. What is the Great Centre
of us all, life animate and inanimate--if any life be inanimate? Is the
eternal universe one dim figure, Motherhood, filling all space?

This scheming Mother of Mayfair, angling for a rich son-in-law! Not a
pleasing portrait to look upon, from one point of view. Let us look at
it, for a moment, from another. How weary she must be! This is her third
"function" to-night; the paint is running off her poor face. She has
been snubbed a dozen times by her social superiors, openly insulted by
a Duchess; yet she bears it with a patient smile. It is a pitiful
ambition, hers: it is that her child shall marry money, shall have
carriages and many servants, live in Park Lane, wear diamonds, see her
name in the Society Papers. At whatever cost to herself, her daughter
shall, if possible, enjoy these things. She could so much more
comfortably go to bed, and leave the child to marry some well-to-do
commercial traveller. Justice, Reader, even for such. Her sordid
scheming is but the deformed child of Motherhood.

Motherhood! it is the gamut of God's orchestra, savageness and cruelty
at the one end, tenderness and self-sacrifice at the other.

The sparrow-hawk fights the hen: he seeking food for his brood, she
defending hers with her life. The spider sucks the fly to feed its
myriad young; the cat tortures the mouse to give its still throbbing
carcase to her kittens, and man wrongs man for children's sake. Perhaps
when the riot of the world reaches us whole, not broken, we shall learn
it is a harmony, each jangling discord fallen into its place around the
central theme, Motherhood.

ON THE INADVISABILITY OF FOLLOWING ADVICE

I was pacing the Euston platform late one winter's night, waiting for
the last train to Watford, when I noticed a man cursing an automatic
machine. Twice he shook his fist at it. I expected every moment to see
him strike it. Naturally curious, I drew near softly. I wanted to catch
what he was saying. However, he heard my approaching footsteps, and
turned on me. "Are you the man," said he, "who was here just now?"

"Just where?" I replied. I had been pacing up and down the platform for
about five minutes.

"Why here, where we are standing," he snapped out. "Where do you think
'here' is--over there?" He seemed irritable.

"I may have passed this spot in the course of my peregrinations, if that
is what you mean," I replied. I spoke with studied politeness; my idea
was to rebuke