LIFE at Gloucester began very much as other life begins in the first delightful possession of one's "ain fireside." Is happiness essentially selfish? For some years after my cottage was built I surrendered my summers to the luxury of entertaining. I remember those as the years of the friends. I was slow in asking whether the North Shore had other claims upon me than those of giving pleasure to other comfortable people, and receiving more than I gave. Having waited, apparently long enough for me to ask, fate abruptly told me without the formality of a question.

One summer evening, in a year of whose date I cannot be sure, except that it was in the seventies, I was driving with a friend through the main street of East Gloucester. It was after tea, and a sky, translucent overhead, was burning down towards the west, preparing for one of the famous Gloucester sunsets.

We were driving through a weir of stores and fish-firms and fish-flakes ---this last, it should be said, is the technical name for the frames or trellises on which salt fish is dried. For Gloucester, it must be understood, is the most important fishing port in the world, and Fish, whether dead or living, is always spelled there with a capital. In fact, there is a dignity about this form of commerce, upon which, to the reduction of most other kinds of interests, Gloucester insists. Her summer guests may come and go, may pay or not, may criticise or adore, but her fish bite on forever. The result of my own observation has been that Gloucester, in her heart of hearts, regards her large summer population with a certain contempt. We are weak on the topics of main-sheets, and jib-banks, of blocks and "popple-ballast," and seines. We are not learned in the times when herring strike and mackerel are due. We cannot man a Grand Banker in a gale. We do not go "haddockin'" in March. We do not pack "Cape Ann turkey" to the limits of the globe. Our incomes, if we have any, are drawn from invisible sources looked upon with instinctive suspicion. They are neither caught with a hook nor salted in a box, nor telephoned to the Board of Trade when the cargoes come in. We are more or less idle folk, who wander about the streets, (who knows why?) or sun ourselves stupidly on the red and purple rocks, or dig for clams on the beaches at high tide, or exasperate the farmers by trampling down the hay, and letting the cattle into the apple-orchards. We are artists, whose crop of white umbrellas sprouts everywhere, and bothers everybody, and whose brushes do not know a back-stay from cornsilk. We are boarders who capsize the catboats, or pay by the hour to sail in a calm and don't know any better; cottagers who create homes in extraordinary localities hitherto little respected ; or even writers who put Gloucester adoringly into the magazines out of the impulses of our loyal and loving hearts, and are hated accordingly of all men for the tribute's sake.

Perhaps every line of this page may cost its writer a friend in Gloucester ---who can tell? Yet I mean only gracious things by the dear old place, which I have loved for twenty years. I devoutly believe and firmly proclaim that Gloucester Harbor is the most adorable spot in this part of the world in which to spend the summer; and that he who has never known her Junes and her Septembers, her wonderful downs (said to be the only specimens of the real thing on our coast), the warm heart of her fishing-folk, and the colors of her waves, seen returning from afternoon sails in a light Southwester, misses something out of life, which the next will remind him that he lacks. I am aware that this is a strong statement, and beyond it I cannot go. This does not mean that I am unconscious of the faults in the loveliest of places, though for love's sake I may pass them lightly by.

All seaport towns drink. I do not know if Gloucester be any thirstier than other places of her kind. I like to think not ---but, on the summer evening of which I speak, it first came to my thought or knowledge that this little city seethed with tempted men, having peculiar difficulties and dangers and needing peculiar treatment.

As we drove through the chief street of East Gloucester, we saw a crowd thickening before us in front of a store or shop, whose existence I did not remember to have observed before. It was a large crowd for a small place, and evidently under intense excitement. All along the sides of the street women who did not join it came to their doors and looked out soberly. They were white to the lips, every woman of them; some of them shook their fists in the direction of the crowd; some wept, some seemed to curse, and some to pray.

"If men folks will do such things, they must expect such things to happen!" cried one matron.

"I hope they'll raze the place to the ground! I hope they'll fire it to ashes! I hope they won't leave stick nor stone of it till morning!" said another, in the deep tones of irreproachable anathema.

I had stopped my horse, and begged to be told what had happened; but it was some time before the women paid attention enough to me to answer my question. I was only a "summer boarder," alien to them, and to the sorrows of their lives. I was of far less importance to them than the school of mackerel which entered or swam past Gloucester Harbor; one might easily say of less than the barnacles on the old piers.

"Haven't you heard?" said a woman at last, scornfully. "Why, it happened in ------'s rum-shop."

Now, I had been in East Gloucester more summers than I cared just then to remember, and never till that moment had I known that ----- had a rum-shop in the centre of the town.

"There 's a man murdered there," continued the speaker more gently, observing perhaps the expression of my face. "He 's just dead. Him and this other fellar had words, and he drove a knife into him and out again three times. He's stone dead, layin' there on the floor . . . . See the men folks crowdin' round to look at him! If men folks will do such things, they must expect such things to happen ! I hope they won't leave stick nor stone to that place, come mornin' !"

"Was he a married man ?"

"She lives up to the Block, and the young ones."

"How many?"

"Twelve."

"Has anybody been to see this poor creature--- the widow? Has any woman gone to

her?"

"Hey?" staring. "I guess not. Not that I know of."

I turned my horse and drove straight to the smitten family. My friend (who had the worst of it) kindly agreed to sit in the carriage among the gathering people while I went into the tenement. I felt like thanking her warmly, for it would have been easy to make that little decision hard for me; or to turn my own mind in the trembling of a choice, upon which, I came to think afterwards, a good deal that may have been important swung.

I went in. It was like other places of its kind, neither better nor worse. Such homes were not unfamiliar to me, but I had never entered one before on such an errand. To my selfish relief I found that some newsbearer had preceded me, and that it did not devolve upon me to break the tidings to the widow. She was pacing up and down the dark, close rooms like a large creature in a very little cage. She uttered strange, monotonous shrieks. She did not notice my entrance. In fact, no one paid any attention to me. The twelve (I think it was twelve) children, in various stages of grief and fright, were scattered about. Her oldest son leaned against the wall, and looked helplessly at the screaming woman. She wailed, ---"Oh, ain't it hard? ain't it, ain't it ?"

A neighbor came in, a big, red woman, and offered consolation in this form: "Mis' ------! Mis' ------! Be still now, there, and have the patience of God!"

This modest and moderate demand, strange to say, was disregarded by the afflicted creature, who moaned on pitifully.

I was an uninvited guest in that stricken household, and it seems like a breach of something for which we have no precise name for me to dwell too far upon the details of such a scene as no spectator could easily forget or describe. In point of fact, nothing and nobody quieted the woman; and so I went up, saying no words at all, and took her in my arms.

For a little her wailing continued steadily; then I saw, at last, that her eyes had fallen upon my gloves. They were white, like the rest of my dress; the room was heavy with the advancing dusk, and I suppose they made a spot of light, by which her frenzied sight was arrested. Her sobbing broke; she turned, and looked up into my face. Still I did not speak, but only held her quietly. . . .

I stayed with her till the body was brought home, and then we drove away. As we turned into the main street, I heard low cries from the people: "There he is! There he is! They've caught him! They've got the murderer! He ran and hid down to the water---but there he is!"

A carryall rapidly driven, and closely guarded by officers, passed us. The sunset was dying, and against a cold streak of wintry color, beyond the western shore of the harbor, I saw the profile of the murderer; as pale as that other face which I had left with a woman wailing over it. He was a very young man, they told me, and came of a self-respecting family.

I had read, of course, like other intelligent people, of women who entered rum-shops on moral and religious errands; in fact, I think once in Andover, when I was a very young lady, I personally besought a liquor-seller in behalf of some ruined family in which I was interested, to abandon the error of his ways; he received me politely and continued them steadily. But as for what is known in this country as the Temperance Movement, it was as unfamiliar to me as the gossip of Tahiti. I was reared in circles which pursued their own proportion of Christian charity in their own ways, and which knew but little of this form of ethical progress. In a word, I was without education for that kind of service to humanity; and I had, hitherto, paid no more attention to it than any woman of society. In fact, if the truth were to be told, I had, perhaps, little more confidence in the wisdom of its prevailing methods. Ignorance is always prejudice, and I was prejudiced in proportion to mine.

That Gloucester murder, and the short sunset hour which I spent in that devastated home, did for me what all the temperance conventions and crusades of America, generaled by braver and broader-minded women than I, had failed to do. All my traditions went down, and my common sense and human heart came up. From that day "I asked no questions; I had no replies;" but gave my sympathy without paltry hesitation to the work done by the women of America for the salvation of men endangered or ruined by the liquor habit.

"I am going into that rum-shop next Sunday," I announced, "to hold a service."

"You?" My friends stared at me anxiously. Would two physicians and the legal certificate of incarceration be needed shortly? Afterwards I remembered how they looked. At the time I scarcely noticed it, but proceeded on my way with the absorption of all young reformers in a new enthusiasm.

Of course my first step was to visit the bartender. I was received with drawing-room politeness. He was more than willing that I should hold a religious service in his saloon. He was, I thought, personally very grateful. He felt the odium under which he stood. He was pale and perturbed. He welcomed me with significant cordiality. Indeed, I think he looked upon me for the moment as his individual savior from social downfall. It had not occurred to me that I was enlisting my energies to protect the rum-seller, and I must say that this amusing view of the situation rather staggered me. But, concluding to ignore it gracefully, I went on with my plan for the Sunday.

"You'll say, won't you," pleaded the dealer in death, "that this ain't my fault? You'll tell 'em it might have happened anywhere, won't you? Why, it might have happened in a church! There's murders do. You'll say so; won't you, ma'am?"

Without committing myself on this delicate point, I arranged our little programme, securing the help of a lovely gray-haired "lady from Philadelphia "--- for this was in the days when my own hair was still so dark that I liked to be mothered a little in difficult positions. We went into the saloon the next Sunday and opened our short services. Now, my companion had been trained by Phillips Brooks in his younger pastorate, and she was far better qualified than I to conduct the service. But with the pertinacity of gentle women she refused. She would read, she would sing, she would help, but speak she would not.

"You will not ?" pleaded I, "but I cannot. I never opened my mouth in a public place in my life. I shall drop of stage fright ---and think of the scene! It will be little less exciting than the murder. I am a coward born, bred, and graduated on this point. It is morally impossible for me to speak in that or any other place."

But I prevailed nothing against her, and speak I had to.

The saloon was of course packed. It overflowed to the porch, and into the street, and back through the three little rooms within rooms, which, according to my limited observation, seem to characterize the grog-shops of our native land; an architectural peculiarity into whose causes or effects I have never penetrated.

There were a few women there to sing for us, and certain of the wives of the men who frequented the shop ; but our hearers were chiefly men, and precisely the men who were the usual customers of this and, kindred places. A great, red stain in the floor was covered from sight by the crowd.

To say that the audience was respectful is to say little enough. If we had been angels from the clouds or courts of heaven, we could not have been received with more deference, more delicacy, or more attention. To say that no disturbance of any kind took place is again to say too little for the occasion. Not a foot stirred, not a lip whispered; indeed, it is quite within bounds to say that not an eye wandered. We read a little---not too much---from the Bible, and we sang a hymn or two, and I said a few words, and we came away. Those men listened to us as if they had never heard a message of mercy before in all their lives, and never might again. I remember that some of them hung their heads upon their breasts like guilty children, and that they looked ashamed and sorry; but most of them met us in the eye, and drank what we said thirstily. Their attention and gravity amounted to solemnity, and had the appearance of resolution. But of that, who can testify?

We did not too much blame these men; they had reasons for getting drunk, which life had never made apparent to us: nor did we berate the rum-seller; we were his guests. We read and spoke to them of better things; that was all. I remember that we read from the Revelation about the dead, great and small, who stand before God to be judged; and I can never forget how these men looked, as I laid down my father's Bible, with those words.

Life has given and withheld much from me that has been or has seemed to be rich and valuable. It has never given me another hour when I felt that I had found the chief privilege of existence, as I felt when I forgot myself and pleaded with Heaven for those miserable men; nor has it withheld much that I should have treasured more than the power to continue my happy work among them.

It lasted for but three years. Though it began, it did not seem to begin with the murder; for, after a few Sundays our services in the saloon carne to an end. The bartender's religious character was not prominently developed, and his hospitality cooled as the excitement waned. Not wishing to intrude upon it, ---for, after all, the rum was his, and the legal right to sell it, ---we devoted ourselves for a little to the concerns of the fatherless family, and returned to the normal course of summer existence. Without were drunkards and murderers, and we thought of them no more.

I thought of them no more, at least not then. But God's lessons are not lost so easily as that. The next year, when the Old Maids' Paradise was opened for the season, a person indistinctly known to our domestic world as "the vegetable man" one day quietly made his way from the back door to the front, and boldly demanded that I should visit the Reform Club and give a Temperance lecture. If he had asked me to discover the North Pole in a Gloucester dory, I should have been less astounded; perhaps less shocked. In vain did I reason that I did not know what a Reform Club was; that I was not, and never might, could, would, or should be a lecturer, and that a Temperance lecturer was a being so apart from my nature and qualifications that I was better fitted to salt fish upon the wharves than to assume the position which I was desired to fill. The petitioner was dogged, obstinate, ingenious, and respectful. It seemed the organization which he represented, having heard of the rum-shop services, had appointed a committee to request my presence in the appalling capacity specified, and no for an answer these enthusiasts declined to take.

"I do not lecture," I persisted, "but I will come up to your club-room and help you somehow."

Thus compromising with my fate, I rode up in the vegetable man's carryall to the clubroom, and I left it that first evening the firm friend of those struggling men and women, and of all like them, in hard positions and in service like theirs forever.

The little local organization with which I was concerned had, in some respects, an exceptional history, but it belonged to a great class of its kind at that time popular with the mass of our people, and unquestionably useful in stimulating a taste for decent ways of living among that proportion of our fellow-citizens whom the liquor traffic disgraces and ruins. Having become once convinced that the method---however foreign to my taste and to my training --- was sound and sensible; was, in fact, ---so much wiser and greater than my ignorance or timidity, that it commanded my respect as well as my conscience, of course I had no choice but to give myself to the principle, and try to improve its practice, if I might. As our Methodist friends would say, I "followed the leading," and I never regretted it.

For three years I had the great happiness of serving the people who had needed and selected me. There and then, if ever, I. became acquainted with life. I learned more from my Gloucester people than I ever taught them, and I shall hold them gratefully and lovingly in my heart as long as I live.

The pathetic battle of those tempted men with themselves; the hardships of the fishermen, shipped for midwinter voyages;---rum on the wharves and rum on the vessel, mocking the vow of the newly-sobered man; the distrusts and jealousies and obstacles flung in the way of "reformed men" by their own mates, or by respectable citizens who ought to have sunk to their knees with shame for deeds that I have known to be done; and the persistent unpopularity of our efforts, an unpopularity that is known to all movements everywhere in the pursuance of what is called the temperance work, --- such things one remembers when the easy side of existence is forgotten.

In the ultimate valuation of life, when soul and body are "put to the question," one may no longer feel concern about the creation of a style, or the verity of a literary school, or the importance of a light touch; one may not recall the brilliant conversers of the choicest society one has known and valued; possibly, even precious passion of study on sheltered winter days by open fires among one's dearest books, and with one's highest masters, may pass : --- who can tell?

I think there are things that will not pass, --- the look of a manly fellow when he has been sober for two years ; the expression in the eyes of his wife, and a word or two she said; the sobs of a man who had "broken his pledge," and begged for his soul's life to be saved (a vulgar incident I grant you! Did I claim that it was "Literature"?); the eyes of the men when they stopped in the middle of an oath upon the wharves, and came in and finished the hymn that we were singing in the clubroom; and oh, the way the women looked! ---these common scenes may last when every other brain-cell but those retaining them and such as they, has given back its impression to the great Engraver.

Touching beyond words were the appeals of the women. One, I remember, walked miles to my house, and she was quite unfit for walking, --- to beg me, in their superstitious way, to "stop her husband drinking." For I was sometimes accosted on the street by strange men, who would detain me respectfully to say:

This woman pulled her sleeve and showed me big, purple bruises on her beautiful arm and shoulder. "He's always kind when he's sober," she urged, "but I wish you'd talk to him. He peeked in at the window last night at the club to see you. He said he see you, and you was readin' something out of a book. He said he wanted to go in and listen, but he dassent, for he felt ashamed. So he come home, and throwed himself on the lounge, and put his hands acrosst his eyes and groaned, as if he was hurted in an accident, and he says, ---

"'Jane, I wisht I was a better man;' an' I says, "-- -

"'Tom, I wisht you was!' and he says he'd like to have you talk to him ---so I come down. First I thought I'd go to Mrs. Cæsar Augustus Smith, but he didn't say anything about Mrs. Cæsar Augustus Smith ---an' so I come to you. For he never hits me when he's sober, and he likes the baby, and so I thought I'd come."

Speaking of literature, I remember a bit of pure eloquence, which I heard from one of our men one evening. He was a fine fellow --- or was meant to be; a tall, well-looking man, with a good head, and something in it. He drank till he was fifty, then stopped --- slipped a few times ---but died sober. He had never been a man of many words on matters of religious belief, and was popularly credited with a tinge of awful skepticism. When one day, therefore, he quietly announced to his mates in our little organization his purpose to sympathize with the more religious aspects of its work, the incident created a furore. The man's motives were immediately and bitterly impugned. Few of his neighbors but questioned his sincerity. It would be difficult to make one unfamiliar with just such forms of service among precisely such people, understand the large temporary importance of small events like these.

The next week our "reformed man" rose serenely in the little chapel and said this only: "I understand that my sincerity has been doubted in what I said here last week---that I meant to be a better man, and that I should like to live a different life. I want to say this: If my old neighbors cannot forget my past, I have been taught to believe that Christ can." For clear "persuasion of speech " I have seldom heard that surpassed.

It occurs to me that I have said more of the obstacles than of the aids to our work among the Gloucester drunkards; and far be it from me to fall into that coarseness of heart which is more conscious of the absence than of the presence of human sympathy. It was invigorating to me at the time; and as I look back upon it from this distance, it seems to have been extraordinary that we received so much assistance from sources outside of the boundary of local interest. I used often to be asked to drive down the North Shore and tell the summer people what we were doing for the fishermen. These parlor talks always resulted in something less evasive than pleasant words. Generous and hearty to a surprising degree were the contributions to our always clamorous needs from people to whose tastes and experience our work was quite foreign. Our steadiest help came from a life-long invalid whose noble heart never failed to reply to the suffering of the world from which she was shut in.

It is so easy to doubt the humanity of the easy classes ; flings at the hardness of wealth and social position are so common and so often unjust that I am glad to take this chance to testify to the warm hearts, the generous impulses, the lavish purses, and the sincere sympathy which I found only waiting for the opportunity to pour themselves upon a need in whose reality they could trust. The thing which interested me in this especial case was that so much of this practical cordiality came from the people who had the smallest natural amount of sympathy with the religious aspect of what we were doing.

I remember one day, sitting alone in my little study by the harbor, that I heard the tap-tapping of a very small, pointed feminine heel upon the rocks, and that the shadow of a little lady suddenly darkened the door. I knew her at a glance for one of the queens of that phase of society which we still call fashionable. She was, in fact, a very gay little lady---and remains so. She came in quite soberly and gently, and began to talk with me about the Gloucester fishermen, asking the most appreciative and intelligent questions; I wondered at them. Her boys, she said, wanted to put a set of standard novels in the library of our club-room. When she went away she left substantial evidence of --- what was it? A moment's sympathy? An hour's genuineness? A movement of regret, or of resolve? Who can say? Perhaps this gay benefactress was doing a bit of penance of her own? It is possible.

Did I feel at liberty to use her name, a large portion of the gay world would appreciate the incident. But, for myself, whenever I hear this little lady, as one sometimes does, criticised for her merry-making at life, I recall that afternoon at Gloucester. I hear the tapping of the tiny heels upon my rocks. I see the sober face, chastened with a look never seen in the drawing-rooms, where she rules it whimsically and royally. I hear an accent of something like perplexity, like wonder, like appeal, like reverence in her elaborate voice, --- and I am silent; for my thoughts of her are kind, "long thoughts."

To this little group of puzzled and tempted people, for whom my heart was full, at my audacious request, came Phillips Brooks. Indeed, he came not once, but twice, in the busiest part of his year, and preached to us; once in September ---and again, I think, in March. I know that the Indian summer was on the harbor at the time of his first visit, and that the snow lay heavily upon the narrow streets when he came again.

Take it altogether, this is the pleasantest memory which I have of the great preacher. He lent himself to those little people with luxurious heartiness. He had that gracious way of conferring a favor, as if he were its recipient. In fact, he seemed to enjoy the two sermons preached to that handful of fishermen ---outside of his own church connections, outside of the trend of his own work, and perhaps a little strange to his experience of audiences -as much as any which I ever heard from his lips.

Of course our people were touched with the honor which he did them; and they thronged the hall, or audience room. The wharves and the streets and the fleets poured out a mighty delegation; Trinity Church never gave him more devout attention. It was a beautiful sight.

Now, one thing I noticed. In the course of his two sermons given to those drunkards and fishermen, the preacher alluded to the object for which we were united but a single time. Then he said: "There are men who give up the beautiful possibilities of life to low sins, and ---drunkenness." He drew himself to his superb height, and brought out that one word with an accent of glorious scorn. The tempted men lowered their eyes before it. It scathed them harder than hours of denunciation, and moved them more than pages of appeal.

DISTINCTLY, in fact almost entirely with Gloucester, I find interwoven my recollections of the poet, Edward Rowland Sill --- a man of exquisite performance, and of superior promise in American letters ; still a young man --- too soon overtaken by death.

He happened on Eastern Point one summer, or opening autumn, like a bird on the wing from some foreign land. In truth, there was always, to my fancy, something bird-like about him. He had that shy eye, that essential reticence united with apparent frankness, that air of a form of creation finer than ours and competent to be critical of us accordingly; yet, from very fineness pathetically depended upon our sympathy.

He had, at the time I knew him, printed but one thin book, I think ---a booklet, he called it. It has, since his death, been republished. The best thing he ever wrote was "The Fool's Prayer." Or perhaps I should hesitate between that and his beautiful poem written for Smith College; that containing the well-known lines:

Were women wise, and men all true---
And one thing more that may not be,
Old earth were fair enough for me."

He and Mrs. Sill occupied a cottage near me, for a few weeks, and it was my good fortune to know something of them in the freedom from constraint which belongs to summer seashore neighborhoods, --- especially, I sometimes think, to Gloucester neighborhood.

I had known the poet for some time by correspondence only; he was a wonderful letter-writer. Real literary correspondence---in fact, correspondence of any kind --- is a lost art in our scurrying day; and I found his letters pungently stimulating through one long, secluded Andover winter. I only understood how valuable they were when they ceased forever. A certain quaintness in the man used to show itself in the shapes and styles of his letters. I remember receiving quite a number written upon long narrow coils of white paper; I never decided whether they were the tapes such as the telegrams of an olden time used to be inscribed upon, and such as stock brokers still use, or whether they were the foldings from his wife's ribbons. This is the only instance in which I ever received letters by the yard.

I had never seen him, as I say, and I well remember his shy appearance at my cottage. He seemed to shrink unaccountably from the first meeting. "We have an ideal of a person from writing," he said. Whether he feared to lose his of me, or mine of him, he did not divulge; and I did not dare to ask. He was, in most respects, one of the most finely-strung human beings whom I have ever known. How easily most of us brush off our ideals! His were the realities of life, to him.

He and Mrs. Sill were enthusiastic walkers; and gave much of their time to wandering over the Gloucester downs. I could not join in this pleasure ; and my talks with him were fragmentary, but always rich and nutritive. He did not chat ; he conversed. A talkative feminine fellow-boarder he named, I remember, The Jabberwock. Mr. Sill was charmed with Gloucester. He had the Wonson cottage, with the beautiful lava gorge in front, where the tide rises almost to the piazza; and his favorite way of spending an evening was to go out and sit on the rocks in the dark, and swing his feet off. He liked to hang them over the water, he said.

The same moral refinement which marks his poems characterized the man. His personal unselfishness was of a very high order. To sacrifice himself for the comfort of others was as natural to him as true metre. It was impossible to be in his company a week and not make some discovery in the science of kindness. This is not always preeminently true of the critical temperament ; and his was distinctly that. He should have ranked with the foremost of our American critics, if he had given himself to that form of literary expression. I always perceived that he had the right of nature as well as of training, to sit in the courts of judgment. His loss has been obvious in this respect. His experience as professor of English had made him an invaluable literary friend; for it added patience to power.

On the morning that he was to leave Gloucester for his home in Ohio, Mrs. Sill came runfling to our cottage for help. Mr. Sill had met with an accident, more serious than it was thought at the time, and had fainted. He remained where he was for some days before being able to move; then pluckily continued his journey. I went with them as far as Boston, where they parted from me; and I never saw him again. He died that winter.

I do not think that the loss to our literature, in missing the full blossom of his powers, has ever been fitly estimated. A few knew, and know what his value was and would have become. A man so sensitively balanced is always at a painful disadvantage in our calling. He is incapable of urging himself, and too easily swerved from the expostulation of competition.

A well-known editor once wrote to him, carelessly, of a certain contribution which had the appearance of being less popular than others: "The people are fickle. They want some new thing all the time. It is 'good-by' to you to-day, and welcome somebody else tomorrow!" Another man might have taken these thoughtless words as lightly as they were given. Mr. Sill was with difficulty persuaded to write again for that magazine. Our editors might learn a lesson from an incident like this; they deal "not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers," of select nature; they do well to take even a little troublesome care where they strike, and how. I happen to know that, in this instance, the contributor was held in high honor by the editor ; but it was almost impossible, afterwards, to make the poet believe it.

It was the same in the last great ordeal. He died under conditions from which a coarser man would have easily rallied. "We did not suppose," was the stupefied cry, "we did not know the patient had such an organization as this!"

Fortunately for human happiness, perhaps, such exquisitely ordered natures are so few that the dull, blundering average of us does not know how to treat them. We inflict when we thought to play, and kill where we meant to heal. When it is too late --- "We did not suppose," we plead. "Other organizations are not like this!" Of course not. Why should they be? How could they be?

The pages of the Gloucester story turn fast now, and yet I write on, because I shrink from the abrupt termination of that beautiful chapter of my life which dealt with those whom I still find it impossible not to call "my people." Time and trouble, illness and death, change and chance, have scattered them far; and yet, to me, they always seem to be a little group, affectionate and wistful, waiting for me in the old club-room, and softly singing, "I need Thee every hour" --- their chosen hymn and mine --- as I come in.

I had been writing "The Story of Avis" during this overwrought time of personal preoccupation at Gloucester. That book came from near my heart, and tore it, perhaps, accordingly. I wrote chiefly in the winters, at Andover, and revised at Gloucester. That last summer, I remember, was pushed with the proof-sheets of this book, crowding in between the needs of my people. Many a morning's work was interrupted by the visits of the "reformed men ;" or by the little dissensions and troubles of their club organization; or by signs of the coldness or opposition of those who might have aided us, and who would have done so --- I like to believe --- if they had ever understood our aims and motives. If there be one lesson above another which experience in moral reforms teaches a fair-minded person, I think it is patience with the averseness of those who do not join in our own particular methods of improving the world. Lack of sympathy with these is quite as likely to signify want of head as want of heart; or simply to indicate a deficient imagination, or one strung below its key.

My own observation leads me to believe that when one has discovered for one's self this profound but subtle truth, one is just about ready to begin to enter upon a course or career of practical beneficence. As a rule, one is far on in such before one makes this discovery. For myself, the enforced end of my work at Gloucester and that illumination which would have made it so much easier and gentler to the enduring nerves, came together. As I say, "The Story of Avis" may have had its share in the sudden surrender of strength, which for a long time put an end to my use of my pen, and to all my hopes and visions of any personal part in alleviating the lot of the tempted men and suffering women of my seaport home.

One evening in September, at the end of a worried summer, I came home from a service at the club-room with a strange lightness at the head. The moonlight on the harbor had a look which it never wore before or since ; an expression remote, as familiar scenery may appear, we think, to those about to leave the world forever. In that thrilling harbor-light, everything that one was doing or caring about took on a small look. Service for humanity itself acquired a vague value, and the fever of soul and body which fed it turned again and rent me.

I sank on my pillow, faintly wishing that I need never leave it again, but perfectly aware that I should get up and go on at eight o'clock to-morrow morning, as usual. Till dawn I watched the harbor throbbing under full moon and full tide. That night the watcher did not sleep ; nor the next; nor the next. I closed my house suddenly, and fled to my father's home; where, except in the great, uncontrollable crises of life, rest had always awaited me. This was n uncontrollable crisis; nor even a crisis at all, that I could see; and I "crawled in," as the grown child does, under a father's roof, confident of peace and healing. Neither came. The next night and the next passed like the others ; and then the rack of habitual insomnia closed in.

One slips into the door of the torture chamber, thinking it to be the entrance to some commonplace apartment, perhaps some pleasant room with broad views and easy exit. One turns to step out, on some natural errand---then, behold the bars, the bolts, the locks. Escape? Try the windows. They seem to hang a million feet above the solid earth; their grating is of metal never known before to the prisoner's chemistry, a relentless fibre, made from the pillars of the world. Weep if you will; pray, if you choose. But "God shut the door." You will stay there till He opens it.

It is not my purpose to turn even one chapter of these recollections into an invalid's diary.

Up to this point I have refrained from a subject always of so much more importance to the sufferer than to his friends, that one's preference would exile it from these records altogether. Since that is not quite practicable, it seems to me the simpler way to meet it as frankly and as briefly as possible.

Perhaps we all have some plea more reasonable than others, to account for the absence of the things which we have failed to be or to do. It has always seemed to me that the views taken by persons capable of "the vision and the dream," of the grounds on which they have omitted to reach their ideal, would have an interest far above that of mere biographic personalities. What warning in this experience of wasted aspiration! What stimulus in that ! But here we come to the question Is aspiration ever wasted? Is achievement, or the effort to achieve, the essence of value? When Sidney Colvin, Stevenson's particular critic, condemned "The Ebb-Tide," ---to my mind one of the best things which Stevenson ever did, --- the exiled and sinking man wrote pathetically: --

"The inherent tragedy of things works itself out from white to black and blacker, and the poor things of a day look ruefully on. Does it shake my cast-iron faith ? I cannot say it does. I believe in the ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still believe it! But it is hard walking! . ."

(Observe the cruelty give me a parenthesis to say it: ---This comfortable Englishman, tasting the fruits of the world, pouring what he called "criticism " on a dying man, prisoner in an island in the South Sea, where the mails come but once a month, and where a poor fellow might be buried before he could know that his book sold, or his critics repented them of their sins! Facts like this deepen a natural skepticism as to the usefulness of the art of criticism into a fierce pang of resentment for the dying author's sake.)

"I am an idler and a cumberer of the ground," he writes in one of the last letters to which he set his trembling pen. "It may be excused to me, perhaps, by twenty years of industry and ill health, which have taken the cream off the milk . . . . I am almost ready to call the world an error. Because? Because I have not drugged myself with successful work, and there are all kinds of . . . unfriendly trifles buzzing in my ear. If I could find a place where I could lie down and give up for (say) two years, and allow the sainted public to support me, if it were a lunatic asylum, wouldn't I go, just! . . . But you men with salaries don't know how a family weighs on a fellow's mind."

Stevenson is our latest and most pathetic specimen of the not inconsiderable list of invalid writers who have been important to the world; and if the rest of them had "spoken out" as bluntly, as quaintly, and as wistfully as he, we might all have been the wiser or the gentler for their candor; at least, all but those critics who appropriate wisdom and scorn gentleness, and who will doubtless perceive in these very outcries of genius and of dissolution, wailing over from Samoa, a fault of syntax, or an error in taste, or some pathological inefficiency, to be picked up and sported on the point of an easy pen. The solemn, antique writhing of power overcome by fate, the great attitude, like that of the Laocoön, the grandeur of strength rending its own weakness, the long, touching conflict of spirit with flesh, the massive determination crowding down physical disorder which would have killed a lesser creature twenty times over, twenty years before --- who is to rate all this in an estimate of the man's value to literature? No one; absolutely no one who has not fought the lions of physical disease in the cage of a life bolted by the sharp need of daily bread; no one who has not fought them with the sinew and the nerve of a creative genius.

An invalid or disabled writer does not ask for the sops and gruels of the sick-room ; he does not expect his metre to be scanned by his headaches, or his perspicacity to be taken by the physician's thermometer. He is the last man toiling and suffering, to appeal to the. stethoscope against his rhetoric or his construction. He asks nothing but fair play, and that fair sense which is the basis of fair play. In a word, he ought to be judged by the presence of a certain quality which suffering only gives, as well as by the absence of certain other qualities which are the properties of health alone. It is precisely this discrimination which is too often lacking in comfortable folk sitting easily on critics' salaries and dictating through nerves cooled by the critical, not fevered by the creative, faculty.

"I have a brave soul in a coward body," said one of our poets when he fainted under a painful accident. How is a champion football player to understand that?

Wise was Hazlitt, who wrote of "The insolence of health." Rose Terry Cooke's physician said to her a few years before she died, "Every time you write you draw out of the very sources of your life."

"No truly sensitive man," said Longfellow once to me, "can be perfectly well." He might have added that one of the cruelest problems of life is to make the perfectly well understand that he is not perfectly sensitive, and therefore may be disqualified from comprehension of those who are.

Far be it from me --- to the farthest limit of good sense ---to seem to undervalue by a semitone the supremacy of physical sanity. Next to holiness, nothing is so enviable as health. I am not ashamed to say it --- I would rather be well than be Shakespeare. I would rather be a hearty, happy, strapping motor-man, or wood-chopper, or stoker, than --- But would I? How can one tell? "To understand the psychology of sheep," said George Eliot, "one must have been a sheep." To understand the mental attitude of health, one must have been descended of health and chosen of it. Ideally speaking, the robust mind in the robust body ought to be the keenest as well as the finest in this world. In point of fact, it often partakes too much of its own muscle; the nerve of perception is bedded a little too deep in the fibre.

A life-long invalid, herself a brave, patient, unselfish woman, absorbed in interests outside of her own suffering, and more useful to the world than most healthy people, said to me the wisest thing which I ever heard upon the subject, --- "The sick and the well do not understand each other." There is philosophy in this, which is worth heeding. It has occurred to me that a mediator is needed between health :and disease, as there was between heaven and earth, as there is between virtue and vice, and certain other separated quantities or qualities. The physician does not fill this function, nor can he; the reasons why he may not, are obvious. Most great human needs create their own supplies; and this one may come, as soon as consciousness of its want reaches the stage of articulation, or, possibly, of clamor.

Life, I believe, teaches most of us some one lesson supremely above all others. The literary artist will make over to the world that illumination which fate has kindled to the fairest flame in his own soul. He may "sketch" or " etch," he may "report" or "photograph," he may be realist or romanticist, he may have the light touch or the strong one---but he will portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

I have sometimes thought that, before I put the shield on my stylographic pen for the last time, I should like to say to that little portion of the world which knows or cares for me at all, such things as I have discovered for myself about the relation of illness to energy, to sympathy, and to fortitude. Some of them seem to me worth saying --- though I may be wrong; and even worth suffering to be qualified to say---though on that I do not insist. But when one reflects on the books one never has written, and never may, though their schedules lie in the beautiful chirography which marks the inception of an unexpressed thought upon the pages of one's notebook, one is aware, of any given idea, that the chances are against its ever being offered to one's dearest readers.

Therefore, though this is clearly not the space for a treatise on invalidism (Shade of Harriet Martineau forbid! She did it too well in a volume for one to do it worse in a page), yet I may be pardoned, if I venture to say --

The world has learned fast how to treat the other defective classes, the criminal, the insane, the shiftless, the pauper; in all these branches of investigation we are developing a race of experts.

In the comprehension of the physically disabled, or disordered, it is my conviction that we are behind our age. I do not mean by this to cast any petty or ungrateful fling upon the usefulness of physicians.

As a class, I think them men and women of courage and of unselfishness far beyond the line at which most of us exhibit these qualities. But the scalpel will never perform the finer surgery, nor the prescription formulate the hidden therapeutics that I have in mind. The psychology of sickness and of health are at odds; and both the sick and the well suffer from the fact. I believe that great pathological reformations are before us, and that a mass of human misery, now beyond the reach of the kindest patience which handles it, will be alleviated. In truth, I believe that sympathy as a fine art is backward in the growth of progress; and that the subtlest and most delicate minds of the earth will yet give themselves to its study with a high passion hitherto unknown to us.

In the days of the Most Holy Catholic Inquisition, one form of torture, above all others conceived of the devil, was held in supreme value. This was the torture of enforced sleeplessness. About three to four days and nights of this religious argument were found enough to bring the most obstinate heretic to terms. Where fire and pincers, rack and famine failed, the denial of sleep succeeded.

De Quincey's Opium-Eater was a prose poem, which stands for all time one of the greatest pathological contributions of genius and of suffering to literature. There is a vision yet to be recorded --- whether in prose or in poetry, in fiction or in philosophy, I sometimes wonder --- which shall disclose the action of another drama, not of splendors and horrors, like his who heard the immortal cry, "Everlasting farewells!" in his ruined dreams; but the drama of endurance, resolve, and conquest, which goes on unrecognized in so many a brave and patient, obscure life.

The abstainer from anodynes who starves for sleep, but does not feed on poison (God forbid that you dare to blame him if he does, though you may safely revere him if he does not!), lacks the gorgeous, narcotined imagination of the great Englishman whereby to tell his story; but if it is ever told, it will be a better one for the world to hear.

There is a light side to most of our grim experiences, and I am glad to record mine in this direction.

Acquaintance with insomnia is like acquaintance with grief. When you have learned how to treat your strange foe, he has half ceased to be your foe. Unexpected docilities and amities develop. Where you looked for a battle to the death, you find a truce; and behold, you live.

Perhaps I may be permitted to say, out of a measure of personal relief from past miseries, that I have learned many things which 1 may reveal in that day when the writer and the unknown reader who loves her best shall commune together. (I wonder if other authors have the fancy which I have, that such a gracious being exists?) Without waiting for that phantasmagorial appointment, it may be worth while here to suggest to other victims of our overwrought American constitution and overbearing climate these two thoughts ; ---for truth I know, of my faith, is in them.

Avoid dependence upon narcotics as you would that circle in the Inferno where the winds blow the lost spirit about, and toss him to and fro --- returning on his course, and driven back --- forever. Take the amount of sleep that God allows you, and go without what He denies; but fly from drugs as you would from that poison of the Borgias which cunningly selected the integrity of the brain on which to feed. Starve for sleep if you must ; die for lack of it if you must ; I am almost prepared to say, accept the delirium which marks the extremity of fate in this land of despair, --- but scorn the habit of using anodynes as you hope for healing, and value reason. This revelation is sealed with seven seals.

Expect to recover. Sleep is a habit. The habit of not sleeping once diverged, may at any time swerve back to the habit of rest. The nervous nature is peculiarly hung upon the Law of Rhythm; and the oscillation, having vibrated just about so far, is liable or likely to swing back. But, if you are to recover, the chances are that you must do it in your own way, not in other people's ways. To a certain extent, respect your own judgment, if you have any, as to the necessities of your condition.

Cease to trouble yourself whether you are understood or sympathized with, by your friends, or even by your physicians. Probably you never will b; because you never can be. At all events, it is of the smallest importance whether you are or not. The expression of sympathy is the first luxury which the sick should learn to go without. This is peculiarly and always true of nervous disorder. A toothache or an influenza, a cough or a colic, calls forth more commiseration than these trifles deserve. Disease of the nervous system is, as a rule, and among enlightened and kindly people, regarded with the instinctive suspicion and coldness natural to a profound ignorance of the subject. Do not be afraid to act for yourself. Define your own conditions of cure. Follow them faithfully. Do not be impatient to be as you were before the liberty of healthy nerves departed from you. It may become needful for you to readjust your life, and all that is therein.

Obey the laws which you have discovered for yourself to be good government for you; and probably, by respecting them, you will regain yourself, and receive once more the natural renovation of your soul and body. Common, human sleep, once indifferently accepted, like light, or air, or food, will then become the ecstasy of living. With it, all hardships can be borne; without it, none.

Guy de Maupassant, in his piteous condition at the last, chased, we are told, imaginary butterflies. 'Where," he cried, " are my lost thoughts? Who will tell me where to find my thoughts?" Then, he beheld them ---blue for love, and silver for joy, and black for sorrow --- winged creatures, flitting from his grasp, and returning to his hand.

So, I like to think, it will be with all of us who have ever had any thoughts to chase and who, through the physical disabilities of life, or any of its apparent refusals, have missed certain of our own best possibilities. Our butterflies will all dip on before, and circle round us --- the blue and the silver, the rose and the gold-wings of what we might have done, and yet may do. For winged things know their course through space; and life and death alike, I think, are flowers to them.

"Tragic Gloucester," a friend once called it, who resented the effect upon myself of the troubled side of seaport life. But beautiful Gloucester, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, it remains to me. Her tides may tell the saddest stories to those who have ears to hear them ; but, like many other sad raconteurs, they tell the sweetest, too.

The autumn of 1888 brushed the palette of Gloucester Harbor. The face of the leaf and the tint of the lining of the wave took on their own strong colors. The October storms and the October suns, equally welcome to those who love the sea, changed places like figures in a graceful walking-dance; and the first delicate sheath of ice upon the top of the hogshead of rainwater which had always been my thermometer at the chalet, and told me when it was time to go back to my father's house, called me to Andover Hill no more.

The Old Maids' Paradise was closed that year forever.

Mr. Alger, in his "Friendships of Women," prudently observes "A man's best friend is a wife of good sense and good heart, whom he loves, and who loves him." We might well say: A woman's best friend is a husband of intellect and of heart, whom she loves, and who loves her. And I should like to add : A literary woman's best critic is her husband; and I cannot express in these few words the debt which I am proud to acknowledge to him who has never hindered my life's work by one hour of anything less than loyal delight in it, and who has never failed to urge me to my best, of which his ideal is higher than my own.

The great semi-tropical region of the Southern States has many a choice spot hidden away from the glance of the fashionable tourist, who cares to do only what his neighbor does; and he whose eyes are fine discovers these winter gardens, and shelters himself in them till they, too, come into the fashion, and are ruined accordingly. Among these luxuriant Edens in 1888 was the village of Summerville, South Carolina. It was, and is, to my mind---and I know something of the South---one of the very best places upon the map below Washington in which a Northerner may take his turn at the fancy of losing the winter out of his year. Most of us try it, and most of us get over it; and we of New England, in particular, return to our own country by another way, and forthwith develop a respect for it never known before we exchanged the snowdrift for the sand-flats, the Northeaster for the soft, weak, stationary thermometer, and the coast pines for the everglades. "An orange tree is a stick beside an apple-orchard!" cried one homesick Massachusetts invalid, exiled for dear life to Florida. Though I confess to something of the same prejudice, I must admit that Summerville is a land of lovely dreams, with more conveniences and fewer discomforts, more tonic and less enervation, than any other Southern health or pleasure resort that I have seen.

Summerville is a village dropped into a pine forest. Roses run riot over it; its homes are gardens, and gardens are its homes. There the winds are laid; a blind may hang loosely half the winter, and will never flap from dark to dawn against your rose-wreathed window. If there is wind enough to blow a little girl's hat off, one calls it a gale. There it is always dreamland, and there the knotted Northern nerves may relax and rest.

The winter of 1888-89 found us in this kindly place. Longfellow wrote once to a friend of his early home life, "We are happy in our own hired house." Our "hired house" was one of the prettiest, I make bold to believe, upon1 which the American traveler might happen, though he sought from Maryland to Florida. The cottage was set in a bower of roses, the Cherokee, the blush, and the yellow. Japonicas, azaleas, violets, and magnolias blazed across box and myrtle, touched in with the soft lights of Southern garden blossoms whose names I did not know, and never had the intellectual initiative to ask, since, to tell the truth, I liked them the better for my ignorance. I have never seen at the North anything to compare with the feeling of the Charleston people (who made their summer homes in this village) for their flowers. This passion was identical with devotion, which is not true of all passions, and easily mounted into adoration. The chief conversation in Summerville was of flowers; and a gentle, refining one it was.

To this cottage, where we sat among the roses, hard at work (for I have never seen the time yet when I could manage to take a vacation not absolutely thrust upon me by illness), came down one day the indefatigable editor of a New York literary syndicate, to whom distance is a myth, and topography a plaything.

From that visit resulted the syndicate publication, and later, the appearance in book form of the two novels which Mr. Ward and I collaborated, and about which I have a few words to say here.

We were engaged to write these novels for a special purpose, and with a special cast and coloring. These, like most of the novels written in the present day, were to be adapted to serial publication first and foremost ; which means, in a word, rapidity of action and sensitiveness of suspense, and more frequent climax than were required by stories of the elder time, peacefully read between covers, of an evening. The one thing which serial publication does not require is less art. Personally, I have always found it more difficult than a tale which has no bars or fences, but may run its own will over the countryside, coming to a top when it gets through. Partly for this reason, but more because of my own inaptitude for historical study, I was very reluctant to undertake the work in question. Mr. McClure, who recognized my husband's gifts in this direction, persuaded us; and we wrote.

Our task was to create two novels built upon Scriptural characters, scenery, and history. They must be oriental to the last adjective. They must treat of life, of love, of action, not as the occidental looks at these great facts. Saints, villains, heroes, and heroines must think and feel not as the New Yorker, or the Bostonian, or the Londoner of 1890 thinks and feels, but as the Babylonian or the Jew of two thousand or three thousand years ago would have loved and fought and wrought and died. This undertaking involved much study, and of a close and exacting kind. And just here, I would like to say:---

The research implied in the construction of these two books must be entirely credited to my collaborateur. I cannot lay claim to any portion whatever of the industry and accuracy which have received the warm recognition of oriental scholars; and I have always felt a little uncomfortable at the chance of being supposed to be so much "wiser than I am!"

Further: One of these books, from the critic's point of view, succeeded better than the other. I am glad to take this natural opportunity to say, that the one which succeeded should be entirely attributed to Mr. Ward---construction, plot, and all but a small fraction of the execution.

"The Master of the Magicians" added to a large circulation the cordial welcome of reviewers. For whatever that is worth, the book had it.

"Come Forth" reached the usual comfortable and satisfactory circulation, but did not leap to the further side of that; and -- I am told---received at the hands of reviewers a treatment amounting to brutality. Of course, in this case, as is my custom in all others, I have never read these opinions expressed by professional critics about my books, and have never felt any temptation to do so.

It fell to Mr. Ward and myself to collaborate one other story, growing out of our life in South Carolina; and the success of this (which was so fortunate as to take a first prize in the "Youth's Companion," in the only competition of that kind in which I ever engaged,) I attribute also, in good measure, to my collaborateur.

A MAKER of books with any tendency towards the activities of moral reform may be at some peculiar disadvantage. As I look back upon the last twenty-five years of my own life, I seem to myself to have achieved little or nothing in the stir of the great movements for improving the condition of society which have distinguished our day; yet I am conscious that these have often thrust in my study door and dragged me out into their forays, if not upon their battle-fields. The grandfather who belonged to the underground-railway, and the grandfather of the German lexicon, must have contended in the brain cells or heart cells of their unconscious descendant, as our ancestors do in the lives of all of us ; for the reformer's blood and the student's blood have always had an uncomfortable time of it, together, in my veins.

It is almost impossible to understand, now, what it meant when I was twenty-five, for a young lady reared as I was, on Andover Hill, to announce that she should forthwith approve and further the enfranchisement and elevation of her own sex. Seen beside the really great martyrdoms and dedications of the "causes" which throb through our modern life, this seems an episode only large enough to irritate a smile. Yet I do not, to this hour, like to recall, and I have no intention whatever of revealing, what it cost me.

In fact, it seems to have been my luck to stumble into various forms of progress, to which I have been of the smallest possible use; yet for whose sake I have suffered the discomfort attending all action in moral improvements, without the happiness of knowing that this was clearly quite worth while.

The creed is short, though it has taken a long time to formulate it.

I believe in the Life Everlasting; which is sure to be ; and that it is the first duty of Christian faith to present that life in a form more attractive to the majority of men than the life that now is.

I believe in women; and in their right to their own best possibilities in every department of life.

I believe that the methods of dress practiced among women are a marked hindrance to the realization of these possibilities, and should be scorned or persuaded out of society.

I believe that the miseries consequent on the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors are so great as imperiously to command the attention of all dedicated lives ; and that while the abolition of American slavery was numerically first, the abolition of the liquor traftic is not morally second.

I believe that the urgent protest against vivisection which marks our immediate day, and the whole plea for lessening the miseries of animals as endured at the hands of men, constitute the "next" great moral question, which is to be put to the intelligent conscience, and that only the educated conscience can properly reply to it.

I believe that the condition of our common and statute laws is behind our age to an extent unperceived by all but a few of our social reformers; that wrongs mediæval in character, and practically resulting in great abuses, and much unrecorded suffering are still to be found at the doors of our legal system ; and that they will remain there till the fated fanatic of this undeveloped "cause" arises to demolish them.

I am uncertain whether I ought to add that I believe in the homeopathic system of the therapeutics. I am often told by skeptical friends that I hold this belief on a par with the Christian religion ; and am not altogether inclined to deny the sardonic impeachment! When our bodies cease to be drugged into disease and sin, it is my personal impression that our souls will begin to stand a fair chance; perhaps not much before.

Too brief a creed ! Yet still too short a life to practice it But may the clover refuse to grow over my grave, and the flowers laid there by the dearest hands shrink from it, if I outlive the impulse of my heart to keep step with the onward movement of human life, and to perceive the battle afar off, charging when and where I can.

Justice Holmes, the son of our great poet, in a recent Decoration Day address struck a pæan in praise of the "splendid carelessness of life" which war taught us. Give us such splendid carelessness, in moral as in physical danger, and the world will spin fast towards the stars.

I have intimated that the claims of my study have interfered with the demands which social reform would otherwise have made upon my life. This is an evitable fact, imperfectly to be understood, except by people whose business is to stay in a study. There is a puzzled expression sometimes cast upon one by men and women---but especially by women---whom one holds in the highest honor; whose own existence is dedicated to the moral agitation of the platform and the convention and to the machinery of organization. Mine is not, nor has it ever been. My intellect may go with them, and my heart may throb for them, but my time and vitality have always been distinctly the property of my ideals of literary aft; ideals which are not the less imperious to me, because I know better than any of my critics how impossible it has been for me to reach them, where they --

"Do not trouble her. She works in another way from ours," said Mrs. Livermore gently, one day, to some unknown agitator, who was abusing rather than entreating me into the performance of some platform exhibition for the sake of the cause. I blessed the great woman who defended me from the small one; and I think of her words and manner gratefully, to this day. And this leads me to say, by the way, if I may spare a paragraph for the confession --- that it is fortunate for the real usefulness and power of women in public address, that their eminent success in this direction has never in the least depended upon my individual contributions to its history.

In the course of my life I have made, indeed, the most conscientious and courageous efforts to defy my own temperament in this respect. I have read, and preached, and lectured; possibly I may have martyred myself in this manner fifteen or twenty times. The kindest of audiences and my full quota of encouragement have not, and has not, been able to supply me with the pluck required to add visibly to this number of public appearances. Before an audience I am an abject coward, and have at last concluded to admit the humiliating fact. The solid amount of suffering which I have endured on such occasions, is as disproportionate as it is ridiculous. Once I was rash enough to pledge myself to deliver a short course of literary lectures before a coeducational university, where I was sure of that admiring and uncritical sympathy which young students give to a teacher to whom, for any reason, they feel at all drawn.

For six disastrous weeks before this simple experience, I dwindled with terror, day and night; and I came to that audience of boys and girls as if they had been a den of tigers, and I a solitary, disabled gladiator, doomed at their claws. I contrived to live to the end of that "course of lectures," hiding my agonies with such hypocritical dissimulation that I was told their existence was not suspected by my audience. Whether the students were any wiser for that literary instruction I do not know; but I was. The inevitable miseries of life are enough, I said. I will never ornament them with the superfluous again. To the lecture bureaus and the charity entertainments of our elocutionary land, I have since that occasion offered one monotonous reply: I am not a platform woman. Go thou in peace, but I pray thee, have me excused.

Dr. Bushnell's strong and vicious phrase, The Reform against Nature, which is so often misapplied in opposition to the higher interests of women, sometimes finds its fit survival; and I meekly suggest this as one of the contingencies which it seems created to cover. I glory in the success of a modest and high-minded woman in public address. I am proud of her to the last shrinking nerve in my own organization. She seems to me something phenomenal, to be admired in silent awe. But this is a reform against my nature; and I have retreated from the field.

1 have said (to return to our interrupted thought) that the duties of a student and writer have often encroached upon my power to throw my life into moral reforms but I am anxious to add that my interest in moral reforms has never, to my consciousness, encroached upon my power ---such as that has been---to write; or upon those habits of study which are the key to the combination lock of all successful writing.

On the contrary, I am distinctly aware that such sympathies with the moral agitations of our day as have touched me at all, have fed, not famished my literary work. I think that most writers who have trodden a similar path would say as much; but there is more involved in such testimony than would seem at first sight : let me suspend the thought, however, while I allow myself a moment of more purely personal musing.

Upon reviewing the list of books which my long-suffering publishers of the eminent and friendly house which has borne with me for thirty years attribute to my pen, I find in the whole of it but one which is confessedly and componently written to further an ethical reform. This is a little pamphlet on the dress of women. It is nothing more or less than a tract ; and never claimed to be. A tract, though it spoke with the rhetoric of men, of artists, or of angels, and though it had compassed the circulation of a yellow novel or a spelling-book, is, in no sense, literature, nor even literary art; nor ever claims to be. No artist or artisan of the school of Art for Art's sake can be more acutely aware of axioms like these than his fellow-student who, from a diametrically opposite conception of the nature and province of literature, dips his pen now and then into the hot blood of some battle with skulking error, which preachers and philanthropists and men of science have passed by upon the other side, and left for the teller of tales or the singer of song to trouble himself wherewith.

If I am reminded how many of my stories have been written with an ethical purpose, that is quite another accusation, and one which I have not, from any point of view, the wraith of a wish to deny.

I have been particularly asked, in closing these papers, to say a few words about my own theory of literary art. However unimportant one's personal fraction of achievement may be, it is built upon theory of some kind; and the theory may be considered of as much or as little interest or value as the work achieved.

"I have never gone --- I do not go --- so deep as that," said one of our foremost novelists to me, many years ago, when I asked him why he did not handle some situation which had presented itself to me as peculiarly adapted to his strong and delicate pen. But he spoke gravely, and too thoughtfully for the lightness of his words. I was not surprised when, long afterwards, I noticed that he had become absorbed in some of the most serious of sociological questions, and that a book of his no longer held itself in graceful scorn apart from the study of the higher and the deeper laws which govern human life. But that phrase of his stayed by me. He would not go "so deep as that"? Yet this was no inditer of society verse, no builder of uproarious paragraphs, no dabbler in comedy, whose profession it was to make a man laugh after dinner, or a woman smile when she had sat down to cry. (Heaven preserve the lightsome race, for we need them when we can spare the tragic artist !) He of whom I speak was an artist in fiction of dignity, versatility, and fame.

What manner of artist was he, I make bold to ask, who would not "go as deep as that?" Graceful, elaborate, subtle, ingenious, charming, he may be. Perfect, I suggest, he is not, and he cannot be; no, nor even complete in the artistic sense of the term, who refuses to portray life exactly as it is.

In a word, I believe it to be the province of the literary artist to tell the truth about the world he lives in, and I suggest that, in so far as he fails to be an accurate truth-teller, he fails to be an artist. Now there is something obviously very familiar about this simple proposition; and, turning to trace the recognition down, one is amused to perceive that here is almost the precise language of the school of writers to which one distinctly does not belong. Truth, like climate, is common property; and I venture to suggest that the issue between the two contending schools of literary art to-day is not so much one of fact as of form ; or, perhaps I should rather say, not so much one of theory as of temperament in the expression of theory.

A literary artist portrays life as it is, or has been, as it might be, or as it should be. We classify him as the realist, the romanticist, or the idealist ; though I am not sure but our classification is more defective than his ability to meet it. Separate, for instance, the first of these clauses from the formulation. Let us say, it is the duty of the artist in fiction today to paint life as it exists. With this inevitable observation who of us has any quarrel?

The quarrel arises when the artist defines his subject, and chooses his medium. The conflict begins when the artist proffers his personal impression as to what life is. "Your work," said Hall Caine before the Century Club, "is what you are." Just here, I venture to suggest, lies the only important, uncontested field left in a too familiar war. Most of the controversy between our schools of art goes "firing wild," because it fails to perceive the true relations of this one simple feature of resistance.

We are all agreed, I submit, that we should picture life as it is. If I may return to the definite words, --- our difference is not so much one of artistic theory as of the personal equation. Our book reveals what life is to us.

Life is to us what we are.

Mr. Howells, in his charming papers on literary Boston, has given us some of the latest phrases of the school of art whose chief exponent in America he undoubtedly is. Of our great New Englanders --- Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfeliow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Mrs. Stowe --- he says: "Their art was Puritan. So far as it was impressed . . it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded . . . and still characterizes the New England mind . . . . They still helplessly pointed the moral in all they did. It was in poetry and in romance that they excelled. In the novel, so far as they attempted it, they failed . . . . New England yet lacks her novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself." Of the greatest of American novels, he concluded by saying that "it is an address to the conscience and not to the taste ; to the ethical sense, not the æsthetical sense.

This is not the place, nor does it offer the space, in which to reply with anything which I should call thoroughness to such a view of the nature of art. But it seems to be the place for me to suggest, at least, so much as this: ---Since art implies the truthful and conscientious study of life as it is, we contend that to be a radically defective view of art which would preclude from it the ruling constituents of life. Moral character is to human life what air is to the natural world --- it is elemental.

There was more than literary science in Matthew Arnold's arithmetic when he called conduct "three fourths of life." Possibly the Creator did not make the world chiefly for the purpose of providing studies for gifted novelists; but if He had done so, we can scarcely imagine that He could have offered anything much better in the way of material, even though one look the moral element squarely in the face, and abide by the fact of its tremendous proportion in the scheme of things. The moral element, it cannot be denied, predominates enormously in the human drama. The moral struggle, the creation of character, the moral ideal, failure and success in reaching it, anguish and ecstasy in missing or gaining it, the instinct to extend the appreciation of moral beauty, and to worship its Eternal Source,these exist wherever human being does. The whole magnificent play of the moral nature sweeps over the human stage with a force, a splendor, and a diversity of effect, which no artist can deny if he would, which the greatest artist never tries to withstand, and against which the smallest will protest in vain.

Strike "Ethicism" out of life, good friends, before you shake it out of story!

Fear less to seem "Puritan" than to be inadequate. Fear more to be superficial than to seem "deep." Fear less to" point your moral" than to miss your opportunity.

It is for us to remind you, since it seems to us that you overlook the fact, that in any highly-formed or fully-formed creative power, the "ethical " as well as the "æsthetical sense" is developed. Where "the taste" is developed at the expense of "the conscience," the artist is incomplete: he is, in this case, at least as incomplete as he is where the ethical sense is developed, at the expense of the æsthetic. Specialism in literary art, as in science, has its uses; but it is not symmetry; and this is not a law intended to work only one way.

It is an ancient and honorable rule of rhetoric, that he is the greatest writer who, other things being equal, has the greatest subject. He is, let us say, the largest artist who, other things being equal, holds the largest view of human life. The largest view of human life, we contend, is that which recognizes moral responsibility, and which recognizes it in the greatest way.

In a word, the province of the artist is to portray life as it is; and life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility. An artist can no more fling off the moral sense from his work than he can oust it from his private life. A great artist (let me repeat) is too great to try to do so. With one or two familiar exceptions, of which more might be said, the greatest have laid in the moral values of their pictures just as life lays them in ; and in life they are not to be evaded. There is a squeamishness against "ethicism," which is quite as much to be avoided as any squeamishness about "the moral nude in art," or other debatable question. The great way is to go grandly in, as the Creator did when He made the models which we are fain to copy. After all, the Great Artist is not a poor master; all His foregrounds stand out against the perspective of the moral nature. Why go tiptoeing about the easel to avoid it?

"Helplessly to point the moral" is the last thing needful or artistic. The moral takes care of itself. Life is moral struggle. Portray the struggle, and you need write no tract. In so far as you feel obliged to write the tract, your work is not well done. One of the greatest works of fiction ever given to the world in any tongue was" Les Misérables." Are those five books the less novels because they raised the mortal cry of the despised and rejected against the deafness of the world ? By the majesty of a great art, No!

Did Victor Hugo write a tract? He told an immortal story. Hold beside it the sketches and pastels, the etchings, the studies in dialect, the adoration of the incident, the dissection of the cadaver, which form the fashion in the ateliers of our schools to-day!

It has seemed to me, to return to the personal question, that so far as one is able to command attention at all, one's first duty in the effort to become a literary artist is to portray the most important, not altogether the least important, features of the world he lives in.

The last thirty years in America have pulsated with moral struggle. No phase of society has escaped it. It has ranged from social experiment to religious cataclysm, and to national upheaval. I suggest that even moral reforms, even civic renovations, might have their proper position in the artistic representation of a given age or stage of life. I submit that even the religious nature may be fit material for a work of art, which shall not be refused the name of a novel for that reason. Such expressions of "ethicism" are phases of human life, are elements of human nature.

Therefore, they are lawful material for any artist who chooses them; who understands them ; and whose art is sufficient for their control. If he has sacrificed truth or beauty to didactics, he is, in so far, no artist. But because he selects for his canvas ---whether from mere personal aptitude, or from a color sense, which leads him to prefer the stronger values---the moral elements of life, he shall not for that reason be denied the name of artist. "Omit Eternity in your estimate of area," said a great mathematician, "and your solution is wrong." Omit the true proportions of moral responsibility in your estimate of beauty, you who paint for "Art's sake," and your art is in error.

There is one form of fiction which, I think, is imperfectly understood by students and critics, to which, as it happens, I have given some special attention, and which is therefore peculiarly interesting to me. I mean the short story. The difficulties in the way of creating a good novel are sufficiently obvious; I question whether they are as severe as those in the case of the short story. The short story, in its present stage of evolution, is a highly-developed piece of workmanship, and will, I think, yet become a far more exquisite one than we at present compass.

A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity. It would not be easy for one who has not "served his time out" at this form of creation, to understand the laws of construction involved in it, and the rigidity of obedience demanded by them. Perhaps I ought fairly to say, in venturing to offer this assertion, that, personally, I make a very hard time of it, over a short story. I do not know how to write one easily or quickly.

"Those things?" said a friend to me once, and he a learned man, accustomed to study from fourteen to eighteen hours a day at his own profession, "Why, I supposed you got those off in a few hours !"

It has always taken me at least from a month to six weeks to finish a magazine story. I confess that I "toil terribly" over them. It makes little difference whether the motif comes in a blinding flash, or in a slow, insulated, electric current :--- the construction and execution remain inexorable ideals frowning above attention, patience, vitality, energy, until the work is done. One who honors this vehicle of thought is often ill with the strain, before a magazine tale of forty pages of manuscript can be apparently completed. The work upon such a story is never done. Revision calls the vision to account in that iron exaction from one's self which is so much more remorseless than the exaction that any critic can make upon one.

Fortunately, perhaps, the editor calls for his copy, and the laboring pen must drop its loving task. The story goes to press. Then come the days and nights of wishing that it had stayed at home! Then the steady action of the brain, which has for weeks stiffened about the story, goes on, till it meets the reaction awaiting all strenuous labor. I recast, remodel, retouch, destroy the whole thing a dozen times in my mind, and recreate it; scathing myself that I ever suffered it to leave the safe protection of the little pasteboard pad held across the lap, on which I write. The proof-sheets come; at once a species of relief, and of torment. The changes which can and which cannot be made in the text combat each other. No proof leaves the study without three revisions.

I look upon a short story, properly fitted for the higher magazines of our day, as one of the very finest forms of expression. No inspiration is too noble for it; no amount of hard work is too severe for it. It is my belief that there is a future for the short story, which all our experiments and achievements are building with a gradual and a beautiful architecture.

Is the natural growth of this way of telling a story in part a concession to the restlessness of our times, in which all men are driven by "the whip of the sky," and leisure is a lost art? Shall we some time come to the point where people will no longer think themselves able to read books? Will the novel dwindle to the novelette ? (that dreariest of efforts to do a thing and not do it at the same time!) Will the scientific volume shrink to the essay in the last review? Will all the classics in fiction some day be short stories? Who can prophesy? Not I : and would not, if I could.

Perhaps the question oftenest asked of any writer by "the great unknown" of his readers is, which of his own writings he personally prefers. It has always seemed to me rather a foolish question; for it is not of the slightest consequence what an author thinks about his own work: he may have his opinion as to what ought to be the best thing he has done; but his readers will decide for him what is the best --- or the worst --- that he has offered them.

"The public," Thackeray used to say, "is a jackass." With this great authority I feel forced to differ a little. On the whole, I have a profound respect for the sense of the reading public. If large numbers of intelligent people like a book, one may believe in one's soul that it is the poorest thing one has done, but one is forced to think that there was something worth while about it. If they dislike a book, I am more than ready to suspect that there is a reason for it, though I may labor under the personal delusion that it is my chef-d'oeuvre.

Still, since there seems to be a widespread, natural wish to know how authors discriminate among their own works, I do not know that it is any more unreasonable a demand to comply with than the mania for autographs.

And, by the way, if I may take a moment's recess from a subject which will not be the worse for a respite, this may be as good a place as any other in which to say that I have been reluctantly forced, for dear life, to decline the distribution of autographs by mail, except for the gratification of the sick, and for charities. The demand having reached a point where I had no longer strength or time to comply with it, I was forced to adopt a course not at heart as ungracious as it may seem. Good Lord deliver us from ten, twenty cards to an envelope! And preserve us from the crisis, when the autograph epidemic strikes a school or a college, like the measles, and runs through ! When autograph bedquilts and autograph aprons vie with autograph lampshades and autograph tablecloths, a writer who cannot command secretary, typewriter, or any aid whatever to the mechanical part of his profession, finds himself at bay. When, one day, 1 received a peremptory order from some remote and unknown individual for autograph prayers, I resorted to the protest of all overworked and underpaid laborers in our times,--- I struck.

To come back to our bisected paragraph: if I am to say for which of my short stories I have any especial preference, the list would be sadly brief. "The Madonna of the Tubs," perhaps, and "Jack the Fisherman," "The Supply at Saint Agatha's," "The Bell of Saint Basil's," and possibly one other. These indicate to my aspiration the astral bodies of something which I should have liked to do, if I could have done it.

Among the books which I have written in the last twenty-five years, there are too many which were cast in very early youth, when an unpracticed pen and unformed ideas of art compassed nothing that I like to recall, or to have others remember.

The stories known as "The Gates" series have a certain interest to me, for the reason that they continue to this day to find more readers than any or all other books I have written; and that, in chronological proportion. "Beyond the Gates" and "The Gates Between" were written in maturer life than the first I have a little tenderness for these two dreams of the life to be.

"The Story of Avis" is a woman's book; and an author would care for it in proportion as she cared for her own sex.

Perhaps, on the whole, I have written nothing which I should be so sorry to have seriously misunderstood, or am so glad to know that I am finding friends for, as the last story, --- "A Singular Life."

This brings me to say, gladly, how much I owe, in the little share of the hard work of my times which I have done, to the picturesque, warm-hearted people of the sea among whom I have spent the last twenty summers. The tide does not rise through my pen as it did through Celia Thaxter's, who, I think, scarcely published a poem which did not contain an allusion to the sea; but I have neighbored the life of the coast too long not to feel myself a part of it. I am told that certain "material" in Gloucester is pointed out as the original of scenes or of characters in some of my stories and I should like to take this opportunity to say that, while I may paint in the tints or outlines of rocks and beaches, downs and harbor, fleet and wharf, I never draw portraits of my neighbors or of my friends.

They have taught me much, however, of a kind of knowledge of which it would be impossible for any writer to divest himself. I honor their courage, their generosity, their patience in hardship, and their pluck in overcoming it; and I like that something wild and salt in their natures akin to the winds and the waves in which they live. In so far as their qualities have washed up into my stories, the debt is distinctly mine.

The story of "A Singular Life" came out of the depths of the sea, and of a heart that has long loved the sea-people. Bayard is my dearest hero.

Our Gloucester home itself has suffered a sea-change within the last five years. The choice spot on the chosen side of the harbor became in time a Babel, in which only those "who sleep o' nights" could rest. The tramp and the tongue of the summer army devastated Paradise. The wand of the house-mover---most startling of modern magicians---waved over the cottage; and to-day we find ourselves wafted from shore to farm ; from stormy tides, both salt and human, we have come to anchor in

How confusing and bewitching is the experience, no one can divine who had not moved his house, and gone on living in it!

Through windows which used to gaze on Norman's Woe, and Boston Light, and the tossing Eastern shore, and the fleets champing at their roads, like tethered sea-horses at their bits, we look to see "the daisies dressed for the dance" with the clovers, and the cattle slowly winding across the downs beyond the rope-gate which --- with the genuine native Gloucester instinct --- we found ourselves quite naturally constructing out of the sheets of our fishing-boat that we do not call a yacht; who tugs at her mooring off the pier, six minutes away. Beyond the door on which the spray used to dash in the autumn gales, lies the tapestry of the marshes, a vast Persian rug, unfolded in all the dull, deep shades that oriental weavers love, against the feet of the cliffs, whose gray shoulders mark the fascinating foreground of the downs.

Happy the flitting that stirs from home to home, and never from home to hotel life!

There is a hillside in the Garden City of Massachusetts, where we have built the most modest of houses into the most luxurious of landscapes. All our splendor is outside. "Oh," said a shivering cockney, "these places where there is climate, and nothing else!" To such a visitor our "poem of places" might seem a view, and nothing else. But town life has not spoiled the whole of our day and generation; and enough remain who have eyes to see and nerves to feel the free horizon, the pure, electric air, the gracious sweep of hill and valley outline, the rose-garden of the sunrise, the conflagration of the sunset, the banner of the woods and meadows.

Poverty itself is rich in a country home; and plain New England comfort and economy we consider to be in princely circumstances.

Our upholstery hangs in our silver birches and bronze chestnuts, our red oaks and olive pines. Our Wilton and Axminster lie in our clovers and snowdrifts. Our bric-à-brac shines on the boughs of our apple-trees when the blossom blushes. Our jewels blaze on the tips of our pine-fronds when the ice-storms glaze, and the sun of the winter thaw is hot. Our galleries are filled with the masterpieces of May and of October, framed in quiet study windows, whose moods we choose to fit with ours.

We can never quite want for society when our pine-groves talk; they have taught us their language, and we need no translator when the winds are abroad. The piano rings to the accompaniment of grand winter storms, from which only the true country lover never shrinks ; and the books on their shelves or tables turn loving faces to the readers, who do not count the evenings dull in the society of these loyal and lifelong friends. The countryside without and the fireside within open the book of home together; and the word they read is peace.

It is impossible for us to sing too loud the song of country life. For a student we believe it to be the one way of living. Perhaps, to be just, I should say suburban life; since it is but twenty-five minutes from Boston to our door; and the world is always with us if we want it.

In point of fact, one may not want it very much. The distractions, the exhaustions, the savage noises, the demands of town life, are, for me, mortal enemies to thought, to sleep, and to study ; its extremes of squalor and of splendor do not stimulate, but sadden me; certain phases of its society I profoundly value, but would sacrifice them to the heaven of country quiet, if I had to choose between.

In this shelter of snow and silence we spend eager winters ; for our hardest work, like that, perhaps, of most people of our calling, is done between October and June. Life seems to grow busier, I find, as middle age strikes step with one. I wonder is this always so? "I have always been thinking," said a gentle, careworn woman to me once, "that the time would come when things would grow easier; it never has; perhaps it will yet." Perhaps it did; for she died that year.

But we, like so many others who think more of working than of dying, care only to push on steadily, wishing less for cessation of toil than for strength to keep at it; and for wisdom to make it worthy of the ideal of labor and of life which we believe to be the most precious gift of Heaven to any soul. When one has gone as far as one can in search of it, will it come, like the father in the parable, though yet a great way off, to meet one and shorten the remainder of the way?

The fog was breathing off Cape Ann when I put my pen to the first words of these broken recollections. The coast was hidden. The sea was calling. He asked grave questions.

The fog is breathing over the inland rolling country as I write this closing page. The blue and purple mists of a soft November storm, that cannot make up its mind whether to stay or go, smoke far along the valley. The outlines of the woods and distance are blurred as if with an imperious brush. Half the meaning of the gentle scene is hidden. The sea is too many miles away to hear him. I am the one who does the calling, who asks the questions now. But strong silence answers me.

Since out of life we all learn a few things well, we find it natural to try to make them over to other lives; and we should choose for our telling, not the most brilliant lessons, but those that have been educative to ourselves; those that will make it easier to live ; and more possible to live happily, and with the eyes focussed upon a true horizon.

Perhaps, in my honest soul, I am wondering if these fragments will have done as much as this for any reader of all the patient number.

But the mist is on the hills, as on the valleys; and the outlines of the landscape all are hidden. I can see but a little way.

Is it the fog that reminds me? Perhaps! But that, or something else, drags out of my pen the poignant words of Zangwill, who said of a certain writer that "he had concealed himself behind an autobiography." If one has done as much as that, perhaps one has met the chief conditions of the case.