raillery was well illustrated by Mrs.
Strong in an incident that ran somewhat thus: A certain boastful young
person was telling of a funeral where among other gorgeous things were
eight "pallberries."

Said Mrs. Stevenson in admiration, "Just now, a-think, pallberries at a
funeral; how delightful!" "My dear," said Robert Louis, reprovingly,
"you know perfectly well that we always have pallberries at our funerals
in Samoa."

"Quite true, my dear, provided it is pallberry season."

"And suppose it is not pallberry season, do we not have them tinted?"

"Yes, but there is a tendency to pick them green--that is awful!"

"But not so awful as to leave them on the bushes until they get rotten."

Finck in his fine book, "Romantic Love and Personal Beauty," says that
not once in a hundred thousand times do you find man and wife who have
reached a state of actual understanding.

Incompatibility comes from misunderstanding and misconstruing motives,
and more often, probably, attributing motives where none exists. And
until a man and a woman comprehend the working of each other's mind and
"respect the mood," there is no mental mating, and without a mental
mating we can talk of rights and ownership, but not of marriage.

The delight of creative work lies in self-discovery: you are mining
nuggets of power out of your own cosmos, and the find comes as a great
and glad surprise. The kindergarten baby who discovers he can cut out a
pretty shape from colored paper, and straightway wants to run home to
show mamma his find, is not far separated from the literary worker who
turns a telling phrase, and straightway looks for Her, to read it to
double his joy by sharing it. Robert Louis was ever discovering new
beauties in his wife and she in him. Eliminate the element of surprise
and anticipate everything a person can do or say, and love is a mummy.
Thus do we get the antithesis--understanding and surprise.

Marriage worked a miracle in Robert Louis; suddenly he became
industrious. He ordered that a bell should be tinkled at six o'clock
every morning or a whistle blown as a sign that he should "get away,"
and at once he began the work of the day. More probably he had begun it
hours before, for he had the bad habit of the midnight brain. Kipling
calls Robert Louis our only perfect artist in letters--the man who filed
down to a hair.

Robert Louis knew no synonyms; for him there was the right word and none
other. He balanced the sente