of untoward conditions. What our girls to-day are suffering is partly the result of temporary and local disturbances, but it is largely natural and inevitable; it has always been, even in the days when women did the least possible thinking. With our grandmothers it took a purely religious cast, and was called 'concern for the soul.' It was settled when a certain mystical, but none the less practical, relation with the divine was established, quite different from the revolt at dogma and the effort to think things out upon a reasonable basis. It was purely individual then, it is largely social now; but the conflict is the same; it is the effort to develop a personality, to master the environment in which the individual is placed, to become truly at home in the world. It is the struggle for existence in the spiritual world, and it must go on.

Perhaps Shakespeare never hit the shield more fairly on the centre than when he represented Henry the Fifth on the night before Agincourt, disguised, surveying his ill-conditioned army. The king,' he affirms, when questioned if the king were not disheartened, and who should know so well as he how the king felt, 'the king would not wish himself anywhere but where he is.' The individual who can stand thus and confront the world out of the midst of his own danger, sorrow, perplexity, despair, has conquered the world. His necessity he has made his opportunity, - 'Here stand I; I can do no otherwise,'-and in not wishing for anything different he has doubled the resources at his hand. Not to wish one's self anywhere but where one is, is about the best that human nature is capable of, when the will to fight goes with it. I cannot perceive than an unblemished past is requisite to this attitude of mind; with all his faults and failings and sins, a man

may stand to it and win out; he may do it without submission to any theological dogma, without being technically 'good' - some who have done it we find quite without the pale; but no man can do it without a vital faith in a living God, by whatever name he calls Him, however ignorantly he worships. If a man will refuse escape from hard conditions and will fight in his own place, he shall know the true from the false and shall have his reward.

These are hard sayings. The achievement of personality is tedious and difficult; it is birth with long travail; when it is complicated with intellectual problems and questionings there is added danger and delay, rebellion against conventions and restrictions, distaste for our lot, doubt of the end, and an inclination to smash things. The revolutionary attitude of women at present may be partly nerves, hysteria, a mania for imitation, - it is all these in certain instances, and it is not always necessarily an advance either in ideas or in performance; but in general it is the index of an effort to reach a higher plane of consciousness by dealing with environment as something subject to will and skill, and by beginning with immediate surroundings to make them over. The hopefulness of it as a movement lies largely in the inclination to try out theories upon local problems, to turn energy into effective work. But mere revolt is not power: it must be followed by voluntary obedience to higher law before it develops anything of power.

If, therefore, the young women of to-day who suffer, they know not why, will revive their hope, and light again the lamp of duty, waiting with patience for necessary changes and adjustments within and working quietly for the conscious effecting of changes in the world without, no matter how small, so they be conscious improvements,

they may pass these Wanderjahre with comparatively little disturbance that is outwardly and disapprovingly noted by the casual observer. To promise more would be charlatanism. The best we mortals can do with these problems of pain and suffering, necessary and unavoidable as they are for growth, is to keep them to ourselves. And there is always duty to something, some one.

The longer on this earth we live
And weigh the various qualities of men,
Seeing how most are fugitive,

Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then,
Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen.

The more we feel the stern, high-featured beauty

Of plain devotedness to duty,
Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise,
But finding amplest recompense

For life's ungarlanded expense
In work done squarely and unwasted days.

A LATE light burned in the office of the Minnesotan. Old Tammas McCullough, returning in the dripping rain from a long drawn-out debate with Willie Wallace on Queen Victoria's attitude toward the Crimean War, tried the door of the printing shop. It was locked, but a red-haired young man came to open it.

'You're an angel in disguise, Tammas,' he said. 'I came down before the rain started. You can take me up the hill directly under that umbrella. It's as big as all Scotland. It beats all how it rains this April. It's the wettest weather I've seen since I left New England.'

He motioned the old man to a scratched yellow arm-chair, and went back to his case of type, offering disjointed bits of conversation now and then.

"The Lady Franklin came in for the first time this season after supper tonight

'She's airly,' said Tammas.
'Yes, the river has n't been open be-

fore the twentieth most years. They brought some government papers in the mail, a call for bids. I'm running it to-morrow. It's a particular job; that's why I'm working to-night.'

There was a silence of some length. Tammas studied the map of the Territory of Minnesota that hung on the wall opposite him.

'It's a call for bids for buffalo pelts. The government is going to buy a hundred thousand for fur coats for the soldiers. There's been a heap of complaining of the cold by the men out on the frontier here this last winter.'

Tammas's eyes dropped to the floor, where the water spread in two muddy pools around his heavy shoes. He evinced no interest in the subject, although he was a fur man in the employ of young John Cameron.

"There'll be a lively scramble for the contract,' the newspaper man continued after another season of work, 'but St. Paul ought to stand some show. We're nearer the source of supply than the other towns.'

'Wull the bit o' printin' be oot in the other towns the morn?' Tammas asked casually, as the printer slipped on his coat, and blew out the kerosene lamp. The young man struck a match to light them to the door. 'Half a dozen of the other papers get it, the Minneapolis Democrat, the St. Anthony Express, and some of those from the larger towns south of here; but they're all weeklies, and won't be out for two or three days.'

"There's sma' doot but that man frae St. Anthony will tak the contrac',' said the Scotchman gloomily.

They shuffled along through the dark over the slippery boards of the high-set sidewalks, descending now and again by a perilous flight of two or three steps to cross a miry street.

'I'm thinkin' Queen Victoria is richt aboot the Roosians,' Tammas chatted, his mind going afield from furs and the far west. At the top of the hill he left the printer at his boarding-house, and went on to the three-room cottage where he lived alone.

a

The house was tidy, but when he had hung his dripping coat to steam beside the fire, he went about setting it more severely to rights. Then he carried a candle into the bedroom, and drew out a large carpet-bag from the closet. He packed it deliberately, humming a thread of old Scotch melody, strange sound for this lonely midnight hour. When he had finished he tried the coat before the fire. It was still wet, so he wrapped a heavy blanket about him, and pinching out his candle flame with rough thumb and forefinger, he stepped out into the wet night again.

The town huddled in complete darkness, except for one light that shone high and star-like through the rain; the extravagant lamp of some late-writing guest in the fifth story of the Fuller House, that palace of travelers. Tammas McCullough took a slow but cer

tain way east for a quarter of a mile and stopped on the porch of a two-story brick house. He knocked heavily, and after a little repeated the summons, until the door was opened from within. John Cameron stood there in his carpet slippers, with an orange and white sun-in-the-east-pattern quilt wrapped about him.

'Why, come in, come in, Tammas. What's wrong?'

Tammas stepped in, but refusing to walk into the parlor with his wet garments he took the one chair in the narrow hall. Directly above his head hung a rack made of a splendid pair of deer antlers. A high sealskin cap hung on one of the branches.

'It's been a cauld winter,' he remarked to his employer.

'Yes, it has,' answered Cameron, huddling over his candle on the steps.

'I'm thinkin' the so'diers in the forts were no' so comfortable as they micht be.'

'Perhaps,' said the young man, with a keen personal appreciation just then of the discomfort of chilliness. But he and Tammas had worked together these four years and had deep respect for each other's ways.

"The American government is no' a really hard maister to warrk for,' the old man ventured. Then there was silence.

'Were you thinking of getting a job from the government?' asked Cameron at last.

The old Scot looked startled.

'Ye'll no' be dischargin' me, Maister Cameron?' he said.

'Oh, no, no,' said Cameron, relieved. 'I would n't like to part with you, Tammas.'

Again no sound but the steady swash of the heavy rain against the house.

'Has Willie Wallace been saying the United States is no good?' ventured the young man.

as to who was buying buffalo pelts in their vicinity. The territory was scoured for the furs; and team, stage, and boat brought them in to the storage houses in the larger towns, waiting the making of the bids, and their opening at Washington.

Tammas McCullough sent faithful and hopeful figures to Cameron by every stage from his headquarters near Fort Ripley, one hundred and thirty miles northwest of St. Paul. His records were remarkable. He was reaching every scattered camp or Indian village on the reservations in the northern part of the territory, and even as far west as the Dacotahs, but his footnotes were characteristic.

'Ye ha' better no' look for more pelts frae here,' he would write. 'Superior an' Red Wing ha' cleaned the coontry oot.' Or, 'We ha' had but sma' luck the week.'

He stayed up in the woods for a month after the opening of the bids, picking up small lots still of pelts, and writing of his extreme surprise that the United States had awarded the contract to one John Cameron, fur-trader of St. Paul. 'Be shairp to lookit ower the papers to see there be no flaw in them,' he cautioned.

'It's all settled,' Cameron wrote back, 'except for carrying out the condition specified in the call for bids, that the government shall inspect the pelts before they are made up. That is but a matter of formality. We have an extra ten thousand over the contract number, and the pelts are all of unusually high grade.'

Tammas came back in the late summer. He went straight from the stage to his little house, unpacked his carpetbag, and walked down in the dusk to Willie Wallace's.

'Weel, weel, here's the great mon from the wild Indian coontry,' said his host.

'Guid-evenin',' said Tammas, as though he had been seeing Willie daily.

'Hoo mony pelts did ye get, Tammas?' asked his old friend curiously. 'Ye're no' a friend o' mine, Wullie, if ye'll askit such pairsonal questins. I am minded no' to stop

'Ah, sit doon, sit doon,' begged Willie. 'We ha' no' talkit ower the RussoTurkish peace papers. I ha' saved the bits o' printin' for ye these mony months.'

Cameron and Tammas went through the shop together the next morning. The building, built of blue limestone and two stories in height, was hemmed closely in on one side by a harness shop and on the other by a frame building housing a restaurant. Its lower floor was divided into two rooms, an ample salesroom in the front, with the rear room reserved for work on the raw skins brought in. A couple of windows and a door looked out from the back wall down on the Mississippi, with a wide valley view beyond. The steep bluff that clambered down to the river bank left only a strip of three or four feet of rocky ground between it and the back of the building. All of the solid row of buildings for a quarter of a mile on either side of the fur-shop ran back thus close to the top of the bluff.

'Back doors are n't of much use here,' said John Cameron, standing in the breezy doorway. 'We'll never deliver an ounce of freight here, unless it comes by balloon.'

'Fur-shops need a' the air they can get,' answered Tammas drily, as they turned to go up to the storeroom on the second floor. The open staircase led up from the salesroom, starting well up toward the front of the store, and hugging the side wall at the right. The one large room above, lighted by three windows in the front, and an equal number in the rear wall, was piled high with