Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of thehighest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.

Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

... while the light burning within may have been divine, the outer case of the lamp was assuredly cheap enough.

It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.

Reform is born of need, not pity.

Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.