r everybody in this world,
who is not yet dead. Buoyed up by a touching, but totally fallacious,
belief that he is performing a public duty, and that the rest of the
community is waiting in breathless suspense to learn his opinion of the
work in question, before forming any judgment concerning it themselves,
he, nevertheless, wearily struggles through about a third of it. Then
his long-suffering soul revolts, and he flings it aside with a cry of
despair.

"Why, there is no originality whatever in this," he says. "This book is
taken bodily from the Old Testament. It is the story of Adam and Eve all
over again. The hero is a mere man! with two arms, two legs, and a head
(so called). Why, it is only Moses's Adam under another name! And the
heroine is nothing but a woman! and she is described as beautiful, and
as having long hair. The author may call her 'Angelina,' or any other
name he chooses; but he has evidently, whether he acknowledges it
or not, copied her direct from Eve. The characters are barefaced
plagiarisms from the book of Genesis! Oh! to find an author with
originality!"

One spring I went a walking tour in the country. It was a glorious
spring. Not the sort of spring they give us in these miserable times,
under this shameless government--a mixture of east wind, blizzard, snow,
rain, slush, fog, frost, hail, sleet and thunder-storms--but a sunny,
blue-sky'd, joyous spring, such as we used to have regularly every year
when I was a young man, and things were different.

It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, even for those golden days;
and as I wandered through the waking land, and saw the dawning of the
coming green, and watched the blush upon the hawthorn hedge, deepening
each day beneath the kisses of the sun, and looked up at the proud old
mother trees, dandling their myriad baby buds upon their strong fond
arms, holding them high for the soft west wind to caress as he passed
laughing by, and marked the primrose yellow creep across the carpet of
the woods, and saw the new flush of the field and saw the new light on
the hills, and heard the new-found gladness of the birds, and heard
from copse and farm and meadow the timid callings of the little new-born
things, wondering to find themselves alive, and smelt the freshness of
the earth, and felt the promise in the air, and felt a strong hand in
the wind, my spirit rose within me. Spring had come to me also, and
stirred me with a strange new life, with a s