the higher revelations of life. It is the
aggregation of individual characteristics that makes the sum-total of
national character; and though at first retrenchment and economy seemed
hideous words to the pleasure-loving, easy-going, self-indulgent souls
nursed in the lap of prosperity, there was coming a realization to those
who had fought their way valiantly across the yawning gulf, that the hot
race for show, the desire to exceed one another, was not a lofty aim for
an immortal soul, hardly for a cultured nature.

They both understood that beauty and grandeur were not far-off, hardly
attained ideals, and that the great pleasures were set in the world
rather as incentives and rewards, than highly seasoned daily food which
must inevitably produce satiety. Some time, when they had earned this
glorious vacation, they would take it hungering with the healthy
appetite of a well-trained soul. At present the duty was to deny one's
self firmly and contentedly, to round off the sharp corners, to shape
the daily living to high, pure purposes; so that the greater excellences
of Art should not despise the minor forms, the steps whereby true
perfection was attained, the tangled threads that often required more
real genius to comprehend than the one great moment of inspiration.

They came home again fresh and bright, with the peculiar fragrance of a
new life about them, just as you shall smell spring in the woods on some
mild, sunny February day. Fred fluctuated between office and city, quite
a prophet of household art, welcomed warmly back to the old circles
which had so quietly dropped him for a while. Is there not a great deal
of this unconscious proving of the fine metal of souls in the world? We
cry out as we are thrust aside, or given some hard task to do; we wonder
people do not hold out kindly hands, smile with sympathetic eyes; and
yet their very help might weaken us. When we have beaten our way across
with the roar of the distant waves still in our ears, the shadows of the
black, fierce, jagged cliff hardly faded, the taste of the brackish
spray still lingering on our lips, an exultant thrill speeds through
every nerve as we clasp a hand that has had to buffet through the same
fateful current.

Early in April Miss Barry had another seizure, a fatal stroke this time.
For a few days she lay in sweet content; and then dropped peacefully out
of existence.

It seems always a mystery, why such earnest, useful souls, doing th