e for three score years it you use it
for a clothes stick on wash day, or a violin retain intact the angel
voice within it if you let rats breed and nest in it, fling it against
the side of the house and dance on it with hob-nailed boots? If an
instrument subjected to such usage pipes out a silver note once in a
dozen years, uncover your head when you hear it, for it is the original
angel within the mechanism, which nothing can kill!

XIII.

THE FIRST KATYDID.

The first katydid of the season has whipped out his bow and drawn the
preparatory note across the strings of his violin. He is alone at
present and he plays to an empty house, but it will not be long before
the orchestra fills up and the music is in full blast. The cricket is
getting ready to throw aside the green baize that has held his piccolo
so long, and before the middle of the month there will not be a tuft of
grass nor a shelter of low-lying leaves that is not alive with the
shrill, complaining sweetness of his theme. The goldenrod has lighted
the candles in the candelabra that skirt the borders of the wood, and
the aster has already hung out her purple gown and her yellow laces
upon the bushes that follow the windings of the steep ravine. Only six
weeks to frost! Only six weeks to the time for the unbottling of the
year's vintage and the exchange of tea for sparkling wine. Hasten
forward, then, oh, days of radiant life and sparkling weather! We are
tired of torrid waves and flies; of snakes, hornets and cyclones.

XIV.

A PLEA FOR MEN.

A more or less extended experience as a bread-winner has taught me a
noble charity for men. I used to think that all the head of a family
was good for was to accumulate riches and pay bills, but I am beginning
to think that there is many a martyr spirit hidden away beneath the
business man's suit of tweed. Wife and daughters stand ever before
him, like hoppers waiting for grist to grind. "Give! Give!" is their
constant cry, like the rattle of the upper and nether stones. This
panegyric does not apply to the man who frequents clubs and spends his
money on between-meal drinks and lottery tickets. It applies rather to
the unselfish, hardworking father of a family, who works early and late
to keep his daughters like lilies that have no need to toil, and to
help maintain the ostentation of vain display upon which depends the
social success of a worldly and frivolous wife. It would be far more