uffering of others, but it is true, also, that too few of us
were born under a laughing star. Gray shadows fall too often on our minds.
A sunny road is the best to travel by. Furthermore--and here is a deep
platitude--there is many a man who sobs upon a doleful book, who to the
end of time will blithely underpay his factory girls. His grief upon the
book is diffuse. It ranges across the mountains of the world, but misses
the nicer point of his own conduct. Is this not sentimentally like the
gray yarn hysteria under the spell of which wealthy women clicked their
needles in public places for the soldiers? Let me not underrate the number
of garments that they made--surely a single machine might produce as many
within a week. But there is danger that their work was only a sentimental
expression of their world-grief. I'll sink to depths of practicality and
claim that a pittance from their allowances would have bought more and
better garments in the market.

Perhaps we read too many tragical books. In the decalogue the inheritance
of evil is too strongly visited on the children to the third and fourth
generation, and there is scant sanction as to the inheritance of goodness.
It is the sins of the fathers that live in the children. It is the evil
that men do that lives after them, while the good, alas, is oft interred
with their bones. If a doleful book stirs you up to life, for God's sake
read it! If it wraps you all about as in a winding sheet for death, you
had best have none of it.

[Illustration]

I had now burned several matches--and my fingers too--in the inspection of
the closet where the women's garments hung. And it came on me as I poked
the books within the barrel and saw what silly books were there, that
perhaps I have overstated my position. It would be a lighter doom, I
thought, to be rived and shriveled by the lightning flash of a modern
book, even "Crime and Punishment," than stultified by such as were within.

Then, like the lady of the poem

Having sat me down upon a mound
To think on life,
I concluded that my views were sound
And got me up and turned me round,
And went me home again.

ON TRAVELING

[Illustration]

ON TRAVELING

In old literature life was compared to a journey, and wise men rejoiced to
question old men because, like travelers, they knew the sloughs and
roughnesses of the long road. Men arose with the sun, and toddled forth as
children on the day's journey