for Mill," she explained—"presents from one and another—and I'm cutting out every word that can suggest to him the idea of any life or any world than the only one of which he can gain a certainty through his senses; childish impressions are so tenacious, and I mean him to be utterly free from influence or superstition; open to believe or disbelieve in immortality when his faculties are trained, and he can judge evidence fairly. The Christian scheme seems to me to rest on a mass of unworthy fables; but he is not to be taught in the sense of my conclusion. I shall guard him from my atheism as carefully as from accepted forms of faith. Surely no more can be exacted from a mother than to rear a child unbiassed, and let him make his own experiences, shape his own belief. I believe there are text-books in which no reference to any possible personal Creator of the universe is to be found, and we hope such are in use at the Genevan kindergarten, and Mr. Malise means, in some of his leisure time, to write a series of stories for children in which there shall be no hint of the supernatural; stories that shall deal only with this living, breathing world we know; with no pretty fiction concerning a life and personages generations of men have invented details for"—and I—