es to take his false teeth out. A wife will promote an angry scene
with her husband over the "other woman"--of whom she is not in the least
bit jealous--when she will never dream of telling him that he doesn't
sufficiently wash--which was the real cause of their early estrangement.
Everybody knows his own vices, whereas most people are blissfully
ignorant of their own irritating idiosyncrasies. I would far sooner be
told of my nasty habits than of my own special brand of original sin.
Sin has to be in very disgusting form to evoke lasting dislike, whereas a
"nasty habit" breeds DISGUST, which is a far more terrible emotion than
hatred.

_Away--Far Away!_

"The bird was there, and rose and fell as formerly, pouring out his
melody; but it was not the same. Something was missing from those last
sweet languishing notes. Perhaps in the interval there had been some
disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardly
believe it since his mate was still sitting about thirty yards from the
tree on the five little mottled eggs in her nest. Or perhaps his
midsummer's music had reached its highest point and was now in its
declension. And perhaps the fault was in me. The virtue that draws and
holds us does not hold us always nor very long; it departs from all
things, and we wonder why. The loss is in ourselves, although we do not
know it. Nature, the chosen mistress of our heart, does not change
towards us, yet she is now, even to-day--

Less full of purple colour and hid spice,

and smiles and sparkles in vain to allure us, and when she touches us
with her warm caressing touch, there is, compared with yesterday, only a
faint response." I cull this paragraph from Mr. W. H. Hudson's
enchanting book, "Birds in Town and Village," because, or so it seems to
me, it expresses in beautiful language a fact which has puzzled me all
through my life, making me fear to dare in many things, lest the
enthusiasm I then felt were not repeated when the time for action
arrived. We are all more or less creatures of mood, some more than
others, and I, alas! among the moodiest majority. All through the long,
dark, chilly, miserable winter I live in town, longing sadly, though
rapturously, for the summer to come again, and with its advent my own
migration into rural solitudes, far away from the crowd, surrounded by
Nature and lost in her embrace. Yet the end of each summer finds me with
my pilgrimage not yet undert