The silly talk of children--and how like some conversations the
propinquity of piazzas has since forced me to listen to!

To find just the button she wanted was sometimes a long task for
mother, and father, it must be admitted, had varied the proverbial
needle simile for our domestic establishment, to read, "like hunting
for a button in your mother's button box." But still the odd buttons
continued to go in, and only the ones needed came permanently out. You
never could tell, to be sure, when the most unlikely button would come
in handy. Sometimes there were days when the village dress-maker
arrived after breakfast and remained till almost supper time,
converting the upstairs front chamber into a maze of threads and
snippings, and requisitioning the button box in long searches for "a
set of six". That was a fine game! Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes
only five could be found of the type she particularly desired. But
never did the box fail completely; always there were enough of _some_
button that, she said, without dropping the pins from her mouth, would
do, "though it ain't quite what I wanted."

All this flashed through my memory as I waited for my wife to
reestablish connections on my shirt. As she finally finished, and
pushed in her silly little drawer, I said:

"Do you call that thing a button box? Why don't you have a real one?"

"That's quite large enough when you have to find a match," said she,
"and too large when you drop it."

Women are practical creatures; there is no sentiment in them. Their
alleged possession of it is the most spurious of all the arguments
against equal suffrage.

[Illustration]

_Peppermints_

I have just purchased a little bag of peppermints, and returned with
them to my rooms above the Square. I did not purchase them at the
promptings of a sweet tooth, but of a hungry heart. They take me back
into the forgotten Aprils of my life, where I often love to loiter,
not from any resentment that I have been unable to emulate Peter Pan
and remain a boy forever, but because this great town is drab and
dusty and imprisoning, and it is sweet to escape down the green lanes
of April, even if only in a memory. A physical sensation--the sound of
a voice, a hand patting us to the rhythm of "Tell Aunt Rhody", an
odor--can plunge us deeper and swifter down to the buried places of
our memory than any process of deliberate recolle