of American history. True to one affection and one pure purpose of uplifting his people, he buried the sorrow of his life in his bosom, and having bound the confederacy to keep in his absence the constitution he had framed for them, disappeared, like the old Greek patriot and lawmaker, to return no more. "In the glory of the sunset; in the purple mists of evening," verily did his white canoe vanish from the straining eyes of the tribes, and here we are up against a hero whom no probing of the story can besmirch. More than that to the white man is the moral and to civilization the reproach. Could any of "them" prying scholars and "fool literary fellers" do worse for us than that? Would that Owen Seaman would spear them all with a jest, and let us have white lambs for heroes that are not quite so "ominous" when served up with the mint sauce of present society.

Nevertheless, since philosophy seems to insist that all our ideas are born of experience and no conception of life or character beyond the range of experience is possible to the mind, we may have to take all the aureoled heroes of song and story as men and brothers yet. There is no denying, either, that when we do come upon them in the ranks of common life they surpass anything that the romancers have ever claimed for them. We can afford to lose all the Norse heroes of fiction, whom John Fiske's searching work, "New France and New England," wipes out in the glory of those humble men and maidens of authentic history that he raises up to stem the tide of savagery, tyranny, superstition and wrong in the new land. What are a hundred Jeannie Deans, either, besides the almost unknown woman, Mary Easty, who faced all the powers of court and clergy in a trial for witchcraft with protestations of its falseness, and the dying prayer, "I petition not to your honors for my own life, for I know I must die. But by my own innocency I know you

are in the wrong way." There are heroic souls and exalted spirits enough in real life to make us uneasy in our vanities, without going to fiction for them. The only thing we can ask of the searchers after their types or prototypes, is that they shall not be thrust upon us too ruthlessly before we are able to bear them. It was a solid comfort to know that the new Enoch Arden of Meriden, Conn., who recently came from the Klondike to gaze silently through the garden gate upon the fair wife Annie, who, believing him dead, was playing "little wife" to another, went way back to Alaska and sat down, without upsetting the gracefully shifting currents of love and matrimony of our day. And what if he did hear his baby boy calling another "papa?" There is a good Englishman not unknown to society who always tells his wife that in case of the "divided path of development" she can have both the boys to dispose of as she pleases. Enoch Arden should know that in these days love

Fulfills itself in many ways

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

It is only when some fierce Zola rises up to cry, "I accuse," to the ruling orders that trouble arises, and even then small harm is done unless he dies and shows them a white-souled hero of truth and justice at the back of it. It is these just men everywhere that disturb the dreams of kings, and when society has spent ages in banishing them, and literature in painting their weaknesses, why should restless anthropologists hunt legends and archives to reinstate them on the face of the earth, especially when it remands us back to a state of nature or savages to find them? "These people are cannibals," said Zola of the representatives of French aristocracy and intellect, who crowded the courtroom to ring out their cheers over the base verdict, "Guilty." But, of

course, any poor, ignorant cannibal who merely gratifies his appetite for dinner might blush to find himself ranged beside these cultured monsters, athirst for lives, honor and every human principle of decency or justice. It is the growth in power and intellect without a corresponding growth in goodness and truth that is the reproach of civilization everywhere, and the thing that makes it almost an appalling matter to have some white embodiment of all its own ideals step out of the dim past and very ranks of savagery to try its progress along the eternal lines.

However, there is still a chance for us, for has not the well-known president of a voters' league recently declared that he would not indorse the Angel Gabriel if he were not on the winning ticket, and it has never been the part of these ideal creatures to get themselves on the winning ticket. To all appearances they only become our snow-white heroes when they are dead and well out of the way. If they can not attach themselves to earth by a few weaknesses while they live, society generally takes up the matter and fits them out with a saving panoply of sins and accusations if it proposes to make any use of them. It is more than possible that if truth were told there are heroes of true and honest purpose among us to-day. But let them start out to do an unusual and earnest work, and see what hints of evil and all duplicity will be brought to bear upon them. That gentle-souled Walt Whitman may have intended no sarcasm when he declared that it is only after the "noble inventors" that the sons of God may come upon the earth singing his songs. But he perpetrated a rather neat one, notwithstanding, and perhaps it is not till we have lost these noble inventors of dusky earth garments for our heroes that we need be very much afraid that we shall have to creep under their huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable

graves, but to be able to speak with the assurance of Browning of "My peers the heroes of old" would certainly be an agreeable thing to any man if he could reconcile the world to it. Many and varied counsels thereto have been offered him also, from Byron's advice that the hero must drink brandy to the modern diplomat's insistence that, like Janus, he must have two faces. But perhaps that discerning old essayist, Addison, comes nearest to the case when he declares simply that he must know how to make both the hero and the man complete.

P

THE PURSUIT OF GHOSTS

OURELY by accident the psychic societies captured a

ghost. An uncapped lens of a camera, left in the deserted library of an old English manor house, revealed on the developed negative the veritable figure of the lord of the manor seated in a high-backed chair of the ancient sanctum. And this at the very hour when the body of said lord was being laid away in a kirkyard near by.

Of course, the society for psychic research took care of the mystery, and the poets and seers who stand harking with spirit ear at the door of the arcanum advised us not to be cast down by such mystery; or marvel, but to "go right on." Joining hands with science, they whispered stoutly, "Let us recognize that mystery of this kind exists, but until it reveal itself we have not the right to relax our efforts nor cast down our eyes and resign ourselves to silence." The aim of all men should be to master the forces of matter and wrest from them their secret, and then go on to that general secret of all life which "lies hidden at the end." The fact that science has become hospitable to a ghost and set upon taking its photograph is directly in the line of their counsel, even though the unbelieving are out with cameras and confederates trying to show by what neat tricks and accidents the filmy ghosts may be developed.

There was a time when the wondrous feats of the Indian fakirs were submitted slyly to the tests of the camera, and the trees and flowers and dancing angels which they claimed to bring straight from paradise or some deeps of the un