Vv * 0* "^ ♦ ♦ , *»' '^ '.^ %^'^' V .^^ * < G w^ * • • s " V ' .•1°^ » M «* .-^"^ % LOOK UP LOOK UP SUNSHINE TREATMENT FOR SHADOWED LIVES By, Randolph Lewis Author of **The Romance of the Steamer Trunk'* "Shadow Trails", etc* NEW YORK JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY 1919 ^ Copyright 1919, by THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY All Rights Reserved iWV 28 iil9 Printed in the U. S. A ©CI.A586691 CONTENTS Marvel of Spring — 13 Bread and Blood ., . 18 After » 21 The People of Want ., 25 Sudden Death 29 The Submerged 33 Ghosts 87 "Cy" Perkins and the Big City 41 Hello! "Miss Lizzie!" 45; Little Tragfj)y 49 Little Lures — 53 Lo, The Parasites! 56 Bridging the Ages * , 59 Fellowship of Dollars 63 Our Animal Friends , 66 A Woman's Tragedy 69 Dukes and Others 74 The Soul in the Voice. 77 Harmony of Hearts , , 80 Golden Might 83 Too Much of a Good Thing. . ... 87 When Mother Broiders 91 Practising the Emotions 95 The Titanic Thief 98 Thinking Young . . ... 102 Glory of Woman's Work 105 Sophistry of Egotism , 108 How Are You Living? 110 A Big Building Lesson 114« The Magic Crystal of Peace. 117 The Passing of the Birds 121 Love and Laughter 124 The Futility of Gold 128 Thoroughness 131 Treasure of a Cheerful Heart 183 Enshrining the Square Deal 137 The Treasure Deeps of Silence 141 The Mystery of Life 145 The Causeway of Shadow 148 A Woman and a Dog 151 Concerning Conscience 155 Helpfulness and Happiness 158 Truth and the Demon Jest 162 Uses and Excuses 166 Crime Color Blind 170 Pampered Present and Primitive Past 174 His Wife and Ours 178 The Boy That Came Back 182 When Old Age is Empty 186 Hazard of Hope , 190 Tragedy of Success 194 Beauty and Life 198 Ashes of Destiny 202 Man and His Mother 205 The "Thoughtless Poor" ,.__. 209 Devotion of the Dumb ...--.. .i.>. . 214 The Hope of the World 218 The Beatitudes of Blood 223 Feet of Clay 227 Going to the Dogs 2S1 Tragedy of Beauty 236 Time's Transformations 240 This Way to the Stars! , 243 The Word "Graft" 247 Our Angels and Demons 250 Romance and Life 255 The Soul's Penalties 259 The Crook De Luxe .,. . . . 263 Concentration and Success. . . . . ... . . 268 Gift of Prophecy. ... ... . .;i^>T.T.T.:iT.i.-. 270 \ ACKNOWLEDGEMENT These little commentaries on men and things in the world's passing show are selected from, syndicate con- tributions and from editorial expressions, the greater number of which alternated with anonymously presented themes of the same character by the late Elbert Hubbard. And, in giving them the dignity of book covers, grateful acknowledgment is made to the New York Herald Pub- lishing Company, The Author. FOREWORD This little book is a genuine contribution to the literature of Inspiration. It is done in prose, but records the drama of a poet's soul. You will read to laugh and cry and think of Life's enigmas with brooding tenderness. In all the range of modern writing I do not know of a more exquisite poem than Mr. Lewis's obituary of a Persian Kitten found in this volume. I quote two paragraphs: "To those who loved her, Pansy looked like a bundle of silver floss. Her eyes were like green jade, large and wdde apart, and, as sun- light and shadow touched them, they were shot with gold or deepened into sapphire, calm and deep as the summer seas when the winds are asleep. Her belly was as white as the hermit snow on unsealed mountain peaks, and her long, bushy tail swayed in the rhythm of her moods like the fan of a beauty conscious of her charms. "When the morning hour arrived she woke FOREWORD her mistress by a method so poetic that it must have come down through the lost years from the joyous time of Hafiz, who saw in the world about him nothing but beauty and love. To arouse her mistress she gently touched the eye- lids of the sleeper with her tongue — kissed sleep from the eyes that loved to behold her." Here's a book to keep on your desk and take as medicine for tired nerves and wearied spirit. Thomas Dixon. New York, August 22, 1919 INTRODUCTION (From the American Press) One of the most successful of New York's afternoon papers, which has treated everything flippantly, even the weather, though it cannot make the rain one drop more or less, has re- cently become a preacher of righteousness. That is to say, the leading editorial every day is an essay of a half column on some subject relating to human conduct, inculcating an ethical or rehgious lesson. Admitting that there is still room for teach- ing along this line, it would appear that the columns of a popular newspaper would be the very best place to catch the attention of a large nimiber of persons who give little thought to the subject, just as the street preacher gains the ear of those who never en- ter a house of worship. If it were necessary in the days of Solomon, INTRODUCTION iwhen a man had ample time for reflection as he journeyed by foot from Jericho to Jerusa- lem, for wisdom to cry aloud in the streets, how much more needful it is now in the mad rush of modern hfe! Wise and great men in all ages have given much thought not only to morals, but to man- ners, which have been defined as "minor mor- als." While the few have done this, the great majority of mankind go along in a happy-go- lucky fashion, trusting to instinct to guide them aright or to Providence to save them from blunders In most cases their instinct leads them surely and swiftly to grief, and Providence does not interfere. It is not because these have not desired to do the right thing, but because they have given little thought to the subject and have made no adequate preparation to meet the various con- ditions which arise in our social and business relations. A man, for example, who will act with the greatest punctiliousness in one matter will blunder ludicrously in another. If the workings of his mind could be uncovered it would be found that in one case he had stud- ied the matter and marked out the course he INTRODUCTION ought to pursue, in the other he had acted on the impulse of the moment. Many men whose good intentions are used for paving stones below have just as earnestly desired to do right as their wiser neighbors, but they have made no preparation. They have probably never read a book on ethics in all their Uves. They have been content if they have understood the more important princi- ples of morality, the observance of which has enabled them to lead a respectable Hf e. News- papers might enlarge their usefulness and ren- der a good service to society if they could print in every issue something which would be help- ful to this class. This may be regarded as unimportant and even fanciful, but it will readUy be remem- bered that some very prominent American citizens have expatriated themselves because of blunders in "minor morals." They have not offended against either the Decalogue or the civil law, but have been led by foolish mistakes in their intercourse with their fellows into un- bearable positions, from which they have fled. Their unhappy plight can only be accounted for on the assumption that they had not given INTRODUCTION proper attention to such matters. If their newspaper had contained every day a little lesson in ethics it might have been different. We are told now that a very prominent man who has been going through life with the smile that won't come off has suddenly been thrown into the deepest gloom because in a weak mo- ment he subscribed to "Fads and Fancies," an act perhaps not inherently wrong, but indi- cating a wrong view of tilings and a lack of the abihty to decide promptly upon the right course. But we are not so much concerned about New York's Four Hundred and their fads and fancies. It is in the interest of the great mass of the American people that we advocate teaching morals and manners in the columns of the newspapers. And we believe the little ethical essay would make a profitable feature for the paper itself. The metropolitan journal referred to has been running the feature long enough to determine whether it is popular and continues it. MARVEL OF SPRING The Spring sun bathed the roofs in a rain of radiance. Across the blue skies the clouds sailed in snowy argosies. A flock of pigeons flashed by in a joyous flight, their wings touch- ed to silver by the sunlight. From afar came the noises of the street, the tremendous day stir of the city. The air was soft and the drinking of it brought a mysterious exhilaration which no medicine yet had given. And thie heart was touched with something like gladness, with hope, with new life and sense of contentment. So felt the sick man in the attic of a tenement. He had survived through the dreary wdnter, grimly holding to life, which in health he found a burden to maintain; and now had come his rev/ard. Spring had arrived. As he looked out of bis window at the sky and breathed the air, which bore a subtle message from the fields, he felt stronger. The mould in the gutter of the roof 13 14 LOOK UE across the court had begun to put out fresh green shoots, and as he looked upon them a passionate yearning to go forth into the open seized him — ^to wander in the fields, in the woods with the forest odors in his nostrils. Weak and emaciated, with a chill in his blood, he felt the gentle warmth of Spring like a kiss, and it thrilled him wth emotion. The mountains, the fields, the hills and the waters he could not behold, but in the symbol of these things, the meagre bit of rank vege- tation on a roof top, he found a nameless joy. It represented the earth that he loved so well, to hnger a brief spell upon which he had striv- ed with savage desperation of spirit. He felt that if he were able he would go forth and, throwing himself face downward on the sod, kiss the earth out of sheer glad- ness. Thus did the spirit of Spring possess him. Thus he dreamed from day to day while th^ sun grew warmer^ until one day work- men came and repaired the roof opposite, re- moving the tuft of grass. Then the man died. During a clear Spring Sunday in New York thousands of persons swarm from their hives MARVEL OF SPRING 15 of habitation and seek the open spots that lie, like blossoms of green, amid the vast, bleak areas of a great city. They answer the call of Spring, which stirs the human with the same magic that brings the hibernating bear from its winter retreat, that calls the robins from the southland and touches the dry plant into bud and blossom. Spring is the time of the year's greatest spectacle, filled with thousands of tints and shifting Mdth varying effects, like the joyous colors that flash triumphant from the prism that holds them. It is also the time of hf e's greatest mystery — ^the unfathomable process of birth and re- surrection. The bright bloom of to-day fades and passes away, to be reproduced a thousand- fold when the next Spring raises her head to the skies and, shaking the diamonds of rain from her hair, smiles upon the earth, and, touching it, thrills it again into hfe. It is the awakening of the year, and in it lies the very joy of hfe. This time of the soul's elation lingers tenderly throughout the less lovely parts of the year. Spring is the time of Stir, and all animate 16 LOOK UP things feel its impulse, from the minute life which hes under the forest mould, to the greatest of all created things — ^which is Man. Spring is the Almightj^'s golden summons to the open, to the gladness of being, of mov- ing, of feeling. Every poet who has written has had some note of Spring to ^ound, because he was human and felt what the great heart of the world felt. "In the Spring a young man' s fancy light- ly turns to thoughts of love," is true in its broadest sense, and is so, not only of the young man, but of all men, whether in the May day of life or in the white winter of old age. It is the thrill of love that gives Spring its charm. The expression of the feeling may Yaxj. Some men shape its overflow to admira- tion of the things of nature; others to tender fancies around the thought of some fair wo- man; the artist, grasping its glories, transfers them to canvas. It is love that animates all — a great note struck on the keyboard of Nature to which we all ^dbrate. Any biologist will tell you this in explaining the phenomenon, but he will not express it in this way. Still, it is the greatest MARVEL OF SPRUSTG 17 of poems, because it is the greatest of truths. And this poetry and truth go at Spring with the glad people of the air, the tribes of the sea that fare on the long way ; the shy children of the wood-world, the caressing spirits of the winds, and Man himself, who, of all, should feel the greatest joy in Spring, BREAD AND BLOOD The women raised their voices in jubilation, shrill, confused, discordant, but thrilling with the breath of triumph. A motley lot they, marked with toil, bent by it, stamped with it. On some of the faces was that pathetic re- signation which comes to those who are broken at the wheel in life's struggle and who, thus crippled, limp doggedly on. Others were dull, apathetic, brutish, as though they might not respond to any sensation save the demand of the most primal things. Poverty exacts terrible penalties. It takes away all and gives in return nothing, only its hideous clutch, which makes a man a horror and distorts and tortures the body. These women, who rejoiced in the sad round of their Mves, had few occasions when thank- fulness and triumph have shaken them like a glad mountain wind and the feeling that filled their breasts overflowed in tumult at the lips. 18 BREAD AND BLOOD 19 Care and pain and the fear of the morrow were ever with them. Only a few days before, stung by hunger and blindly rebelling against an oppres,sive system, they had swept in a frantic, disheveled toiTent along the street, their voices sounding harshly, savagely, with the note of beasts whip- ped by hunger. In the passionate impulse that made furies of them, their eyes burned with a mad fever, and, in paroxysms of feeling, they stretched their arms skyward as though the movement aided in the expression of what bitterness was in their hearts. Then the wives, the sisters and the mothers of the New York East vSide strik- ing bakers were side by side with the men in their fight with the "scabs," their raids on the bakeshops. But now they raised their voices in joy. Forty-niQe of the employers had given in and the prospects were that the strike iSoon would be fuUy won. No note sounded by the human voice was ever more sincere. The gratitude of the poor rises straight to heaven. It must be for a long time to come that some will have much and others barely possess 20 LOOK UP. the least. Some, too, must go empty-handed and feed on the husks. One man robed in purple is bored by exist- ence; the other, naked, is overjoyed at the mere privilege to live. The struggle to live becomes more terrible as it goes downward. Often from the depths there comes a cry, rising above the torment din, appealing to the hearts and consciences of men, even as it reaches heaven. AlFTER The man who discovered the white corpus- cles in the blood conferred a vast benefit on mankind and gave incalculable aid in the bat- tle against disease. His name is Metchnikoff and he spent years in paiustakiug research and experimentation. His view of life is neces- sarily materialistic, and his book, "The Nature of Man," while it is rich in surprising facts, Iqses its authority when he approaches the spiritual side. He finds life full of "disharmonies," and avers that we are the degenerate descendants of anthropoid apes! As to immortality he is frank in saying that it has no justification in fact. Science made this eminent suvant a miser- able man indeed, and Felix Adler, in answer- ing his principal contentions, shows how far a man may go amiss who ventures outside of his own particular field. Newton made a poor theologian. Darwin was a weakling at 21 22 LOOK UP ethics and' Goethe proved anything but a great painter. Metchnikoff could not study a human soul through a microscope. He could only do so through the medium of himself ; but he rejected the material so near at hand. One of the most potent arguments for the belief in immortality, says Dr. Adler, "has been the passionate longing of love — love mourning at the grave, love refusing to give up to night and annihilation the object of its cherishing. Yet whenever this plea of love is put forth how unavertibly does the misgiving enter, in a world which is so ordered that hap- piness is frustrated — those whom we cannot afford to spare being taken from us — whether in such a world there is adequate reason to suppose that frustration will be compensated by future restoration, and that the ties which were fSo ruthlessly ruptured here Mali be knit anew, never thereafter to be sundered. Is the desire, no matter how passionate and intense, a guarantee of its own fulfillment?" How many of you have stood by your be- loved dead, and, looking at the lips sealed with eternal silence, pondered over the mystery which they could not tell? AFTER 23 Only the dead know and their tongues utter no word. Yet faith breathes a message in the heart, a message that has been the same since the first primitive man looked at the sun and, marveUing at its glory, felt stirring in his hairy breast a dim sense of infinite awe. The belief in immortality has been a power- ful expression through all ages, and modern science, so destructive to old concepts, has been thus far unable to disprove it. It is instinctive as breathing. A promise, it is also an uplifting force which makes man feel a glorious kinship to God — ^the touch that transfigures the base and the sodden and puts into the breast of man that mentor of good which is the immaculate twin of con- science. A man who realizes one perfect moment in his life has tasted of the eternal. So it is that we may know of immortality while isurrounded by homely labors and cares. The humble laborer, rank with the sweat of toil ; the wealthy man, furrowed with the care of expanding fortune, may realize this infinite satisfaction. But the one who is empty-handed is likely to come nearer to it. 24 LOOK UP Immortality is a comforting belief, like the promise of a cool, green shade after a sun smitten journey over bare, rocky places. If it sufficeth a man, why seek to take it from liim, Hke a robber who w^ould steal through mere wantonness and tiien tlii'ow the plunder away? You who have had the. harmonies of nature forced in upon rou, or who have sensed them with superior inislvrjct and noted their incom- parable beauties with eye and ear, you have felt ineffably the great lesson of immortality! The Springfime resurrection, when the gaunt dead of winter take on floral bridal robes and enter again into the fulness of love and living; the awakening which stirs through all nature and touches deeply the fibre of man — ^they are pages in the Book of Belief, elo- quent ^vith the lesson of the Law, wliich neither the adventuring mind of man nor the profane hand of the atheist can change. THE PEOPLE OF WANT The gospel of work carries with it the very secret of existence. Life is the state of activi- ties in which man reaches his highest develop- ment. When we cease to work we begin to go backward, to weaken and to die. The world has no place for drones. Its rewards crown only effort. And yet, if a man is willing and can find nothing for his hands to do, he must pay the penalty, even as the one of sloth and idleness. This is not as it should be ; but when all social and economic conditions are perfectly adjust- ed we will have reached the millennium. John D. Rockfeller, than whom no other man has a clearer insight into industrial pro- blems, once called attention to the fact that in 1898 there were 3,000,00 men out of work and predicted that, because of overproduction in all lines, 1907 and 1908 would see from 7,000,000 to 10,000,000 in the idleness of hard times. Add to these the millions of the con- 25 26 LOOK UP tinually unemployed and one had, indeed, a grim and imposing legion in the future! Many of these millions may have read Mr. Rockefeller's formula for success, set forth about the same time, but that it profited any of them is a matter of doubt. A thing given so freely is not apt to be of much value to a man whose charactei- is not shaped hke that of the giver. How Mr. Rockefeller amassed his enormous fortune can only be effective when put in operation by Rockefeller himself. Otherwise it must prove to be a strange tool in unf amiHar hands. Speaking before a prayer meeting in Cleveland, the genius of the Stand- ard Oil said: — "I believe that it is our duty to pray and work, aild I believe it is our duty to give in support of the Church. This is the secret of our success in business* Why shouldn't it be the secret of our success here?" But what if there's no work to be had? Such a condition was predicted for those 100,000,000 Avilling and wasted men which Mr. Rockefeller saw peopHng the future. And the haggard, distorted shapes which at all times are at the bottom — ^the "submerged tenth!" PEOPLE OF WANT 27 These people of the abyss pray or, weary of unfruitful supplications, turn to shudder- ing blasphemy. If from the depths any sound should rise to the clearer atmosphere, in its brutal babel might be detected curses and groans, such as are wrung from souls in mortal torment. No hell was ever created that is filled with more tortures, more terrors, than stark pov-' erty. It crushes and lashes a man, and, when his soul becomes seared and distorted, trans- forms him into a brute. Added to this is im- posed the horrible penalty that, while being a brute, he should retain enough of what is human to make the torture all the more poignant. In this bell of the "submerged tenth" there are prayers hot with pain or thrilling with an- guish. They are uttered by those whom a re- morseless system has just pushed over the brink. Others, numbed by pain, hopeless, spiritless, wander dumbly and blindly, not knowing whither, only knowSng that death awaits at the end. But the great mass, with the instinct of the brute dominating the spirit of the man, falls one upon the other in a sac- 28 LOOK UP age, sickening struggle, like ravening wolves. The pit is f uU of monstrous things, the sight of which causes the heart to turn faint ; but few there be who care to look down into the inferno and, looking, go down to extend a helping hand. There is too much theory about most of the schemes for the alleviation of poverty and too little of the responsive human heart which goes direct to the seat of the trouble. Statistics show that millions of men, women and children in America are foredoomed to a desperate struggle for the bare necessities of life — enough food to hold body and soul to- gether and shelter, whether it be in unguarded hallways or noisome cellars. When the bitterness of blasphemy palls on the lips and the fierce spirit of rebellion passes and is followed by helpless calm, praj^er from these, maybe ; and it shapes itself in sobs. But there is no work. And the secret of the wealthy man, with its potentialities of food and com- fort, proves to be an empty, mocking thing — the gift of bread that turns to stone. And so the world goes. Some have much, others none. And men live because they fear to die, and die because they fear to live. SUDDEN DEATH The Man had travelled a long way when night fell. Through sunshine and shade he had gone, along smooth roads and rough, through green valleys and rugged uplands, and yet his feet were not slowed by fatigue. In the starshine the white road lay plain before him, and he walked confidently onward. Dense shadows lurked amid the trees, and, as he looked upward, the heavens seemed to flow along in a great tide of stars. He who gazes at the ocean's horizon when it has neither be- ginning nor end may feel the same sense of awe and littleness of him who looks in solitude and silence on the eternal sweep of the River of Night. And, so gazing, the Man felt humbler than a mote that struggles in a thread of sunshine. This impress of the Infinite, while it stirred him to reverent emotion, seemed almost to an- nihilate him. So he looked backward, in his mind, to the things that were nearer to him — 29 so LOOK UP along the Way of Years, marked by cool green spots and brocaded with flowers, on which neither malice nor envy had ever laid its blight; the places that were fragrant with the souls of good deeds. There neither wddow nor orphan raised a voice in bitterness and tears because of any act of his; no man was there who trampled the garden spots and cried a curse on him who had passed, and the only sounds heard were the low whisper of the wind, the crystalline plash of fulling waters and the full-throated rapture of birds. It was a cheering retrospect and the heart of the Man grew with an infinite content. The best of his life was there. The rest lay before him. He was strong in looking forward to those things unborn, w^hich were shaping them- selves in the future. Suddenly something brushed his lips, light and soft as the touch of a butterfly's wings. The star-scattered skies and the dewy earth melted into darkness, so that there w^as neither sky above nor the earth beneath his feet. Yet was he unafraid. Swiftly he went forward, and beside him SUDDEN DEATH 31 the figure of a woman; but her face he could not see. Only he knew that her presence brought him a contentment deep as the sound- less seas. His eyes at last pierced the gloom and she turned her head so that he beheld her face. In her eyes were infinite sorrow and pity, and her lips, gentle, firm, yet tender, were an- guished at the corners with unutterable suffer- ing. Yet, withal, she had a beauty that moved the soul. There were tears on her pale cheeks, which she pressed against those of the Man, and sobbed as a mother who is touched by the hurt of a child. ' "Wherefore do you weep?" he asked. "I am Sudden Death," said she. " I grieve that I swept you from the world so suddenly, without a word of warning, as a leaf caught in swift eddy of the capricious wind. I grieve that you should, in darkness, be brought face to face with such a terrible shape as I, who cliill the blood of men and put into their hearts the Nameless Terror." The Man smiled as he looked upon her and said: — ^"None of these things do I behold or feel." LOOK UP "That is because you behold me through the eyes of a clear conscience," came the answer. We live but to die, and die but to live. That IS the most cheering of all beliefs. A man's deeds make the way for him in the infinite or heap it with obstacles. Sudden Death brings an admonition to right living and to that preparedness which should mark the wise in the battle of life. A tornado may claim hundreds of victims, a railroad wreck hurl many lives into darkness; but the sorrow and desolation that come to sit at the hearthstone may be followed by this consolation — ^born of hope, faith and belief — that Sudden Death revealed itself, not as a shape of grisly horror, but a thing of eternal pity and tenderness. THE SXJBMERGED During the coming summer nights, when the air is so clear that the color of the skies seems to submerge the world, gazing upward tlu'ough the sea of crystalline blue you will be- hold the firmament in all its regal glory mov- ing onward in its eternal way. Star gazing is no idle occupation, though the trival or the purely material person may so regard it. The vast and impressive spectacle compels thought. Stirred by a vague sense of the In- finite, the trivial person perhaps will say "It's grand!" And feeling that he is face to face with an enigma he can never hope to solve, he dismisses it for the consideration of things nearer at hand and less perplexing. To him who sees even in the minutest work- ing of nature a manifestation of symmetrical and immutable Law the nocturnal sky is a region of fathomless delights, unutterable ecstasies, bringing to one an overpowering sense of the boundless and an awed realiza- 38 84 LOOK UE tion that man, puny man himself, is part of it. When the star-lust enters into the isoul of man and millions of sidereal hands beseech and beckon, the desire seizes him to fly, to spurn the earth, soar untrammelled above it and swoon beneath the kiss of the stars. Mythology tells how adventurous ones tried to fly — and failed. Yet this spirit has become stronger in man as he has advanced in knowl- edge. It is an outward expression of the soul's struggle to rise higher and higher as well as the material instinct in man to overcome, to accomplish, to conquer. Still, if we may not fly we can climb. So, we are a race of climbers; not like the ape that is content to swing from hmb to limb in purposeless play, but, still burning with star lust, mounting as high toward the goal as the dizziest of mountain peaks wiQ. per- mit us. The way to the eidelweiss is marked by the footprints of the dead. So it is written, not only of the grim rocks that thrust themselves into the blue sohtudes, but of the higher, more awe-inspiring heights reared and scaled by the wit of man. The list of Alpine climbers who THE SUBMERGED 35 have lost their hves is appalling, and yet this grim roster has not in the least daunted hun- dreds of others just as eager to face the peril for the mere satisfaction of "overcoming a mountain" and looking down upon the earth as one that is not a part of it. Rare delights are the reward of the climher. Often from his height he looks out upon a billowy expanse, white as snow and flecked by the sun with rose and gold, a silent sea be- neath which the rest of the world lies sub- merged. Andrew^ Carnegie must have had such a spectacle in view when in discussing the virtues of climbing he spoke of the "submerged tenth." He declared that he was determined to aid only those who climb. A man who reads that he might benefit thereby is a promising climber, in truth. Said the ironmaster: — "A library requires the recipient to read and study. He becomes more sensible and rises in the social scale. I have little faith in benefiting people who do not benefit themselves. You cannot boost a man up the ladder unless he does some of the climbing himself. If people read they will soon learn how to better the 36 LOOK UP conditions under .which they live. In other words, the only way to improve the submerged tenth is to improve their tastes and habits." Very often the task is tedious and torturing. Footsore and exhausted, the cMmber feels like stopping and abandoning the task. But the stars smile and beckon, his heart becomes stronger and his soul Hghter and he resumes his toilsome way. Look backward to the birth of Christ and you will see what obstacles and what horrors have filled the way. Look forward and, in- deed, you will behold the way stretches out to the triumphant stars. GHOSTS This — October — is the ghost-tide of the year, when field, mountain, valley and woodland are full of vague, whispering phantoms. Most of us beheve in ghosts, and where we refuse to do so the doubt is not so firmly implanted that conviction is impossible of makiug. The self- sacrifice and bravery of the Japanese and other quahties, which are fused into intense patriot- ism, are based on the belief in the conscious presence of departed spirits. The wisest men in Western thought cannot prove that they are wrong; for what do we know o£ those who have passed away over the gray rim of the world? A society composed of some of the most skilful investigators in psychical science has been years endeavoring to solve the problem. Marvellous manifesta- tions have they disclosed, but the riddle still remains unanswered. Still, we who have sensibility, who have lov- ed and suffered, and for whom memory creates m C8 LOOK UP a realm whose people, never die — ^we are sur- rounded by ghosts. The scent of a flower, a strain of music, a particular blending of colors, an effect of cloud and water, a flying glimpse of landscape, may cause them to come before us, bringing mth them the joys and smiles of Nevermore, the tears and the regrets. The late Professor Munsterberg, of Har- vard, declared that what impressed him most concerning life was its unreality. A day filled with the activities of our lives passes, never to return. When it becomes past it is as unreal as though it had never happened — indeed, like a thing imagined. So each day passes, as .good Omar has aptly said, "a shadow show." We, too, are shadows of all of our yesterdays and are only real in the eternal present. Let us believe in ghosts, if we will. They are our dearest companions, even though wan with griefs and suffering. Take memory away and the whole throng which has filled our lives is exorcised. And who that can face conscience squarely would care to live without memory? Our ghosts influence our lives, perhaps not GHOSTS 39 as directly as in the case of the Japanese, but oftentimes just as effectively. Now that the spectres of the field and upland are flitting one feels the ah' full of strange presences. In the chill mists that rise from brake and swale, and shrink before the mild passion of the autumn sun, there are hosts of pale, regretful spectres. One, who knows the moods of Na- ture and has shared her confidences, may see them and! feel their son^ow. The crimson of the maple, the mountain birch and the sumach, those gorgeous funeral fires which flame the pyxe of summer, call up innumerable ghosts — ^wraiths of the langour- ous, full flowered, serene days that have pass- ed into the shadowland. The radiant youth of the year, joyous with the bewitching odor of hope, has grown into the fecund maturity of summer, and summer has waned and palsied under the growing chill of the end. Into the shroud is woven a wondrous thren- ody of color, the very pomp of death! Ghosts of summer! Time of radiance and sunshine; time of the heart's elation, of its in- 40 LOOK UP effable content; time of sapphire and ruby, now expired! Into the flame, which blazons its passing God sends fluttering a golden benediction. "CY" PERKINS AND THE BIG CITY A king in tatters was "Cy" Perkins, and when he died it developed that he had amassed $1,000,000. He lived in New Hampshire, and carried his garden truck to market in a prim- itive wagon drawn by oxen. He owned land and knew how to sell to advantage and invest his money. He was frugal, his wants were few and he was happy in his homely activities. Had he been so minded he might have moved to the city, spent his advanced years in "rest" and died of a disordered liver. But the city had no lure for him. He re- garded it as an enemy, a vampire which sucked the souls from men. Yet he strove and put by just as did the men of the city, with this difference, closeness to nature had broadened while it narrowed him. He was inflexibly honest and had a bitter aversion to those things, which, in his eyes, made man artificial. So it was he hated the city. Many of us prisoned therein have looked 41 42 LOOK UP upon it in our dark moments and felt the same aversion rising witliin us. Houses huddled together secretively, in an unfriendly companionship, jealous of each inch of the cumbered earth; nxed, immobile things, wliich nevertheless take on the expression of character; the hives and the homes of men, ordered by rule and compass; so much space and light and air grudgingly allotted, as though the sun did not shine for all and the world itself were not dressed in the flowing draperies of the TOnds. The touch of man is sordid, and in the pic- ture that one beholds in gazing at the city from a liigh place this impression comes min- gled with a feehng of wonderment. The sun ghnts on the roofs and plays mar\^ellous tricks of high light and shadow. Snowy vapors rise, the spirits of an enchanted place, and, throw- ing their arms wide in the air, slowly expire and vanish. Here and there kingly piles, spurning the democracy of uniformity, rear themselves proudly to the skies and look ^vith hundreds of steady eyes on the wdde huddle beneath them. Here, too, is shoT\Ti the caste, the char- "GY" PERKINS 43 acter of men manifested in brick and wood, in stone and steel. There is something both impressive and sad- dening in this view of a city from above — a sense of tremendous activity held in so many shells, a vast storage place of wonderful cur- rents of human electricity which do and undo and make eternally for joy or for sorrow; a place of effort, of stress and travail, a place iwhose energies bind one to the earth, a slave to pitiless tasks. As the eye wanders to where the stern army thins away and houses finally detach them- selves, as though eager to escape to the fields and hills beyond, one feels the charm of hbera- tion, of expansion, of the uplift which nature always gives. Verdure cools and refreshes the tired eye and the silver of flowing waters is burnished by the sun. Now in June is the time when the spell of the woods and waters is upon us and we ac- tually turn from the city to seek the grateful green places and sail in the crystal quiet of secluded streams, the rich and the poor alike. And yet that man is richest who finds the greatest content in nature. 44 LOOK UP Dollars may build a palace grotesque ^\dtli the vanities of man or embodying the fairest dreams of beauty that arise from the- soul, but they cannot buy that mysterious thrill, that exquisite obsession, which comes to liim who looks with open eyes on Nature and reads her eternal lesson. "Cy" Perkins' million dollars did not make him any richer than he really was. They re- presented his natural Yankee thrift, and he would not have exchanged liis wooden home for the princeliest pile of stone. Tattered, primi- tive in his taste, he was none the less blessed among men in that he yearned for nothing that he had not, and was perfectly happy with what he possessed. Of how many of us is this true! HELLO! "MISS LIZZIE!" A woman who can make perfect bread which recalls the kind that came from mother's hands ; she who is the model of housewives or the good soul who is a tender hearted but discriminat- ing mother, is hardly less important in her respective spheres than the woman who directs her activities to business life and succeeds to the fullest measure. Some women are peculiarly adapted to home life and fulfil its functions naturally and flu- ently; others find domesticity full of irritations and sharp angles, and consequently their lives are filled with harsh discords. Few of us possess perfect self-control; and, because of their very make-up, women do not stand boldly forward as exemplars. Yet, in the complex development of modern life, is being fashioned a type of woman, highly specialized, who, under cold material influ- ences, has k>st little of the charm of the sweet maid of long ago. 45 46 LOOK UP Doubtless Phyllis and Dorothy fitted per- fectly into the substantial, picturesque frame of that day. But the world is going onward at a dizzy speed, and the new conditions that arise either create new types or so modify the old that they, in fact, become new. Time was when the Telephone Girl was re- garded as an inconsequential and perhaps un- necessary part of a peculiarly modern acti\'ity. Now she has grown to be a vital factor, and, in this hne of work, like all others which require quick intelligence, calm judgment and cool self-control, the best brains are bound to tell. Thus some telephone girls are queens of the calling, for capable operators' wear the ermine of merit. The other day a Canadian millionaire, ob- serving the perfect method and poise of a young woman at a hotel switchboard, made her his bride. Every capable telephone girl deserves a millionaire for a husband, provid- ed, of course, be is a man of brains, morals and healthful activities. In return for his T\^ealth and devotion the wealthy man gets a helpmeet who has been tested in one of the . HELLO! "MISS LIZZIE!" 47 most trying schools of modem utility — and found to be true gold. A young woman who can handle during a day's work nearly five thousand inward and outward calls of a great establishment, whose organization covers the entire world, is a per- son of no small importance in the make-up of this gigantic organism. She is the storm cen- tre of voices that come out of the invisible — voices reflecting every variety of temperament — ^the suave, mild, gentle and uncomplaining, the petulant, blustering, impatient and uncivil. Eight long, turbulent hours in aural touch with good humor and bad, often harried, some- times abused, the perfect operator seldom, if ever, loses her poise, and her control is such that the even, low modulation of her voice sel- dom varies. If it were a general thing that fair candi- dates for marriage had to undergo this rigor- ous test, it is safe to say that an amazing majority of them would fail absolutely. Small wonder it is that keen millionaires and other shrewd men, who are not millionaires, should realize the value of the "test by telephone." This is the reason that "Miss Lizzie" has gone. 48 LOOK UP and every man or woman in the great estab- lishment is genuinely regretful. There were even tears when the time for parting came. It seemed as though quite an es- sential part of the establishment was being taken away. But what is one man's loss is another's gain. That is a trite saying, but the truth of it constantly is brought home to us. The man at whose hearthstone "Miss Lizzie" goes to sit will know the truth of it, and she in turn will pass to future generations the per- sonal lessons she mastered so well. This is but an incident, which is probably being duplicated from day to day all over the country ;^ but, to those who regard human work seriously and who watch with care its complex development and its effects on the social life, it assumes no small value. It shows, too, that the cheerful "Helios !" in life are the bright floweus of sound which give color and music to an otherwise prosaic retro- spect. LITTLE TRAGEDY A Persian kitten died in New York a few days ago, despite all modern science could do to save it. And when its little life faded away the shadow of a tragedy fell upon the household. It was as though a human life had gone out, and the grief was real and poig- nant. Let not those scoff who deem the bereave- ment of these good folk morbid or hysterical. The pet was an influence which made for af- fection, kindness and consideration. The at- tachment for it brought out nothing that was not best, and in the affection bestowed upon the kitten the family were united in a common joy. A eat or a dog has often meant more to the happiness of a family than men with small hearts will ever be able to imagine. There is something so sublime in the devotion of a dumb beast that the highest praise that can be said of a man is that he loved or befriended 49 50 LOOX UP with brute-like devotion. He who is kind to animals is sure to have a warm heart for his fellows. Now a Persian kitten is a mere baby cat, if you Yvdll, and scarcely worth the considera- tion of so many words, but this case deals wdth human hearts, as well, and is therefore direct in its appeal. To those who loved her. Pansy looked like a bundle of silver floss. Her eyes were as green jade, large and wide apart, and, as sun- hght and shadow touched them, they were shot with gold or deepened into sapphire, calm and deep as the summer seas when the winds are asleep. Her belly was as white as the hermit snow on unsealed mountain peaks, and her long, bushy tail swayed in the rhythm of her moods Hke the fan of a beauty conscious of her charms. Her httle feet were broad and rounded, T\dth long tufts of silken fur between the "toes," as though she were shod for continual ^^dnter. Thin as a wafer were her ears, faintly pink, like the ros^e of dawn that the sea shell holds. Her face came to a point in a delicate, patri- cian chin, and the nose, a tiny point tipped LITTLE TRAGEDY 51 with black, showed much of the long years of breeding that fined her down to a flesh and blood toy. When the morning hour arrived she woke her mistress by a method so poetic that it must have come down through the lost years from the joyous time of Hafiz, who saw in the world about hioi nothing but beauty and love. To arouse her mistress she gently touched the eyelids of the sleeper with her tongue — ^kissed sleep from the eyes that loved to behold her. She seemed as much a stranger in the sur- roundings of a modem flat as though she were a veiled lady from a harem. One looked on her sensuous beauty and thought of the magni- ficent tiled palaces of Susa and Persepolis ; of symbolism wrought in weavings which consum- ed a lifetime ; of rare carvings, cunning inlay- iQgs and wonderfully iQuminated manuscripts ; of the groves and gardens of Shiraz, where wise Sa'di made song and wisdom, which find a renewing spring in the birth of eadi year of the newest century. The affection given now to dumb pets is not a recent growth. Puss has been a comfort and an inspiration for centuries. Ibn Alalaf, 52 LOOK UE who himself o\^Tied a Persian eat long before the new world was found, expressed a grief over her taking away wliich has survived while ^vhole dynasties have passed away and kingly cities blown to dust : — Poor puss is gone! 'Tis fate's decree, Yet I must still her loss deplore. For dearer than a cliild- was she And ne'er shall I behold her more. The love of animals is one of the most beau- tiful traits in us humans. Woman's very make-up gives her aptitudes for love and af- fection. Whether she give affection to an in- animate keepsake or artistic creation; whether it be to a honse, a dog or a cat, there is some- thing comforting in the fact, something hu- manizing and tender. The heart is niot a prison to hold healthful emotions which mil ^vither for lack of hght azid freedom and, -v^athering, finally destroy the shfell that prisons them. LITTLE LURES A pretty bookkeeper with a tooth as sweet as her smile and a complexion that suggested strawberries and cream — of which she was pas- sionately fond — was, at one time, in sore dis- tress because of this fact and few others of the same relative importance. Her employer ac- cused her of taking, in occasional small amounts, the sum of two hundred dollars. She denied she took that amount, but admitted that what she did appropriate was spent for candy, soda and ice cream. The simphcity of explanation was feminine, of course, but the employer looked upon the act as though a strange thief had come into the establishment and robbed the safe. So the young woman, who was inclined to look at the matter from merely a candy, soda and ice cream standpoint, found herself in an unen- viable position. That she should have been brought to such straits by candy, soda and cream may seem to 53 54 LOOK UP some persons quite out of rational proportion. And yet this case stands as a fair type of the many. She who looks into the eyes of temp- tation is inviting disaster. The wisest part is to turn from it. Don't neglect to guard jealously against small imperfections. Pygmy weaknesses soon hold one in a giant grasp. Temptation is a protean thing which shapes itself to meet every mood of man; to encom- pass him on every hand ; to obsess him in wak- ing and fill his dreams with its insistent lure. It is with the humblest callings of earth; it is a sinister force with the highest. From the time we distinguish right from wrong, to the hour when we are in darkness of doubt as to which is which ; from hotly beset youth to the lull of old age, temptation still besets us. And so it will continue while the heart beats and we are governed by human motives and aims. Temptation not only concerns overt acts and concrete things, for it often befalls that the most desperate struggles, the most terrible plunges into depths that know no sounding, take place in the secrecy of a man's soul. LITTLE LURES '5.5. Whereas in yielding many persons commit crimes against the person, against property or violate the moral code, there are yet others whose abasement lies in a single word. A "Yes'' or "No," which leads the way from truth, small as is the utterance, carries the pos- sibilities of a world of woe. Right stands fair and changeless throughout the ages. It is thus because Right is Right. It is the fixed star that holds us steadily to our upward faring. A venerable carving m a European museum, shows Utysses bound to the mast of his ship to prevent him leaping overboard to the call of the syrens. There is syren fascination about wrong which calls for the same rigorous meas- ures. One may bind himself mth the bonds of liigh purpose so that temptation may not avail, whether it be the lure of dishonest fortune, personal ambition unworthil} realized or — candy, soda and ice cream! LO, THE PARASITES! Andrew Carnegie may have been a shade too severe in one of his addresses wherein he stigmatized stock speculators of the land as pa- rasites. Any man honestly engaged in that Hne of activity may deem that he exercises a whole- some and necessary function toward the rest of society; but, Mr. Carnegie, who saw with a clear vision the relation of even the simplest things to the perfect whole, evidently had weighed the question well before he made the expression. "The world," said he, "is not advanced by the man in that large department of business which is mere gambhng in stocks. They are parasites feeding on business." The crime which Nature treats with relent- less severity, the gravest offence against the Law, is parasitism. It receives the «ame inflexi- ble treatment through all the forms of nature, from the thing that lives in the black night of the mud, to the man, who, vaunting himself 56 LO, THE PARASITES I 57 above other men, lives in silken comfort on their labor. "Parasites are the paupers of nature/' says Drummond. "They are the forms of life which will not take the trouble to find food, but bor- row or steal it from the more iadustrious."' It will be seen at once that the parasite is the type of selfish unproductiveness and of hopeless degeneration. A human parasite is a melancholy and a tragic thing, whether he be an eminent stock speculator or the restless vag- abond, whose roof is the sky and whose couch is the earth, from which he sprang. Both com- mit the sin of unproductiveness. Embryology shows that many a parasite starts out, like many a man, with the best in- tention, which, if persisted in, would carry it to succeedingly higher levels of activity and development; but it finds living easy and set- tles down to take existence serenely at the ex- pense of others, exerting none of its functions save to draw in sustenance. Inaction and disuse may cause the eyes, legs and jaws to waste away and finally drop off, so that in time it often becomes a mere torpid sac, a low, detestable thing. 58 LOOK UP So it is with the man who, ignoring the law of evolution, gives no conscious effort to the bettering, sustaining or extending the great social plan of which he is a part, but, wilfully unproductive^ sits down and draws his susten- ance from others. He may deem himself clev- erer than his fellows, who toil and produce, who expend effort in achieving and going for- ward; but Nature treats all of her children with terrible impartiahty, and, while the man parasite may not lose his physical hands and feet, eyes, ears and jaws, he nevertheless suf- fers a corresponding moral loss, so that, at last, he is likely to become a human sac, slug- gish and incapable of a sensation and the ela- tions which act upon progressive mankind. The whole lesson of Nature is production. It is manifested in the myriad forms of life, from the infinitesimal mite, which moves under the microscope, to man, who is made in the image of God. As it is a great function of nature, so also is it that of society. Parasites have no welcome part in the great scheme, which is the world's expression of force, of effort and of life, itself. BRIDGING THE AGES The black savage, into whose ears rang the deafening thunder of the great Victoria Falls, and who witnessed the tremendous power of its swift waters, conceived that a great spirit dwelt there, a giant whose strength could defy the whole world of men. Sometimes it was in the water, but more often in the changeful mist which filled the gorge and took on fairy hues in the sunshine. The cliffs are 420 feet above the river, and it was a daring mind that con- ceived the scheme to span them. And the thing has been done. Really big deeds are chary of words, from the laconism of C^sar, "I came, I saw, I conquered!" to the historical sentence of Morse, ''What hath God wrought?" flashed over Mie first telegraph line. The spanning of the Zambesi River, in far Africa, is of tremendous interest to the rest of the world, for it is a gigantic part in an opera- tion that will change the heart of a savage continent. 59 60 LOOK UP The Cape to Cairo railroad is a civilized ar- tery through Africa, sending out its activities and enlightenment on all sides, opening up pos- sibilities of development and riches surpassing the legendary King Solomon's mines. Yet the great feat when accomplished was announced in a cable despatch of fourteen words : The Victoria Falls railroad bridge, projecting from either chff, was safely joined this morning. Long, unceasing labor, at last, had spun a web of steel across the cataract. As the final rivet was driven into place and the structure stood hardly less firm than the basaltic cliff, a mind observing the movement of world prog- ress, looking down from, the vertiginous height to the white chaos below, must have felt profoundly impressed upon it a sense of im- mense contrast. The awful power of the world's greatest waterfall, typical of nature in its wildest and most sublime aspect, stood as a magnificent ex- hibition of force. Above it the emblem of All Conquering Thought, the sign of achieving man, who was to make the imperial power of the cataract bend to the yoke so that its energy BRIDGING THE AGES 61 would eventually shape itself into light to make day in the darkness; into heat that, breathing upon the secret deep (\^rested from the bosom of the earth, would fuse it into pure gold ; into power, subtle, soundless and unseen, which would turn millions of wheels and send, myriad shuttles chattering backward and for- ward in the active joy of production — power that would carry the hard earned treasure from forest and mountain and the abundant offer- ings of the fields and the rivers. And from its widest expression will yet de- velop more fully another power — ^that which puts into the mind of man dreams so daring that he may scale the heights of the stars ; for it is the power of Progress — ^invincible as the sun itself. And now the spirit of the falls, before which the black savage trembled, has been con- quered by men perhaps not half so hardy, but equipped with mental weapons which are changing the face and the nature of the world. From the simple savage thought to the thought which thinks out and constructs the highest bridge in the world is more than a two thousand year span in the evolution of man. 62 LOOK UP So great is the prodigy of modem progress that, in the driving of a single rivet, a land and a people may be suddenly whisked through the dust of twenty centuries and blinded and be- wildered by the light, be thrust into the active and pulsing world of to-day. What miracle of the past has ever equalled this? FELLOWSHIP OF DOLLARS Anatomy deals with the structure of the body; physiology the functions of the various organs — facts which every grammar school pupil knows. They are set forth here to illus- trate a point which Andrew Carnegie once de- veloped. The great ironmaster more than any other man of his time knew the anatomy and physiology of the dollar. He knew that it may have personality and a capacity for good or evil, hke a flesh and blood man. A dollar may be endowed with deeply human qualities and it may, on the other hand, be absolutely heartless. It makes sacred links in the fellowship of man when wielded by a generous, noble hand. Truly, said the greatest of the world's givers: "There is not much in dollars if you do not become attracted to your fellows. If you are true to the judge within you, you need have no fear of the Judge hereafter." A man who possesses the wealth of the world 63 64 LOOK UP and yet has no sympathetic kinship with the rest of mankind is as poor as the most luckless beggar. Dollars take a new value when moved by humane impulse or high ideals. Touched with the warmth of life they be- come living things. The greatest joy of wealth is the power to do good for others — in "exercising your money for human fellowship." The question of dollars is as broad as hu- manity. They stand for so much given of thought, of energy, of toil; the token, also, of love, hate and all the passions which bum or lash us. How dollars may obsess a man and pervert his nature is told in the little tragedies that ap- pear day after day in the newspapers — stories of lost honor, of hypocrisy and crime. Maurus Jokai in one of his novels, which presented a profound and subtle study of a human soul, makes his hero establish a settle- ment — a place of idyllic simplicity and calm — from which money is rigidly excluded. The products are bartered for articles needed by the dwellers. Money had caused the moral FELLOWSHIP OF DOLLARS downfall of the man who devised the scheme, and, by banishing it from the island, he hoped to keep out the black evils which follow it. Dollars are beautified by a saint's counten- ance or sinister with the face of a demon, as you wish. Dollars I We eat them, we wear them, we live them, we die them! Civilization has made them the measure of human life and death. They are clothed with a beautiful aspect "if you are true to the judge within you" — ^the mentor whose say is unfailingly just and up- right. No man of plenty who hearkens to the voice can ever be a niggard or fail to be attracted to his fellows. Mr. Carnegie knew, to an infinitesimal frac- tion, what was in a dollar and all that it might accomplish. By his own statement he knew, also, when it was mere dross. In this was he blessed, for he o^Tied a gift beyond the value of gold — a some" tiling that made for his happiness and that of his fellows, who, should no book of his many libraries stimulate them, will still find in him an inspiration and a message comprehended only in the library of a great heart. OUR ANIMAL FRIENDS Like a page of some mediaeval romance read the disclosure of the death of an aged New York woman surromided by six black cats, which fiercely assailed all who approached the body. An eerie sight it must have been as the body lay there, guarded by the pets she had loved so well, to whom she had given confi- dences and who knew her heart even better than the humans with whom she came in con- tact from time to time. We get the most unquestioning fellowship from dumb animals, which know neither guile nor hypocritical shifting, but which are as fix- ed in their attachments as the magnetic needle is towards the North. And in this the dumb beast may teach man many a lesson. Even the learned may acquire wisdom from either a cat or a dog; and this idea is admirably worked out in Kingsley's "Hy- patia," wherein one of the characters, who is so full of knowledge that doubts beset him, 66 OUR ANIMAL FRIENDS 67 ! resolves to make a companion and confidant of his dog and to be guided alone by the wis- dom of the beast. And he did not choose ill I Love for the cat is not so general. TheBe is something so stealthy, so sinuous, so sug- gestive of hidden things that, as in the earlier belief, some people regard the cat with in- stinctive aversion. But to those who look with open minds, it is a symbol of caressing, sin- uous grace; a tender, devoted friend, dehcate- ly sympathetic at all times and possessing sometiiing of a feminine charm. Recent study into the nature of the cat has revealed many new beauties. Animal study, itself, shows that our minds are being broaden- ed to the wonders of Hf e by which vv^e are sur- rounded. Had this aged woman so died in the Dark Ages, doubtless she would have been con- sidered a witch and her faithful cats as demons come to claim her soul. A wonderful legend might have sprung from the incident, ap- parently authenticated by ignorant folk who had witnessed the occurrence. Ignorance and superstition have given way before education, the light of science and a closer knowledge of familiar things. But su- 68 LOOK UP perstition is an almost ineradicable blemish in the limnan make-up, and, even to-day, there may be some who look upon the manner in which this old woman died as a happening of evil portent. We, who look ahead at the bright and ever lengthening vista of progress, should feel a deep joy in knowing that these benighted ones are few and see in this melancholy happening a lesson which is full of meaning to those who try to live a life of proper and just relation to the rest of mankind. A cat, though lacking the highly specialized mind of modem human beings, nevertheless, with its limited equipment* may, unconsciously realize the philosophy and even religions that have been taught for ages for the moral uplift of man. Thus it is that we might receive some pregnant lessons from the lower forms of Kfe. Instead of being an unhallowed picture, the death of the old woman was an incident with infinite grief and pity, v/herein Death, quiet and stealthy of tread as a cat itself, empha- sized the bond between mankind and the brute. [A WOMAN'S TRAGEDY I am a widow, thirty-six, so really cannot call myself an old woman. I am writing to ask whether is there any place for a woman who is passe, who is no longer young? I was for some years connected with the stage. A severe illness left me lame, and i then followed posing at which I made a fair living. I then lost home, child and annuity, all at once ; and the shock gave me nervous prostration. Since that time I have not been able to do any posing. The terrible shock of my daughter's death left me for two years quite deaf. At that time, which is now nearly four years ago, I was cashier in a prominent hotel, but had to give that up on account of my defective hearing. Nearly everything seemed shut off from me. I am at an age too young for an old wom'an's home, but not young enough to get a position as an office clerk. In fact, I see nothing, but clouds' gathering, blacker and blacker and no clearing away. As to sunshine, that I dare not anticipate. Oh, will you, can yoiu, tell me is there anything for one in my position to do ; or is there a place for me? 69 70 LOOK UP Heaven knows I am willing to work, but have - lost all mj family and am utterly alone, I try very hard to live in the present and let the dead past bury its dead. To' forget is easier said than done. For any advice you may offer I shall indeed be more than grateful. (Signed) RUTH Here is a humgin cry of pain, and it must touch every heart that hears* it. In it the whole round of our little lives is summed up, only the shade of a tragedy lies most heavily upon it. It is the cry of a woman, poignant with grief and anguish, yet still bearing with* it something of hope, that divine inspiration which makes us look upward, even when on the brink of the great abyss. A wounded soldier of a victorious army falls by the wayside, while the great host sweeps onward. Maimed and bleeding, torn at by hunger and tortured by thirst, smitten by the relentless sun and choked by the whirling dust, he lies there doomed to death if no one goes to his succor. But hope takes some of the burn- ing keenness from the edge of his torture, and, even in the last deliriimi that passes through his disordered mind, he believes that help is at A WOMAN'S TRAGEDY 71 hand! Then darkness. So it is with unnoted thousands in the battle of life. The world is going forward at a tremendous pace^ and, in the great onrush, where numbers are not overwhelmed and crushed under foot, they gradually fall exhausted and wounded by the way. The burden of years, Hke the heavy equipment of the soldier, proves too much of a handicap; and yet where the one may throw the staggering weight aside, the other cannot ^ — ^not any more than he escape from himself, of which age is a greater part. The whole world is covered with those who have fallen behind, but with superb courage are wilhng to continue (Struggling with their last breath. Sometimes they hold with a mate and dogged persistency. Again, the bitterness and enigma of the thing arouses some expres- sion that reaches far. "Is there any place for a woman who is passe, who is no longer young?" The answer springing instinctively from every human heart is that, in this great world, overflowing with richness and in the noon-day light of the highest s'ocial and scientific pro- gress, there is a place for every human crea- 72 LOOK UP ture. For as society grows in its complexities, its sjTnpathies broaden and deepen. R-ome, in the zenith of its glory had no hospitals, yet to-day the world's heart never beat warmer for the common cause which is the ALL cause — no one being too humble or too unblest to share in its composite benefits. Age comes like a benediction to some lives; to others it brings tragedy, overilo\\dng with bitterness. From afar it is apt to be regarded as the calm evening glow of life, full serenity and repose and that depthless joy which fills the soul, and, in the stillness of the evening hour, beholds in the sunset raptures unseen by the common eye. It is also true that some regard age as a malady, which, added to other afflictions of the body, makes a woeful lot Ajid yet, in the darkest hour, if one thing survives then mis- fortune is not without some compensation. Hope even burns brightest in the darkest hour. It is the divine spirit, with up -reaching hands, bom of the very humanity that is witliin our- selves and a belief in the omnipotence of the Almighty and the humanity of man. When a cry arises like this, sharp with pain A Yv^OMAN'S TRAGEDY and suffering, but yet still mingled with a hopeful sob, there are ears to hear and noble hearts to respond. It is this thought which makes life bearable during the blackest hours of misfortune. DUKES AND OTHERS A Duke cannot help being a Duke any more than a poor boy can avoid being the son of his father. Both are born to it. Neither should be blamed or discriminated against because of this fact alone. Andrew Carnegie evidently had this well in mind when he declared he would much prefer to have his niece wed to an honest, intelligent coachman than a "worthless Duke." There are Dukes and Dukes. Some of us admire titles. The love of them seems to be innate in woman, because they are something in the way of exclusive ornament, v/hich may be worn like a beautiful cloak or goT^Ti — exalted badges of station, which clothe their wearers v^th superiority and are esteemed to be out- ward sign of merit. But the fact is that titles, at most, are in- tangible things, shaped in the mind and play- ing no actual part in the world's economy. Title cannot make a man — ^it often unmakes him. The best title a man may have comes 74 DUKES AND OTHERS 75 from his own merit, his own virtue, his prowess. Born into the world naked, all possibilities lie within him — ^the gifts of the Creator. In the pink, wrinkled hand of every babe, like the mystic crystal which holds visions for the seer, reposes the Future, full of unshapen events, prodigies, struggle and achievements! Mr. Carnegie gave the wholesome American view when he sharply indicated that the mere fact a man is a Duke is not sufficient to place him high in the human scale. A Duke is a Duke because we think he is ; because the people who yield him his title think he is so. When the people cease to think he is so, the distinction of the title, the form and pomp of it, and the very title itself, will fade like the fabric of a dream. We, in America, ao not believe in the divine right of Kings. Many people of the earth still hold the belief; the divine right expresses itself to them in flesh and blood actuality, be- cause they think it so. Mind, a divine endowment, makes all things possible. It circles the world, in a pulse beat; it whispers under the weltering seas; it rip- ples invisible messages to the arching void 76 LOOK UE above the eternal tides ;• from the printed page it sparks into the hearts of the world's waking miHions. When man first began to reason, the race started- on its upward journey. It has been on the move ever since. This has heen possible because the great majority have been Vv-orkers, constantly striving to surpass that which had gone before. The men who do things will ever be the earth's real kings — ^not crovTied with empty diadems, but bayed ^4th the love, ad- miration and veneration of those who find in high ideals a constant inspiration to the best endeavor. Title cannot give a man character if he have it not. There are vrorthless Dukes, just as there are worthless men who are not Dukes. A coachman or a blacksmith may be one of Natures noblemen. He is clothed in the dignity of work — work, which has made our civiliza- tion a marvelous reality and yet is making for others in the future. What a sublime privilege the future is! We live for it ; we die for it. It is both a pro- cessional and a benediction. THE SOUL IN THE VOICE We do not appreciate the marvels of the most familiar things- of life, the most natural fmictions which are interwoven with the thought and action of every day existence. A thought shapes itself in the mind, and, quick as a Hghtning flash, it is interpreted into words which may sound with the rhythm of music or be harsh with the discords of passion. Science has delved deep into the mysteries of organic and inorganic nature. From the one it has brought wonderful secrets of productive force, of gro\^i;h, of life; from the other it has produced prodigies of chemistry and freed gi- gantic and awesome forces — Titans of destruc- tion which now play so complete a part in modem war. As the greatest study for man is man, the scrutiny that has been turned upon him has been productive of revelations so astounding that the mind can scarcely grasp them. Hu- 77 78 LOOK UP man life is full of marvels, and one of the greatest of these is speech. Emil Sutro, a patient investigator, daring and original in method, gave a great impetus to the study of the voice as a spiritual medium. One reading his most interesting work cannot fail to be deeply inpressed by the marvel of this most simple of things, which is yet the most complex. The voice can be cultivated so that it may express most accurately every subtlety of feel- ing, every emotion, and even bring, vibrating from the depths of the soul, that w^hich no word can compass. A voice may be golden ; it may be silvern, or it may ring mth the cold sharpness of steel. It may bring laughter or tears, and, being capable of expressing the rounded circle of human nature, it may even go beyond that into the world which is not of matter and whose outposts are sentinelled by the stars. In her voice every woman has a gift even more potent than beauty; for beauty withers with age, whereas the soul-sweetness of voice has remained unaltered to the brink of the grave. THE SOUL IN- THE VOICE 79 A Canadian capitalist, widowed and with-« out a home, who found in "high class hotel Mfe a bitter reminder of the tender comforts once enjoyed, was first attracted to the telephone girl by the quality of her voice. As of the switchboard, she was perfect mistress- of it. She never struck a discord. It was restful and soothe to hear her when it was not actually inspiring. This man of three score and ten years, a sharp judge of human nature, and who had seen the world with alert eyes, wisely conclud- ed, that the voice was indicative of the charac- ter. So it was that this girl's voice entered his hfe and possessed it, twining itself about him in a caress of sound. She became his wife. This is a pretty story of December and May, and, while it serves to illustrate in a measure the wonderful gift we have in voice, it is the truth. The old adage of silence is being sadly misused in these days when the brain develop- ment is such that everybody must talk. And thus it not infrequently happens that speech itself is golden. HARMONY OF HEARTS All of nature is a divine harmony, which is manifested most impressively in the change of the seasons, the rise and fall of the ocean tide and the swing of the sky's countless hosts through the infinite. The same lesson is taught to him who looks into the mysteries of chem- istry or the awesome power of electricity. The highest ideal of society is a harmonious whole, to the fulfillment of which, consciously and unconsciously, we have given our lives. Love is a force greater than any that experi- menting man has wrung from the dark recesses of nature. It is governed by laws as immutable as those that govern the stars or sliape the pass- ing seasons. It is a law of personal and racial harmony, which goes even to the depths of creation and moves the hearts of the rich and poor alike. Sometimes society has erected obstructions so great as to interfere with the operation of the law, such as family pride, caste or sordid ma- 80 HARMONY OF HEARTS 81 terial motive. But it is Love that animates life, that glows throughout all creation; that breathes its magic into the changing races of men and stirs even the heart of this great earth of ours. Love! Those who look upon it with seeing eyes and broadened minds realize its sublimity, its eternal power, its sacred majesty. Blit there are many who regard it rather as a malady of the flesh, which* while it may give glimpses of rarer altitudes, brings us finally to earth. The most precious of gifts, it cannot be pur- chased. It is given without cost. And, as it falls, the pauper is often a prince and the rich man a beggar. It is the power that was with the dawn of creation, though it had neither a beginning as it has no end, for it is eternal. Man is born to it as he is to the light of day and the free air. That we must love and suffer, enjoy and weep, is part of the plan. Every man must live his own life. It is a sacred custodianship with which he has been entrusted. He makes bis own happiness or un- makes it. iN'ow and then some mind which 82 LOOK UP takes a broad view of the question, superbly disarms all artificial distinctions and mates with the heart and soul, which, attuned to his, has made perfect harmony. This is not poetry nor imagery, but plain fact, as has been exemplified from time to time, one outstanding example being the young wealthy man of distinguished lineage who took as wife a poor girl whom he met working among the poverty-stricken of New York's great East Side. He saw in her beauties that fairer women did not possess and found her wealthy beyond any heiress of Belgravia in the abundance of her humanities and her capacity of sympathy and suffering. It is a mistake — ^the days of romance and chivalry have not given way to the forces of a material age. Romance, which is one of the golden chords in the harmony of life, is ever sounding in the great song of our complex activities. And so it will be forever, while man and woman look upon each other and, looking, love! GOLDEN MIGHT Vast wealth is an accumulation of power, the influence of which may reach not only the broad, open stretches of the world's acti- vities, but penetrate into the obscure nooks and corners of life seldom blessed by the light. It may quicken thousands of hands to the do- ing of prodigies of labor in leveling a mountain or tearing through its mighty heart. It may carry blessings to the lame, the halt and the blind* and be an influence so tender, so hu- mane, that there is a sympathetic heart-beat in every penny. Again, it may be the power that sends forth thousands of men to slay one another, and, with fire and giant, demon forces, make ghastly scars on the face of the world. These lessons are brought home to us each day. Sometimes they directly affect us, but, to the average dweller in peace who sees his day's duty well done, they seem somewhat remote. Yet the power of wealth presses in upon us 83 84 LOOK UP from every side and affects our living and our well being. It influences the laws which govern us; it has corrupted courts and legislatures for the benefit of the few and created oppres- sions which are forcing a social revolt. And so, one time, it came to pass that there was to be a "Blicklast of American MilHon- aires." This was because there were many earnest folk who beheved that wealth is not its own certificate of character; that millions without morals are apt to be worthless money. It was the declaration of the clergjTuen who rose to protest against "tainted money." In the keeping of this list, as fast as financiers were shown, by regular legal proceedings, to have made their millions by oppressive and il- i legal methods, the church would refuse to i solicit gifts from them or accept money for charitv at their hands. ^ Money, bounteously poured out, cannot sanctify the wrongful methods by which it has been produced, nor cleanse the hands of those who have used unclean methods. The black- list of milhonaires! It was a long coming, but the sentiment shaping it, which was begun when the ancient GOLDEN MIGHT 85 moralist, with far-seeing vision, cried out against worship of the Golden Calf, has never ceased growing. It shaped itself to the various forms of social life. It found expression in the civilizations that have passed like chimeras, and now, in the marvelous growth of the twen- tieth century it has sounded a clear, far reach- ing note that men hear and, hearing, behold the problem with undazzled eyes — seeing what is fair, and what is ugly in the Golden Thing. The race has been rebelling against tyrannies since the first head-man abused his power, at a time when power lay in muscle and those who wielded club of stone came to grips in bloody death struggles. The tyranny of wealth came later, with a power greater and more complex, as civilization had become com- plex. The protest has persisted under the most unfavorable conditions. Sometimes smothered until its cries were tortured into a groan, it still survived. Over-ridden, trampled by steel- shod oppression and injustibe of power, it stiU found insistent expression. And always have there been spirits bold enough to raise 86 LOOK UP their voices in declaring that might, panoplied though in gold, does not make right. It is this to be said, however: ''Tainted money" may be purified by high purpose, a view that is held by many who have followed the current discussion. JSTevertheless, money cannot buy a place in heaven. Neither can it purchase a clear conscience. No man who be- comes a free-handed giver with either of these purposes in mind is ever wholly deceived. i^ ;-^Cft-^W'% S ' TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING The saddest condition of a human existence is to possess "too much of a good thing;" for, whereas want and unsatisfied desire have a burden of pain, satiety is, by far, a deeper af- fliction. The man and woman who have squeezed the orange of life dry, and even eaten the pulp, often find little in life further to at- tach them to it. Satiety shows the way to suicide; and, while one person takes his life, thousands, thankful for even the smallest part of good that falls to them, give thanks that they have the en- estimable privilege of living. And so it goes through all the levels of our existence. What one prizes most highly, the other rejects. The sweet-toothed girl, who, looking upon a confectionery as the early expression of para- dise, at last got a position at a candy counter and ate so much sweets on the first day that she was sickened. After that, sweets became her aversion and she sought other employment. 87 88 LOOK UP Sometimes satiety does not work as rapidly but, because it is slower, is none the less ef- fective. Take love for instance! A big-brained American woman weaving, with the gold of her verses, Gautier's wonder- ful story "Clarimonde," has the beautiful vam- pire proclaim that she is "satiety itself." Un- disciplined love dreams of an unlimited feast! There is only one passion that knows no satiety. That is avarice, which can never be- come glutted because it is a bottomless pit! If love were like avarice the world would be a riot of madness. Because it is not, is a cause for fervent congratulation; for no in- considerable part of the planet is mad already. A man who loved the odor of flowers and adulation, so the ancient story goes, was so showered with fragrant blooms that he was buried beneath them and suffocated by their breath. And so kisses, which bear the same re- lation to love, may kill the very thing that call- ed them into being. Kisses are the pink roses of affection, which, breathed upon by Love, turn to blazing crim- son. Then came the thorns. A comely ISTew York wife* who, as a college-bred girl, married TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING 89 a romantic Latin some time ago appealed to law for refuge from his endearments. She averred that, unchecked, he would have kissed her 86,400 times a day. That is a kiss for every second of the time, so that this couple might, in fact become a human clock, with the time marked by the most romantic method ever devised. To "kiss the hours away" may sound attrac- tive in a song ; but the reality is altogether an- other thing, minus poetry or music, if this wife was to be believed. "I sacrificed everything for this man," said she — "friends, family, pro- fession and art — for I loved him so. But since that time my life has been a hell. My husband will run up from his shop during business hours to kiss me. He kisses me in the morning, through the day and through the night. He won't let me sleep. He wants to be kissing me every second." This is the expression of a material age ; and it is just as well that no poet is at hand to sing the joy and the pain of this story. There are some joys that kill, and some griefs too deep for utterance. Meanwhile, let us prefer to chng to the fancy that love moves all things ; 90 LOOK UP that, if the whole universe is an amatory har- mony, the stars are kisses which mark Love's pathway through the infinite. WHEN MOTHER BROIDERS This an an age in which woman is exper- iencing a great intellectual awakening. Some of the expressions of this fact are amazing in their sure perception of the truths of life; of the forces that surround and operate upon us and the sacred obligations of existence. Some of these women, free from the rever- sionary influence of centuries, with balance un- disturbed by sex aptitudes, have come to a calm, broad outlook on perplexing social pro- blems. There are others who have not the same sure position and to whose view arise distor- tions, grotesque, impossible and often laugh- able. Still these results mean something. They indicate that woman is thinking; that she is struggling for Hght and a clearer, surer view. It has been a long, long journey from the first primitive boat to the palatial ocean flyer; but through all the stages, of slow, painful devel- 91 92 LOOK UP opment, the thought, seekiiig ultimate perfec- tion, was working. A\^hen we adventure into the reahn of thought, we are apt to make mistakes in the heginning. Success is pretty sure to be last- ing that has been achieved over a long way of error. Errors are inflexible teachers, whose lessons we are not prone to forget. Evil is the very shadow of good. And yet some earnest souls there be who are prone to mistake the substance for the shadow. A well intentioned member of the Woman's Clnistian Temper- ance Union it was who sounded an impressive warning against the baleful evils of embroi- dery. Awesome tilings lurk 'vvdthin the innocent, placid, and artistic pastime, according to tliis good dame — dangers, not only to the worker but to the innocent generation that follows. Here is the substance of the pronouncement: ''The sons of a mother who wears out her nerves on embroidery are as certain to go to liquor as to school. The girls either take to liquor or hysteria." There has been a lack of competent testi- mony that embroidery wears out the nerves WHEK MOTHER BROIDERS 93 and is so deep seated in its injuries that they may be passed from generation to generation. It is probably a new discover}^, for the lady urged that the professors of psychology in col- leges be asked to teach "this scientific fact." Our ancestors, with more or less artistic taste, should this be true, have been going along for centuries shaping a curse with every movement of the needle; ^xing with each pris- oned thread, a grim penalty, to be passed on to the unborn! Better far to believe that the good lady was wrong, though her intent was quite laudable! As art is the expression of the as- piration and the sense of beauty of the race, so are its domestic handmaidens, weaving, paint- ing and embroidery, the things which fill with an active content the surplus time of the woman who feels the need of beauty as a part of life, and takes this mode of expression to show the love of it and to embody some of the fair fancies which people her mind. Embroidery, like painting, like music or weaving, can also be a spiritual expression — ■■ a means by which ideals may be given concrete form. A heart that is full of happiness often overflows in song. Sometimes it finds other 94 LOOK UP Tents in things that the hand can do. A Troman may embroider the lark song of her soul. She may also embroider its swan song. But we are unwilling to believe that her floss-filled needle could ever embroider a line of drunkards. PRACTISING THE EMOTIONS The tutored, emotional woman was one of the striking figures that innovating Chicago put forward some years ago. She was the re- sult of "psycho-physical culture" and could be relied on to sound any note of human feel- ing, or to suppress it. Theoretically, she should have had power of expression to surpass Bern- hardt or Duse — not in magnificent electric bursts of feeling, but in the easy, natural and convincing dehneation that comes with actual Hfe. "Every woman should practise the entire gamut of emotions," said the exponent of the new creed. "She should know them and master them. An emotional woman is magnetic; an implusive one electric." At the same period, in another part of the country, another woman was prey to conflict- ing emotions. The law asked her life for the killing of a man, whom she said she loved. Figuratively, she had crowded all of life into 95 96 LOOK UP an hour and so, sounded the entire gamut. She drank deep of pleasure, beholding in its irides- cent sparkle new delights, new gratifications. She was blind to the fact that, in its depths, like the storm-harv^est, which marks the floor of the seas, there lay the cold, w^hite bones of dead men and the wreck of fair lives. Later she knew. The drink was bitter upon her hps and she sat in the shadow of death. In her life the prisoned woman had gone through all the emotions. And the most ex- quisite of all was fear — that overwhelming, in- born shrinking from an idea which unnerves the strong, but oftentimes makes strong the weak. Xo matter how dull her moral sense might have been, no matter how keen minds might have observed and deemed her deficient in this or in that, it must have been that the emotions that possessed her brought no pride in their manifestation. It was no mere theoretic exercise, but a tragic reality. The best schooling in emotions is that wliich experience gives ; and, the lesson once learned, is not readily forgotten. Woman's whole rule is to be on the defensive, and she instinctively and consciously controls her emotions. Each PRACTISING THE EMOTIONS 97 one of the children of God is strung Kke a harp, so that every note of feeling can be sounded. All that is good and bad can be expressed at the touch of the proper chords. What divine music is possible! What ter- rifying discords, what melting harmonies! And yet, wherein is the profit unless the call- ing of one be to portray these emotions, to practice them as one turns to the running of a musical scale? Should one simulate grief be- cause there is a morbid pleasure in tears? Or anguish because it is the reverse of Joy? Should a woman "practice emotion," as she does some empty social accompKshment ? No! The Chicago woman's advice, it would appear, was the doctrine of decadence. The heart is too precious a gift to be made the ob- ject of a fad. And, in the gamut there are feel- ings so sacred that any irreverent appeal would be nothing short of personal profanation. THE TITANIC THIEF It seems incredible that one man in a posi- tion of trust should be able to steal $1,500,000; that this wealth should not have been more rigorously safeguarded. That the passion for, speculation should sweep a man away from all scruple so that lie risked ruin and disaster in the click of the ticker is a story that has been written in blood and tears, for many a sad year. Peculation has grown in proportion to the in- crease in material prosperity; but the degree of punishment to fit the crime, has not. The penalty that fell to the pygmy convicted of stealing $100 is the same that faces the large financial figure who to-day takes a million and a half. We are living in an age of giants. They have been in the process of making since, confident in the strength of youth and ^^ith an inspirational sight into the future, the nation threw off the yoke of England. For the rear- ing of these Titans the earth has yielded its 98 THE TITANIC THIEF 99 vast treasures of metal and grain, while the thought of generations, a wonderful dynamic power, added its potency to the sweep of the natural forces. The country has grown bigger and bigger, so now it stands with a foot in either ocean and its form towers so high that the eyes of the en- tire world find in it an object of admiration, emulation, enw and distrust. A country of giant thought and achieve- ment, the same massive structure is in its virtues and its evils; its profits and losses; its hopes and fears. In no other place than a land of giants could such vast individual for- tunes be accumulated. In no other land, save one measured by the broadest scale of possi- bilities, could there be developed a trust mon- ster which, combining v/ith others of the same family, develops a combined power stronger than the government itself. The best thought of the land has been directed to the problem, realizing that in it lies that which, to the far- seeing eye, arouses the gravest apprehensions. The great industrial and commercial enter- prises are the work of giants. So, too, is the charity, which, at one magnificent movement of 100 LOOK UP the hand gives $10,000,000 to a single cause. But, side by side with gigantic charity, skulks gigantic theft. The one and a half million dollar thief is a malevolent colossus. He is a distinct result of these times, and, by this one act caused more misery, anguish and dire mis- fortune than the unpretentious cut-throat who cheaply takes human life. The one and a half millon dollar thief, it seems, held in him a trust in all the evil, black passions that possess a man who loves money and power, and to whom the only guage of all things is the golden dollar-mark. Sacred trust betrayed, friends preyed upon and deeived — all these weigh nothing in the scale of "finan- cial expediency." Conscience, ethics and those intangible things of which serious minded folk talk, mean nothing to the materialism of the Giant Thief. His conscience is a process which* operates against the other fellow; and his ethics to rob the greatest number for the greatest benefit to himself. A Trust is a Giant Thief. And truly has it been said that a Trust has no heart, however the individuals may be constituted who com- THE TITANIC THIEF 101 pose it. What a calamity it is, therefore, vv hen the remorseless Trust spirit enters the bosom of an individual ! Then it is that either the one and a half million dollar thief is made or the little miscreant, who first murders and then robs his victims. THINKING YOUNG One of the most beneficent blessings of second youth is that it never departs. When the last hour comes, the gray of Death is dis- solved, like mist before the sun, by the radi- ance of a heart warm with humanities and mel- lowed by mature years. Youth in old age is an inspiration, a pro- mise, a symbol to those who struggle along, spiritless and disheartened, that the last miles of hfe's journey need not be a way of bitter- ness, regret and tears. In the span of his seventies, Chauncey Mit- chell Depew, now eighty-five, was in the very heyday of his birthdays. He had the heart and inclinations of a youth and the wisdom of a sage. Here, indeed, is an ideal condition of man, which, should it become general, will send us along the way of progress at a rate that would stagger comprehension. This is an age of hale active old men — despite any ridiculous 102 THINKING YOUNG 103 suggestion of a "chloroform limit" — and their condition is undeniably the result of a life full of the activities of thought and body. An active life is its own reward, bringing abun- dant compensations and deep-reaching joys, which have no part in the existence of the idle or the unproductive. Our Chauncey, though some folks are apt to question his inevitable optimism, has ever looked on work with a sense of intimate kin- ship — as something to which he would be in- debted more and more as the years grew on. He has given much to it and it has given him much in return — ^things which sweeten the life of the individual and are not to be counted in dollars. Each man should fulfill some useful fimc- tion in the great human family. He may not be able to direct a vast public utility like a railroad; he may not be able to till the fields or to tend the flocks that we might live; nor weave that we might wear; but he who does the meanest of duties is dignified by labor no less than the others. That he does it to insure his own livelihood in no wise detracts from the merit of it. We all share in the benefit. 104. LOOK UP So it is that whatever your hands find to do, do it to the utmost of your ability. The feeling that you have so contrived will give you a calm, pervading pleasure. All of life is work; and the man of activi- ties lives to the fulness of his being. More people die of inaction than are claimed by plague. Old age is merely a mental condition, a delusion, which the vast majority of the race still persist in ; but great broad minds superbly reject it and keep joyously at the front in the onward march. GLORY OF WOMAN'S WORK The material development of America is an Aladdin story in which adventurous brains, skillful hands and mechanical ingenuity have furnished the magic. The Lamp is still burn- ing that all the world may see. Nor does the greatest countries repose alone in these things. Back of the hands, which coarsen with the toil of the field; which, in the mill, with the regularity of machinery, work like pallid shuttles; which may direct a great railroad system or cunningly shape the most terrible engine of war — back of these is the character of man, his moral stature — ^the real thing that de- termines the worth of a people. Contemplating this at once brings for- ward the element of home influence and the mother of the race. The rest of the great family has gone onward with amazing strides ; but, though she knows the joys of new free- dom, Woman is still retarded by influences that come to us from a far, savage time, when 105 i06 LOOK UP she was a slave, and not only carried the "bur- den of humanity" but actual loads, wliich bent the shoulders and taxed head, heart and mus- cle. Similar conditions may obtain to-day, but they are as much a^part of this electric age as would be the home of the crude cave dwellers in place of the perfectly appointed modern apartment house. Woman has borne patiently her ills while she moved slowly forward. Sometimes a voice has been raised bitterly in rebellion, shrilling sharply as some injustice galled, so as to cause a thrill of torture. Often it has been hysterical and irrational; but every now and then there has sounded a voice of the inspired one, ^dbrant vrith conviction and toned by reason and that truth, which the eyes of the seer beholds behind the veil of ordinary things. Mary A. Livermore, died in the fullness of of 84 years ; she was one of these. A champion of her sex, she was large of heart and her sym- pathies reached out to all humanity. It has been truly said that one of her deepest and most earnest doctrines was that the greatness of this country depended, to the highest degree, on GLORY OF WOMAN'S WORK lOT the intelligence and independence of its women. The good we do lives after us. And it is also true that it may go before. Frequently, from the heart of some strong personality there springs a conviction so vital, so full of the vigor of truth and justice, that, with flashing, v/ing- ed feet, it speeds into the future with its mes- sage to the unborn. So it v>^as that the bless- ings of this woman's work did ever befall her, beckoning her on, filling her undimmed vision with a vista so broad, so far-stretching and abundantly peopled that only the soul, with its subtle sympathies, could realize the full mean- ing of it. An enlightened, free vvomanhood and a na- tion with the daring for eagle flight, and then the eagle's eye to brave the sun ! A life such as was this one woman's, makes for that ideal — a life whose energies glowed with steady white radiance; whose reward is in the measure of things accomplished and in the unshaken be- lief that the seeds, sowed by inspired words, will bring increasingly abundant harvest as Time strings the opalescent years on his eter- nal rosary, SOPHISTRY OF EGOTISM Pride goeth before a fall, but egotism digs the pit. The world is full of pretentious medi- ocrity, which so vaunts itself that many, w^ho can not see below the surface of the shov/, are apt to deem it worthy or even exalted. The false and the vicious, knowing how repellantly they stand in the naked verity, take on the drapery of the rainbow and modulate their voices to gentle harmony. The hiss of a snake can be set to music. The voice of sophistry may sound in polished periods or melodious measure. There is a dead- ly poison in the sting of each. Sometimes a moral delinquent raises his en- venomed voice against the established order and frantically avers that everj^thing is out of gear ; that the world was started y, rong and the race has been laboring up the weary, misty steep of j^ears weighed ^vith horrible errors. And the little, distorted brain, seeing all creation through its oy\ti pitiable egotism, at 108 SOPHISTRY OF EGOTISM 109 once recommends a remedy that will produce a race of beings which, compared to those of to- day, will nearly approximate gods. Those who would defy the most vital laws and audaciously flout recognized custom are hailed as courage- ous souls that dare — giants, that rise magnif- icently above the dull common place of ordi- nary existence. So, too, maybe the claim of the thief, w^ho, disdaining the laws of society, breaks in and robs by night; the desperado who, attacliing small value to human life, kills for the mere excitement of it; the corrupter or the wrecker of homes, often beyond the written laws, but nevertheless an outlaw; the man who, also keeping free from the law, makes fortune from the corruption of politics and the wrecking of civic virtue. HOW ARE YOU LIVING? One of the wise men of the world has said that we should study how to live, and not how to die. Death will take care of itself. The measure of a man's life, the good he has done ; the things he has hoped for and achieved; the unhallowed temptations, which have come to iiim and been resisted, and those which have at times overcome him — all of these make for the setting of that brief moment before the light is quenched in darkness. The fear of death has been one of the most powerful factors governing the souls of men; and, yet it would seem, despite the insistent impress of this idea, which has come down to us through ages, that a surprising number of persons regard death lightly, unconsciously, perhaps, aissimilating the idea of that mse ancient who declared that of all things to which the human race was subject death was least to be feared, for "When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not.'* 110 HOW ARE YOU LIVING? Ill In this laconism Ues infinite truth and philosophy. Thousands upon thousands of books have been written, concerning the great mystery, without bringing home the truth more directly. The gigantic slaughter of war brings out, with crimson intensity, the fact that vast numbers of men may go willingly to death without a quaver, eager to kill one another Mdth the last convulsive twitch of their stiffen- ing hands. In this the Christian, who has in his mind the divine tragedy of Calvary, and the Orien- tal, who sees only the watchful spirits of his ancestors, do not differ. Each gives life with a freedom that shames the prodigal, who scat- ters his gold in the street. It tests a man's nerves to walk to certain death in the face of a killing machine which works with infernal precision. Yet, ia a city crov/ded with humans, like New York, thou- sands are going just as surely to death through the lack of proper precaution. Little ailments noted in time and treated tend to prolong life, but we are most prone to disregard the im- portance of these little things. *'A stitch in time saves nine." And, as our 112 LOOK UP lives are mere fabric, torn and rent by con- flicting passions and beset by unceasing de- lay, it is these little stitches that count most. If a single one saved nine, a man, in his Hfe- time, may so save that he actually doubles the days of his existence. The war has furnished many lessons. In the strategy that has to do with the slaughter of human beings, the dreams of conquest and the hope of prevention, new standards will be established. But the most salient lesson, em- phasized in every feature of the great struggle, was that of preparedness. Trifles often are the golden grains, which, when assembled at one point, make for price- less efficiency and strength. The man who is prepared to die is the man who has lived well; who approaches the brink of the abyss without a fear, seeing before him in the great void of darkness the beaconing light of his own kindly deeds. So he goes to the end serenely, with no horrible phantoms at his side jeering him or lashing him with the cruel stings of conscience. We all cannot have that wonderful intoxi- cation of war which makes men laugh on the HOW ARE YOU LIVING? 118 verge of Hell but we may have the calm up- lift and the serene spirit of deeds well done. So, while we look back on the bloody pano- rama of death, which has caused the world to shudder, let us give a thought to how we are living. A BIG BUILDING LESSON Some one has called the subway system of New York one of the world's new seven won- ders. Dwellers in the big city regard it most as a convenience of discomfort and its daily familiarity makes no appeal to the imagination. And, yet, it is one of the world's most instruc- tive human shows — New York's interior whir- ring and flashing with activities and teeming with life — it's a gigantic study for generations to come. Though reassured by mechanical and struc- tui-al perfection, the building of tunnels through a city like New York is an act of daring. The man skilled in such projects must bring to the task both imagination and cool, unwavering judgment. No man who lacked self-reliance and determination ever sue- fully essayed an undertaking in wliich great natural obstacles were to be overcome. The undertaking is a measure of the man. Not all of us can be tunnel-builders or 114 A BIG BUILDING LESSON 115 stanch-hearted men who dare to erect a modern tower of Babel on spiles; but most of us may- cultivate self-reliance. It is the moral sinews that build the individual, so that the arm of his purpose is strong and he stands solidly upon his feet and moves with the ease, grace and assurance of an athelete. And, in veriest fact, he is an athlete ready to undertake the most exacting trial in which reward is at the end. lie moves with vigorous certainty and his feet seldom encounter grievous obstacles. This matter of feet is most important. They are made to stand on, to walk with, it is true, but they do not carry all men through the world. Some make their way on their stom- achs ; others refuse to make effort at any sort of locomotion and finally die of inaction. The world belongs to the self-reliant, the just and the strong. They alone have the cour- age to make it their own. The ambitionless weak, the irresolute and the supinely dependent have no place in the scheme. No man can become morally big and strong who hangs his reliance upon others for what should be the result of his own God-given effort. A young man who constantly falls back 116 LOOK UP upon the bounty of home has no spur to ad- venture out into the bleak unpromising places to make his way. The love of the easy fire- side, the little creature comforts and the ready indulgence have been strong enough to shut out legions from careers worth while. From the pathfinder to the subway builder is a long swing of the pendulum of progress. And it shows how self-reliance, strong confi- dent and hopeful, arises to meet every new problem of civilization. So stand squarely on your feet ; cultivate confidence in yourself and you will grow in strength. You may not build a gigantic subway system but you will go a gi'eat way toward the building of yourself. THE MAGIC CRYSTAL OF PEACE Into the high fever of the war spirit that possessed the man at home as he read of the prodigies of arms performed on distant plains and seas, the spirit of Peace comes with its cool, calm presence, holding in one hand the olive branch, and, in the other, a crystal sphere wherein are shadowed the dreams of the future and the measure of their fulfillment. More yet than a mere hope, it is an inspired behef that, some time in our upward journey, mind will so develop that the animal part of man, which impels him to spring at a fellow being and tear and rend and kill, will fall away like a foul ulcer, and, in the world-wide spirit of perfect humanity, war will be impossible — a thing of the savage past, the recalled horrors of which will only serve to emphasize the im- provement of the race. No matter how "humanely" it may be con- ducted, war is a barbarous proceeding which modem science has stripped of nearly all of 117 118 LOOK UP its picturesque and romantic trappings. Now it is a grim, matter-of-fact killing on a gigantic scale, in which the marvels of new sciences are brought to bear. Long ago when they slew man by hand, and foes always came to grips in the red fury of the onslaught, the blows that sounded on helm, shield and buckler made a music which poets have shaped into stirring verses. But, now, that men are fed to machines and die without striking a blow, it is appalling- ly different. There is a diabolic ingenuity in the modern method of man-killing, when the turning of a crank may send a thousand humans out into the darkness; when the pressure of a button may cause the rending and destruction of the most powerful and most complex of warlike mechanisms, the field of action of which covers the entire world. Fourteen years ago, while the temple of Peace was being projected at the Hague, a structure whose white beauty would typify the dignity and purity of the idea, the whole world thrilled ^^dth the war spirit and nations began looking to greater armament. President THE MAGIC CRYSTAL 119 Roosevelt at that time in his Brooklyn speech said: "The surest way to invite disaster is to be unarmed. We should not be aggressive unless aggressiveness is in defence of our self-respect as a nation and for the good of mankind. To be aggressive and not to be armed invites dis- aster and the contempt of all." Power, like powder, is to be guarded from flame. What flame is more destructure to men and nations than selflsh ambition? Germany has furnished the answer to us of to-day. Some minds, at times may see aught of the futility of hfe and again realize what a puny dust heap the world is after all. Others foresee a god-Kke future for man, who, with all his tremendous intellectual and material advance- ment, has not yet freed himself from the in- stincts of the savage. And yet, despite the poet of nations, there are some unmoved observers who still reluc- tantty believe that the methods of wholesale slaughter and destruction will continue until the world is spiritualized in an era of light or until a time, as predicted hj Nikola Tesla, when war will be fought out wholly by auto- 120 LOOK UP matons and no blood be shed — a contest of wonderful machines which will carry in their complex hearts all the warlike, intellectual, strategical and mechanical genius of a nation. Then, indeed, will the time of universal peace be near, for if any question may be left to the arbitration of mere machines it could be ad- justed fully as well by the brains that created the automatons. Yet all these things are but dreams that lurk in the depths of the magic crystal or whisper to the soul the poetry of the new golden age. THE PASSING OF THE BIRDS In the process of civilization, with its con- stantly changing conditions, many things once prized are cast aside and forgotten, or tram- pled upon and destroyed. The same with men ; the same with ideas and conventions. Like- wise, with things with which we come in con- tact and which have no part in the newest ad- justment. The red man has almost been annihilated by civilization; the buffalo, which roamed the Western prairies in thousands, is now w^ell nigh extinct. And, not so long ago, it seemed that the wild birds, those joyous people of the air that give to nature a charm which has stirred the heart of many a poet, were hkely soon to be but memories of the past — shadow shapes that wing their way through by-gone days like precious dream fancies. ..* As human life becomes denser and spreads itself over the Continent, the birds flee before it, if they are not destroyed. As the great 121 122 LOOK UP centres of population blight and wither many tender souls, so do they shape the fate of the feathered folk. This is one of the most pitiful tragedies of nature, and many persons who sense, with a finer appreciation, the wonders and beauties of outdoor life are filled with sorrow. When the protective movement was under way, some years ago, a Massachusetts ofiicial compiled a census of wild birds, Vv^hich treated of a great variety of purely "game" and those musical throated vagrants that follow the sun as it wheels on it's goldern course through the seasons. The robin and the tanager, bringing life, movement and color to the city parks, when the trees are in their greening and the sides are soft aglow, have thousands of friends v/ho love them and whose hearts grow lighter when they come from the Southland with their joyous messages. To feel that in time they must vanish brings a sense of a great calamity. As we look upon our cities and how the growth is being extended by means of the elee- tric roads and the improvement of waste lands, we may see the doom of bird life written. The PASSING OF THE BIRDS 123 Massachusetts authority, in assigning the causes for destruction, mentioned these: — Sportmen or so called sportsmen; the cutting of timber and shrubbery ; market hunters ; egg collectors; milliners' hunters; the draining of marshes and meadows, gun clubs in hunting contests; the erection of telegraph and tele- phone poles; the building of electric trolleys; railroads and automobiles. CiviKzation demands its price; and, to the modern man imbued with commercial activities and material instincts, the question of birds is as remote as a consi(Jeration of something the existence of which has ceased to be. The song birds are nature's happy troubu- dours. Those troubadours, who sang in the time of love and romance, are nh more. Even now, the less romantic street singer is seldom to be heard. Yet love and romance are not dead. They are so inwoven with our lives that they will remain even after the marvelous fabric of this civilization has been swept away and the last man and woman on earth stand side by side. It is a poetic wish that, at that time, the song of the birds may be attuned to the one great feeling that fills their breasts. LOVE AND LAUGHTER Theodore Roosevelt, said that, in gauging the character of a man, the capacity for honest, unaffected laughter is an element that should not be overlooked. The historian of the future who, in T^Titing of our most strenuous Presi- dent, applies this test to him, will find that he was an admirable example of his own rule. A really big man has a really big laugh. JMany little men, like^\dse, have big laughs ; ones just as small are liable to have big heads. But a man, who is intensely lumian and is gifted with intellectual bulk, is apt to show as much character in his laughter as he does in his talk, his walk and gesture. So were good Dr. John- son; that versatile giant Balzac; our graceful and witty Washington Irving, and the JMaster of all men who have thought and written, Ordinarily laughter is such a natural and spontaneous action that it causes no wonder- ment; yet, indeed, it is a powerful thing. Modern science has turned to it, so that we 124 LOVE AND LAUGHTER 125 may know, with more or less certitude, the philosophy of mirth. We learn now that sel- dom do two persons laugh the same, and that laughter itself is an indication of character; that, as an expression of good spirit, it is much the same, from the primitive New Zealander to cultivated Caucasian. Sir Arthur Mitchell, who had given much study to the subject, thus announced the sum of his finding : That laughter is a state of mental disorder, which is evidenced by the irrational and pur- poseless phenomena attending it, and the ab- sence, during their continuance, of all thought ; that these short states of mental disorder, which may be very frequent, do not hurt us, but, on the contrary, do us good ; that laughter is not even usually the expression of unalloyed pleasure or joy; that, on the contrary, it often expresses states of mind which are mean, contemptible and cruel, the moral faculty be- ing then in abeyance, and that laughter so aris- ing is only pardonable on the view that it is a state of mental disorder. It will be seen, therefore, that laughter is as broad as human nature ; yet despite the sinister dde, a laughing face is one of the cheeriest 126 LOOK UP tilings in life. One sees so few of them in New York! Cities grind out the humanities and so attentuate and starve the soul that very often laughter is the expression of tragedy. There are two magic gifts with which the Creator has endowed us more marvelous than any which have figured in the fairy fabrics of ehldhood; more powerful than any of the forces that modern science has grasped from the infinite ; more precious, by far, than all the fabled vrealth of Ind — tv/o gifts which so transfigure and exalt existence that, life with- out them would be a thing that lacked both soul sunshine. These gifts are Love and Laughter. From the germ-psalm to planet, clothed in human activities, Love is the vital note. The universe, mth myriad worlds, held in the hollow of the Creator's hand, draws from Love the power that animates it and makes its flashing glories. When the earth was still in the darkness of the Beginning and man w^as not, an Angel held in its heart all of the joyousness that was to come to the human race. It struggled for ex- pression, like a torrent held in bondage. At last it found freedom, when the Angel LOVE AND LAUGHTER 12T laughed. Then the earth became bright and starred with visible light. The winds awoke, and, whispering, carried the echo of the sound which circled round and round the globe like a golden cincture. Some very wise men say the earth was bom amid travail and pain. If this be so, it was christened with laughter. That may be the reason why tears and laughter are so nearly twdn. THE FUTILITY OF GOLD Money may make no caste for the dead. In the democracy of the sod, prince and pau- per are aUke. The grave-worm knows no dis- tinction, and finely woven cerements and costly funerals are things without meaning — futile forms laid at the feet of the Unknowable. This much, however, is known — ^that the pale, lax hands can carry no mite of treasure on the long, gray journey of the dead. The Book is simple and direct in its admonition, concerning the storing of earthly treasures. A man whose religion has been the acquire- ment of wealth, to whom the dollar mark has been a sacred emblem, and who, at last, has figuratively gained the whole world, is liable to experience a change of heart as old age grows upon him. Things are very apt to take on a different perspective, and a craving grow in the soul for that which he does not possess. Conscience grows with the years, or it be- comes atrophied. Its growth is encouraged 128 THE FUTILITY OF GOLD 129 when a man has time to sit down and look closely at himself. If he has been large in achievements and craft, he is likely to realize how little he is in his bigness. The soul that is not wholly dead demandsi something more than material things. He who amasses wealth, and lives for himself alone, is as a castawav on a treasure island, cut off from the world and the joys that come from the sympathetic intercourse of men. That the country has many such men is apparent because of the rising denunciation of the "greed of riches." Speaking of this class, Theodore Hoosevelt said: *'It is far more imi'ortant that they should conduct their busi- ness affairs decently than that they should spend the surplus of their fortunes in philan- thropy. Much has been given to those men, and we have a right to demand much of them in return. Every man of great wealth v/ho runs his business with cynical contempt for those prohibitions of the law, which, by hired cunning, he can escape or evade, is a menace to our community; and the community is not to be excused if it does not develop a spirit which actively frowns on and discountenances him." 130 LOOK UP A great gift to Yale perhaps realized Colonel Roosevelt's idea of something given ''in return." But it is doing good without lowering the ideals of the young men who are being benefitted by it. Money surely should be put to the use productive of the most good. Let the wealthy give to worthy objects. A step over the faint line between Mght and dark- ness, and money becomes dross. It is essential- ly a thing of life, and all of the forces held in it are human in their interest. Some time be- fore the war, a citizen of Hungary, had liis for- tune of $17,500 buried with him in his coffin. His relatives hearing of it, exhumed the body and divided the money among themselves. Such an occurrence is unlikely to happen here, for our wealthy men, who are experts in trans- portation and rebates, know full well the im- possibility of carrying specie on the *'long, long haul." THOROUGHNESS Thoroughness* is the fibre, flawlessly woven, which gives the highest value either to charac- ter or to attainment. Much that is merely superficial passes for actual quality, and there is little disposition to question, so long as fixed results are achieved. We are in a period of amazmg opulence, of stupendous greed, of impatience that thrusts aside moral standards the quicker to grasp the gain ; a period in which time is actually minted into gold, so that minutes are grudged, like sordid tokens which may be held in the hand and bartered. These forces are destructive of ideals; for, when one begins to measure the mental work of a man by a percentage table, the condition resolves itself, not so much into a question of what he knows, but as to his dex- terity in accomplishing rapid and gratifying results. In a time of shoddy, of specious imitation and criminal adulteration, thoroughness does 131 132 LOOK UP not receive the measure of respect that even justice woLild accord. Yet it is the stable ele- ment on which is based the strength of things that call into play the brains and hands of men. The false, the unworthy, must fall before the tests of time, while the things of thorough- ness take on a permanence like the imperish- ables that spring from the heart of Truth. The man, who has witliin his grasp a thorough knowledge of a science or an art, is a giant among liis fellows, providing he possesses an alert brain and a far-seeing percecption of possibility and result. The world will cleave to a plain man of thoroughness, despite the more impressive but less worthy figures that pass like ephemerals, for he is fixed and unshaken as a rock. Shp- shod method and the surface show of ex- pediency are short-lived, and those of you who go out to wrest from the world its favor and its rewards would do well to accept this as an unfailing truth. TREASURE OF A CHEERFUL HEART Riches cannot purcluise repose, tliongh that IS the promise they liold ont to those that have no great store. Repose is grown from the nature of the man, a harmony of personal force which gives to the character symmetry, poise and content. And of these the rarest is Content. It falls to most of us that we are moved by discontent and by little ambitions; and death comes and takes us, unsatisiied, on the long, gray faring. Happiness is not always foimd on the heights, amid tlie glow of rose and gold, thongli it may raise one from the clod to an infinite star flight. The laborer, earth-stained and sodden with sweat, wlio leaves the toil of the day with a cheerful heart, and who, in the hum- ble surroundings of his home feels at })eace with the rest of the world — that man is rich 133 134 LOOK UP in the possession of what men of millions might envy. The fairy tale tells of the prince who, satiat- ed by luxury and polite hypocrisies, went in search of happiness — and found it in a cabin in the forest. The materialism of the age gives us shot-swift automobiles and palatial express trains, instead of magic carpets; commercial craft, instead of the magic wand to turn dross into gold. Yet withal, are we in a fairy age when the things apart from man's acquiring are put aside, and the things within man or springing from him, are considered. So, it is true even to-day, that story of the prince and his quest — ^true because it was inspired by the wisdom of a great truth lying at the heart of human nature. Men may consecrate their lives to various material ends ; but, eventually all turn to the quest for happiness. He to whom it comes without an effort, is, indeed, abundantly blest. The discussion of wealth is widespread, and, in the present temper, there has been much un- reasonable condemnation of the wealthy and much, too, that has been just. Where the A CHEERFUL HEART acquirement of wealth by "modern methods" is touched upon, there naturally follows some ex- pression concerning lofty ideals. From which the uninitiated would receive the impression that they are far removed one from the other. Theodore Roosevelt in an address to school teachers said; "Moreover, where altogether too much prominence is given to the mere possession of wealth, the country is under heavy obligation to such a body as this, which substitutes for the ideal of accumulating money the infinitely loftier, non-materialistic ideal of devotion to work worth doing, simply for that v/ork's sake." That is a strong note. It rings true. Only through work is repose and content possible. A lapidly increasing part of the people are beginning to realize the dignity and the vital necessity of work in relation to the progress and uplift of society. Idleness is sterility. The next step is extinction. The man who works with hand and mind is the one who toils fruitfully, giving something worth while, be it large or small, to the sum- total of endeavor. A financier may feel a not 136 LOOK UP unreasonable pride in the fact that liis shrewd- ness has netted him $2,000,000 in a single day, as Mr. Thomas Lawson once confessed; but the humble laborer, who has bent liis back and strained his muscles in the glare of the sun, can hold hinjself in a higher esteem that every cent of the day's wage was earned in the strict- est honesty and that he gave full value for the money. With such a feehng comes the con- tent of effort. Witness, also, a Long Island Railroad laborer earning $1.20 a day, who learned that he was heir to $3,825,000. From his meagre earnings he saved enough to purchase three small farms, two of which he rented. He lived in a cottage, the like of which must have figur- ed in the fairy tale. The possession of the vast fortune could bring to it no more wealth than it already held. "Anyway," said Thomas, "If I never get a cent of the millions, what of it? I don't need it. I have been happy, with no thought of wealth and I will remain contented if it never comes." Here, indeed, was the fairy tale realized I ENSHRINING THE "SQUARE DEAL" An honest man is the noblest work of man» Though many of his virtues may be God- given, it is by his own conscious effort that he is honest. If honesty were a thing into which we were born, like the body with its varied functions, it would not be a virtue, but some- thing forced upon- us, precluding any choice. It is a virtue because it can only be main- tained by fixed adherence to the highest stan- dards concerning the obligations of men one to the other, and jealously safeguarding them from the enervating influences which spring from covetousness and avarice. It is easy to be dishonest. The path of per- dition is a piimrose way. The honest man does not always enjoy se- renity. It must come at times that he is sorely tempted to give way slightly from the fixity of his position and argue the matter with himself. More often he is compelled to use 137 138 LOOK UE the very sinews of character in repelling as- sault. The man who is honest with himself must needs be honest with other men, and "square dealing," therefore, works for good both ways. The untutored, rough adventurer, who goes to wrest a living from the wilderness and makes his rule of conduct *'a square deal," has the very religion of humanity and much, too, that is divine. Theodore Koosevelt said a great many things worth remembering. He had a talent for phrase-making; and, whether expressing the convictions which shaped themselves with- in him or some declaration of mere policy, he was very likely to put some thought into words which would linger in the memory. His "square deal" declaration, because of its homely bluntness and the spirit of fair play it expressed, is likely to be remembered long after the more important deeds of the man are dimmed by forgetfulness. The "square deal" symbolizes the ideal American spirit of man's relation to man ; and, though volumes upon volumes on sociology have been written to impress this obligation. THE "SQUARE DEAL" 139 still has it never been more tersely or vigor- ously expressed than in this phrase, so typ- ically Ameriran. Even if human memory should fail, which is unlikely, the expression is commemorated in gold, as it expresses the golden creed. St. Gaudens, one of the world's giants in art, fashioned the inaugural medal, as you may re- call, and on the solid gold one sent to the President was this legend: "Theodore Roose- velt, President of the United States, Acquum Cuiqiie.'^ The Latin lacks the frankness of the Roose- velt tongue, but it gives to the expression a classic dignity which, however, adds nothing to the strength of the original expression, "a square deal." The present is so full of dishonesty, trick- ery and is diseased by the gangrene of graft, that a "square deal" has a refreshing and in- spiring sound. It is like a voice from the homely past, when the gospel of each man was to "tote fair with the other;" when there were no vast accumulations of wealth to tempt men to fraud, deceit and shameful chicanery. The "square deal" is the expression from a 140 LOOK UP time when most m^en were "square,'* counting this the great part of their hf e conduct. There was much in the good old days that has heen left behind, to be supplanted by the improved thing ; but plain honesty is of an absolute qual- ity, which neither age nor custom can add to, nor in any wise improve. That is the reason the "square deal" is minted into gold, and, a living thing, shrined in the temple of classic tongue — Acquum Cuiquel THE TREASURE-DEEPS OF SILENCE Speech is the soul's interpretation, the ex- pression of the things that shape themselves in the consciousness of man, and, thus, coming forth, are readily comprehended. So wonder- ful has been the development of man that the time will come, in the far future, when the soul is so grown that oral speech will be an obsolete thing of dim tradition; and those who live in that time will hold intercourse in thought, which has neither sound nor sjanbol, but which will manifest itself in depths of feel- ing and sympathy undreamed of in this mate- rial day. Nor is it a dispiriting prospect, this sur- rendering of speech and all of its lights and shades, its varying beauties and graceful fluc- tuant moods, its tender caresses ; its fires glow- ing from the heart, which sway the soul as the flame in the breath of the wind. What ecstasies are there in silence! What 141 142 LOOK HP measureless calms and exalted delights! The master-minds of the world, who have looked with inspired insight into the great secret of life, have been saving of words, most of them; thoughtful men, silent creatures who, sunk in contemplation, found silence teeming with eloquent things. Thought implies silence, and so, in time, Avhen thinking man will have reached a large measure of his limitless development, those voiceless days Mdll be full of that which mere weak speech could not comprehend. A talkative person is liable to be a shallow one, as well; for, as the good old saying goes, "The shallow stream brawls the loudest!'' This truth, born of observation in a homely, plain time, finds expression tin many other similar adages. If any striking example were needed to-day it might be found, perhaps, in an unusual development in a well known yacht club. It was all because of a "talkfest," or, as it was more popularly styled, "a hot air festival." Two members were pitted against each other, and it may be that, in the enthusiasm of the contest, they said many foolish things. SILENCE 143 When the matter became the subject of public criticism, the conservative members, who knew the value of words and looked upon them with a certain reverence, were displeased at what they considered an undignified exhibition. As a result, one of the most conspicuous figures, the president of a great railroad, resigned, and it was said that other members of the same mould of thought believed that their business would suffer it they continued to remain in a club that descended to such frivohty. It may be contended, with justice, that a club is a social organization in which there should be certain relaxations which a man does not find in his business; and that, there- fore, it is hardly in the spirit of the thing to apply to it the same rigid measures as one would to mere commercial affairs. Whatever the merit of the discussion, the fact remained that man, while he has raised speech to great spiritual and poetic heights, has also sunk it to unspeakable depths, and applied it to un- worthy uses, wasting it with a prodigality that seems pitifully ignorant of its wonderful value. Strange is it, indeed, that of all the animals 144 LOOK UP which inhabit the earth, the one that is en- dowed with the divine gift of speech is the only one, which, through this very gift, makes a fool of himself. JMere talk is the badge of the fool; and, being a fool, he takes speech at his own valuation, and scatters like it chaff to the world's winds. THE MYSTERY OF LIFE The propulsive power of thought sends the human race foi ward to its destiny, which no man may read. Whence came we, and whither are we going, may find reply in the soul of the poet or shape itself in the mind of the daring one, who is both poet and philosopher; but there is one thing we do know, and hold it to us as a promise of what may come: we are rising steadily ; and each morrow, which comes and speeds into the mists of yestertime, is bright with things achieved in man's ceaseless struggle to know. What a marvelous amount of thought is in the long weary interval between the abode of the cave dweller and the complex modern apartment house, with its elevators, electric lights, refrigeration, steam heat and tele- phones — ^between the oldest Asiatic hiero- glyphic inscriptions and the modern news- papers, wliich come from a mechanism whose marvelous working is but the expression of 145 146 LOOK UP many minds given, one after another, to the thinking of the things to ultimate perfection! We are now benefitting by our inheritance of the "accumulated endowment of centuries of genius and labor." The thought that produced these things was astounding in its abundance. JMost of it went for nothing that can be counted in direct re- sult; but, inasmuch as it represented effort, it counted for good. No seriously directed effort may be deemed futile. In a common enterprise, one man's failure warns the other what to shun; what byways are barren; what fruits are bitter. Thus, he, who has apparently \^TOught to no advantage, furnishes the most advantages; the signal hghts of his failures make safer the way. As the race goes onward, it upbuilds, with surpassing cunning, structures vast and im- pressively devised, which other generations tear down, retaining only that which conforms to the newest revelation. Charles Robert Darwin's fame will rest on his "Origin of Species," and he gave to mod- ern philosophic thought a tremendous impulse. THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 147 iflashing an intense, white light into dark places, rudely stirring the bats and owls of bigotry and ignoorance. Later came the son of the great man, himself a scientist of high dis- tinction, who frankly confessed that radium had so upset accepted things that he was com- pelled to modify his father's theory of con- tinual evolution. "It is not my object, nor am I confident," said Professor Darwin, "to examine the ex- tent to which the theory of natural selection has needed modification since it was formu- lated by my father and Wallace. The mys- tery of hfe remains as impenetrable as ever." The more man knows, the more baffling and complex becomes that great enigma — the flight from darkness to darkness, with a flash of light between them, which spans the existence of a man. Whence cometh? Whither goeth? Why? The very spirit that raises man to the con- sciousness of his immortal part and makes him feel a kinship to God, impels him, in reverent profanation, to seek to rend aside the veil and stand in the awful radiance of Eternal Knowl- edge. THE CAUSEWAY OF SHADOW Wheeling along in the trackless paths of the infinite, the sun for a brief period is ef- faced by shadow. As we regard the pheno- menon through smoked glasses it brings home to us, sharply and directly, an appreciation of the mystery of life, as we know it, and that which has to do with the myriad worlds that circle on their unread journey through the infinite. If we could but clearly see, the smallest things about us might take on a significance scarcely less impressive than this vast celestial show, which is marked by features that stagger and appal the most daring mind. The moon, whose shadow hides the face of the sun, is such an insignificant body that the larger luminary might swallow millions of them. In the near heat of the sun this world of ours would go Hke a pinch of dust before the wind. Think of a pathway of shadow one hundred US CAUSEWAY OF SHADOW 149 and sixty-seven miles wide, Kke a gigantic funereal ribbon, reaching from the wilds of Hudson Bay across the Atlantic to Spain and Africa and ending in South Eastern Arabia! If we had the eyes and the beliefs of those men who were struggling out of the path of light thousands of years ago, we might follow, in this gigantic darkness, a fearsome army of shapes, all of the things born of darkness ; evil thoughts, which arise from the heart of men; their distorted passions, or the cold, well shaped ones which are even more terrible; the creatures of crime, of murder, robbery, incen- diarism and lust; the tragedies of love and the hopeless despair, and the embittered souls that created them; the grisly horrors of war, and all of the things which crowd on the black side of our existence. And indeed, who will show that they will not be there? Though much we know, we, indeed, know little. We are still in a world of chimeras, and we, ourselves, are but passing shapes. This mystery of light and darkness bids us once more ask man's eternal question. Lafcadio Heme, writing of one of the greatest minds the world has ever produced, 150 LOOK UP says: "To every aspect of the problem, Her- bert Spencer must have given thought ; but he has plainly declared that the human intellect, as at present constituted, can offer no solution. The greatest mind that this world has yet pro- duced — ^the mind that systematized all human knowledge, that revolutionized science, that dissipated materialism forever, that revealed to us the ghostly unity of all existence, that re-established all ethics upon an immutable and eternal foundation — ^the mind that could expound with equal lucidity and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history of a sun — confessed itself, before the Riddle of Existence, scarcely less helpless than the mind of a child." As we look at the marvel of the skies, we, who have sat at the feet of the great man and wondered at his grasp of cryptic things, like him, realize that we are helpless, mere children in a world of wonder and mystery awaiting the reading of the final chapter. A WOMAN AISTD A DOG The woman's eyes were red with weeping. There was a pathetic tremor in her voice as she told of her misfortmie. She had passed a night of suffering, each moment of it edged with the keenest anguish. She had not given way at first under the shock of what befell, bearing it with admirable fortitude; but, as time wore on, the sense of her loss, tortured her and Misery sat at her side. IMisfortune relentlessly forces home its philosophy, and this woman realized that be- reavement falls to the whole of the human family; that some griefs are as shallow and transient as a cloud upon a mountain stream; others as deep as the soundless seas. And, yet she wondered whether the rest of the world had her capacity for suffering. She felt that she was going mad. To her loss were added grim dread and torturing anxiety. The serene course of her life had been suddenly and violently disturbed. 151 152 LOOK UP That upon which she had lavished affection and those little attentions of love that fill the hours and days with care and caress — ^that up- on which most of her life centered — ^was now gone from her. Living scarcely seemed worth while. The thing itself was little, but to this woman the tragedy was great. She had lost her collie! The same day's chronicle told of a man, rough of speech, with hands calloused by toil and a heart so tender and so cruelly torn that he lay down with a smile and awaited the coming of death. He was starving. And, also, in his wounded heart there was a hunger that might not be put from him. He loved not a dog, but a woman, being happy in play- ing the dog's part and giving her implicit trust and devotion. He toiled in the mines, where the damp gloom blanches the face i^dth the pallor of Death, who bides there, away from the sunlight. At last he saved nearly $5,000, in each cent of which was the thrill of his effort, the puls- ing of his own blood. The future, so long dreamed of, and, for long years, so far away. A WOMAN AND A DOG 153 seemed near at hand — that future of serenity, rest and love ! Then the woman, v/ho dreamed none of these things, took the money and fled. From the far Pennsylvania mines the man walked to New York City, hoping to find her. Footsore, despairing and starving, he was at last unable to walk more. He felt he was dy- ing and cast about for a place to die — to *'die like a dog.'' Nor is there anything revolting in the way a dog dies. Where it feels the summons, with keener sense even than man, it seeks some secluded spot, shut out from curious eyes, and passes away in the very con- tent of death. The man found a place in a park and lay him face downward on the grass, the smell of green and of the moist earth filling his nostrils. Heart to heart with Mother Earth, the throb of whose mysterious activities he seemed to feel, a vast peace came to the soul, and he wept — wept like a sick child on the bosom of its parent. But he was not permitted to die. He lived to bear the blow more sturdily than the wo- man who lost her dog. But his grief had been 154 LOOK UP no greater ; which shows how completely either a great or a little thing may fill one's hfe. Also, that the extent of grief cannot be meas- ured by the cause. And, here the question not ineptly arises, which of these griefs was the worthier — that for the faithless wife or that for the faithful dog? CONCERNING CONSCIENCE An eminent lawyer making a special plead- ing for one of his clients, a giant of our na- tional industries, in explaining methods bit- terly condemned, said that nothing was done by his employer which was not wholly ^vithin ''business conscience." That, in itself, was the weakest of defences; for, in the methods that obtain in the struggle in any industrial field, the conscience is apt to be wholly lack- ing; and, where there is any differentiation as to conscience, that force itself is apt to be lack- ing. The great bard tells us that "conscience doth make cowards of us all"; but the 'busi- ness conscience," more often than otherwise, impels man to be shamelessly courageous in moral lawlessness and is apt to make him either a brigand or a wolf among men. Herein is the whole thing, the measure of the good that man may do, and know he may fall in the doing! "Conscience is the sense 155 156 LOOK UP through which God can and does directly speak to the soul of man, and through which His will can be impressed upon the heart. It is endowed with the power of distinguishing broadly between right and wrong; but, arti- ficially it may be perverted to any extent." What is acceptable in business might be considered wholly reprehensible in the per- sonal relation. Professor Ghent has treated of the "class conscience," which may be accepted as a perversion, and says: "The degree to which adulteration of staple goods and the substitution of inferior goods has grown in the world's markets appeals to all classes ex- cept those of the traders and the fabricators. It is simply monstrous; yet, to many, if not most, of the members of these latter classes, such acts are not only justifiable but emula- tory, and the threatened intervention of the State in the behalf of pure foods and drugs, honest fabrics and 'unsophisticated' merchan- dise generally is looked upon as oppressive and confiscatory. Even traders who have de- veloped or absorbed some general concept of social ethics are people, who without violence CONCERNING CONSCIENCE 157 to their conscience justify substitution and adulteration/' Out of all the base and the worthy in man— the divine light, the evil shadovt^, the clogging clay and the struggling spirit, the turmoil of impulses and ambitions — there arises a white purity from which all the virtues grow. It is Conscience. And it is because of these con- flicting things that Conscience is. It finds its fullest and most beautiful expression in struggle. It may rise to sublimest heights of self-denial, humility and sacrifice. We grow strong in moral stature by carry- ing cheerfully its burdens, even though they bend us to the dust. It has its crown. Like- wise its cross, and he who is crucified thereon comes into a Kingdom greater than any of those of the earth. HELPFULNESS AND HAPPINESS A big minded college president, observing our interesting social conditions, spoke of the sad isolation of the very wealthy, who, as he drew the picture, move in a narrow circle, de- void of worthy ambitions, and, pursued by ennui of purposeless ease, live out their lives as though they were a race of beings apart from the world from which they have arisen. The man who lives for himself alone is a selfish and unworthy creature. Most of our happiness, in the course of a serious, active life, arises from the agreeable and fraternal relations that we maintain with other men. We are not always enabled to aid with dollars; for, despite the natural sordidness of human nature, there frequently arise situations in which money can play no potent part — where a kind word and a sympathetic action bear value beyond any computation in dollars and cents. The miser, careless of all else, who starves 158 HAPPINESS 159 his body and soul that his hoard may grow, is a figure to which the world gives its desta- tion. He is the concrete type of inhumanity, a creature lacking in function, so far as the great social organism is concerned — a with- ered, dead thing. Likewise, may a person be a miser in his activities; and this is mostly aptly applied to the very rich that hve lives of fruitless idleness and personal gratification. Many such seek happiness, as though it were a thing that could be purchased, like an automobile or a yacht, not realizing that its possibilities do not always lie without them, but more often within. So it may be that a man might seek for years in all the far corners of the earth for the very thing whose seed he carries in his own breast. Pleasure, the alluring siren robed in the hues of the rainbow — diffusing langorous odors, her eyes hazy %vith seduction or flaming with passion — ^is a fickle fateful thing, whose drink ultimately turns bitter on the lips. Satiety is the grim shadow that follows in the wake of Pleasure; and when the shadow be* comes real and the substance the shadow. 160 LOOK UP then is there tragedy so deep that no words may describe it. The happiness that springs from witliin is a lasting, sustaining tiling, and its possibilities are only bounded by the spiritual capacity of the person. The very wealthy, it would seem, have in their choosing whether to be very happy or very miserable; but the brighter al- ternative is more apt to become a fact through a broad expression of social consciousness. A significant event, some time ago, was the election of an enormously wealthy woman to a Long Island school board. Energetic, sym- pathetic, li^-ing upon a magnificent estate, she was not content in that exile of the rich, of which that ^vise college president spoke. She evidently had the same pride of town and lo- cality that the most enthusiastic native feels, and her determination that the school should receive the best that advanced educational methods could give was wholly the manifesta- tion of a sinere interest. In the school the quality of American citi- 7:enship is determined and any reactionary economy here is false economy. Tradition must give way to the demonstrated superiority HAPPINESS 161 of what is new and helpful. Madame's in- terest ,therefore, was patriotic as well as so- cial, and in the expression of these activities, she doubtless found no small happiness. It is in apparently small things, hke this, that one very often gets actually in touch with the throb and movement of the big world, and so comes into a broader and more optimistic view of human life. TRUTH AND THE DEMON JEST There are some forms of microbes marvel- ously tenacious of life, being able to withstand heat so excessive as to kill any ordinary forms, and survive cold so extreme that the measure- ment thereof is beyond the familiar thermom- eter. A lie, which is one of the most poisonous forms afflicting moral life, is just as stubborn, withstanding the heat and cold of condemna- tion and spreading its insidious power under most adverse conditions. Truth travels more slowly, and it is an odd perversity of human nature that most of us are prone to accept w^hat is unreal and false rather than the homely, modest truth. It happens, too, that a jest, frequently ut- tered with the friendliest intention, becomes endowed with this quality of insistence, and, preserving through various modifications, be- comes accepted as truth; whereas it is a frivo- lous untruth. These are the wholly involun- tary lies which surround persons and events. 162 TRUTH 163 Disregarded at first because of its obvious character and lack of serious quality, it shapes itself into a thing of substance, of more power to gall and distress. The minstrel's old ques- tion, ''When is a joke not a joke?" may be answered by saying. When it becomes a trag- edy." In the lives of a majority of men who have stood long and prominently before the pubKc, it is safe to say that there are many of these grim things which have been repeated so in- cessantly, in season and out, that the victims finally conclude the torture is part of the cross of greatness, and so patiently endure it. Sometimes it happens, however, that a pro- test is made against the thing which, gro^vn from a small beginning, becomes a monster, threatening to crush its victim. Kentucky has been noted for the beauty of its women, the high breeding of its horses and the mellow perfection of its whiskey. That of course, was before the new order of things; but it may safely be said now that apprecia- tion of god whiskey in nowise made a drunk- ard of a man; for, as in things of higher art, moderation governed true appreciation. 164 LOOK UP Rational enjoyment, too, is governed by mod- eration, and the glutton, who eats himself into insensibility with costly foods, is on a par with the white savage, who used to bestialize him- self with the finest brand of whiskey. Moderation and restraint ever mark the gentleman, and, when a Kentuckian was twit- ted regarding the "sunshine tipple," he took it in good part, and even entered into the spirit of the thing himself. So it came to pass that, in the general estimation, Kentucky and whis- key were always associated; not offensively, but in a good natured, neighborly spirit. Colonel Henry Watterson himself, who is a man of serious purpose, probably has joked about it. But it came to pass that the joke dropped its smiling mask. Colonel Watterson was brought to declare he had been grossly misrepresented; that a story had been circulated of his raising mint on his country place near Louisville. And mint inevitably suggested a julep in minds im- pressed by the tradition arising from a jest. "As a matter of fact," said the Colonel, "there has never been a mint julep made on my place in Kentucky, and I do not know if TRUTH 165 there is any mint growing there. It is barely possible that there is, but I personally do not know of it. Now, there are a whole lot of people in the country — good people — who look on drink with horror ; and while I am not a total abstainer, if I take wine with my din- ner, as I often do, surely that is my affair and not a matter for public comment." Colonel Watterson is right. A joke ceases to be a joke when it affects any of those vital qualities in a man which make for high dig- nity, honor and integrity. He is a big man, and his genius and ability have enriched the history of our times. His long years of con- tinuous intellectual efforts clothe him in a worth, from which idle and ill considered jests fell harmlessly. That he thought fit to protest against the tradition showed that he felt keenly. A smaller man of the Colonel's years and of less mental calibre might have been complainsant ; but great souls think deeply and feel keenly, and there always comes a time in a man's life when, without pretense or simulation, he stands for the truth; wilUng to be accepted for what he actually is, no more, no less. USES AXD EXCUSES All excuse is the seemly garment with which we would cover the unsightly rent of derelic- tion, both in the doing and the not doing of the thing. A man who is forced into the posi- tion of making an excuse is always at a disad- vantage, because, no matter how plausible or how convincing, his always is the attitude of defense. Most of us are so constituted that we are liable to find justification for nearly every- thing that we do. It takes a strong character to come out flatly and declare, "The blunder is mine, and I am wholly responsible for the consequences!" It must so happen at times, however, that tliis stand is taken, not volun- tarilv, but because there is no other alterna- tive. To make a \drtue of necessity is a most graceful way in meeting a difiicult situation. It was the proud boast of one of the big men in American finance that he never was forced to make an excuse during his entire career. 166 USES AND EXCUSES 167 That does not mean, of course, that there never arose any necessity for the making of it, but rather that this shrewd, far-seeing person sharply reahzed the disadvantage of such an attitude, and, so avoided it. Political bosses, strongly entrenched in power, adopt the rule to make no excuses, but, to use the parlance, "Let it go as it lays/* Obviously, that method has its advantage; and, if it could be generally ajjplied to all of the activities of Hfe, the big problem would be easy of solution. But it cannot. There are some things so vital in their bearing that they have either to be explained or excused. Frequently the terms are interchangeable. The man accused of murder, who naively explained that he was incited to do the deed by "a little black man," was only a magnified example of a process that is going on all over the land every day. 'Not always as frank are some financiers who, having done, frequently refuse to tell how or why, so that the courts are often invoked and agitations set afoot for special legislative inquiry. In a time of evasion, of adroit shifting and gauzy equivocation, the excuse once offered 168 LOOK UP by a Des Moines man came with amazing novelty and opened up a field of psychological possibility, which might be richly cultivated by both finance and politics. As great discover- ers are heralded to fame, so should be pro- claimed to the world this man who created something absolute in its novelty. His name was Simon Brandt, and he was being sued for breach of promise. Evidently, the case was strong against him, for he made no denial that he did propose to the fair plain- tiff. On the other hand, he admitted that he might have done so, but said he must have uttered the words, to which she Hstened with heightened color, w^hile he was asleep! Simon Brandt, further explaining, declared that his bachelor life created the habit, w^hich had be- come so fixed as to get beyond control; and that, in his calls upon the lady, he frequently lapsed momentarily into the land of dreams. To determine the value of dream utterance in law is a vast undertaking. If it can be de- veloped that a man may speak intelligently and convincingly while he slumber, even talk- ing on such a grave responsibility as a pro- posal, who shall determine whether a person USES AND EXCUSES 169 be asleep or awake? However, if dream ut- terances are valid in law, it must follow that most of us, who might fear such an unfortun- ate development, must keep awake while €Ourting or at business, as every normal man should do. It is not a new discovery that some men who are taking a considerable part in the af- fairs of life do inopportunately go to sleep; but they are the ones, like Simon Brandt, who frequently are put in the position of making excuses. There is a great difference between him, who takes his business into sleep, and him, who takes sleep into his business. Here- in lies much of the secret of success and fail- ure. CRIME COLOR BLIND Time was when we heard a great deal of ^'financial moraiityj" and amazing develop- ments showed this value apparently httle in evidence. Time was, not long gone when there was a wide-spread financial immorality, so amazing in its boldness and utter disregard of all ethical principles as to stir the entire country. Persons formerly held in highest es- teem were involved. Revelations showed that these men, who stood apparently for the high- est ideals in personal life and in their business relations, had been well nigh criminal in their handling and acquisition of vast amounts of money. There is but one standard of honesty, and that is as fixed and inflexible as the law which governs the universe. There can be no modi- fication of it, no temporizing, no evasion which would render unto others anything less than vital, naked honesty. It has been noted by more than one astute 170 CRIME COLOR BLIND 171 observer thatj in America, there is a marked disposition to sympathize with criminals ; or at least to regard, with more or less indifference, the crimes that have to do with illegal meth- ods of getting money. Andrew D. White, a really big Amtrican and something of a cosmopolite as well, took note of this fact. He said that there should be cultivated among the people a greater ani- mosity for criminals. That we sympathize too much v/ith those who transgress is sadly apparent; yet, in the evolution of justice, the criminal should be exterminated. The worthy feeling in a man should be to battle against the lawbreaker with all of his energies; and, that feeling, infused into every citizen, should in time be productive of greatly changed con- ditions. Mr. Wliite, diplomat and clear sighted so- ciologist, doubtless knew when he expressed himself, that the condition was wholly due to false ideals, the acceptance of which vitiates society, politics and commerciahsm. This is the Day of the Dollar, and the man who wins it, according to the false standard, is the man who achieves and is worth while. 172 LOOK UP That the dollar is the badge of merit is ac- cepted by the disheartening many. A funeral in New York of a bank burglar, was attended by men of conceded respectability, including high city officials and business men. Politics may have felt a deep sense of kinship, but the attendance of the others was explainable on no other ground than that the men were lack- ing in healthy ideals. A philosophic gambler, in explaining the affair, said that the men w^ho mourned the bank burglar did so because he was thoroughly honest in dealing with his friends ; because he had gotten his money at a deadly personal risk, whereas other men, masked in respectability, too cowardly to take a chance, plundered mdows an dorphans. There were both sophistry and truth in this statement, but the grouping of the rude pro- fessional criminal and the genteel one is a symmetrical and wholly just conjunction. Every criminal does not get his legal deserts. If this were so, there might be a cluttering of the jails which would seem almost revolution- ary. It appears, however, that we have gone to the far point of a pendulum in this worship of CRIME COLOR BLIND 173 gold, and we are slowly swinging back to the other end of the arc. Our moral conscience is not dead, despite what some pessimists de- clare. There has arisen a fervid protest against "tainted money" and tainted men. And this sentiment will grow because it springs from that which is imperishable and will last as long as man lives his brief hour and vanishes from the earth. Honesty is the golden thread that holds society together and makes harmonious relation between man and man. As we grow in social consciousness it develops, also. At times, rank poisonous growths may obscure it ; but, it is still there, a tremendous power in the nation. Better days are coming, and there is no rea*- son to feel discouraged. As Mr. White ad- vised, *'Do not lend your strength to unreason, do not prostitute your genius or talents to in- justice; keep your faith in human liberty; keep your courage amid the storms of democ- racy; never despair of the republic^" PAMPERED PRESENT AND PRIM- ITIVE PAST Our modem life is a wonderland, but most of us, who move in it, only scantly appreciate it as such. Its mystery is ever before us; the soul's ceaseless task is the solving of it, lead- ing the way into terrifying abysses of thought, or rising to heights of rare elation. The mate- rial things are closer at hand: they surround us, press in upon us and so become more neces- sary in the mere process of li^dng. A man buys his shoes and clothing and ac- cepts them as matters of fact — as though they had always existed — seldom dreaming how many complex acti^^ties were brought into play to produce ordinar}^ things. We work and contribute our part to the great economic scheme, and, while we benefit others, there is a vast army that works for our comfort and well being. The primitive man fed and clothed himself \^dth his own hands and builded his own habitation. Now 174) PAMPERED PRESENT 175 none of these things are imperative to us, for human effort is so specialized in the care of man, and so perfected, that other hands not only house, cloth and feed him, but there are mse men to look to the care of his entire body ; and holy men to look to the welfare of that which is in the body, but which is neither of flesh nor blood, but of the substance that up- lifts and sanctifies prayer. There are hands to care for the hair; to shave the face, to train the eyebrows, to care for the delicate mechanism of the eye, to treat the nose, the mouth, the teeth and the ears ; to care for the hands, the feet and the entire in- terior apparatus which makes the man the most wonderful of machines. There is even some one to look after the brain; and, so well is this world of mystery known in the physical aspects, that it is charted and mapped with geographic exactness. If suddenly deprived of all these helps, a modern man would find himself in a dire situ- ation. Not being able to master all the pro- cesses necessary to the making of cloth, from the growth of cotton, or the shearing of wool, or the weaving, he would instinctively cover his 176 LOOK UP nakedness with the skin of some other animal, just as his ancestors did in the long years a gone. Thus he would suddenly be thrust back thousands of years in the scale of hfe. That all these varied things, which make for creati^'e comfort and refine life, might be swept away in a breath is a conception which is fruitful only in the field of fantastic specu- lation it opens up. Apparently we are held secure against such a lapse by myriads of in- visible bonds, and by the mechanical marvels of the age. And, yet there has been furnished an example of what might happen when, by a sudden freak of events, one is cut off from that society, which does so much for the indi- vidual and ends by annihilating him; also by what slight thiags we are held in our places during a particular period, and how easily it befalls that we may go lapsing backward. A modern steamship, furnished T^-ith the latest products of the genius of the time, broke a part of her machinery, a bit of steel — the very name of which has no significance to the average man. It had held them safe on their way, and in a practical prosaic century; yet, when it gave way the ship, crew and passen- PAMPERED PRESENT 17T gers drifted back into another century — ^into an old fashioned sea romance. Hunger gnawed them and they panted for fresh water. Ship after ship passed them and refused to throw a line to tow them back into the present. So they drifted as hopelessly as a disabled caravel on an uncharted sea. Fish, even sharks, were caught for food, and finally the crew, among them descendants of fierce Asiatic pirates, rose in mutiny. Nearly three weeks of this experience — cut off from the world — and finally help came. Out of a bit of the strenuous, primitive past they were towed back into the matter of fact realities of today. The men who replaced that piece of frac- tured steel did not realize how its injury worked a marvel in turning time backward. Every subject takes on value or loses it, ac- cording to the angle of the smallest things that relate to life and the living of it by man, not excepting the "eccentric stud" of a ship's en- gine HIS WIFE AND OURS Man may be of the sterner sex, but fre- quently he is weakest where he should develop the most strength, and the w^oman, whose lot is cast with him, exhibits a strength and fortitude far beyond her mere physical capacity. Character, well formed in woman, is cap- able of undergoing the most heart-breaking ordeals; for, to character she brings, con- sciously and unconsciously, a spiritual quality that refines and glorifies love and blesses her beloved; that tempers with sympathy all of her relations with the rest of the world. Not all fully approximate this ideal, but that the vest majority possess some of the \drtue is a promise of a larger fulfilment. "Character in a woman, as in a man, will always be found the best safeguard of virtue." For its inspiration and direction, it has prin- ciple, wisdom and integrity. Under the in- fluences of religion and morality, it grows with the delicate, ethereal beauty of the meadow- 178 HIS WIFE AND OURS 179 sweet, which mists along the summer stream, and the strength of an oak whose rugged breasts have been beaten and torn by a thous- and storms. Wifehood and motherhood bring shaping forces to character — something of self-sacri- fice and the capacity to suffer. And from suf- fering spring virtues which appeal to the whole heart of humanity. Love of home, the priceless prizing of family ties and conserv- ing the honor of a name — all these are ele- ments in character which are the sustaining power of the family group. Theodore Roosevelt in one of his addresses, touching on this very point said: "No man can be a good citizen, can deserve the respect of his fellows, unless, first of all, he is a good man in his own family; unless he does his duty faithfully by his wife and children." And, while a vast throng listened to these words, away on a New Jersey mountain farm a woman whose face was drawn and seamed with mental anguish, tearfully defended her husband. He had fallen from a position of high trust and was now a fugitive; his name sent broadcast through the land by prints 180 LOOK UP showing his face, so that any honest man, looking upon it might know that he was a thief; that he plundered the rich and the poor alike, and — ^worst of all infamies! — that he robbed the very friends who aided in his up- hfting. The wife was a pathetic, inspiring figure* Though the whole world deemed the man vile, she still clung to her faith in him, holding that, in some horrible way, the world had mis- judged him. "I cannot believe this evil-doing that is be- ing said against him," she declared, "and I am certain that, if he were here, he could explain away the terrible accusations. But what good, after all, would it do him to defend himself? No matter what he might say or do, no one will beheve him. My God! My God! He is iTiined forever; but still I hold him to my heart!" Thus the crudest blow fell upon those to whom this man should have "done his duty faithfully," and guarded from stress and storm. And in the sore trial, the devotion of the wife came with the smothered moan of a great hurt and a brave showing of unshaken HIS WIFE AND OURS 181 faith. Hers to suffer long and deeply; his to return and repent. Out of suffering, woman comes like gold refined; man, merely humbled and broken. The runaway husband returned, and, for- given by his wife, if he never realized it be- fore, must have felt it then — ^that a good wo- man's devotion may accomplish miracles, in that it cast out evil spirits and even raise the dead. THE BOY THAT CAME BACK Not all of the lessons that come to us in life do we learn. Many pass by unregarded; others are conned, soon to be forgotten. The punishments meted out by system and by cir- cumstances often have a corrective effect that persists until gray maturity. We grown folk are but "children of a larger growth," and what we have failed to learn in the carefree days of childhood, is often our loss as the years grow upon us. In childhood a thing is haply learned and as haply forgotten. In that care-free period, when responsibility seeks most zealously to im- press itself upon us, lies an abundance of life's bitter and sweet — for the pleasures and trage- dies of childhood are very real. So it is that those times of vivid impressions live undying in the memory and we revert to them mth a pleasure that is tinged with sadness, knowing that we can never live them over again. The years have exiled us forever from that land 182 BOY THAT CAME BACK 183 bright with dreams, and tuned to laughter and plaj^ And yet this strange paradox has happened — ^that the exiles who mourn their banishment are children still, governed by the precept and admonition of voices long lost in silence. It is a wonderful feeling to be thus, and you may recall that one of our most touching poems in the language was written by an inspired soul who wished to be a child again, "just for tonight." This story came out of California, telling of the romance of a boy, nearly forty years old. Twenty-seven years before, he was thrashed by his father for refusing to go to the store and get a package of smoking to- bacco. It might have been that the lad was of clean habit, and, hke Robert Heed, of the school reader, condemned the use of the "filthy weed." However, he finally admitted that he was wholly wrong in refusing to do the bid- ding of his father. Smarting under the punishment, he started out ostensibly to do the errand but did not return. Years passed, and he was given up for dead. Meanwhile ill luck befell his parents, 184. LOOK TIP so that they were in very straightened circum- stances. Then, on the twenty-seventh anniver- sary of his disappearance, the runaway en- tered the house, and, handing" his father a package of tobacco said: "I couldn't find the brand you usually smoke, but I guess this will do," Xor was the tobacco the only thing he brought with him. He had money enough, not only to keep father in tobacco for the rest of his life, but to maintain a home and give his parents every comfort. He had made a tidy fortune in Australia. Chancing to meet in that far away land a man from his native city, he learned of the condition of his parents, and, in a rush of memory, all of his childhood came back to him, its pleasures and its punishments. And, yearning to be a boy again, he figuratively be- came the boy, for he said to himself : "I guess it's about time I had done dad's errand. I realize that I have been quite a bad boy." To this man, indeed, was given a rare pleas- ure; for, in being a boy again, he experienced all of the joys of a return to the forbidden land and the melting tenderness which comes BOY THAT CAME BACK 185 from the awakening of those springs, which brim over in the heart of man when he looks back, from the stern reahties of life, to the time when everything seemed possible and mother love sweetened all the days. How many of us, in mature retrospect, re- view the things we might have done and re- gret that our hands did not turn to the doing thereof! WHEN OLD AGE IS EMPTY Some men live their lives well nigh to the end before they discover that their controlluig purposes have been scarcely worth while. To him who has carried years of heated activities in his more than three score and ten this re- ahzation must come with commingled sadness and regret, though remorse is likely to be a frequent element. Yet, it is age that clears the vision and touches conscience mth some- thing of the solemnity of the sunset that pre- cedes a starless night. A man at seventy-two, near the end of the journey, who, stripped of all illusion, looks back over the way filled with the deeds of his doing, is very apt to see things in their true proportion; and in what was esteemed great, discerning the mean, the petty, the unworthy ; in the little things, deemed inconsequent, be- holding that which was large with worth and personal quality. It is both a blessing and a penalty that a 186 WHEN OLD AGE IS EMPTY 187 man is permitted to become wise before death, earning the privilege by having journeyed toil- fully into the contemplative winter of life. It gives him an opportunity to make a read- justment, atonement or expiation — a precious privilege to the one who feels that a clear con- science sweetens the vfay of death. What irony must be in the fate that makes a man see how pitiful a figure he has been in the shaping of the really vital things of life; that displays him of a form big only in the pride of self and passing power, actuated mainly by self-interest and the disregard of ethical ideals! A master of national poKtics in celebrating his seventy-second birthday, while declaring he was at peace with all the world, made it clear that he was not at peace with himself. During his career he had been most savagely assailed and brutally abused. He was no theorist. Go- ing to the hidden heart of politics, he made himself master of its every move, drawing from it harmonies of graft and guile, as a master hand calls forth the fullest expression from a musical instrument. Nor is this simile inapt, for he was not without a taste for good music. 188 LOOK UP though he had frequently compelled his foes to dance to a dolorous tune. Not, with some- thing of melancholy, had he come to the behef that much of the time in his long career had been only empty dissonance, phantoms of sound and of things, melted away, leaving him still with something to be desired, to be achieved. Speaking of politics, he made this declara- tion: "But, after all, I do not know that the political game is worth while. I do not know, and if I had my life to live over I should play politics differently from the way I have in the past. I shall not tell any one what I have in mind. If I did, it would open a broad field of discussion and maybe lead to develop- ments, so it is just as well to stop with the statement that I would pla}^ the game differ- ently, if I could play it over." All of our necessary activities are worth while, and few men were better quahfied than this venerable man to determine the worth of a thing in politics. So it must be that this declaration can be construed either that he failed to take advantage of certain, oppor- tunities; or, having taken advantage to the WHEN OLD AGE IS EMPTY 180 fullest measure, he, at last was forced to the conclusion that, from the abundance of things so gained, there was no consolation to a soul, which would turn from sordid machine politics and calmly gaze upon the setting sun of a life full of unhealthful fevers. HAZARD OF HOPE There is unquestioned wisdom in the admon- ition not to carry all of one's eggs in the same basket. And, as hfe is full of disappointment and unwelcome surprises, it is well not to con- centrate all of our hope upon a single earthly tiling. Change is the very power that spins the globe. Only eternity is stable, and the hope that turns its expectant eyes thither is the frankest expression of the human soul. Hope is the spiritual heart of life, which sends its wonderful currents into all of our activities, sweetening the days and purifying the blood of purpose against discouragement and despair. It is hope that makes life worth wliile^ — ^the unread possibilities of the coming day, which will bring to us the snowy argosies of the soul's desire. Life without hope is a shadow without substance — a sentient death without a prom- ise in the morrow, or in the long night which knows no morrows. The hopeless, who, through 190 HAZARD OF HOPE 191 suicide, efface themselves, but do a thing already done. Many of the helpless elect to live, and so it is that the world is full of melancholy spectres which move and act like flesh and blood, yet are of the grave — ^the grave deeper and blacker than that fashioned in the sod, for it lies in the infinite soul of man. Often, when hope lies still in its cerecloths, a listless curiosity takes its place, and men, who hope for nothing, still linger on to see how the play will end. The lounger on the Paris boulevards, the peculiar type of New Yorker wedded to his Broadway — ^both blase and weary with the ennui of worldly wisdom — ^walk the thorough- fares where each incident and grouping, each parade, is an old, old story. The entire lesson has been learned and the time of reward and surprises is past; but, by the instinct that causes a man to cling to familiar things, they hold on until the end. Men cleave to life and endure its hurts and its anguishes either because they are strong to bear, or too weak to dare. 192 LOOK UP A suicide extinguishes himself because he either knows too much of hfe or too little. Diversity of interest gives us broadness and adds a value to life commensurate to the things occupying our activities. Men, who have con- centrated all of their energies upon one point, have given to the world marvels of science and material gain. But he w^ho makes the single compensation of self must have the strength to bear what dire results may follow. He must be so moulded as to stand the shock of the earthquake and the stroke of the thunderbolt. A weak man, assuming the burden, is over- come in a flash. Small objects take upon them- selves gigantic shapes in small minds, and trifles are frequently tragedies. When Richard Mormongue entered his apartments on the fourth floor of the Rue Popincourt, Paris, he found that his landlady had broken his pet pipe. He at once committed suicide by leap- ing from a window This man's life was centered on a pipe! Therein, mingled with the rich brown coloring of the meerschaum, were his content of the present and his hope of the future. When he was gone the neighborhood would recall with HAZARD OF HOPE 193 admiration what a perfect pipe he possessed! That was something to live for, something which would give importance even to death! So he thought, simple minded, honest creat- ure! And v/hen this thing, which held all of his hope and affection, was shattered, life owned nothing to hold him to it. Thus it is that we may exalt httle tilings or hold life itself small. And yet the world is made up of comparisons ; and what is pitiably small, and even frivolous to one man, is a thing so vast, so absorbing to another that even his life thrown in the balance may not out- weigh it. It is this very fact that gives the world its balance TRAGEDY OF SUCCESS The tragedies of failure are written in blood and tears. Grim would be the stain in the Book of Endeavor were it not that, from the bitterness of failure, good must ultimately come. It is so ordered that some men must grasp full blossoming, golden petals of success while others receive only the cruel sting of the thorns. Failures are danger signals which mark for fresh adventurers the barren desert spots and the depthless pits that await the unwary foot- ! step. The world has gone onward to a sure development over the whitening bones of failure, just as the great tide of ci\dlized life has swept over the deserts and prairies of the West, transforming them into farms, dotting them with cities ; and, in the bleak, melancholy stretches, where thousands of lives faltered and were extinguished, calling into existence by the magic of modern science, gardens and vine- yards which "blossom like the rose." 194 TRAGEDY OF SUCCESS 195 To the man, moved to effort by ambition, failure is only an incentive to renew the strug- gle; and, as it brings a keen enlightenment, it must often happen that one really finds in the wrecked and futile things a value which fairer causes could not yield. More poignant in its bitterness, in the un- speakable irony of the thing, is the tragedy of success — success which is still a failure. An inventor, who had put his very life blood into the things he had originated for more than forty years, died by his own hand. He patented more than sixty inventions. They enriched a score of men; but, though this man had the cunning to wrest from nature and the laws of mechanics secrets which made for progress and enlightenment, he was unable to garner any of the fruits thereof. Though he actually achieved largely, this was his only compensation. To the person, who works with a spirit of unselfish enthu- siasm, achievement is half compensation. And yet it is clear that mere achievement — ^the ela- tion of the thing done — ^is not sufiicient to meet the material demands of a man who must live. 196 LOOK UP The butcher and the baker must be paid; rent time comes around with ciockhke regularity. The bit of mechanism that marks the pass- ing of time is either a thing of golden promise or a diabolic steel-nerved monster, devoid of sympathy and heart. Our lives are governed by it. It is a tyrant, ever after us with its goad or the beckoning of some sweet seduction. To him who realizes how brief is the span pi human existence, the clock looms with the majestic grimness of fate. To this man who had come along a toilsome way, led on by the thing which he could never grasp, the clock, at last, must have proved a horror. When dis- couragement and despair at last seized him, and he felt how fruitless all of the years of toil and study had been, he might well have asked a question which men have asked who have I watched the struggles of humanity: "Why? (Whither are we going?" The inventor, who reaped notliing but fail- ure from success, at least had the compensa- tion of knowing that he contributed something to the benefit of his brothers. Though little material gain came to him, still he will be TRAGEDY OF SUCCESS 197 reckoned as one who reaped abundantly; for he who achieves, though not decked with the purple of fame and riches, is of the elect among men. BEAUTY AND LIFE It may be that beauty is the ultimate ex- pression of the soul, but it does not hold this relation to life. Here, it is the changeful flower broidered on the robe of materialism. To the seeing eye, it is found on every side, and de- velops in obscure places, hke a thought that struggles through the darkness to light and being. If the earth and its children were fashioned in absolute beauty it is to be feared that it would be full of sweet but terrible satiety, so overwhelming in its character as to lack it ; for character is a thing that finds its strength and stature in comparison. The lover, moved to extravagant flights of speech by the beauty of his mistress, may de- clare that his passion is infinite — that in every face, in every star he sees the features of the woman he adores. A daring and gratifying flight, maybe; but if the imagery were to be realized, it is not difficult to foresee that the im- 198 BEAUTY AND LIFE 199 varying sameness of the faces, which looked upon him from every side, would soon drive him insane. Eeauty of person is a gift of heredity and more often of a caprice of nature, which the iwisest minds fail of explanation. We cannot, all of us, be of the Venus and Apollo types, the reahzation of which, however, is nothing of our own doing; for we have no selection in the allotment of our raiment of the flesh. Some must, therefore, be fair; others homely. The endowment of the first may bring poignant tragedy; the other is not inherently tragic. Fair face and shallow heart, too frequently go together; and homeliness is often softened and transfigured by a beauty beside which formal types become vapid and unreal. Most of the women who have left their impress on history were not abundantly endpwed with beauty; but they were beautiful, nevertheless, creating, through mastery of self and subtle acquirement, a perfect illusion. Nor does one have to go far afield for ex- amples. Think of those among your own ac- quaintances, who, by personal charm, are en- abled to laugh at physical handicaps. A charm- 200 LOOK UP ing "vvoman, known from ocean to ocean, besides being no longer young, is as abundant in lively expression as she is of flesh. Yet, withal, a confirmed pessimist, full of the bile and rebellion of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Strinberg, and who fails to see the utility of mere woman, after talking a half hour with this one declared that she had the wholesome, light-hearted fascination of a girl, and even seemed to take on the semblance of one. Thus beauty of character, of disposition and aspiration may so triumph over the dere- lictions of the flesh as to produce the very thing that is lacking. The pathetic suicide of the daughter of a distinguished father because she was not come- ly 'like other girls" was due to an acutely sen- sitive nature. The quality in homeliness, which makes for beauty, is strength. The master of color and refined sensuahsm, Gautier, whose religion was beauty, looked with horror upon the blight of old age, the re- morseless touch which would take the bloom from the cheek, the brightness from the eye and choke, with ashes, the fires of the heart. Yet he was beautiful to the end ; for, despite his BEAUTY AND LIFE 201 years, the spirit in him was undimmed. Home- liness is a tragedy to many a woman who does not know how many of the essentials of real beauty actually lie within her. It is possible for a homely woman actually to think herself into beauty. ASHES OF DESTINY Youth sees through rosy glasses; the bleak and lovely of life, aHke, take on dehcate, mel- low tones — elusive ghosts of color beyond the power of any material brush. Old age, through flawless spectacles, wliich keens the vision and reveals vivid pictures, sharply defined con- trasts in light and shade and melancholy mo- notones in gray. Sorrow's banner is gray, symbolizing the mist of tears, the sunless yesterdays of sorrow. Elack gives to grief, deep, tragic, inconsolable grief that no word may measure, no plummet sound; that no one may comfort; that nothing may lighten save the touch of God. Those differences in heart-pain enable us to lapse naturally from gray to black, like the eastern sky at sunset. Grief is a tragedy ; sorrow an intermezzo of tears. In some Hves both are combined, and we have either a soul that rises triumphant from its lacerations or one that, hopelessly 202 ASHES OF DESTINY 203 overwhelmed, utters a plaintive cry of pain and vanishes into the eternal to-morrow, A septuagenarian who had gatherd for long years found himself beyond the allotted span of man, not holding the blooms of life, but rank weeds. Then he sent a bullet into his head, having first penned this message to his son: "You can't have things as you want them. In your old days you can't have them that way. You've got to prepare in your youth for that time when your hair turns gray. If I had it all to do over again I would have quite a different ending. But that is impossible, so I must go." Happy old age, it will be seen, owes an in- estimable debt to youth. The stripling flushed with confidence, who steps forth into the world of stress and struggle, carries in his hand all the secrets of the future, though he may not divine what will follow in the end. Time, rich in potentialities, one minute of which is something worth an eternity, men dis- sipate with the prodigal spirit of the spend- thrift. Time is our brief but priceless herit- age, and he who lives no idle, no unproductive 204 LOOK UP moment is he who builds for a symmetrical life, rounded into that content which shapes old age into a benediction. One man stands strong and rugged in his failure; the other is overcome. They are as a stern admonition to the strong and the weak who go out in the blossoming fields of Worth While to "gather handfuls while we may" — a lesson that life is a tiling of purpose and that no one may disregard the sterling and true without eventually bearing a bitter penalty. Peace may be the reward that awaits at the end of the way; and peace may come to us in the sere reaches of the troubled journey. To him who loves nature, despite the forces which break with harsh discords mto his existence, life cannot be wholly unlovely. He may reap along the way that which will be realized in its fullness at the end. Benson, the English poet, in his verses, "By the Wier," sounds, mth com- pelling charm, this note: Ah me! but we forget to live! We sell sweet days for wealth and pride; And when we have no more to give The soul is still unsatisfied! Well I have labored, I have planned; For once my plans, my labors, cease; God lays to-day a loving hand Upon my shoulders, saying "Peace." MAN AND HIS MOTHER By the love and devotion given to his mother may a man be judged. The fullest! measure betokens usually an upright man, apt to be generous, sympathetic and considerate. No higher praise can be said of a man than "He is devoted to his mother." It is a bill of character, written so that all may understand and read in between the words other things which have to do with the moral fibre. It frequently happens, however, that a man whom the world considers vile or unworthy finds his only honest instinct in his relations with the woman who bore him. One of the most odiously notorious of a gang of corrupt legislators, a bloodless, keen-minded person, with no sense of civic integrity unless it re- sulted in personal gain; a man as indifferent to public opinion as he was shameless in his relation to conscienceless corporations ; cynical, boldly defiant in the strength of his malign 205 206 LOOK UP power — this man's one redeeming point was his love for his aged mother. It was probably the only real thing in his selfish life, and it outweighed all else. And, as one was spurred to utterance of hot denun- ciation by outraged decency, a view of this other side of the master corruptionist was apt to cause a modified judgment of the actual man. It is held that no man is completely vile, and, though this is reassuring and what we would like to believe, still there are cases in which the rule is sharply questioned. The "vilest man in the world" was at one time sen- tenced to a long term of imprisonment, and, from the nature of his crime, it might have been surmised that he was never born of iwoman. The needy mother who begged her "emi- nently respectable" son for money for the bare necessities of life, and who was driven awav and threatened with arrest, drank to the dregs the cup of ingratitude Crucified upon the cross she had borne, her parched, withered lips were moistened by the bitterest draught. The unnatm^al son voiced his justification; MAN AND HIS MOTHER 207 but, if all other virtues were swept away and only "decency" remained, what sufficient justi- fication could he have? The widespread indignation over this re- markable case was one of the most encouraging signs of the times. The sacredness of mother, which has come to us through long, dim years, stands unshaken. Honesty may be a mere by- word, honor become a thing of derision and infamy, and graft sit in the high places, but this one thing, which the thinking anunal holds jealously to, is universal in its appeal. The mother of the race, the bearer of its travail and anguish, she will be haloed in the hearts of men as long as the earth lasts and creatures come helplessly in^o it from the mortal dark. Woman always has been elevated, admired and adored by civilized man, for she is that part of him which holds in her hand the cradle of the world — ^the destiny of nations. Man gives her respect, love and a place in his sphere of usefulness. As the queen bee brings forth her race and has others slave and die for her without one regret, so does man's labor really 208 LOOK UP circle around that throne upon which sits woman. If the past could only roll back its dreary memories; if the sleeper could only open his eyes; if the aeons of time could unfold them- selves; if from the distant depths of the long- centuries gone a picture could be seen, it would be that of woman. And from the skein in her hand would be threaded the only tie that has come down to us from the dim past, through the long avenues and myriads of time unto the light of the present day — ^the death- less tie of inheritance. THE "THOUGHTLESS POOR'* A well nurtured, complacent matron, serene in the assurance of care and keep, took occa- sion, in addressing a fashionable meeting, to criticise the "thoughtless poor." Amid warmth, light and comfort, from which the gaunt shadow of want is as remote as the crea- tion of a fairy tale, some persons like to sit and discuss the riddle of poverty as though it were a mathematical problem and one dealing with cold figures, and not with human beings. This good lady was politely indignant and curiously lacking in sympath}^ because the poor persisted in bringing so many children into the world ! Even a casual study of society will reveal the fact that many, who lack the courage to speak with such brutal frankness, regard the fact as a well-nigh unpardonable offence. Less births mean less souls to struggle and to suffer; less to struggle and to fail; less of the helpless and unproductive to burden and 209 210 LOOK UP wear upon the healthier part of society. They mean, also, the beginning of the decay of a nation. Any attempt to arrest the normal expression of life entails the most disastrous results to the social body, and the individual as well. The Rochester priest who draped the baptismal font in mourning tragically sym- bohzed the condition among his flock. "The thoughtless poor!" In the terror of want there is a task unending, bringing dull pain, and most of it whitened here and there by exalted self-sacrifice. It is impossible for a well-fed person, with no fear of the morrow, to argue from the \aew- point of a man whose innards are clutched by the talons of hunger, and who desperately sets about to get food for those who cling to him in the abyss of the submerged. "For men must work and women must weep," runs the song. And when men cannot work they may weep, likewise. ^^Tiat a blessing there is in tears that spring freslily from a strong emotion! Some griefs and tortures would kill like virulent poisons could they find no fluent expression. Tears "THOUGHTLESS POOR" 211 iwet the hard bread of God's poor and sanc- tify it. The voice of divine hope makes heaven near for the suffering poor and the children of the poor. Unloved, save by few ; shunned and neg- lected or studied as creatures barely human^ and put down as a sore care or a dire menace — outcasts of the earth too small to hold them — there is still room for them and the millions to follow in the breast of the Almighty, where they may rest in Eternal Peace. Thousands of pale, worn women, many of them actually starving, at one time paraded in London — ^wives, sisters and daughters of unemployed working men. They went to beg the Prime Minister to call Parliament to vote money for public works. Few persons looked upon the demonstration unmoved. "The dep- utation," saj^s a spectator, "was composed of women — and women typical of the class whose claims they had come to urge. They wore the pitiful garb in which the sordid poverty of a great city is clad, and some of them carried in their arms wailing children, whose crying not even the presence of a Prime Minister could hush." 212 LOOK UP And later nearly ten thousand unemployed men held a demonstration, some of their ban- ners bearing these devices: "There is a Limit to Human Endurance/' and "Curse Your Charity! We Want Work." To a man will- ing to work, but unable to get it, charity comes with a sting. He is forced to accept that which takes away his independence. Formal charity is a cold, mathematical proposition, and too frequently becomes a scourge and a mockery. John Boyle O'Reilly, whose great heart overflowed with human kindness, once referred to Organized charity scrimped and iced In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ. Sacrilege? No, Only the reproach of cold fact. If sacrilege there be, it was in calling some charities Christian. Many desperate souls have willingly gone to death rather than bear the humiliation. Self-respect is thus fre- quently held dearer than life. But one will never fully understand and be able to give intelligent, warm sympathy and to realize how the remedy is to be brought about until he has descended into the pit and "THOUGHTLESS POOR" 21S beheld the awful things that are there; until he has felt a blood kinship to the pale people and held in his own heart all of the anguish, all of the tortures and pain that make the cross upon which the abject poor are crucified. DEVOTION OF THE DUMB The friendship of the dumb beast for man is one of the most beautiful of attachments. It is frank, it is unselfish, and never, at any time, is it tainted by the hypocrisy that rankly overgrows the relations of humans. The worst, and, at the same time, the best, may be said in the truism, "A beast may eat you, but it will never lie to you."" Insomuch is the. beast exalted above man, who will not only lie, but rend and devour his brother in the hunger of acquisition — a hunger far more terrible than that which drives the monarch of the desert to slay. The increasing complexities and artificiali- ties of life so cloak us, so influence thought and action, that it not infrequently happens that a man becomes divorced from his real self. Or, if still conscious of that self, he is not honest* in his obligations to it. Unreality and insincerity mark the spirit of the times, and more than ever has friendship 214 DEVOTION OF THE DUMB 21S become a fragile, pictorial growth of a fair day season, to be torn and shattered by the first blast of foul weather. This is not a note of despair; for the oaks of friendship still flourish in their sublime strength, beaten and torn by storm, but still deep-rooted and triumphant, yielding a sooth- ing shade in which the footsore, the heart- weary and the sorely smitten may find rest, comfort and inspiration. This symbol of strength and constancy, which inevitably oc- curs to him who would adequately express the thought, takes us back to nature and the be- ginning of things. At the beginning always is the truth to be found. The man who is the friend of beast and bird is quite near the beginning. Such a man was Peter Shannon, now dead, who in his thirty-five years at the Central Park menagerie knew and sympathized with the moods of all the jungle folk, from the tiniest bird to the bulkiest elephant. They sensed him as their friend, and, in that strange com^ munion that may grow between the dumb and the speaking animal, explained to him the mys- tery of the woods; of the wordless message of 216 LOOK UE the seasons which tells beforetime what is to be; of the voice that fills with vague whisper- ings the woodland night, and the hurrying ghosts that pass at dawn. He learned their msdom, and so learning came closer to nature. Therefore, he was a man of heart, who felt for all Hving things, and who, like his dumb friends, was honest in his friendship, steadfast and unquestioning. A London reviewer, writing of the verse of Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman, said the one raises the beast to the level of man; the other sinks man to the plane of the beast. Nor is the latter so unfortunate as it sounds, for the verse of Mr. Carman, while smelhng of the earth and breathing an ardent kinship to beast and bird, reveals a depth of soul and a human sweetness as grateful to the jaded senses as the balsam of the pines or the wild- wood odors after a spring rain. Man in spirit may "sink" to the animals and learn much. JNIen with bigger brains than Peter Shannon have given their lives in study without learning as much of nature, and the wisdom there abiding, as he. He took not DEVOTION OF THE DUMB 217 l)rain with him, but heart. What came to him in return was satisfying. He felt a close personal relation to the bird that flew to his hand. The tigress, in her striped dress, lazily stretched to show all of her sinuous beauty, and narrowed her eyes dreamily as he stroked her head. She counted it a caress and knew it was sincere. She might have turned and mangled him. Many a woman has thus repaid caresses. Mayhap these things and many others thought Peter Shannon, as the knowledge of human nature and the nature of animal kind grew upon him apace. Who shall say that his dumb friends did not lead him to a wisdom beyond the teaching of books? THE HOPE OF THE WORLD It happened at one time that in the heart of a master of men there was shaped a dream, a strange and beautiful vision. He saw the races who had regarded one another with sus- picion, envy and hate and who, in dispute, had fallen upon one another and slain- — he beheld them throw aside the sword, while their angry voices were softened and hushed. A measure- less calm had fallen upon them, and, as each man looked into the eyes of his brother, he saw there a kindlier light, an expression that be- spoke a kinship never before felt by men, one for the other. They turned their faces toward a broad white way, a road level as a plain and spotless as the snow that lies on unsealed peaks. It was bordered with trees, which sent from their great arms a generous shade. Flowers broi- dered the road, rich, profuse blossoms in a gay riot of color, filling the air with a perfume that 218 HOPE OF THE WORLD 219 brought a strange content to the soul. For this was the road to Peace. The city shone in a white glory, so that the eye was dazzled. The men who beheld it paused in awe. It seemed as a place that no mortal hand had builded, and in their hearts was a conflict of feeling — ^the old warring with the new. The new whispered that here was the beginning of a higher hfe, where men came well nigh into the God-gift, casting aside those which had marked the savage man. The old feeling, which measured its strength by thou- sands of years and was in the very blood, told them that what they saw was unreal, the shadow of nothing that existed or ever would exist. Yet their hearts swelled in a common hope as they beheld the great temple, majestic and serene, its columns rising like giant arms to uphold mighty sculptured burdens. The steps flowed in a giant cascade from the entrance, wide enough to bid the passing of all races and those that were yet imbom, even to the end of time. So they entered. And it seemed that the temple walls stretched away to the four sides 220 LOOK UP of the world and the place was roofed by the stars. About an altar glowed a soft, steady radiance, which now and again flared and was shaken as though in the breath of the wind. And they knew, though no word was spoken, that the flame was the Hope of the World. On the altar was a full blown rose, than which the snow was not whiter. A token, they knew it; and to them it carried a new signifi- cance. The olive branches beside it were ber- ried with the blood. At the base of the altar was a sword, red mth rust, over the cold hori- zon of whose edge millions of souls had passed in anguish. Down its runnels had flowed blood in a tide sufficient to make the swinging earth show crimson before the affrighted stars. The races of men looked and pondered. And unnumbered dead came trooping up the twilight way of the past, a horrid, distorted, grewsome troop, and, gazing on the scene, murmured in muffled voices: "Have we died m vam i And the races of men thereupon made cer- tain agreement and went their ways. Still the old spirit was strong within them, and when differences grew betwixt two they reached for HOPE OF THE Vv^OHLD 221^ their swords, even as the savage forefathers of the race had done. It came to pass that when the City of Peace was called to their memory they answered by word and action: 'That is only a dream!" Some dreams are woven of the silver and golden threads that brighten the black mantle of sleep — wonderful creations, filled with flow- ers, music and love, with wealth and fame, or vivid with bewildering grotesques that fade in the waking hours, like a dance of nymphs in the passionless gray of a woodland morning. Then, too, there are other dreams more beauti- ful than the rest, which have to do with living and those who have not yet come into life — dreams born of man's passionate longing for nobler things and not of the fabric to be dissi- pated by a down-sped mind; dreams which, by their very nature, are destined to take form and substance and assume a place among ac- tual things. They have the deathless vitality of the soul, as they are themselves an expres- sion of soul, and will persist until they are at last clothed in glory of realization. To the ordinary eye, the way may not seem broad and v/hite, its temple may not loom with 222 LOOK UP impressive majesty and the altar hold no great white rose; but the City of Peace holds this beauty in the hearts of kindly, wide-visioned men who strive for the betterment of the race. It is a reality and the way thither is now being pointed by the hand of God! THE BEATITUDES OF BLOOD When a man is overflowing with healthful activities and possessing sound convictions, and not only voices them, but puts them into deeds, the verdict is apt to approximate him as being full of "good red blood." So, also, is characterized a narrative abundant of daring. Blood is a great determining factor in the human race. It has been shed so prodigally that the very earth sickened ; yet each drop of it is so precious that no man may gauge the value thereof. Some men shed it, exalted by the noblest feeling; others, marked by the basest of im- pulses. Yet greater than the man who has had his veins opened in the war is he whose blood flows into his work through the energies of his hand and brain. At one time love was glorified above labor, and in this rose-hung period, which came as a languorous lull before a great awakening, the man who could turn a verse was greater than 223 224 LOOK UP the lords of material achievement. This is no less true to-day, but we do not feed on poesy, and the folk that write acceptable verse are as numerous as the singing sands of the Persian stor}^, and even as musical. In time agone one man, Frederick Von Trenk, wrote his heart's passion in blood, and the verses, though the interpretation of an extraordinary mood, evi- dently lacked the vitalitj^ of the rhythmic broideries of some of the cavalier poets. The story was brought to light some time ago by the sale of the "Blood Bible" at Bres- lau. It was bought by one of the descendants of the poet for $200. Thus runs the tale: Von Trenk, imprisoned and bound in chains for making love to the King's sister. Princess Amelia, whiled away the weary bom's by writ- ing sonnets in honor of the lady of his love. They were inscribed on twent}^ blank pages in this Bible, a gift of the Princess — and every word was written with his o^vn blood. It is unusual writing fluid that makes this stor}^ stand out, and blends, with its crimson, the glo^ving tints of romance. Yet, in compari- son to the actual, productive deeds of the blood, this one is not only not extraordinary but triv- BEATITUDES OF BLOOD 225 ial. Every action of our lives is shaped in blood ; not so that the scarlet flows in the sight ; but each thing we do is one of the innumerable burdens borne hy the tide of life, whose un- ceasing flow means existence. When its warm tides cease to ebb and flow there comes a twi- light calm, which men call death. It is said that, by Nature's wonderful proc- ess, the body is completely changed every seven years, so that in the septenary dispensation, no man should deem his material part bej^ond re- demption. The body of us is a changeful hu- man document, written in blood. The laborer ho bends to rearing an edifice, taxed by toil until his muscles ache, puts blood into his work ; for, as the effort burns away the tissues, the fresh, vivifying blood supplies what is lacking — that which he has put into his task. What treasures the blood has conveyed to the minting brains of Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius and the rest of that dim army which pioneered the thought of an endless future, or to those of our great moderns who have accom- plished marvels of scientific achievement! There is blood in every thought, so that when the thought becomes the thing, the blood is still 226 LOOK UP in the new form. The fast express train that meteors its way through the night at seventy miles an hour, though composed of steel and wood and animated by heart of fire, is, never- theless, a thing of flesh and blood as much as the iron-nerved man who holds the engine lever ! The blood of man is in all things that come from his hand. It is in the great thought that springs from his brain, with this thing added — soul. Too precious is it to be torrented lq a modern saturnalia of death or even to trace the despairing song of a lover ; for in a single drop of blood lie potentialities which might change the spirit of the entire world. FEET OF CLAY Big men frequently have little vanities. An individual whose power might sway a nation; a soldier whose feats of arms have won the admiration of nations, or a giant of finance or industry, whose activities flow around the world, may bend submissive to things so puny and of such actual unworth that even weak men look on in astonishment and pity. Which shows how difficult it is to approximate the ideal of the god-man — ^the man who not only raises himself to great powder above liis fellows, but who, by this very fact, becomes divorced from the failings and fancies of ordinary men. Fiction has created the figure; but fiction either adds something to actuality or withholds something of the unlovely truth. Power in- creases the stature of a man. It envelopes him with a purple that marks him from his brothers. It gives to him, therefore, an aloof- ness and holds one apart from a handshaking, 227 228 LOOK UP slap-on-the-shoulder acquaintance. Familiar- ity is checked and abashed. This, in fact, is the meed of the great, as [well as a condition that develops without con- scious effort. Power has aureoled many a saint and haloed many another that will never reach the elevation of a niche. But the aureole and the halo are not about the heads of common men. We are prone to believe that they are for saint and superman. A daring, fascinating theory, this of the superman. A demi-god cannot afford to have feet of clay, though his hands be formed of it. Take any one of the great figures that have risen through the sheer force of a powerful, insistent passion, and smite his feet, which, a sky-flight from his head, press upon the earth, and you have revealed a man who can feel as other men do; for the greatest of earthly tasks is to throw off the thraldom of the clay. It has been related that John D. Rockefeller, whose bald head has indelibly impressed the personality of the "Oil King" upon thousands who have beheld him in the flesh, and remote milKons who have seen him pictured in print — it was told, in circumstantial detail, how he FEET OF CLAY 229 made his appearance at church under the friendly, but plainly artificial, protection of a wig! Nom a man who wears a wig, or who dyes his hair or mustache, deceives no one except himself. If Mr. Rockefeller actually did wear a hirsute thatch it would be vastly interesting to know the mental process by which he was led to cover, even for a brief period, the hair- less dignity of his impressive pate. His is a remarkable head — in one sense, the greatest head in the world! There is nothing of it to be apologized for. If apology were necessary, his domination over vast activities and the mountain of gold he has piled up stand effectively to offer it. By his head is shown the whole story of his achievement, of his pas- sions and his power. It is as much his monu- ment as is his wealth, and more so, too — ^it is the house wherein is stored a marvelous mind. Just as soon deface it with a mask of another man's hair as to put a mansard roof on a Greek temple. The force which brought this even-pulsed, clear-sighted man to do so must have been resistless. 230 LOOK UP Can it be that he became ashamed of his baldness? It is by no means discreditable or unworthy. Can it be that vanity prompted the act — vanity that made him wish his head was like that of another man? Nevertheless, this much, at least, stands out clearly: A man who wears a wig, after a period of distinguished baldness, is afflicted with a vanity at a time when vanities should have all fallen away — or are returning afresh for a revived youth. In either case the super- man has shown that his feet are of clay. GOING TO THE DOGS We are in a period of what is popularly called "nature study"; and into great cities, where men are crowded and herded, there comes a call to God's open spots and revela- tion of what beauties and marvels are placed there in the great scheme of nature. Also, we are given a nearer and more friendly view of animal hfe. Thus it is, while we are enjoying an increasingly high state of development, so refined as to leave us with diminished humani- ties, this reversionary summons calls us back to primitive but healthful things. As we get nearer to nature, we approach closer to the heart of truth. The man who reads the mind of a dog is greater than an inspired poet. For he is inspired; is a poet, and much more. Byron's poem to his dog friend is one of the most beautiful, as well as the most bitterly keen things in English. The dog has long, long years been the sym- bol of fidelity, and it must have been some one 231 232 LOOK UP just lacking in nice discrimination who first used that expression, "Going to the dogs." Even now, that we view the dog with keener appreciation and sjTtipathy, this phrase still carries with it condemnation and approbrium. Many a man could go to the dogs to great advantage. There he might learn many vir- tues lacking both in himself and his fellows. It is often, too, that a dog has more decency than a man. And this, also, is a moral trait that one hardly looks for in dumb animals. There has been told, in the news, a story of how a faithful dog saved its mistress from death at the hands of her husband. It lay quiet during the time that the man foully abused the young woman ; but, when he struck at her heart with a knife, it leaped upon him in savage rage. Of the two enraged brutes there is no question as to which was the nobler. Another case is recorded wherein a dog saved a girl who was battling for more than her life. A faithful bull terrier fastened his teeth in the right arm of the man and desper- ately fought the miscreant into flight. The record of the summer seasons shows many GOING TO THE DOGS 233 cases in which dogs have gone to the rescue of drowning persons. One of the finest bits of bookmaking is de- voted to the history, hfe, habits and breeding of the dog. Also is there quite a voluminous dog literature; but the human side of the brute^ — ^the part which draws him nearer to us and gives him a place deep in our aif ection — is the one that shines most impressively in liter- ature. And recently Albert Payson Terhune, a man of large humanities and a fine literar}^ craftsman, has added to the appreciation of the devoted dumb one of the most exquisite and appealing studies in all literature. A dog belonging to a New York physician, who is an authority on physiology, could sense its master's moods more accurately than the doctor's wife. It seemed able to grasp even complex ideas conveyed by speech, and the owner addressed it as he would a human being, and was clearly understood. This dog had often been sent from the lawn to some particu- lar room in the house to bring a specified ob- ject, and had done so with the alacrity and intelligence of a model servant. And you have probably read of that won- 234 LOOK UP derful dog in "Hypatia." It is a creature of silent wisdom. Its master, realizing tiiis, con- cluded that, beside the brute, all knovdedge of life, his education and his philosophy, amount- ed to naught. He might have gone and sat at the feet of some Gamahel, but he had gained a wisdom even bevond this, and so concluded to let the dog be his mentor. Giving up comfort and riches, he actually followed the dog out into the world, and finally — as the novelist tells — ^into light. As this man was wise, so men to-day may follow him with profit. We are too apt to bound the whole imiverse by ourselves. JMan is at once the greatest and the least of eartlily things. Herein is a dog blessed. It has no egotism and, therefore, never jeopardizes its self- respect. Let us reverse the apphcation of that old saying and make "Going to the dogs" an expression of beauty and worth. Those who love dogs will appreciate the de- votion w^hich gives the brute a burial like the human; the dumb friend who is "denied in heaven the soul he held on earth." One may read the epitaph over BjTon's dog and cease GOING TO THE DOGS 235 to wonder why General Daniel Sickles had his pet buried in the family plot. Thus the rest of the poet's friend is marked: Near the spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, All the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of BOATSWAIN, a dog, who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803 and died at Newstead Abbey, Nov. 18, 1808. TRAGEDY OF BEAUTY The eye of experience is deceived by no chimeras. It sees truly and at a perspective that gives to things their proper proportion and to actions their just relations. It keenly appreciates all that is bright and cheerful, be- cause it unfailingly perceives the darker side, vnth its shadows and sorrows. All of these tilings have to do with us humans — ^^^^hat we do from day to day and what befalls us in the doing. It is a great world, full of contradic- tions, and light or the darkness, just as we regard it. Into the natural world the Creator placed, with a lavish hand, all of the things that are reflected in the soul of man. Beauty He gave in myriad forms, so bounteous a dower that it might impress itself into the nature of the race so as to become as much a part of man as any of his passions. And beauty is a passion with many. If it possesses 5^ou, a look at the star-strewn sky, 236 TRAGEDY OF BEAUTY 237 from the hot pavements of the city, will fill your soul with harmony and content. The fields, starred with purple at eve; the hills, whose green is shot with gold at noon, and with purple at eve; the quiet stream that .murmurs through the sedges, or the bold mountain tor- rent that brawls and blusters on its way to the sea; the mountains, the valleys, the trees and the floral life scattered by Spring Fud kissed into passionate maturity by Smrmncr ; the eter- nal skies, with the changing songs of light and color, and the royally appareled people of the sky — all these make chapters in the marvelous Eook of Beauty. And no man, in life, may read it to the end. We, who love beauty and know what prec- ious things it can bestow, deplore the vandal- ism of a coromercial age that vdll sacrifice the miost lovely forms of nature for mere gain. Commerciahsm is a foe to beauty or anything that possesses it. For, where a thii^g lacks the warmth of soul, it has no appreciation for what appeals to that which is most unselfish in man. You may recall the verses of the school- book: ** Woodman, spare that tree!" Read them now, and, though they may not seem as 238 LOOK UP companionable" as they were in the old days, you will admit that the heart appeal is there. But our beautiful forests, with all their mys- terious wood hfe, are slowly disappearing. ]\Iodern progress — ^whether it be in some green oasis of a street, in a desert of brick and stone, or in a primeval forest — ^halts not for beauty. This material spirit, if carried far enough, would strip the world of everything fair, out of which a profit could be reaped, and compel us to live even more than now an artificial life, surrounded by make-believe things. The woman who wears an aigrette m her pretty hat may be a tender-hearted soul, and if she is told that her purchase of the feathers encouraged a CTuel slaughter of plume birds she might shudder and say it was to be de- plored. But she would hold to her aigrette. If told that the aigrette was stained with hu- man blood she mio^ht reluctantly discard it. And so., in sentiment, is marked every plume feather now worn. For the protection of plume birds a national association of earnest-hearted persons has been doing splendid work. In Florida, where the rookeries are most numerous, wardens are ap- TRAGEDY OF BEAUTY 239 pointed to the task of safeguarding the birds and their young. Guy M. Bradley, shot and killed on Oyster Key, was murdered by men who had sworn to take his life, WilKam Dutcher, at that time president of the National Association of Audubon Socie- ties, said: "A home broken up, children left fatherless, a woman widowed and sorrowing, a faithful and devoted warden, who was a young and sturdy man, cut off in a moment, for what? That a few more plume birds might be secured to adorn heartless women's bonnets. Hereto- fore the price has been the life of the birds; now is added human blood. Every great movement must have its martyrs, and Guy M. Bradley is the first martyr in the cause of bird protection." TIME'S TRANSFORMATIONS Progress, wing-footed, robed in the myriad glories of achievement, and with her eyes fixed unwaveringly upon the future, speeds onward, singing the anthem of endless change. Genera- tions pass away like phantoms and new, surpris- ing things take the place of the old — of what we once deemed the stable, the true and tried. It was a toucliing reminiscence told by a Confederate veteran, who had listened to Jef- ferson Davis' inaugural address and years afterwards stood on the identical spot and heard Theodore Roosevelt dehver a newer message to the South, revealing a broader hori- zon and hopes and aspirations, which are writ as the epitaph of the dead past. Planter feu- dahsm, with its cultured leisure class and its nation of slaves, has passed away amid blood and flame, to be supplanted by an industrial class. Those who toil in bondage in the piti- less round of the mill are slaves — not black, but white. 240 TRANSFORMATIONS 241 Frequently, thus, forms survive, but names change, just as words persist to be worn by things wholly unlike those which brought them into existence. Knave originally meant a man servant; villain, a farm laborer attached to a \dlla ; pagan, a villager ; dupe, a dove or pigeon ; lewd, of the laity ; churl, a tenant at will ; mis- creant, a misbehever. And, so, down a long list of words, once, at least respectable, but have become transformed into things that have not a ghost of a semblance to the original. These are little things that carry a big lesson, a mournful one to those who, holding jealously to the present, realize what unfeeling oblitera- tions and transformations Progress will surely bring about. Bear this fact in mind when you go to the Horse Show, the magnificent Hippodrome of Fashion, in which the Horse has already be- come but a picturesque incident. You turn from the dun-colored arena to the great oval of humans and fill your eyes with the shimmer of silks, satins and the misting of finer fabrics ; the polite pomp of nodding plumes; the cold fire of diamonds in Golconda abundance; the liquid glow of depthless sapphires; the cool. 242 LOOK UP satiny sheen of pearls, scarcely fairer than my lady's teeth, moist with smiles; the passionate flame of rubies, too frequently showing beneath cold, passionless lips; emeralds, green as the soul of the northern sea aflash in the midnight sun; cunningly wrought gold, poems of chas- ing and strophes of incrustation, embodying beauty and love and dreams which are the!.- children ; blooms that bring into a highly arti- ficial hfe the very apotheosis of artificial growth — ^hothouse flowers ! And in all this glory is the Horse eclipsed. A real effacement, to be sure, but there is some compensation in the honor of having given to the enchanting display a name. Who can see so far into the future as to say that the name and the show will continue long after a marvel- ous mechanical age has forced the noble beast into uncomplaining extinction? You who love the Horse, and have felt the hmnanizing kinship that grows between things of flesh and blood, will turn from this melan- choly picture. And yet it were something of a regal distinction that its name be perpetuated by so much pomp, beauty and magnificence. THIS WAY TO THE STARS! This old gray world is spinning on its way through the blue void, a punctuation point and a problem that transcends any that beset mind of man. It is something of a relief to turn from the miserable, mean and petty things which infest our existence and find calm and peace in looking at the heavens. The flashing glory of the stars, the sapphire immensity of night and harmonious reaches of silence fill the soul with beauty and wonder, and bring to the observer an overwhelming sense of his own littleness. In two ways only does the contemplation of the external bring about the humbling of man — the viemng of the earth from a mountain top and the gazing upward along the whispering heights, to the stars. The professional star gazer, however, has ceased to be an impracticable character, a dreamer of dreams woven of sidereal gossamer, a reader of signs and portents, and dweller in 243 244 LOOK UflP a realm of phantoms. He is now one of the most skilled of scientists, his work necessitat- ing infinite delicacy and precision — and imagi- nation, also. We gain some idea of how incon- sequential a part of the universe we are when we ponder on some of the wisest of authorities, who venture the belief that, unmarked in space, there are probably milhons of inhabited worlds. Among them our little earth is as a mote in the shine of the sun. Professor W. W. Campbell, at that time director of the great Lick Observatory, in speaking of the possibilities of communication with other worlds, said: "At present we have no idea how the problem is to be attacked. We must not overlook the possibility that tele- scopes, of capabilities and powers now un- known to us, may be invented and that discov- eries will be made as undreamed of now as was wireless telegraphy fifty years ago. As to human beings on Mars, it is entirely possible, although we do know that the human animal, as we know him, could not live in the atmos- phere of that planet, which is not as dense as that on the tops of our highest mountains. It is not difficult to believe, however, that human THIS WAY TO THE STARS 245 beings on Mars might be created in our own image and still have lungs capable of sustain- ing life there." And Professor Simon Newcombe, viemng the subject from the point of the mathematical theory of probabilities: "Let us suppose, to fix the ideas, that there are a hundred million worlds, but that the chances are one thousand to one against any one of these, taken at ran- dom, being fitted for the highest development of life for the evolution of reason. The chances would still be 100,000 of them would be in- habited by rational beings, whom we may call human. But where are we to look for these worlds ? This no man can tell. We only infer from the statistics of the stars — and this in- ference is fairly well grounded — ^that the num- ber of worlds which, so far as we know, may be inhabited are to be counted by thousands and by milHons." When you swell with the pride of power, or blush in the shame of a national disgrace, or fret or worry over the small things that make big discords, it may be well to take a breathing spell in contemplating the stars. It will likely 246 LOOK UP be^vilder you ; but if you think of what fills the vision in connection with the activities of our world, it will broaden your view, make you more human, and therefore less proud. You will reahze at once the httleness and the in- feriority of life as we know it. THE WORD "GRAFT" The Church Federation's sanction some years ago of the use of the word Graft was significant and impressive. It was emphasized by the failure of the clergymen to find a word of more polite texture to express the same meaning. "Dishonesty" cannot begin to give the various shadings, the high hghts, the low tones of Graft. It cannot even suggest the brazen operations or the hypocritical face of it ; nor even hint its subtleties of expression, its dizzy, false heights and its black depths of shame. There is something primitive in the direct- ness of "dishonesty." It is easily defined, but this word of an advanced civilization is a cha- meleon of crookedness. Graft has come to hold an acknowledged place in the language, and it stands in the record of the doings of the ministers in all its naked evil, without the scant drapery of quotation marks. It is comprehensive and spans a wide gap. 247 248 LOOK UP The unspeakable man, defiant in his utter degradation; the financier, who stands on the upland in the noonshine of power — ^these are grafters. So it is the mighty is debased and the debased elevated by his blood kinship to the other. Just as society has been built up through successive planes by achievement and the magic of thought, as it has grown in its com- plexities and the interplay of forces until it is a gigantic, bewildering fabric, so has Graft been developed. Every pattern of it tells of some human aspiration that struggled remorse- lessly upward; the crass, sordid things that sank into the black ooze of infamy and were happy; the little evils of avarice, soon grown to be monsters, and all the legion of tempta- tions and blemishes that spring from the money-lust. Graft is now as broad as human nature, and it may express all of the notes of moral obtuse- ness. It is a giant because it is the evil shadow of a giant people. At first a pale, noxious thing, it owed its being to the vicious and the fallen. Its strength flowed to it from the evil in man. It grew THE WORD GRAFT 249 amazingly. Soon it reached power and arro- gance. Its touch tainted all classes, and its breath spread a malignant fever. But the out- cast compelled recognition. It had become a social and an economic force. It mounted into high planes and took a place among the seats of the mighty. And now w^hat was once a poisonous, furtive thing, born of the brothel and the gutter, is uttered in the shadow of the Cross, marking the most insidious curse* of gain and the shame of a nation. OUR ANGELS AND DEMONS The vestments of old beliefs are gradually falling away. Many of us regard the process as we would the desecration of our childhood ideals; for the things we know first, and take lovingly to our hearts, are the last we care to surrender. This expression of the new, while it promises much and is compelling by its sheer force, is nevertheless saddening. Who that has grown to maturity in an old homestead, in- stinct with precious memories, would see it rent and leveled to the ground to make way for a structure desired, v/hose design made no appeal to either the utihtarian or the aesthetic sense? It would be a tragedy, which no bene- fits of the new things could dispel. Objects, like beliefs, are so interwoven in our lives that they take on something of the human quality. A familiar spot by the river, a path- way through the meadow to the woods ; a tree under which rosy-faced children romped and shouted in the pure joy of living; the moun- 250 ANGELS AND DESIGNS 251 tain of a sentimental journey; the troubled wastes of a mighty sea; the grim desert, held in abyssmal silence; a book, a glove — all these and numberless more, big or little, majestic or mean, hold some cherished part in our lives. They have been breathed upon by our souls; they are sacred tilings. Yet it is the universal decree that forms must change and the Truth endure to the end of time. So it is that the old vestments fall away and we see Truth in a new dress. Angels and demons of old — they have come to us from WTitings born of the highest aspirations of the soul ; they have filled glowing pages of poetry and given to art some of its sublimest aspects. Modern thought pronounces them impossible creatures; but modern thought often tears down what it cannot upbuild. True, it would be difficult to find an angel with a spread of wing forty-five feet from tip to tip ; or a demon, half human, half beast, that fed on the bodies and souls of men. Yet both angel and demon exist as surely as the sun rises and sets, as the tides brim up and sink back joyously to the bosom of the seas. In this fevered modern life we are the prey 252 LOOK UP of demons that torture ceaselessly, before they; kill and devour. The demon Drink! That ;was no idle figure of speech. It was a life tragedy told in three words. Hear what the richest man in the world said of a drunkard for whom a gathering of devout folk had offered up prayers: "I have been very sad all during this meet- ing, because I have been thinking of that young man for whom our prayers were asked, who is struggling with the demon Drink. I have great s}Tiipathy with every man overcome with the temptation to drink. I hope this man may be made to know hope. His friend will let him know that the prayers of this church — of all of us — are with him in efforts to free himself of this terrible evil. That is his temptation. We all have ours." Thus we have it from the mouth of the man, who has wielded more power than a crowned king, that Temptation is the demon that besets us all. Even he is not exempt. In the secrecy of introspection, as his one self looked upon the baser other, he probably beheld the ugly scars left by the clutch of the demon. The foul ANGELS AND DEMONS 253 thing that is the spirit of Financial Avarice is probably the most terrible demon of all. Side by side with the news of the prayer for the drunkard one read of a girl, a slave of the demon Superstition, the dupe of human har- pies, who believed that, if she failed to see a * 'fortune-teller," she would be transformed into a hideous beast. She took her own life. The demon Speculation has wrecked thou- sands of homes and sent men out, tortured, into the long, long night. Speculation, a puffed, distorted thing breathing out fevers, sits on a mountain of gold, from which gleam the whitening skulls and bones of men, women and children. It has possessed the people with a deadly frenzy and many victims will go to the sacrifice. There are heaps of money in Wall Street! That is the lure. A wise ob- server says: *'The accumulation of wealth has excited the public to such a degree that thousands of spec- ulators are bringing their hard-earned money into Wall Street, hoping to double or triple it by lucky accident. The bulls and bears are prepared to take care of the lambs." So the world is full of demons, which lie in 254 LOOK UP wait and beset us on every hand. They come in the guise of fair things and have a thousand lures. Angels may be fewer — ^wingless, com- monplace shapes that have no haloes — but the word of comfort that they give, the ready aid that instinctively finds the need, and the silent, warm handclasp — ^these leave behind a radi- ance and music which tell of the visitation of God's own messengerSr ROMANCE AND LIFE More books are read now than ever before in the history of the human race, and the out- put still increases. Everybody reads, from the bootblack to the millionaire; for the treasure house of literature is so easily accessible that, in his gleanings, the bootblack may, indeed, be a millionaire. The department stores sell books by the ton, hundreds of thousands of them, which reach all grades of society. Though we are in an unromantic age and a great flood of mediocre creation is coming from the press, the fine old standard works, unshaken, still hold their place. Scott, Dumas, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others equally dis- tinguished are read in factories; and even a wider field 'is found there than grew during that golden time when there was an Emerson cult in the Massachusetts mills. Which shows that, however the external aspect of the world changes — no matter what social or economic convulsions may occur — ^the 255 256 LOOK UP spirit of romance glows in the heart. It is an illiunination which creates a realm of fairies and gnomes for the young, and, for the ma- ture, mirrors life in a magic glass, which gives back reahsm wdth something added, some spirit that plays upon the emotions as did the marvel tales of childhood. It is the spirit of romance. It is the lure of the book, and will be so long after the aenemic, analytical school has passed away. The cruel realities of life we know, for we hve them and weep over them. Much of wisdom is pain ; and j{ some things we should not learn too much. Why take a book to lay an anguish bare when many of us have it in our own souls? The skill of a surgeon may call for gratitude, but the memory of it will not last as long in the heart as the echo of some love song. It is the touch of the romancer that transfigures all, and, careworn and wise of the world, let us idle a while in the realm of fancy. And yet, if we could but fitly see, we need not go to books for all of our romance. We are surrounded by books of men and women, flesh and blood stories; tragedies written in sombre fact and lighted by human souls. Day ROMANCE AND LIFE 257 after day the newspapers have their tales of the tragic. Now it is the scion of wealth who speeds to meet Doom along the country high- way; again, the wan-faced child of the tene- ment who, playing along some city beach, is swept away to a shore unseen. High and low, rich and penniless, the trag- edy is universal. Grief in the palace ; tears in the hovel. There is no bond stronger than that which maketh akin the hearts of men in sor- rov/'s night. Were it not for this golden tliread of grief, which binds us all, whatever our place in the world may be, the brotherhood of man would be as a rope of sand. When Bouguereau depicted, with his master brush, the despair of Eve beside her dead child he spoke a universal language, one that could have been understood at the dawn of time and vdll still murmur in the hearts of women at final judgment day. But the mother who has lost her child, the youth who has looked upon the white, calm that once was mother or sister — all who have been left stunned and lonely when the mys- terious reaper passed — to these must come, ere long, a peace that is sorrow's own reward. In 258 LOOK UP the life that has gone out of their own they have read a beautiful tale. Just as a good book does not cease to exist when you reach the regretful finis, so the tale is woven into the warp of their hves. The conflicting emotions, the hope that the tale would end just so, the sympathy with the hero's sufferings, the pride in his prowess and ambitions — all these have been real. And even when the tale is ended and the covers of the book are closed forever, how we recall our favorite passages, reconstructing tliis incident and finding the old-time joy in that! IVow, if such be so of the hero created by the fancy and kindly genius of a favorite au- thor, how much more so can it be with the hero or heroine God created, in whose adventures we ourselves have shared? THE SOUL'S PENALTIES When many a man is dying he does not look backward at his life, but forward, for it lies between him and the hereafter, with all the good that has marked it and all of its enormi- ties standing out with pitiless salience. A hfe evilly led is its o^vn punishment. It exacts its penalties with implacable certainty. It is full of harassments. Its demands never cease, so that the man who carries its burdens is bound, like a slave, to the wheel of evil. The pleas- ures that grow out of an unworthy life are un- real, fitful and unwholesome. They, too, exact a penalty even greater than the others. When a soul stands, weak and failing, on the brink of judgment all these unworthy tilings, some of them creatures long forgotten, rise up before it to bar the way, mock and jeer. It is a blessing, and more often a punishment, that no man may escape from himself and the things that are of himself. The black shapes, when they do not confront him, follow him as 259 260 LOOK UP relentlessly as shadows; sleep with him; wake with liim, and eat with liim. Thev are with hini even in his most secret thoughts and weigh upon him, stifling and»restraiiiing when he tries to rise into a white day from the darkness of lower tilings. The simplest action is frequently as potent as the most inyolved one. By a single un- truthful "yes" or "no" a world of injustice and pain may be created. A mere motion of the head may bring about a hke result. The most vital tilings of hfe frequently hang upon apparent trifles. Yet an action is a tangible something. While it possesses personahty, it has neither form nor substance, so far as our normal senses tell us. Yet if, in our relations with the rest of society, all actions became real, palpable tilings that live as long as we Hre, it is easy to conclude that the lives of men would be purer, more generous and s^mipathetic. And it does some- times happen that these intangible tilings in a man's life become grimly real to him, though no other eye may see them. A miscreant died in the hospital. All e^-i- dence pointed to the fact that he lived a hfe THE SOUL'S PENALTIES 261 full of evil, regardless of human life, and was actuated only by the sordid passion for money. That a man will sell his soul for gold is an old, old story, told to us in tradition and em- phasized by the revelation of life day by day. This man's Hfe was especially abhorrent. He endeavored to set fire to a house in which there were scores of sleeping women and children. Their lives weighed nothing in the balance against his purpose. The horror of the thing never appealed to him for an instant. Love of money had made him inhuman. He had as much compassion as that which stirs the heart of a wolf which has at last pulled its panting, straining prey to the ground. In his career he had probably caused more than one disaster and escaped, but now the Fates had turned against him. The tragedy was averted and he fell into the hands of the law. It is said that confinement may kill what little soul is left in a man, or resurrect the whole of it. A rebirth often, too, comes from pain. This man — a prisoner — had been racked by pain for many days, hsLving been frightfully injured while attempting to escape. Pain chasteneth, even as fire ; and, while he lay upon 262 LOOK UP a bed of suffering, some wondrous things were taking place. Something was born within him linked to fear — something he had never known before — and to him came a view of himself which made him shudder. So when death, silent and gray, stood at his bed, he saw, besides the Presence, all of the unclean things he had done, the acts his hand had shaped. He shrieked in frantic fear. "Fire! Fire!" he cried, repeating the word that carried terror in the night, when he had worked and brought death to many therein. "Fire!" He never knew before the horror and torture in the sound of it. Around him the cool, white walls of the hospital seemed to burst into flames, hissing, roaring, smiting. Then he cried for water, as one in torment. Writhing in torture, his soul went out. So the life that he lived was before him when he passed away. It would be difficult to find a more impressive sermon than this to take to our hearts as we discharge or evade our re- sponsibilities in the struggle of life. THE CROOK DE LUXE Burglary to-day is practically a new art, with certain essentials that have called to the profession a much higher grade of individual than in the old days, when an industrious cracksman went forth with only a "jiromy" and a bludgeon. The coarse, rough-hearted man, primitively equipped, was the pioneer in an evolutionary process, which has now reached a state of culture and refinement. The number of visitations that the smart folk in the vicinity of New York received from literary and epicurean thieves drew public attention to the fact of an amazingly high development among the "crooks." Time was when the ordinary housebreaker, if hunger as- sailed him, was content to satisfy his internal gnawings with a bit of cold mutton and a bottle of beer, or, as has often happened in England, by having an orgy with the pies and tarts. The burglar of quahty, as pictured in the 263 264 LOOK UP news, was not only a judge of good cooking, but was competent to pass upon the most ex- pensive brands of wine, and insisted upon hav- ing Burgundy always at blood temperature. Not only concerning things of the palate was he expert, but, apparently, in literary matters he possessed both polite judgment and unfail- ing good taste. An uninvited visitor to a house who, after taking a light luncheon, including v ine and one of the best cigars, retires to the library to read Herbert Spencer is not a person of the ordinary gumshoe sort. He probably wore patent leathers, had his nails carefully mani- cured, his teeth pearly in their whiteness, his dress thoroughly genteel in line and design, and was so mannered that he might grace an afternoon tea with charming poise. This, at least, was the ideal conception of him. How much polite criminal literature has to do with the actual man and our conception of him opens up an interesting conjecture. Crime stories have the appeal of forbidden things, and, when formed by clever minds, we are given friendly, sympathetic, handshaking THE CROOK DE LUXE 265 acquaintance with criminals, impossible had they remained in the matter of fact isolation of the daily prints. In truth, it is all very diverting and absorbing, and, in the exhilara- tion of it, one is not conscious of how he may become affected by its poison. Yet, when an honest man, reading of the exploits of a polite thief, gives the character his sympathy and follows him through his exploits breathlessly, for fear the heavy hand of the law will fall upon him — that very moment has the reader lost something of his moral worth and has himself been robbed of something as precious to the character as jewels are to the vanity of women. He may not realize it, but the thing has been done, just the same! It is a peculiar fact about evil that it has the tenacity and insistence of life itself. Its roots go deeply into human nature, and the growth continues, despite perfunctory ablution and formal resolve. That a man should find himself not only sympathizing with, but admir- ing, crime because it is deft and picturesque, should be a revelation to awaken him at once to his danger. 266 LOOK UP As we have welcomed the polite thief in liter- ature, so now are we responsible for him in actuahty. Born in the mind of the novelist, he at one time stood an imposing but unreal figure. Now, if thieves were not progressive and were entirely lacking in imagination the unreal man of fiction might still have been holding his place as an interesting abstraction. But the thief appreciated him fully as much as did the honest reader. And what ambition was more natural than to realize the type in life, to incarnate it? And so it has been done. The thing taken to the hearts of many from the field of fancy, and possible only through the approval of the public, becoming an actuahty, now turns upon those that made it possible. The public finds itself confronted and preyed upon by the real- ity, a Frankenstein monster with literary tastes, which robs and reads by night. And yet there is one cheering side to the dilemma. Wliile those who possess expensive "wine cellars and de luxe libraries are in con- stant fear of being visited by the gentleman burglar, those who have, at most, a few bottles THE CROOK DE LUXE 267 of near-beer in the ice box and a collection of standard works, well worn and in inexpensive bindings, may retire to untroubled sleep with the assurance that they will not be disturbed by the literary burglar with expensive tastes. He could not visit them without losing caste. CONCENTRATION AND SUCCESS Study the life of any successful man and you will find that which brought a full measure of rewards to him was his singleness of pur- pose. He knew what he wished to attain, and, keeping the prospect clear of all diverting in- fluences, kept his eye fixed upon the objective and struggled straight toward it. This may not seem to be a difficult task to a man who has no purpose in his life and who is indolently indifferent to the things that most men prize. Yet it is one of the most arduousu, for single purpose is made effective through concentration, insistence and pertinac- ity. These things are not possessed by a man of vacillating character. Manv successful men in material affairs have lacked the education that might have brought to them hair-splitting hesitancy or analytical irresolution; but they roughly and directly worked purpose to realization. It is pointed out that Hamlet, over whom 268 CONCENTRATION 269 there has been so much critical study and an- alytical psychology, had in him all of the essen- tials of a man of action — which he was not — * but that the one flaw in his make-up was his divided will. Fused into single purpose, there might have been another story to tell and less of that which is obscure and puzzling. If the Prince of Denmark, carefully weigh- ing matters, had finally come to a determina- tion and said, ''This one thing will I do and none other till this is accomplished!" there would have been less of tragedy and heart- breaking. But, then, the story would not have been half so interesting and folks would not have been debating it even until to-day. As Hamlet's divided will brought disaster, so it has been with men and bodies of men that have been afflicted with the same misfortune. Make it a habit to concentrate — try it for pas- time, bring it as an essential to work — and you will be building the sinews of success! GIFT OF PROPHECY A man with a gift of prophecy, first regard-' ing the conditions of life of to-day — ^the stu- pendous industrial development, the prodigies of finance and the artificialities which attend our actual living — and then looking in the fu- ture, may behold wondrous things, unbeliev- able even to those of us who are gifted with the most ardent imaginations. Prophecy may often be an inspiration, like the flower of thought that suddenly blooms in the soul of a poet and finds expression in color and form, and that music which is the audible perfume of the soul. Again, it may be the result of the operation of conscious or uncon- scious logic. For the things that come to pass, and which realize prophecy, are the result of the unfailing logic of events; of what men think ; of what their hands find to do, and what they hope to accomplish in that period which is ever before us. There has even been written a work showing 270 GIFTED PHOPHECY 271 how prophecy may be something in the nature of an exact science; but this statement is nat- urally regarded with some question, though sybils, seers, astrologists, chiromancers and all of the varied and bizarre class that prognos- ticate for pelf probably insist to the contrary. But these are petty, sordid considerations which" have to do solely with the individual and his puny activities. The real prophet is a giant, whose feet press the earth but whose head is capped by clouds, and into whose ear the stars whisper their eter- nal mystery. H. G. Wells, who dehghtfuUy intermingles science, sociology and fiction, pos- sesses the breadth of view of the real seer, and the only regret is that we cannot live long enough to give him his full measure of great- ness. That we may, indeed, truly foresee some of the wonders of the future is emphasized in looking back over the speeches made by Wen- dell Phillips. On July 28, 1865, he delivered an address to the school children of Boston, in Music Hall, and the boys and girls, now grown to gray ma- turity, realize what a rare privilege was theirs 272 LOOK UP in being given a view of one of the marvels of the future, which is so familiar to-day. ^ "We invented a telegraph," said Mr. Phil- lips, speaking of old age and progress. "But v/iiat of that? I expect, if I hve forty years, to see a telegraph that will send messages with- out wire both ways at the same time. If you do not invent it, you are not as good as we are. You are bound to go ahead of us." And just within the forty years that this in- spired man fixed as the period of development the things were demonstrated as a social and commercial fact. So, surely as the natural eye beholds objects, did he see the thing in the future. Wliich shows us something of the divine pos- sibilities of thought working within a man of absolute integrity, of most exalted purpose, and with a heart big enough to feel the pain of the entire human family. To love is to live and — to suffer. Honey soon cloys the taste ; bitters give the zest. The heart that canl)e cheerful amid disaster makes to-morrow a God-given promise. LOOK UP 27S Foolish pride is not always the garb of the fool. Genius is notoriously careless in its dress. No one is old whose heart is full of the joy of life. Thus you frequently see eighty years young and thirty years old. Just how much wild oats a man sows in his youth determines the amount of breakfast food in his old age. When you cultivate intellect at the expense of heart, the day may come when you will envy the wisdom of the fool. Constancy is a jewel, when it is not set in the base metal of an unworthy attachment. Keep your face ever toward the light, and the black shadow will be behind you. Adversity is the crucible that refines to gold a strong character; a weak one, it often turns to dross. 274 LOOK UP Faith may grow dim in the sunny, care-free days, but it becomes transfigured by gloom. It touches with gold the keen edge of suffering and sweetens the bitterness of anguish. How often do we weep over the comedies of deceit, and smile at the tragedies of con- science ! He, who is ill-bred enough to tell the truth, may not hold to much social prestige; but he will retain his self-respect, which is immeasur- ably greater than crown or favor. They tire of hfe most who have not Hved at all. We learn the full blessing of pleasure after we have mastered the alphabet of pain. Wise men may puzzle over the mission of this old world of ours, but beautiful mother- love makes it a simple cradle. Because of its freshness of feehng, its sunny hopefulness and love, all Youth is beautiful. And it has a rare, exalted charm when set in the snows of life's winter. W2S LOOK UP 275 A woman, deserted, scourged by ner sisters and gnawed by hunger, turned her face toward heaven and gratefully smiled. And Cynicism, looking on, was moved to tears, saying, "Here, indeed, is Faith." Anguished Love stopped to console a dark- haired woman whose eyes were tearless and whose face was contorted with pain. And the sufferer said: "Now, that I have beheld you, my torture becomes as nothing." Some folks wonder why the world does not adjust itself to suit them; others marvehng that it does, share their happiness with others. "Tell the truth and shame the devil," said Candor to Fashion, who sweetly replies : "But why wantonly humiliate a clever friend?" . ** J\ ->. . • « ^^K**