ely better! It may be she loves as she
can. Her heart may not yet be equal to the love of a child, may be able
only to cherish a creature whose oppositions are merely amusing, and
whose presence, as doubtless it seems to her, gives rise to no
responsibilities. Let her love her dog--even although her foolish
treatment of him should delay the poor animal in its slow trot towards
canine perfection: she may come to love him better; she may herself
through him advance to the love and the saving of a child--who can tell?
But do not mistake me; there are women with hearts so divinely
insatiable in loving, that in the mere gaps of their untiring
ministration of humanity, they will fondle any living thing capable of
receiving the overflow of their affection. Let such love as they will;
they can hardly err. It is not of such that I have spoken.

"Again, to how many a lonely woman is not life made endurable, even
pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog! The man who
would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock
at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid
with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog. Nor would it change his
countenance or soften his heart to be assured that that withered husk of
womanhood was lovely once, and the heart in it is loving still; that she
was reduced to all but misery by the self-indulgence of a brother, to
whom the desolation of a sister was but a pebble to pave the way to his
pleasures; that there is no one left her now to love, or to be grateful
for her love, but the creature which he regards merely as a box of
nature's secrets, worthy only of being rudely ransacked for what it may
contain, and thrown aside when shattered in the search. A box he is
indeed, in which lies inclosed a shining secret!--a truth too radiant
for the eyes of such a man as he; the love of a living God is in him and
his fellows, ranging the world in broken incarnation, ministering to
forlorn humanity in dumb yet divine service. Who knows, in their great
silence, how germane with ours may not be their share in the groanings
that can not be uttered!

"Friends, there must be a hell. If we leave scripture and human belief
aside, science reveals to us that nature has her catastrophes--that
there is just so much of the failed cycle, of the unrecovered, the
unbalanced, the incompleted, the fallen-short, in her motions, that the
result must be collision, shattering re