hing, sewing,
scrubbing, saving, helping neighbors, "choring" outside--where does
the catalogue end? If she does a bit of scolding now and then who can
blame her? But often she does just the reverse; keeping the children
clean and the man good tempered, and soothing and smoothing the whole
neighborhood into finer shape.

Eighty years ago a certain Montyon left to the Academie Francaise a sum
of money to be given in small prizes, to the best examples of "virtue"
of the year. The academy's committees, with great good sense, have
shown a partiality to virtues simple and chronic, rather than to her
spasmodic and dramatic flights; and the exemplary housewives reported
on have been wonderful and admirable enough. In Paul Bourget's report
for this year we find numerous cases, of which this is a type; Jeanne
Chaix, eldest of six children; mother insane, father chronically ill.
Jeanne, with no money but her wages at a pasteboard-box factory,
directs the household, brings up the children, and successfully
maintains the family of eight, which thus subsists, morally as well as
materially, by the sole force of her valiant will. In some of these
French cases charity to outsiders is added to the inner family burden;
or helpless relatives, young or old, are adopted, as if the strength
were inexhaustible and ample for every appeal. Details are too long to
quote here; but human nature, responding to the call of duty, appears
nowhere sublimer than in the person of these humble heroines of family
life.

Turning from more chronic to acuter proofs of human nature's reserves
of power, we find that the stimuli that carry us over the usually
effective dam are most often the classic emotional ones, love, anger,
crowd-contagion or despair. Despair lames most people, but it wakes
others fully up. Every siege or shipwreck or polar expedition brings
out some hero who keeps the whole company in heart. Last year there
was a terrible colliery explosion at Courrieres in France. Two hundred
corpses, if I remember rightly, were exhumed. After twenty days of
excavation, the rescuers heard a voice. "_Me voici_," said the first
man unearthed. He proved to be a collier named Nemy, who had taken
command of thirteen others in the darkness, disciplined them and
cheered them, and brought them out alive. Hardly any of them could see
or speak or walk when brought into the day. Five days later, a
different type of vital endurance was unexpectedly un