e existence this trouble to the man must have been
much less, must have been little more than the sympathy of an hour,
because, in nature, unaffected, there is seldom much of suffering and
almost never death prematurely. But we have changed all this. We have
violated gentle Nature's laws in our ways of living, and inasmuch as we
have done this, we have lost, to such extent, her soft protecting hand.
We breathe too little of the pure air; we are lax in physical effort,
and, even though the individual man or woman be wise, he or she must
bear the burden of the errors of an ancestry or the evils of the
present. So, to the woman gentle-bred there comes a risk in the
undergoing of that which she has most hoped for since she loved a man,
and since she would be all there is of perfect womanhood. There is
peril, and she knows it, but is braver than man at this time. There is
peril, and he knows it, and he is helpless and clinging as a child.
What can he do? Nothing, save to bring in a hard hour the presence of
one who may not bear a portion of the real trial. Yet this is
something. It has saved dear women's lives. There is something--we do
not quite understand about it yet--which is a band of more than steel
between two close together, and which holds back the one sometimes from
even the grip of that force seldom denied, which is named Death, the
one who fills the graveyards.

And, one evening, there was a man in deep trouble, and in the morning
he sat beside a bed in which was his small wife and beside her a tiny
red thing, "rather underdone," he said, in the buoyant reaction which
came upon him, for that was Harlson's way when he had emerged from
trouble; and the small red thing was the son of the two of them. And
who can tell what the man said to the woman. There are precious,
sacred overflows of love, sweet outbursts of what makes life worth the
living, never yet in words for all, never yet written in black upon
some white surface. There is a sanctuary.

It was a healthy baby, and the mother was soon herself, and the most
foolish of small women over it. I rather liked the young animal
myself, for they let me see it when its days were few, and it clutched
at my fingers in a way that won me. It was a curious young animal to
me. It took to the water wonderfully, and all three of us together
sometimes, when I would call, would summon the nurse and see the young
villain bathe. This was when he was but a few mont