Castle wall a girl waited, evidently for him. He came and stood beside her, and when she lifted up her face I could see that she smiled. Presently the soldier glanced around the courtyard; there was no one in sight. He kissed the girl. I felt abashed, I turned aside, and at my elbow I heard the thoughtful wizard chuckle.

By jerking the cord which dangled from the ceiling, the wizard transported us from one section of the city to another in a second's flash. It was swifter than the magic carpets in the Arabian Nights, and there was no danger of our being spilt over the edge. I have never really approved of those magic carpets, the motion must be so unpleasant.

There was a beautiful public garden in the city, at the base of the rock on which the Castle perched, a long green garden where children frolicked and students meditated. On a bench behind a flowering shrub there sat a middle-aged man reading a book.

"That is Professor of our University," whispered the wizard; although why he whispered I do not know.

I gazed eagerly at the eminent scholar who thought he was alone. I watched him annotate the margin of his book, pause, lean his head wearily on his hand. Yes, I heard him sigh. Or was it the wizard who sighed? A trail of rushing smoke tore up a trench in the middle of the greenness.

"The London Express," said the wizard. "The line is sunk below the level of the garden."

The Professor arose from his bench with a shrug of impatience, and we also moved on.

"It is true," I said. "Your city is one of the most beautiful in all the world." The wizard answered nothing; he only twitched the cord. And I remembered that the city was famous for its squalor and its wickedness as well as for its beauty. Old houses leaned outward, inward, and sidewise, along the narrow hilly

streets. In and out of black holes that the wizard said were covered alleys, children crawled like maggots. Filth strewed the sidewalks, and slime dripped from the roofs. Foul humanity choked the way. I breathed sparingly, imagining a stench.

In a little arid square at the bottom of the hill, below the congested region, a few gray children played. Suddenly, at a gallop, a carriage drove across the open place. The children scattered like frighted frighted sparrows; but one wavered, moved this way, that way, uncertain, and the off horse struck it. The people in the carriage huddled together; the horses plunged as, for one brief moment, the driver reined them in. Then, there was some kind of sign from the occupants of the carriage; he gave the horses the whip, and they dashed on.

"Stop!" I shouted, and brought my fist down smash upon the table. But the carriage slipped over the edge of the circle into the darkness.

"They were probably catching a train," said the thoughtful man.

The child lay very still in the square, the other little ones fluttering about it. Then a woman came out of a house, and I was glad we could not hear her scream.

"I do not often see anything so dramatic as this," observed the wizard. "Thank God!" said I.

We came down the stairs in silence. By the light of that magic circle at the top I began to read more meaning into the diagrams which represented the excellences and deficiencies of the kingdoms of this world.

"You have given me a most stimulating afternoon," I said to the thoughtful man when I bade him good-by. "I mean to have a camera obscura of my own, when I go home." "It is simple and inexpensive," he replied. "Observation, reflection, a high place, these are the chief requisites. It never fails to amuse, and there are some people who get more than amusement out of it."

"I shall build my Tower higher than yours," I continued, "so as to have as broad an outlook as possible. And when it is finished I shall be at home to my friends. Do you think they will come?" He hesitated, and then he said, “ Perhaps they will if you serve tea."

I WONDER, now and then, as I watch the progress of humanity, just On Progress. where we shall stop. In matters of church finance, for instance, how will our children's children, a century hence, conduct themselves? No one can question that we have made tremendous strides in this direction. Economy and thrift in the adjustment of religious affairs have become matters of course. Abel, it will be recalled, offered to the Lord the firstling of his flock, and the Lord looked with respect upon the offering of Abel. But with the offering of Cain he was distinctly displeased, if one may trust the record. I often wish there were, among modern inventions, some sort of spiritual phonograph by which one might judge the attitude of the Lord toward the present mode of sacrifice. With a little effort of the imagination, one can conceive such an instrument treasuring up for future generations the record, "The United Church of Centreville offered to the Lord, last evening, a rummage sale; and the Lord had respect unto the offering of Centreville."

The ideal of the Puritan Fathers which was essentially that of Abel, namely, to give to the Lord the best of the flock has suffered many changes on its way to the rummage sale. But in each of them there has lurked a thrifty desire to get much and give little, a desire to win the respect of the Lord at a minimum expenditure. It has been reserved to the rummage sale, however, to achieve a degree of shrewdness before which the imagination is dumb. Think of the delight of the first woman to whom the idea presented itself. She was, doubtless, some level-headed matron of the church who had labored long in the

cause. She had baked cake for church fairs, and beans for church suppers, and made ice cream for festivals, and coffee for all three, till her soul was weary within her and her countenance reddened with fire. Then, in a flash, there came to her, some night, perhaps, when she laid her tired head upon her well-earned pillow and thought upon the future welfare of the church - there came to her a revelation of the possibilities of the attic. In her mind's eye she saw, as in a dream, the roofs lifted from a hundred homes and the contents of a hundred attics exposed to view, a harvest for the Lord, -old dresses and chairs and tables and hats, boots and shoes too small or too big or too thick or too thin for the present owners, but sure to find a purchaser somewhere in the congregation. The stuff that everybody rejected should become the head of the corner. The idea flew like wildfire from mouth to mouth and from home to home. Old garments were routed out, cribs and baby carriages cherished by barren women, bags and baskets and lamp chimneys, rollingpins, stoves, and pie-tins, - church members appeared bearing them proudly in their hands, offerings to the Creator of the world.

The idea in its inception was a stroke of genius, — religious, commercial genius; and its execution has been no less happy. It has grown, indeed, in the brief years of its existence, to magnificent proportions. When it was found that, although every church member was willing, and glad, to contribute things that he did not want himself, he was sometimes inconvenienced by the burden of carrying them to the church, the furniture van was introduced, and a postal was sent to each member of the congregation announcing its arrival on a fixed date. There was still left to the individual contributor the labor of climbing the attic stairs and the mental exercise of choosing from among cherished relics the least desirable ones. But this amount of

sacrifice one renders cheerfully. One does not expect to get everything for nothing- even in church finance.

Certain features of the enterprise still remain to be adjusted. A perfect adaptation of means to ends has not yet been achieved. The sale, for instance, was at first held in some part of the church building, and the buyers were, for the most part, members of the congregation. But it soon became plain, even to the least enlightened type of mind, that more could be had for the money by enlarging the circle of buyers. A hall was hired outside the church and the public invited in. Then a curious sociological development took place. It was found that the chief buyers were old clothes dealers from the down-town district; and a second move was inevitable and natural. A room was taken in a part of the town more accessible to these buyers, notice was given from the pulpit that cast-off garments of every description would be especially acceptable for the prospective rummage sale, an advertisement of the date and place of the sale was put in the daily paper, and the circle was complete. Clothes that formerly filled the missionary box or went to clothe poor relatives were now thriftily sold and the money given to the Lord. What further reach of economy is to be achieved only the future can reveal. The "manufacturer's sale" has possibilities that appeal to the imagination. When the manufacturer sends samples of his goods for nothing, and the ladies of the church sell them for something, the problem of church support has been reduced to a science. The ladies of the future, it may be, will have only to sit in stalls gay with bunting and inscribed, “Eat Calkins' Breakfast Food For Red Cheeks," or "Ball's Blacking Is Best." The manufacturer's sale is only a variety of rummage sale. Its career is of necessity limited. And what will our children do then, poor things? It might almost seem that we have reached the limits of economy, and that a return

woman once reached the height of her intellectual and physical charm. This is proved by the overwhelming testimony of biographers, poets, and novelists. Did n't Goethe, for example, who rivals Solomon not only for his wisdom, but also for the number and variety of his heart entanglements, fall in and out of love with his Lili when she was just at that proper age? At fourscore and over he still had a vivid recollection of her beauty, wit, and grace in those far-off days. Of course I am wandering from my subject a little here, for no hearts were broken in this transaction, as Goethe did n't finally get his Lili, and she made it lively for him during their brief engagement. But even if we set aside this case as not wholly belonging here, what are we to do with the testimony of countless biographers, poets, and novelists? Take the profoundly philosophical and wholly unsentimental Jane Austen, in her Sense and Sensibility,

to make one illustration do for all. Does n't she let her Marianne finally marry the flannel-waistcoated, rheumatic colonel of nearly forty after her recovery from a broken heart due to "an affection formed so late in life as at seventeen"? No, whatever the scoffing may say, the proper age for broken

hearts used to be about fifteen.

Before I became a Darwinist I was a scoffer and ignorant, too. I could not close my eyes to the fact that girls of fifteen are nowadays exceedingly crude, unformed, and trying, and in my ignorance I scoffed particularly at the old-time novelists. Darwinism has shown wherein they were right and I was wrong. I was ignoring entirely the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Our up-to-date novelists will hardly permit a broken

heart under twenty-five, and such an impaired organ at forty-nine is not at all uncommon. They are right, too. Any one who chooses to look carefully into the reasons for the rush citywards, the rising cost of beef, and the increasing age at which marriages are contracted, sees at once why the novelists were right then and are right now.

Of course, the broken heart is almost exclusively a prerogative of the fair sex. The male is, in general, the tougher animal. Besides, he has one privilege which every self-respecting novelist denies to woman, he can drown his cares in drink and so preserve his heart in alcohol.

But there is another psychological inquiry which is at present troubling me, and on which I should like to have light. Our novelists (I speak of novelists only, for biographers do not give testimony on this point, and we have no poets) invariably cause the hero to make all the advances when it comes to proposals of marriage. Are they right? Is there something in the make-up of the Englishman or American which causes him to be the aggressor in all affairs of this kind? My experience with the broken heart has taught me to be cautious about doubting novelists, but there are certain considerations which lead me to suspect that they are on the wrong track here.

The inquiry was forced upon me more than a score of years ago during my student days in Germany. In my strolls through the university city the most frequently recurring sight was some servant girl roaming about with her arm around her soldier's waist.

Or per

haps they were sitting on a bench with her arm tenderly encircling his neck, while his head rested on her shoulder. Here evidently woman was the aggressor, and man the passive victim. Sometimes he would look ashamed, but she never. While in the contemplative mood caused by this oft-viewed specta

cle, I ran across a French picture entitled Love's First Kiss. It represented a stalwart youth, with hands down at his side, while a pretty young woman (undoubtedly not a servant, but some sort of duchess, countess, or princess) stood on tiptoe with her arms resting on his shoulders, and in the fit attitude, not to receive, but to give, love's first kiss. Here, again, woman was clearly the aggressor.

This led me to consult Continental poets and novelists with this particular point in view. To my surprise they helped confirm the mute testimony of the servant girls and the picture by frequently making the hero the victim, not the victimizer, in those acts of aggression by which love comes into its own. One example may suffice for all. In his Alexis and Dora, Goethe, who is chosen again because he is such a past master in all that pertains to love affairs, lets the youth admire Dora as he might admire the beauty of the moon, but with no more desire to have her than he felt to make that pale orb his own. But, enticed into her garden where she gathers a basket of fruit for his journey, he suddenly finds her arms about him, and succumbs at once. When his ship sails away a few minutes later, we see him leaning against the mast in a veritable delirium tremens of love and jealousy.

But the most serious consideration is still to come. Lay hold of almost any

SHORTLY before daybreak, in the closing night of the session of the Congress which came to an end on the 4th of last March, Mr. Cannon made a remarkable speech. One of the great appropriation bills of vital importance to the government was in conference between the two Houses. Unless it should pass before twelve o'clock on that day it would be necessary to have an extra session, or the wheels of some of the great governmental departments would be stopped. A Senator had delivered an ultimatum that an ancient claim of his state should be fastened upon the bill, or, as an alternative, he would talk until the end of the session and defeat the measure.

Under the rules of the Senate it was clearly in the power of one Senator to carry on, as long as his physical strength would last, the appearance of debate, which would in no fair sense be debate at all, but simply a forcible stopping of the legislative machine. Mr. Cannon very unwillingly consented to pay the price demanded, but he declared with emphasis that the Senate should change its procedure, or that another body, "backed up by the people, will compel that change, else this body, close to the people, shall become a mere tender, a mere bender of the pregnant hinges of the knee to submit to what any one member of another body may demand of this body as a price for legislation."

Such instances of the effect of the rules of the Senate are by no means rare. Perhaps one more strikingly illustrat

ing not merely the tendency to efface the House as a legislative body but also the overthrow of the rule of the majority in the Senate itself was seen two years ago. The River and Harbor Bill, after a protracted consideration on the part of both Houses and of their committees, and after passing both Houses in its substantial form, had reached its last stage in the report of the conference committee within less than twenty hours of the final adjournment of the Congress. An unsuccessful attempt had been made to attach to the bill, to which it bore no relation, an irrigation scheme involving scores of millions of dollars. A Senator who had the irrigation project much at heart determined to defeat the bill. It did not appeal to him that the measure had received the careful attention and approval of both Houses. The rules of the

Senate permitted him, under the guise of debate, to consume all the remaining time of the session. He took the floor against the measure. To talk against time for twenty hours demands qualities which few, if any, of the greatest parliamentary orators have possessed. The "debate" which followed afforded a rare display of physical endurance. The Senator demonstrated his capacity to defeat the bill, and, to save the little time that was left to the Senate for the transaction of other urgent public business, the supporters of the bill surrendered and withdrew it from consideration.

It is scarcely a conclusive answer to