tainly produce a new soul in the hero's case from such a life germ, though it were trailed through a hundred prisons in the operation, and probably the Great Master of life and souls is not behind them. But just what life or literature would do with the heroine's case is really another matter, and it lies too deep for any surface treatment to dispose of. It is certain that Walter Scott kept some eternal truths of life and its sequences intact when he refused to let a whitesouled heroine introduce the black thread of a rank perjury into the web of her life. Nevertheless, it shadows her with something almost equally as dark when she is made to stand up and swear away, so far as her power goes, the life of a loved one, to keep her own soul inviolate, and human love and reason refuse to believe that such violence done to nature and the tender affections can ever turn out a means of grace. The real lesson in such monstrous spectacles is to set forth the deplorableness of laws and civilizations that can not get beyond them. Society is said to be a tissue of falsehood from beginning to end, and no wonder when, from the schoolboy to the court witness, human beings are expected to turn state's evidence against their best beloved for the purpose of having them put under the rod or the executioner's ax in some clumsy form of law and punishment.

One of the early recollections of a New England boarding school life shows a tender maid of sixteen incarcerated for seven long days in a dreary chamber, and fed like a jailbird on bread and water, allegorically called toast and tea, because she refused to betray a favorite schoolmate whom she had accidentally seen skip through an open window and go off with the "boy tenor" for a stroll in the summer moonlight. That she was truthful enough to confess that she knew the parties, and loyal enough to insist that she could not betray them, was the head and front of her offending. And this

is much the condition of things with many a trembling witness who is snapped up to give evidence in different directions against friend or lover, with only this deadly difference in more serious cases, that refusal to speak means often most fatal indorsement of the evidence on the other side. Since home discipline has gone into the hands of the children instead of the parents, we hear less of brothers and sisters being required to give each other over to the rod or torture chamber by witness bearing against one another. But for how long was that a recognized part of family training and policy? Not till brilliant humorists like Ingersoll began showing parents that standing over puny creatures with a club, ready to annihilate them on conviction, was not the way to make the sensible child lay bare his soul before them, or tell the painful truth about which boy hacked the cherry tree. And now that the children have got the club, and smash the furniture or hang themselves over the roof if a stern look crops out anywhere, it is a courageous parent who dares say that his soul's his own.

Intimidation works to the repression of troublesome facts in either child or adult, and when it is brought to bear upon the finer feelings it is not so strange that some skillful tactics in "breaking the legs" of injurious truth should be resorted to. "I speak truth, not so much as I would, but so much as I dare," said the high-minded Montaigne, and it is a nice commentary upon the state of life and society that that should be very much the case with all of us. To tell the truth is the natural impulse of the soul. It is the danger and calamity that attend it that begin to train the innocent-minded child to phase and twist it till often, the more intelligent he grows, the more of an adept he becomes in the operation. It is the pleasant sophistry of some to imagine that they can save themselves from too much com

pounding with the father of lies by suppressing the truth, while they fail to utter the falsehood. But it is just that that society has set itself to outwit most effectually. Like the poor girl on the witness stand, to fail to testify against is to admit the evidence for the thing that undoes us, and so a protective panoply of white lies becomes almost a necessity in guarding our most sacred possessions.

Everywhere, in love, in law, in religion, there is a penalty attached to the truth. How many ministers dare speak it to any people as their inmost souls behold it? How many mismated couples dare face it honestly and openly, though all their lives become a living lie in consequence? What cowards in love everywhere do violence to the very life principle of their souls, because the truth is made a costly thing for them? What scores of Jeanie Deans are hiding the slips of recreant loved ones because society knows nothing better than to crowd them into pens of contamination, brutality and ignominy if the slip becomes known? Indeed, what church, court, government or civilization, the world over, has brought itself to the sublime height of dealing honestly with life as it is, or making it possible for other than children and fools, as the old adage has it, to tell the truth about things as they are? The little English lad who defined a lie as "an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, but a very present help in time of trouble" sized up the whole situation. And yet truth is the very central flame that feeds the "white radiance of eternity," and to clear the path to it the most essential thing for any creatures who would reach the eternal hills. To put a premium on lies and make martyrs or monsters of those who would speak the truth has been too long the world's system of education in such matters, and it is certainly a ground of congratulation if any jurymen in any land look to the motive, and not the

deed, that imperfect human courts themselves impel. Long ago a prophet, dreaming, whispered of a day when mercy and truth should meet together. It is for that we wait. And heaven grant that it may dawn before the exigencies of the present system hurl us all into the "lake that burneth" through our futile endeavors to connect the two.

THE TOUCH OF NATURE

T is a divine touch in literature which seeks to make all life kin to us. To knit the animal world to our own in almost human loves and human sympathies, has been the work of our most engaging writers, and in stirring the pulse of tenderness and respect for all created things, especially in the heart of childhood, the work has been a splendid one. But, with all respect for the gentle and gifted ones who have so happily preserved for us the unities of life in all the remotest corners of the kingdom, it is still a regret that for any cause or effect they should have been moved to drop down the burden of human pain, as well as human pleasure, upon the free, glad spirit of the lower world. It was bad enough for man to come to that state of higher consciousness which would fill him with pain, fear and mourning over the ordinary processes of nature, or stir his bitterness and revenge over the natural workings of that great law of the survival of the fittest. But when it comes to tangling br'er wolf and brother bear in the heavy and pathetic toils of it, the very ends of nature seem turned astray.

The one great answer to the tremendous problem of suffering in the animal world, and all the preying of the stronger upon the weaker therein, was that it is not suffering in any real human sense; that the processes of life and death go on there with no such jars and wrenches of relations and affections, such passions of grief, despair and longing, as mark our beautiful "higher intelligence." Yet here are our loveliest writers filling our dumb relations with such in