the best economy, we shall not despise it. People call it benumbing; and so it is if we do not understand it: but if we understand that through it we can do more work in less time, and have more time left for the expansion of our souls, that through it we cultivate the habit which makes people know we can be counted on, we shall cease to say hard things of it. Even in those whose lives are narrowly circumscribed, we see the splendid courage and fidelity which come with faithful routine. The longer I live, the more I admire as a class the women who fill small positions in New England public schools, the typical schoolmistresses or "schoolmarms" of our more Puritanical towns and villages. Their notions of English grammar are as inflexible as their notions of duty; like Overbury's Pedant, they "dare not think a thought that the nominative case governs not the verb;" their theology may be as narrow as their philology;

they have little primnesses that make us smile: but they have the hearts of heroines. Pitifully paid, often with others to support, often subject to ignorant and wrong-headed committees, and obliged against every instinct to adopt new methods when education is periodically overhauled, often with little physical health, and living on courage and “wire,” with few social diversions higher than the Sunday School picnic, and few hopes of rest in this world higher than the Home for Aged Women, they are at their posts day by day, week by week, year by year, because they are, as Milton said of Cromwell,

"Guided by faith and matchless fortitude." What is more inspiring than the men and women who are "there," and "there" not in the high and ambitious moments of life, but on the obscure dead levels that take the heart out of any one who does not see the glory of common things?

These schoolmistresses, though they may not know it, illustrate the absolute necessity of routine for steadily effective living. In little things they may show the hard and wooden quality of a mind that works in the treadmill day after day, and may thus give a handle to those critics who scoff at routine; but if their small accuracies seem pretentiously little, their devotion is unpretentiously great. Through habit, supported by unyielding conscience, they have forced upon themselves a routine without which they could not live.

A boy when he meets with loss or grief or disaster, or even when he feels the excitement of joyful expectation, is likely to stop work altogether. He has "no heart for it," he says; he "cannot do it." A young man crossed in love, a young woman who loses father, mother, or bosom friend-these may pine and fret, and suffer the sorrow for days, or weeks, or months, to stop their lives,

may cease to live except as burdens to themselves and others; but, young or old, a trained man or woman whose heart and will are strong keeps on. There is always somebody or something to work for; and while there is, life must be, and shall become, worth living. "In summer or winter," said the proud advertisement of an old steamboat line, "In summer or winter, in storm or calm, the Commonwealth and the Plymouth Rock invariably make the passage;" and this should be the truth about you and me.

The use of routine to make a sad life endurable was once brought clearly before my mind as I watched the polar bears in the Zoölogical Garden at Central Park. In a kind of grotto cut in a hillside, two polar bears were caged. Two sides of the cage were of sheer rock; two were of iron, one separating the polar bears from the grizzly bears,

and one separating them from the spectators in the Park. The floor of the grotto between the steep rock and the pool of water which represented the Arctic Ocean was narrow; but on it one of the bears was exercising with a rhythmic motion strange and inexpressibly sad. He moved from the centre of the grotto two or three steps toward the rock, swung his head wide and low three times to the right and three times to the left, with a sweep like that of a scythe, stepped back two or three paces, completing a sort of ellipse, stepped forward again, swung his head right and left again three times, precisely as before,— then back, then forward, then swinging, on and on and on. At intervals, whether with numerical precision or not I cannot say, he broke his circuit, walked to the iron fence between him and the grizzly bears, walked back, and began once more the round of motions devised, as it seemed, to save him from madness or