"to peep" in opposition to her will. She bends you to her ends with the merest minimum of effort; she moulds you to her purposes as clay is moulded in the hands of the potter. Woman's control of man is the eternal theme of literature, the burden of biography, lyric, and romance. In one form or another, it is always Samson laying his shaggy head in the lap of Delilah, - the old lion allowing the fair maiden to draw his teeth and clip his claws.

"Did not the great Hercules lay down his strength,
Spinning with Omphale, and all for love?"

Was not Achilles, - the terrible Achilles, impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer, though he was; he who

"All covenants would still disown,

And test his quarrel by the sword alone;"

he whose mere shout alone made the horses of Troy tremble in their shoes, foreseeing the sorrows which that shout implied; the Swift-footed himself, who slew the Horsetamer; was not even he conquered by the gentleness of the fair Briseis? And when he was robbed of her by the leader of the Greeks, did he not stalk ireful and moody by the shores of the many-sounding sea, and mingle his briny tears with "the ocean wave"?

There was possibly a time before man emerged from the savage state, when woman might have been "the weaker vessel; " but to call her so to-day, when with absolute selfreliance she preaches in the pulpit, argues in the courts, performs surgical operations, harangues on the platform, wins" double-firsts" at universities, holds political conventions, organizes parties, and outwits and defeats even the Jesuits at the polls, when a woman (Mrs. Livermore)

travels during a hot fortnight in August 4,500 miles, and delivers eleven lectures at Chautauqua, besides speaking during the same brief time at several conferences on temperance, woman suffrage, nationalism, and physical culture, to call such a being "weak" is to be guilty at once of an anachronism, a misnomer, and a libel.

If!

A NEWSPAPER writer, speaking of the late Thomas J. Potter, who as general manager of the Union Pacific Railway received an annual salary of $40,000, says that he began his career twenty-five years ago as a lineman on an Iowa railway at $45 per month. "He worked his way up," it is added, from the latter position to the former; "and there is not a young man on any railroad in the United States for whom the same result is not possible, if he should put into his work the same amount of brains and zeal which Mr. Potter did.'

How inspiring! What a trumpet-call to young railway employees to become, one and all, presidents of great lines, and the recipients of yearly salaries each one of which is in itself a fortune! "If he should put into his work,” etc. No doubt; and "if my aunt had been a man, she would have been my uncle." It is just and only that provoking "if," reader, that prevents a beggar from becoming a Rothschild, or you and me from rivalling Webster at the bar, Gladstone in the senate, or Scott and Dickens in fiction. If" is a very small word, a monosyllable of two letters only; yet how immense is that "if"! Thousands of persons who now languish in obscurity would astonish the world, were they not, like Mirabeau in his youth, confined in the castle of IF.

"If I but had an opening," sighs many a young man in

these days of overcrowded professions and multiplying competitors for office and place," the world should see what I can do." "If I but had an opening! as if the very seal and sign of ability- the essential difference between it, or genius, and dilettantism were not a regal superiority to the "openings" and "opportunities" which so many aspirants to wealth or honor make a condition of success. The successful man is the one who made a way when he could not find one; who made the adverse circumstances, over which others were moaning, the ministers and aids to his advancement, instead of becoming their slave. The difficulties which disheartened them only stiffened his sinews; the block of granite which was an obstacle in their pathway became a stepping-stone in his.

A lad of twelve years of age, who already played the piano very skilfully, once said to Mozart: "Herr Kapellmeister, I should very much like to compose something. I to begin?"

"Pho, pho," said Mozart, "you must wait."

How am

"But you," said the boy, "composed much earlier." "Yes," replied Mozart, "but I asked nothing about it. If one has the spirit of a composer, one writes because he cannot help it."

On another occasion, writing in reply to a friend who had asked about his way of composing music, he names certain occasions when his ideas flow best and most abundantly, and adds: "Whence and how they come I know not, nor can I force them. Why productions take from my hand that particular form and style which makes them Mozartish, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so and so, large or aquiline, or, in short,

makes it Mozart's and different from those of other people, for I really do not study to aim at any originality."

The letters of Dickens show that it was in a similar way that he wrote those wondrous novels of his that enchant the world. When a new creation was about to rise from the ocean depths of thought, he did not go about asking advice, or gird up his literary energies by a prodigious effort of the will, but, to use his own language about "The Chimes," "all his affections and passions got twined and knotted upon it;" he went wandering about at night into the strangest places, "possessed," spirit-driven, a prophet commissioned to utter the life-giving word to men's souls, and finding no rest until he uttered it. So, though rarely perhaps in the same degree, with the eminent men, the great leaders, in almost every calling: they chose their respective pursuits, if they can be said to have chosen them, not because those pursuits promised the most money, fame, or happiness, but unconsciously, because they could not help it; and they succeeded, not because they resolved with an intense, continuous act of volition to do such and such things, but because they were impelled by a great, prevailing, paramount desire, which engulfed all lesser desires, to do them.

No doubt there is a will that makes the man; but if it is not inborn, it cannot be put into him, and it needs no prompting. To tell a young man that he can become a millionaire, a railroad king, etc., if he will put into his work the same amount of brains and zeal as A or B did before he became a millionaire or railroad king, is the veriest drivel. It is equivalent to saying that he will become a Samson if he will only put forth a Samson's strength; or that if an astronomical student will put into

his work the mental energy, the spiritual force, of Newton, he will do as great things as Newton, which is not a very stimulating statement, if it be true. How strangely men persist in regarding moral qualities as habits merely, and not gifts! The will is a natural endowment as well as the mental faculties, and to want it is as bad as to want mental power.

The Virtues

WHY is it that in this age of cures, - grapeof Sunlight. cures, movement-cures, faith-cures, etc., which are lauded as panaceas for all the ills that flesh is heir to, so few persons avail themselves of that best and cheapest antidote to disease, as well as cure of it in many cases, the sun-cure? The love of sunshine is one of our strongest instincts; yet cats and dogs, which have it also, follow it more intelligently than men and women. No man ever basked in the sunshine on a bright, sparkling morning, without feeling and being the better for it; yet how few of us avail ourselves of the wealth of sunshine that is poured out so lavishly all around us! We all understand the effects of the withdrawal of sunlight from plants in winter; but it is too often forgotten that through its short, gloomy days the human body suffers in the same way as vegetation, and therefore requires the therapeutic agency of sunshine to repair its wasted forces. Dr. Bell, in his work on Climatology, observes that the free action of light favors nutrition and regularity of development, and contributes to beautify the countenance; while a deficiency of light is usually characterized by ugliness, rickets, and deformity, and is a fruitful source of scrofula and consumption.

The sun-cure, we believe, is not found in rooms glazed with blue-glass (though even that craze had a truth under