hen they wish to use this
form of culture in the home circle only. It is not at all a bad thing to
do. Thus to train the voice for sweet and fine or for powerful and
striking modulations, to give the face new power of showing emotion, to
win also the help of gesture, is to add to one's resources and to make
them a greater source of enjoyment in the daily walks of life.

It is hardly possible to think of society in any age of the world since
we became human beings when the intercourse of people was not lighted up
with electric bits of humor, joking and ridicule, based on the dramatic
principle of imitation. But when the day came for our solemn ancestors
in New England to appear on the scene, they concocted a theory of duty
that was not favorable to these pleasurable forms of activity.

Yet, as we have seen, these subdued people loved music and they loved
beauty in all forms. And when beauty could be had along with what they
considered a pure and dignified aspect of expression, they winked at the
keen pleasure that they felt and said nothing against it.

An interesting story of Catherine Beecher, daughter of the great New
England theologian, Dr. Lyman Beecher, illustrates this. It is related
in the autobiography of her father that she once devised a play and
prepared, unknown to her parents, to give it in the kitchen of their
home in Litchfield, Connecticut. The unsuspicious parents, it seems, did
not notice that the neighbors were dropping in with a very unusual
simultaneousness and that after supper an unwonted fire was being built
in the parlor. Soon the door into the kitchen was opened with a
flourish, a curtain was seen to have been strung across the room, Roman
senators began to stalk across the stage--the kitchen floor--and a good
rousing dip was taken by all into the fountain of antique romance. After
it was over the stern father, who had been too greatly overwhelmed by
the events of the evening to make any objection, whispered to that
favorite daughter of his that it had all been very interesting
but--better not do that again! Catherine got off easily, considering the
repute in which dramatic representations were held by our forefathers.
Temptations to evil, at least, they were considered to be, if not the
very path itself.

Yet Catherine Beecher made many plays, devised in large part from the
plots of approved and semi-pious story-books, and these were enacted at
school and at the picnics of her large circle