object in life may not be equal to the energy and sacrifice made to achieve it. A laconic preacher once described a great genius in literature, who had thrown the force of his immense talents in a direction in which the preacher thought there was nothing possibly commensurate with the great ability devoted to it, as "a spiritual giant, sitting on the tombstone of hope, cracking hazelnuts with a sledge-hammer." There are cases in which this is true, and we are not now wholly to defend this hunter. But how are we always to know that the end will justify the means? How are we always to know when it will justify them? Are we always to stand around till the infallible certainties of prophecy declare we may take our hands from our pockets? In these cases, where the end does not justify the means—in the times when we have run a mile to crush a butterfly in our hands-is there any compensation? To be lost in the impulse of an enterprise—that is great, unless the enterprise be evil. That wolf was not worth a good dog and a good horse, but THE CHASE

WAS.

That which is objectively gained in life may not be worth what it costs; but the effort made to get it has its value. Have I paid for things

more than they are worth, and is my life therein the loser? If by any overplus of payment the struggle of my life has been intensified in any degree, the thews of my soul by that struggle have been drawn out. My own effort has put its own sunshine into me, and in the final product I have been the gainer. Heaven!— where is it? I do not know, but I know the race I make for it will put into my spirit its substance by the time I have reached it.

"A fireplace filled the room's one side

With half a cord o' wood in

There war n't no stoves (till comfort died)

To bake ye to a puddin'."

-LOWELL.

WHAT

relations of men and women in the earlier days! I shall be pardoned if I express the opinion that men and women were better mated then than now. False ideas of social caste were not in the way then as now. "Sassiety"

is frequently scandalized now over some blueblood of a boy or girl marrying below rank. Frequently these escapades are mistakes, but they are more significantly declarations of revolt against the conventionalism of society. The barriers of station and rank in life may work

desirable things for certain families and certain classes; but they are not the better conditions for the race. The relations of the sexes, under the moral standard, should be controlled more by nature than by the cobwebs of owlish philosophy and iron-bound social custom. It is now and then the thing for the scion of titled nobility to defy the courts and his regal grandmothers, and go out and marry some buxom country lass, and put a strain of fresh, clean blood into the well-pedigreed and well-run-out family line.

It is often a benediction to the tenderly-caredfor house-flower of a daughter, reared in wealth, when she shocks her set by declaring in favor of some rough-handed country greeny-not only on the ground that there is sure to be outcome in him, but for the ill-apprehended reason that the attrition of her life against the sober, practical sense of his, will give to her the added feature of her experience and training so necessary to the full rounding of her womanhood.

Is it not so that a man of spirit is nearly always popular with the ladies? A woman, as a rule, admires a courageous and manly man. So a woman is attractive to a man in the degree that she is womanly. There are mannish women, and womanish men; but they are the

exceptions. They are variations from type. There is that indescribable sum of qualities which constitutes our ideal of woman. It is the splendid feminine spirituelle we call woman. Tennyson says:

"For woman is not undeveloped man,

But diverse. Could we make her as the man,
Sweet love were slain. His dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference."

The man who never felt love in his heart for a pure woman is a stranger to one of the highest emotions of the soul. Woman is the feeder of the fountain of love in man's heart, by which he is made strong and good and great. No man is ever really strong until he falls down at the feet of the woman he loves.

Fond as Reuben Blannerhassett was of the society of good women, he lived to be an old bachelor; and, as would naturally follow, his social life was not devoid of an occasional escapade. What reasons these may have had for his living to be an old bachelor, I do not know. I only know that he did a smart thing for himself when he did get married. There was always an immense spirit of raillery about him when he would volunteer to give mother an account of the times he had with many a fine girl before he ever knew her. She would sit