it she
will tear him limb from limb and eat him raw. So he goes to his work,
writes his pieces, hums his gentle bee-song--so that men do not like to
room with him at the office--and has learned to keep himself fairly well
buttoned up in the great city. But Miss Larrabee that was--who used to
edit the society page for our paper, but who now lives in New York--told
us when she was home that as she was walking down Fourth Avenue one
winter day when the street was empty, she saw Mehronay standing before
the window of a liquor store looking intently at the display of bottled
goods before him. When he saw her half a block away he turned from her
and shuffled rapidly down the street, clicking his cane nervously.

It was not for him!

XVIII

Sown in Our Weakness

When one comes to know an animal well--say a horse or a cow or a
dog--and sees how sensibly it acts, following the rules of conduct laid
down by the wisdom of its kind, one cannot help wondering how much
happier, and healthier, and better, human beings would be if they used
the discretion of the animals. For ages men have been taught what is
good for their bodies and their minds and their souls. There has been no
question about the wisdom of being temperate and industrious and honest
and kind; and the folly of immoderation and laziness and chicanery and
meanness is so well known that a geometrical proposition has not been
more definitely proved. Yet only a few people in any community observe
the rules of life, and of these few no one observes them all; and so
misery and pain and poverty and anguish are as a pestilence among men,
and they wonder why they are living in such a cruel world. It was Eli
Martin who, back in the seventies, won the prize in the Bethel
neighbourhood for reciting more chapters of the Old Testament than any
other child in Sunday-school; and the old McGuffey's Reader that he used
on week-days was filled with moral tales; but someway when it came to
applying the rules he had learned, and the moral that the stories
pointed, Eli Martin lacked the sense of a dog or a horse. Once, when the
paper contained an account of one of Red Martin's police court
escapades, George Kirwin recalled that, when we offered a prize during
the Christmas season of 1880, for the best essay by a child under
twelve, it was Ethelwylde Swaney who won the prize with an essay on the
Weakness of Vanity; and she married Eli Martin when she and the whole
town knew what