gratified her housewifely pride, they offended her sense of delicacy. In her day people didn't make such a fuss about their food. They took it for granted it would be good, and it was good, and that was the end of the matter.

Still she answered them all with gentle courtesy. She promised to give recipes, and tried to remember the component parts of the queen's cake for one enthusiastic lady who took down notes on a visiting-card.

The party grew much more sociable under the kindly influence of food, and when it began to break up the guests were in very good spirits indeed. They made many pretty speeches to Mrs. Allen as they left, and assured her how much they had enjoyed themselves.

Mrs. Fulton officiated faithfully in the dining-room, and was among the last to leave. She came up smiling and satisfied, and Mrs. Allen recognized her instantly as the one who had seized the reins of her party and driven it-she knew not where.

She felt a tiny spark of resentment, but she smothered it instantly, and said, with cordial interest: "I hope you haven't wearied yourself, Mrs. Fulton. I didn't mean to ask so much of you."

"Oh, don't speak of it. I was glad to help you. I only wish I could have done more."

Mrs. Allen looked at her and wondered what more she could have done, but she only said: "You were most kind. I thank you very much."

Then in a few minutes the last guest

had departed and the bells rang out for seven o'clock.

Mrs. Allen thought of her card-tables all ready for the evening, of her wine in the decanters, and her almond cake and sponge cake in the pantry. It was all so different from what she had planned.

She went out into the dining-room, where the servants were clearing away the tables, and gave a few directions. Then she came back and sat down by the fire, her hands folded in her lap and her feet crossed at the ankle. She had never crossed them higher than that in all her life.

The Colonel watched her anxiously. He, too, was full of disappointment.

Finally he said, in a cheerful voice and with a manner which he tried to make off-hand and casual: "Harriet. you were quite right about our entertaining-you always are right. These people are undoubtedly cultivated and charming, but you and I are not adapted to modern ways and people. We won't repeat this experiment. Hereafter we will devote ourselves entirely to our old friends."

She lifted her eyes to his, and they were full of tears.

"But, Cornelius," she said, softly, "there are none left."

He made no answer, but came and sat beside her, reaching over and taking one of her hands in his. She cried a little very quietly, but his presence comforted her.

The fire burned low and the twilight deepened, but still they sat there hand in hand.

Is there not a certain defect of gayety in contemporary sport? We Americans seem, nowadays, to take ours excessively hard. We take some of our soberer matters very easily. We giggle over heresy trials, and have endless patience for the shortcomings of politicians; but we hold our breath over the reports of football games and yacht races, and lose our sleep over intricacies in the management of those events. The wear and tear of our emotions for fear our great matches of one kind or another will not run smoothly and turn out well, and our anxiety for fear the contestants will squabble and "sport" receive detriment, threatens to result in an increased measure of nervous prostration.

There seems to be excessive difficulty in making "sport" take care of itself. Business prospers on its own responsibility. The business man who doesn't know the rules of his industry and observe them, goes through bankruptcy and receives instruction. War takes care of itself. The weaker side gets beaten. But sport requires constant nursing and attention. It is a form of competition in which it is not enough to win unless the winning is done according to the rules, and the rules are rarely so clear but that one contestant's interpretation of them may seem about as good as another's. Charles Fox said of gambling that the next best thing to winning was to lose. That ought always to be true of sport, but it seems uphill work to make it come about. It seems to require the constant efforts of the masters and nurses of sportsmanship to reconcile the vanquished to defeat.

As much diplomacy has been invested this last year in the promotion of the game of football in the United States as was required for the settlement of the Alabama claims. We worried nearly as much last September over the international yacht races as our fathers did a generation ago over Mason and Slidell and the affair of the Trent. Let us common people, who do not claim the lofty title of sportsmen, endeavor to look on at sport with somewhat more equanimity and take it easier in all its forms. If it is not enjoyable, let us try to ignore it and amuse ourselves with croquet and "one old cat" and simple diversions that we can understand. If sport cannot take care of itself, so far as it concerns us, let us let it go to the dogs and stay with the dogs until it is fit for better company. They say we spoiled the yacht races because we would persist in crowding in to see them. They say we have injured football by precipitate curiosity of the same sort. It is a pity to subject ourselves to such complaints. There is a disease that is vulgarly (very vulgarly) known as "the big-head." If the great mass of us pay too much attention to sport it seems straightway to get "the big head;" players and contestants of various sorts swell overnight into representatives of the American people; sportsmen of recognized standing tower up so high that mere statesmen are dwarfed beside them. When that sort of thing happens sport gets empty and tiresome; runs to rhetoric and newspaper interviews and argument, and gets to be a burden and an annoyance. When it comes to that let us put it out of our minds and go about our other

business. We can get on without it for a while without difficulty or detriment, and a share of wholesome neglect may do it good. When it ceases to be a recreation and an entertainment it ceases to have a right to be, and we have no obligation to worry over it.

DR. JOHNSON said "it seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity;" but I doubt whether the true philosopher does not really get the majority of them from the past. All his inferences as to the future, consolatory or otherwise, are the result of his own or of recorded experience; and meditation over this is commonly the most satisfactory method of combating such worries as a philosopher may be supposed to entertain

at all.

Dr. Max Nordau is distinctly not a philosopher; and inasmuch as it would interfere very materially with the hypothesis with which he has succeeded in alarming this generation, it is perhaps too much to ask that he shall devote much attention to the past, especially for consolation. But I wonder whether even he, in secret, has not occasionally had a glimmering consciousness of the hoary age of some of the spectres which, in the expressive slang of the day, he has been "giving us," and whether the thought has never crossed his mind with how little trouble, on the whole, the race and civilization have survived their ominous appearance. It is to be hoped that no serious student of history, capable of the task, will waste his time in writing a detailed rejoinder to Nordau's clever and specious "Degeneracy;" but I imagine that it must have occurred to many such readers that there have been really only a few exceptional periods of any considerable civilization, about which it would not have been possible, with equal literary powers, to write a similar and equally true book. At all events, although the mass of detail necessary to support it is perhaps formidable, I commend this proposition to industrious members of debating societies:-that not only in degenerate periods, but in those which seen in historical perspective appear most vital and fruitful, every one of Nordau's

evidences of degeneracy may be duplicated, and by an evidence relatively if not absolutely as important. If the industrious debater enjoys only a small part of the ingenuity of Dr. Nordau in arranging his fo cus, he can amuse himself by proving "the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” with their fantastic imitations, their strange sects, their jumble of fashions, their euphuism, their cult of cipher and symbol among the learned, to have been peopled by a race whose nervous systems had been injured by the disturbing strain of the Reformation, and whose future was unquestionably desperate. Or he can get enough out of his classics to show him what a bad way the Greeks were in with their symbolists and preachers of the unknown god, and the equivalents they had for "Der Tolstoismus" and the other isms; or he can work up the Italian Renaissance -I don't know indeed of a finer opportunity than this-and show conclusively that it was not a renaissance at all, but only, if you will but look at certain mighty factors which history has consigned to the works of specialists, a period so packed with the germs of decay that there was no hope in it.

If you can make figures prove anything, that achievement is as nothing to what you can do with the abnormalities of human nature--abnormal whether for good or bad, genius or insanity. Group them skilfully, and you can make the race seem to take any form and to be marching toward any fate; only while you are busy at it the great army of the normal mixes up your groups, and carries you and them on with it toward some other goal. History alone, that looks on at a distance, ever finds out which were the determining fac tors-and she does it only in the largest way, and often wrong.

My very reputable friend, Mr. Wilkins, asks me to put his case before that enlightened and discriminating public to which he believes me to be a special messenger. To vouch, at the outset, for Wilkins, let me say that he is a gallant and personable young fellow, well-intentioned in all ways, and with no special disposition to criticise women, either directly or

by implication. On the contrary, as you will see farther on, he is wholesomely fond of their society and susceptible to their influence. Here is his statement and his dilemma.

"I got into a cable car a few days ago,” he says, "to ride up-town. I had just had a long session with a Chicago business inan, and crowded him into a close bargain. I was entitled by all the laws that govern trade to a particular selfcomplacency, but instead I only felt mean and depressed. This is always the way when a fellow in business has not yet sweat the Calvinism out of his bones -(Lowell, as Dr. Pangloss would say). Well, the instant I stepped into the car I saw the face of a woman I know and particularly admire. She isn't a young woman, nor a beautiful one, neither is she specially brilliant, though she is very intelligent. But there seems to radiate from her always such an atmosphere of unworldly goodness, almost of holiness, like all the beatitudes rolled together in one human form, that I can never be a half hour in her presence without feeling myself a better fellow-as if I had taken a bath morally, and put on a fresh suit of clothes, which I meant to keep clean; just as I used to feel when I was in college and went home for a vacation and my mother talked to me. Any fellow knows how that is.

"Of course, as soon as I saw Mrs. L I went and stood in front of her, as there was no opportunity to sit next her, with full intent to shrive myself for all my commercial meanness before her unworldliness. What do you think she flung out at me, on the instant-What did I think the Republican party in New York would do with the excise question this fall? Now I try to do my duty as a citizen; I belong to a Good Government Club and attend a good many primaries. I even like to talk politics sometimes, when my mind is at ease and my dinner is digesting. But just now I didn't want politics; I wanted help. I was hungry and thirsty for a little of the spiritual suggestion of things better than politics and the shifts of trade, from a woman who had peculiar power to help me. I suppose all this was very boyish and

sentimental, and that I had no right to expect a spiritual uplifting in a Broadway car. But men do occasionally, even yet, feel just so sentimental and boyish, and I knew that if I could only sit quietly beside her for a little while, and look into her serene face and her clear eyes, I should have had help enough, though she were not to utter a word. But what I did do was to stand on my feet in that plunging car, for two-thirds the length of Broadway, and talk municipal politics with a woman so changed that I felt as if I had never seen her before. She was entertaining, to be sure, and intelligent, and I got several new points from her fund of facts; but any ward politician could have given me these, and meanwhile I felt all the impulse toward goodness that had leaped up at the sight of her face ooze out of me. I was tired in body and mind, and bruised and disheartened in spirit. I felt vaguely that I had hoped for bread and found a particularly unnecessary stone.

"Heaven knows I want women to have any privilege and opportunity that they think belongs to them, from the ballot to bloomers, and I humbly acknowledge the benefit of intellectual comradeship between the sexes. I even believe that when women are intelligently informed in political affairs they will do much for the improvement of politics; which is further than most men will go. But what I want to know is this: When all the benefits of intellectual comradeship and political participation are established, when men and women find their greatest common interest in the political situation or the intellectual problem of the hour, where is to be found the woman whose sweet, old-fashioned unworldliness makes her mere presence more uplifting than all the words of many men? Who will take the place and fulfil the unconscious mission of her whose mission is made by being out of the current of worldly things? Who is going to help me remember to say my prayers?"

And Wilkins's question is mine as well.

I SOMETIMES wonder what the aggressive modern, in the generation just coming

into active life, is going to have hereafter for a literary background, so to speak; and how it will serve him. I mean the young fellow, of whom there is a large leaven in every year's college output, who is finely confident that the gods and heroes of his day are better than, or at least as good as, those of any other day; whose really interested knowledge of literature -the kind that he absorbs and that seems living to him-begins, in spite of his indignant protests to the contrary, and in spite of the fact that he supposes himself familiar with the great masters, at a date not more than fifteen years ago. He is a very healthy type, if he is perfectly clear that there were no brave men before his own Agamemnons; and he will keep on "discovering old things" until his education is duly amended. But after all, those interests which he has felt keenly at this age, in the books which came out in his day and were the subject of his hot discussion, enthusiasm, detence, will form in the future a special part of his life, for which "literary background" is not too strong a phrase.

It is so hard to know for how much mere age is responsible in one's view of things, that a man who has reached middle life must, of course, face frankly the question how much of his critical opinion on any subject is only the result of his own lack of zest, and must be willing to make large discounts. Yet when all this is done it is still difficult to avoid the conclusion that successful appeal to the moment, which has been the distinguishing trait of the most notable books of the last decade or so, has made less provision for lasting pleasure in this background than we oldsters have enjoyed. It may be conceivable that anybody is going back in the fut

ure to "Robert Elsmere " and "David Grieve," and "Marcella," with the same feeling with which we remember the ap pearance of "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss," or even-not to go so far back-of "Middlemarch;" that the immortal Trilby will be a landmark like the later books of Thackeray to a man who remembers their first reading and boyish discussion; that Mr. Watson, and Mr. Thomson, and Mr. Davidson will be looked back to as Mr. Du Maurier's heroes and men of their age look to their Swinburne. This is conceivable, but is it prob able? It is curious, and has a significance of its own, that the one figure which bears these comparisons, Stevenson, is already talked of by these youthful readers (1 have observed with some wonder, but I think I am not mistaken) as though he were of older time. They hardly reeognize him as among their "up-to-date" possessions; he stepped into the high place while they were getting sensations out of minor people, and his mastership will be one of the old things they will discover. The first reading of the best half-dozen of Mr. Kipling's stories does belong to the literary impressions which are permanent ; and that is a possession which is all their own-but it is dangerously lonely.

Seriously, it seems to me that our present type of novel, written consciously at certain conditions, is succeeding in entertaining the moment rather at the expense of the future, and that the present younger reader is going to get the evil conse quences. But after all, he may have the consolation that he will not know it: and I have no doubt that he will be abundantly able to take care of himself. "For life, though largely, is not entirely carried on by literature.”