who no longer makes music in that home, but who has gone to the fairer life, where "their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven."

This mother sheds copious tears each day, as she looks at this little memento of the one who was her pride and joy; but meantime she is nervous, listless, out of touch with life, living with her memories and not with her hopes. So the little shoe, dear as it is, becomes a drag on her, even a chain, to keep her back from the real consolation that comes to us in the presence of death; namely, the effort to take our place once again and do our work in a world which still holds for us joy, if we will only shake ourselves free of the fetters that would bind us to the past.

Another guiding principle is consideration as to whether in the place of the things we are loath to part with we can substitute something better. You do not want, for example, a creed, out of which the real life has gone, which the discoveries of scholarship have rendered obsolete, which your own religious experience has already outrun. You do not want any text-book, or

story-book, the reading of which will prevent

you from reading a better one. You do not want, my wealthy but parsimonious friend, the hundred dollars which some Armenian orphan, just bereft of his parents and hungry and naked, needs more than you do at this

moment.

Our business is with the present. Let us always remember that. We would better throw away a good many things when we are through with them, lest they litter up the place where we live, and even worse than that, lest they fetter our lives in the pursuit of the things that are most worth while. The really brave man is he who can let some things go when they have served their uses and have ceased to yield anything to the development of character.

I

LIFE ON EASY STREET

HAVE never been able to acquire any

property on Easy Street, but since a few friends and acquaintances are just now residing there I am somewhat familiar with its life. It is an interesting and charming little community. I like to study it as I pay an occasional call or visit to the street.

There are my friends the Welloffs, for example. They never had any children and Welloff once confided to me that neither of them very much cared. And when I ventured to suggest that they adopt one he rejoined, "What do you take us for anyway!" Relieved of all parental responsibilities, they come and go as they please. Almost every winter they spend at least a few weeks in Florida or Egypt or some other balmy region. They are very hospitable when at home and I have met in their drawing-room some of the leading artists and musicians of the city. Once in a while they develop a rather ephemeral interest in some popular charity, and Mrs. Welloff was for one season the president of the Anti

Public Expectoration League. I like to dine at the Welloffs. The eight courses are always delicious and faultlessly served as well. Their house is full of fascinating antiques and curios from all parts of the world. Somehow, I miss, however, the little shoes and dollies that might be here or there. But Mrs. Welloff is very fond of her canary and once sat up nearly all night to tend it when it was sick.

Just opposite the Welloffs is the fine stone mansion which belongs to my college classmate, Jack Chameleon, or to speak more exactly, to his wife, for after Jack had struggled along two or three years in his profession, a rich and estimable young lady captured his fancies and responded to his advances. They are now enrolled among the substantial people of the town. They have a number of children and plenty of servants to look after them, though they themselves never scant their parental duties. Perhaps it is my imagination, but it has seemed to me as if Chameleon ceased to feel the pressure upon him of the fight for daily bread, for he was poorer than most of us in college. Chameleon has undergone quite a cooling of professional ambitions. Though he maintains nominally office hours

they are well inside the limit of even a seven-hour working day. Not that he has altogether degenerated intellectually, but when I asked him the other day about that book which used to glow in his imagination as a possibility of the future before he met Mrs. C., he jokingly replied, "Oh, well, there are a lot of books of that type afloat now and if I should ever get mine out I doubt if it would find the public. Come over and play golf, won't you, some afternoon?"

There is another house on Easy Street where I call occasionally, but not so frequently as when little Elsie Sweetface was just beginning to toddle. What a fascinating little creature she was then! She is very pretty now at nine, but somehow her face often takes on a discontented and petulant expression. Things have been made very easy for Elsie all these nine years. The understanding was that if she cried for a thing she had better have it. "Get along with her as easily as you can," I once heard her mother remark to the nurse. She was bathed and clothed and fed long after the time when she ought to have begun to attend to these daily processes herself. When the public school proved a little hard