e letter. She glanced it through, and then, taking his hand in hers,
faltered gently, "My poor boy! I can guess what it must mean to you."

He put his head down in her lap and sobbed like a child, while she
stroked his hair and face and spoke shy words of sympathy.

"David," she said, "it was for your father and me that you gave up
college. Perhaps you think we don't appreciate it, because we never
say much. I know what it has cost you and how nobly you have stuck to
your duty, and you know that in God's sight whatever may come of it
you have done the kindest thing."

"Oh, but mother, that doesn't make it any easier to lose Janet. She
was so much to me, and we were going to be so happy together."

"Hush, little boy, you mustn't take it so hard. Perhaps some day
you'll see that it was for the best."

The afternoon light was fading and the rain was beginning to fall
softly outside. In the dimming light the two continued sitting there
together, hardly speaking a word, for what comfort could words bring?
And slowly a vague peacefulness began to fall upon his heart under the
gentle touch of his mother, and rising, he kissed her silently and
went out to his work.

_Literary Monthly_, 1902.

THE ENDITING OF LETTERS

STUART P. SHERMAN '03

"Now for enditing of Letters: alas, what need wee much adoe about a
little matter?"

In a letter to Miss Sara Hennel, George Eliot writes that "there are
but two kinds of _regular_ correspondence possible--one of simple
affection, which gives a picture of all the details, painful and
pleasurable, that a loving heart pines after ..., and one purely moral
and intellectual, carried on for the sake of ghostly edification in
which each party has to put salt on the tails of all sorts of ideas on
all sorts of subjects." These two classes embrace, perhaps, the great
bulk of letters, but George Eliot says there is a third class to which
her correspondence with Miss Hennel belongs--one of _impulse_.
Strictly speaking, all of the letters which really belong as such to
literature come under this last head. The result of a perfect fusion
of the two other styles, they exhibit a sparkle, a pungency, and
lightness of touch, which take the curse from mere gossip, supple the
joints of intellectual disquisition, and mark unmistakably the
epistolary artist. The letter-writer, no less than the poet, is born,
not made, and his art, though for the most part unconscious, is no
less an art. T