time
commonplace of domesticity, wherein there was no more room for the
preservation of love tokens than there would be in a seraglio under
lock and key. Non-possession, or, at least, uncertainty, is for the
love token a perfectly safe endowment policy in the insurance company
of passion. Thus it is that the liberty to-day given woman in American
society has made the love token more treasured than ever it has been
in all the history of the world. Yet no one writes its history; not
only because of the angering equality it bespeaks, but also, and
chiefly, because the men that could write it best are those that
mingle something akin to a curse with the kiss they secretly press
upon some trifling souvenir, men to whom it has brought suffering, or
to whom only a hopeless longing after ideal love is represented by the
token--which is rarely the evidence of triumph, but rather of regret,
the reminder of something lost or unattained.

But even those that suffer most at sight of some such trifle, those to
whom it would be anguish to write its history, would not for a throne
part with it. And yet you, perhaps, are one of those that will have no
conception of the meaning of all that I have said. Do you know what it
is never to have felt the supremity of the love token? Are you so
engulfed in the greed for gold that it could not touch you even were
it to be slipped into your grasping fingers--so keen for power or so
lustful for fame? Or you may be of those that believe romantic love to
belong to the abnormal. But, in either case, even to you, like De
Maupassant's horror-stricken youth dragged to the threshold of the
priesthood, the day may come when you will shriek:

To never love--to turn from the sight of all beauty--to put out
one's own eyes--to hide forever crouching in the chill shadows
of some cloister--to visit none but the dying--to watch by
unknown corpses!

For that is what it is to live without touching your lips to a token
of love--even of a love that is lost.

TIMON CRUZ

Oh, lovely is the quinta in the warm and sunny morn,
Acequima's ripple softly to the coming of the dawn;
Fresh breezes toss the branches green, the chill of dusk is past,
Sheer joy of living fills the world! Rare hour, too sweet to last!
The roses fling their petals wide, their fragrance fills the air;
It mingles with the orange buds which blossom everywhere;
The birds chant loud their matins; all the earth