she was sent to a private school. Indeed, her entire life has been ordered from the point of view of what would be most easy and agreeable for Elsie. I wonder if at thirty or even at eighteen she will thank her parents for their over-indulgence of her. As you drive through Easy Street and view the well-kept lawns and comfortable dwellings the tone of things gratifies all your esthetic susceptibilities. And I know some people on the street who are living just as earnest and self-sacrificing lives as are being lived anywhere in the world today. Indeed I sometimes have a drawing toward Easy Street myself. And yet if these are the alternatives I know which I would choose for myself and children. As between Easy Street and a flabby intellect and Hardship Lane with an alert and acquisitive mind, as between Easy Street with a dull conscience and Hardship Lane with an active one, as between Easy Street with a patronizing, condescending spirit and Hardship Lane with a truly democratic one, as between Easy Street with an ossifying heart and Hardship Lane with sympathies as wide as the world, I can decide in one second which I would choose.

THE STANDSTILLS OF LIFE

YOU are traveling a crowded, narrow

You

thoroughfare. The stream of humanity advances slowly and with many turns and twists. In the street the drays, wagons, and motor vehicles barely crawl along. Suddenly everything stops. Something has happened to impede further progress in any direction. It makes no difference how important your engagement somewhere else, you must wait until the policeman straightens out the tangle.

Sometimes in the early spring after a mild period that has started the buds there comes a succession of chilly, dreary days. The faint signs of new vegetation grow no more pronounced. It looks as if there has been a relapse into winter and you say, "Summer will never come.'

The business of a great nation, which has moved forward for a number of years by leaps and bounds, returning rich rewards to those who conduct it, suddenly suffers an arrest. The chill of an inexplicable fear lays its paralyzing hand upon many industries.

"The country is all right," you say, "but there is no gainsaying the fact that we have come to a halt for the present." A reform movement is strongly inaugurated and moves. on splendidly for a while. But before long the wheels drive hard. Popular interest

flags. The champions of this worthy cause are subjected to ridicule and even abuse. It begins to look as if they were visionary and too much in advance of public sentiment. The movement halts or even apparently recedes.

A strong, ambitious man with far-reaching plans only half realized is suddenly laid low on a bed of illness. The interests with which he has been identified suffer. Another may be found to take up his work, at least in part, but his own career halts for a time, the length of which he can only conjecture; invalidism holds him as its prisoner.

Now what shall we say about these standstills of life which in one form or another few of us escape? First, that, irritating as they are, they are meant to make us broader and better men and women. We may be too intent on one end. We must be made to think about something else for a little while. We may be and probably are far

too self-absorbed and self-centered. So we are suddenly, and, as we think, almost ruthlessly halted in order that our thought and sympathy may flow out in other directions.

Again the period of standstill may be utilized by us to good advantage. While you are waiting for the street blockade to cease you can patronize the apple woman, or send your thought above high buildings to the blue dome of heaven. While business halts, you can reexamine your commercial methods and projects in the light of the highest ethical standards. While your pet reform suffers a temporary eclipse you can ask whether the intensity of your zeal is matched with a spirit of patience and a good temper that refuses to be disconcerted even under adverse criticism. While you are ill you can make your sick-room as Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry Drummond made theirs, a place of peace and of unfailing cheeriness for those who resort thither.

Depend upon it, the standstills of life are among its most blessed boons. They have their great compensations, and whatever is worth while in our characters and in our purposes will suffer no permanent arrest.

WHAT

SNAP JUDGMENTS

HAT an ungracious thing it was in that dignified banker to refuse recognize you on the street the other day. It is not the first time, either, that he has been so discourteous. It cannot be that he did not know you, for you have talked with him half a dozen times. It must be that he is an aristocrat, pure and simple.

The young woman who conversed so volubly at the boarding-house table the other night, in fact monopolizing the conversation and dealing chiefly in frivolities, surely cannot stand for much in the intellectual or moral realm. A pity it is that so many of our American girls are given over to dress, display, and society chit-chat, with no interest in better things.

How lacking in neighborhood spirit is that family which moved into the big house on the boulevard a few months ago! The members do not seem disposed either to make or to return calls. They seldom show themselves at public gatherings. Evidently they consider themselves quite above the ordinary