, I did the same, but they
never noticed; my man was drowned, and my beautiful boys got the fever
and sickened one by one and died: that was all I got. Priests say it is
best; priests are not mothers.

* * *

"They were greater than the men that live now," she said with a solemn
tenderness,

"Perhaps; Why think so?"

"Because they were not afraid of their dead; they built them beautiful
houses, and gave them beautiful things. Now, men are afraid or ashamed,
or they have no remembrance. Their dead are huddled away in dust or mud
as though they were hateful or sinful. That is what I think so cowardly,
so thankless. If they will not bear the sight of death, it were better
to let great ships go slowly out, far out to sea, and give the waves
their lost ones."

_MOTHS._

When gardeners plant and graft, they know very well what will be the
issue of their work; they do not expect the rose from a bulb of garlic,
or look for the fragrant olive from a slip of briar; but the culturers
of human nature are less wise, and they sow poison, yet rave in
reproaches when it breeds and brings forth its like. "The rosebud garden
of girls" is a favourite theme for poets, and the maiden in her likeness
to a half-opened blossom, is as near purity and sweetness as a human
creature can be, yet what does the world do with its opening buds?--it
thrusts them in the forcing-house amidst the ordure, and then, if they
perish prematurely, never blames itself. The streets absorb the girls of
the poor; society absorbs the daughters of the rich; and not seldom one
form of prostitution, like the other, keeps its captives "bound in the
dungeon of their own corruption."

* * *

The frivolous are always frightened at any strength or depth of nature,
or any glimpse of sheer despair.

Not to be consoled!

What can seem more strange to the shallow? What can seem more obstinate
to the weak? Not to be consoled is to offend all swiftly forgetting
humanity, most of whose memories are writ on water.

* * *

It is harder to keep true to high laws and pure instincts in modern
society than it was in days of martyrdom. There is nothing in the whole
range of life so dispiriting and so unnerving as a monotony of
indifference. Active persecution and fierce chastisement are tonics to
the nerves; but the mere weary conviction that no one cares, that no one
notices, that there is no humanity that