Ah well! The sacred names rebuke this irreverent trifling. Let me no more profane the eternal verities with goopish verse. But often, sleepily, when the moonlight stirs on the pear-leaves outside my window and a cricket is singing in the quiet of 'the longe night,' I shall put my hands over my dreamfilled eyes and ponder somewhat sadly about those atoms.

THE HERO OF MY DREAMS

ALL the beautiful red and yellow and blue best-sellers had been swept away before I got to the library. Even the best-sellers-before-last, dully rebound but still re-readable, were gone, for it was Saturday afternoon, and our town was laying in its supply of Sunday reading. So I took home three slim, dingy volumes standing neglect edly on a shelf, lettered, 'The Head of the Family, By Miss Mulock,' and proceeded to investigate them.

The woodcuts were hoopskirted or bearded. The chapter-headings were long quotations, mostly from Shakespeare. Every one, even the villain, went to church twice on Sunday and held Family Prayers in the front parlor during the week: and I curled down on a couch with a feeling as of rest after toyle, port after stormie seas. I knew I was on the track of one loved and long-lost. Presently I found him. 'He turned aside in stern self-mastery,' said the first line on page 73 - and I sighed happily. He was come back to me the Lover of the English ladynovelist of the sixties and seventies!

His particular avatar in The Head of the Family was named Ninian Græme, and for the whole three volumes did he continue to fight his emotions sternly down. I did n't like him as well as John Halifax or Eugen Courvoisier, because he had long, loop-shaped whiskers. But ah, the heart that beat

beneath those whiskers! His life was one long, eager self-immolation. He immolated himself for his sweetheart -or, rather, the Object of his Affections; he paid his wayward brother's debts whenever he could most ill afford it; he kept the villain's secrets, and succored the same villain's insane victim, who afterwards made a hit on the stage; he got the Object's trying father out of debtors' prison, managing meanwhile to bring up strictly six halfbrothers and sisters, and keep his office-hours intact he was a Writer to the Signet and worked hard.

Everything he did was done well and thoroughly; still, one could scarcely wonder that at thirty-eight he explained to the drooping heroine, too well brought up by himself to contradict him, that he was too old and worn to think of love or marriage more. A life like his would fatigue the keeper of the Fountain of Youth.

Yet it was not an unusually strenuous life for his class and time. Others did as much, or more, and throve on it. John Halifax worked quite as hard, and had greater calls on his emotions. And Eugen Courvoisier, the beloved First Violin of our teens, he supported not only himself and his son, but a load of unmerited obloquy. Will there ever be another hero as winning as Eugen? He was a widower with a child, and as we and the heroine discovered with the same shock of horror - he won his bread by performing in a small orchestra, whereas we had thought him a count at least! But when he did turn out to be a count after all, and not to have forged the check, though he had always insisted he did, and not to have cared a bit about his first wife - will there ever be joy like that joy?

Jean Ingelow had some pleasant heroes, too. The one in Off the Skelligs was a trifle given to hobbies, and once in a while came dangerously near fail

ing. He wrote a book, for instance, which was not a success; something no hero should do. But he let his younger brother have his sweetheart in the approved manner, and succored the widow and the orphan whenever they came his way. Also, he married the heroine in the end, and kept several entirely unnecessary secrets. He was very satisfactory, on the whole, if he did make small jokes.

Miss Braddon was a producer of heroes not to be despised. They were silent, purposeful gentlemen, not as religious as some of their confrères, but to the full as iron-virtued and tenderhearted. Sometimes they combined the business of hero and villain in one person. Their wickedness was wicked then, and no mistake! But it had this saving grace, that they never forgot it, nor allowed you to. Nowadays villains have a trying trait in common with mere human beings they consider themselves, on the whole, admirable and virtuous persons. Not so in Miss Braddon's day. No well-regulated villain ever allowed the fire of remorse to die in his seared bosom. It glowed to the end of his days, regardless of how long he had been a philanthropist. And when, thirty-eight years after its commission, his sin found him out, he was unaffectedly pleased to have it off his mind, and owned up handsomely. Yes, he had made away with his aged grand-aunt and interred her privately beneath the cellar floor. He had regretted it ever since, but at the time his debts pressed — and, with several anguished expressions of repentance, and the assurance that this was the happiest day he had known since the grand-aunt's burial, he would help them find the skeleton. He might even throw in details about outlying victims at rest under apple trees and hencoops, whom no one had been so rude as to think of laying at his door. Then

he killed himself, always with the sincerity, and belief in himself and a personal devil, which had characterized him straight through. Ah, villains were villains in those days! They believed it and so did their friends, and there was nobody to undeceive them.

It was, also, quite easy to pass yourself off as a villain, to the trusting public of that day, on ridiculously insufficient evidence. Many a spotless hero brightened a life of monotonous virtue and adulation by such a course. Eugen Courvoisier did it to admiration. Ouida's guardsmen, too, were greatly given to the practice. They were generally stately gentlemen of title, whose brocaded sofas and unusual muscle, coupled with wonderful impassivity, superior intellect, and great beauty, made them well known and much admired. But his furniture and personal attractions were only a passing trifle to the Guardsman-a mere bagatelle, as he was in the habit of saying recklessly. What his heart really yearned after was a chance to sacrifice all his home comforts, including his hitherto stainless honor, for any worthless male connection. The more undeserving, the better. Like the Duke in Patience, he was so tired of adulation that a little hearty contempt cheered him up immensely. He never could be brought to admit his guiltlessness till the very last page, and then it was reluctantly. As he did own up-it was generally in the heroine's expensive boudoir, on a sofa such as he had been used to in his better days - he always dashed away a silent tear to the memory of some poor girl who had vainly loved him. Yes, indeed, he was made of the same manly yet melting stuff as John Halifax, scratch him deep enough. Though none would have dared to scratch, even ever so lightly, a Ouida guardsman.

He had his drawbacks, the Mid

Victorian Hero He wept on all the available articles of furniture when his manly heart was wrung. He was certain to observe a noble silence at exactly the wrong time, enabling the gay and glittering gentleman who was more than suspected of being an Atheist to get the girl. He was cross once in a while, when he was keeping Another's secret at the expense of his own character, and somebody took him at his word.

for it was indeed he.

But oh, how dependable he was! How sure to meet a train, or make an excellent omelet if the fragile heroine had mislaid the cook-book! How strong he was, and how fond of carrying people upstairs! How well he brought up his first wife's children, if he was a widower, or the heroine, if he was her guardian!

He will not come again not he nor such as he. He has passed, always with a certain dignity, his heroine's drooping curls brushing his protecting arm, into the country of last year's snow, and year-before-last's presidential candidate, and all forgotten, irrecoverable things. And, as his favorite author, the Swan of Avon, said, We shall not gaze the upon his like again. He is gone Mid-Victorian Hero is gone, and none so poor to do him reverence. His position is filled by a set of sunny, irresponsible young gentlemen who have to be coaxed and mothered by the stalwart, all-sufficing young women of to-day's fiction-young gentlemen young gentlemen who would have had short shrift as Wayward Younger Brothers, or Awful Examples, how few brief years ago! They are doubtless easier to entertain, and pleasanter around the house. And John Halifax and Ann Veronica would lead but a sad, cat-and-dog life.

But I am sentimental, and I have ideals. I want the old hero back. Thinking of him, I brush away the silent tear.

'LITTLE THINGS'

It is not the arguments and persuasions of the well-meaning that most often send the prodigal on his way back to the fatted calf and the robe and the ring of civilized life. It is much more frequently the haphazard vision of a stranger's lamp-lit hall, the glow of a kitchen fire seen through an area railing, that wakes the unbearable homesickness, and suddenly renders the swine and the husks detestable.

unless, of

Those who have experienced great sorrow or great pain know that the sharpness of the first hideous impression soon blurs, gradually becomes vaguer and vaguer, and, when time has passed, it is one of the hardest sensations possible to re-create in the memory. Great sorrow and great joy transcend the ordinary events of life too much to have an abiding place in a thing so small as a brain, course, they obsess it to the exclusion of everything else. More often, however, the large experiences become anchored to the brain—or the heart, or the soul, or wherever the individual prefers to locate his emotions by means of the small details attendant upon them. A man does not remember exactly how he felt when the news of a disaster came and overwhelmed him; but he is not likely to forget the gesture and expression of the messenger who came to tell him about it, or the first terrible words with which the news was broken; and whenever he hears and sees them repeated in other circumstances, he will feel the same sick dread creep over him which he felt for the first time when the news was fresh.

devil, indeed. The things that are dear to us, for instance, we nearly always we nearly always call them 'little,' however unsuitable the epithet. One of the broadest and most unproportionately broad Airedale terriers of my acquaintance is frequently addressed as 'little dog,' while the gaunt and not altogether prepossessing lady of the Charlie's Aunt type is the 'dear child' of the man whose bride she was some forty years ago.

We love little things, we hate little things, we fear little things; our lives are knit up with little things from the time we are born to the day we die.

Big things draw us up to Heaven or crush us down to Hell. Little things live beside us on the earth, eat and sleep with us, laugh and grumble with us, catch the early train with us, or make us miss it, irritate and appease us, never let us alone for a minute. That is why they are so much more important than the big things the things that come only once in a way, at long intervals, and even then are nearly always the result of a hundred and one little things combined.

To be crushed by a large misadventure is natural, but to fall a victim to a series of petty misfortunes is humiliating. There are many who would prefer to break their necks once for all by falling off a mountain, rather than bruise their whole bodies and dislocate their tempers by the daily stumbling over a mole-hill. It is the little things that count, the satisfaction of climbing Mount Olympus is a poor sort of attainment if the scores and scores of pleasant details which wait upon success be absent.

It is the fringe of a foam-flecked wave rippling through the edge of a sea-fog that sets us longing for the open sea. It is the sharp scent of azalea, sold in the street, that makes us wild for a game of pirates in the garden where we were children. It is

the big things that blur and fade. It is the little things that bite their way into the memory as a red-hot needle bites its way into wood.

And that, perhaps, is the whole secret of the love and the hate we bear them, these same insidious little things which so often pretend to hide themselves away in the background, when in reality they are the most important part of the whole picture.

TWENTY YEARS AGO

I HAVE just hunted up an old Reader. It was Cleo's story that prompted it. Cleo is thirteen, and has taken her pen in hand to compose a romance which she has brought to me for criticism.

It is a sad story, naturally, for lighthearted youth loves tears. A young girl, betrothed to one of her own age, is compelled by her cruel parents to wed an old man for his gold. She consents, and the young man, starting in search of a career to fill the aching void in his heart, sees through his tears, held back with difficulty, the old man, wrinkled, gray-bearded, tottering up the steps to greet his bride-to-be.

Two years pass, and the youth has won fame and fortune abroad in Art (kind not specified) and sails for home. On landing, a newspaper is brought him in which he reads of the death of his beloved's husband. 'Died, on November 12, B. B., at the age of forty-two.'

Forty-two! And two years before, gray-bearded and tottering, he had wedded the young girl.

I am forty-five, quite sprightly, and with no trace of gray hair. This was what sent me to the old Reader, the one that immediately succeeded McGuffey's in the schools of our middlewestern state. I had a dim recollection of a poem which I used to read, illustrated by a picture I much admired, just thirty-five years ago. A feeble

gray-bearded man was seated on the river-bank, under a willow tree; there was a churchyard in the distance, and near by, a village green on which school boys were playing. The lines were headed, 'Twenty Years Ago,' and in them, the graybeard was apostrophizing an absent school friend named Tom,

I've wandered to the village, Tom,
I've sat beneath the tree.

He goes on to recount how he had visited the village green on which the youngsters were playing; the old schoolhouse, sadly changed now, with its new benches; the spring, bubbling from beneath the elm; and the river bank, overshadowed by the willows. They were all there, but alas! gone was almost all the band of merry youngsters who had gamboled on the green, coasted on the hillside, swung in the grapevine swing, and played the game

I have forgot the name just now; You've played the same with me— 'Twas played with knives by throwing-so and so.

Not gone from this place to some other, in search of a career, but dead, and dead from old age, presumably, since there is no mention of a plague having swept through the village. Almost all the 'band' were in the churchyard laid,' though 'some sleep beneath the sea; but few are left of our old class excepting you and me.' The graybeard's lids have long been dry, he says, but he confesses that they were filled with tears as he rose feebly and tottered to the churchyard to strew flowers upon the graves of those he had loved some twenty years ago.

Judging from internal evidence, the sports in which he and Tom were engaged, barefoot boys, remember!mumble-peg (hypocrite! I could never believe he had really forgotten the name!), coasting, tree-carving, and so forth, they must have been at that time some twelve or fifteen years old,

and therefore, at the time of his visit, twenty years later, he and the decrepit Tom must have been all of thirty-two or thirty-five years of age, as were also those companions so untimely sleeping in the churchyard or beneath the sea!

It is all very funny, now, and I was glad, as I re-read it, that I had preserved the old Reader along with my mother's Mitchell's Geography and Kirkham's Grammar. But when I read it in school it was my favorite selection, I being at that time, as Cleo is now, a sentimentalist; and never a thought of its absurdity entered my mind, any more than the absurdity of having a hero old enough to die at forty-two has entered the mind of Cleo. Indeed, I could picture myself returning some twenty years hence, feeble and gray-haired, to sit under the beech trees of our school grounds, trying to recall the names of our old games, beanbag and hop-scotch and skip-the-rope -hop-scotch I loved so passionately that I knew I should never forget it. And our teacher! She was a young girl, probably not yet twenty, and I remember well with what feeling her voice dwelt on the lines as she read them first to show us where 'to lay the stress' and what 'pitch of voice' to take, according to the instructions in the notes. The editor, too, must have been young, for while he diligently put in all the acute and grave accents in the first stanzas, that we might know where to lift our voices up and where to bring them down (they were mostly downs in this), - 'It's music just the same, dear Tom,' he was evidently so overcome by the sadness of the last three stanzas, where the speaker's long-dry lids moistened as he visited the churchyard, that he omitted them altogether.

I shall not call Cleo's attention to it, after all. It might lead to some troublesome questions, and twenty years from now she will need no explanations.