m some flower garden in the country and quite bewildered and
lost in the barren city. The beautiful creature fluttered into a
lady's face and she screamed and struggled as though attacked by a
rabid beast. "Oh, kill it! kill the horrid thing," she cried, while
her attendant beat the air with his cane and sought to drive the
dangerous interloper away. It rested for a moment upon the gripman's
cap, where it looked like a feather dropped from a wandering bird. At
last it settled upon the breast of a little child sleeping in its
mother's arms. The mother brushed it away with her handkerchief as
though its presence brought defilement. A gentleman who was seated
near me caught the bewildered thing and with a very tender touch held
it for a block or so until we came to one of the pretty parks that make
our city so attractive. Stepping from the car, he loosened his grasp
upon the captive moth near a big syringa bush that adorned the entrance
way. He watched the dainty white wings flutter down into the cool
seclusion of the blossom then turned and boarded the car and pursued
his homeward way conscious, let us hope, of a very pretty and graceful
deed of kindness to a most insignificant claimant for protection and
succor. Sentimental, was it? Well, God help the world when all
sentimentality of this kind is gone out of it.

LXIII.

TAKING INVENTORY.

How poor the most of us prove to be when we take inventory of the
soul's stock! We have lots of bonnets, and plenty of dresses, and no
end of lingerie, we women, but how are we off for the things that count
when the dry goods and the furbelows shall be forgotten? How about
love, of the right kind, the love that ennobles rather than degrades,
and how about loyalty, and patience, and truth? If one of Chicago's
big firms should close its doors to take inventory of stock in January
and find it had nothing but the labels on empty bales to account for,
its poverty would be as nothing to the poverty of the soul we are going
to schedule shortly behind the closed door of the grave. What slaves
we are to passion; how we hate one another for fancied or even actual
slights, when we have such a little moment of time in which to indulge
the evil tempers! How we bicker, and lie, and betray, the while the
messenger stands already at the door to bid us begone from the scene of
our petty conflicts. For my part, the interest we take in things that
pertain to this perishable life,