he archway, beyond, down, and far along the
ravine. Can you call up fairyland to your mental eye? It would pale
before this scene--those feathery trees! that enchanting vista! I stood
there drinking it in, and pitying the sleeping world. I could not, even
in thought, express my delight and gratitude for being permitted to
behold such beauty, but finally a familiar line leaped from my lips:

"Praise God from whom all blessings flow."

I can never forget that night; it kindled and warmed my heart with a
reverential fire. If, in the course of years, my way should be overcast;
if, for a time, I should let the artificial--the ignoble, clog the path,
and shut me out from the light of heaven, even then I shall be saved
from doubt, which is always engendered by our stupidity--the things of
our own manufacture--I shall be saved from doubt by the sweet, pure,
radiant memory of that winter, moonlight scene. Only a beneficent God
could create such beauty.

XI

On my way back--at what dissipated hour I firmly decline to state--I
passed a home with an interesting history tacked thereto.

The leading events were brought me by one of those active, inquisitive
little birds that find out all sorts of things, and often fetch from
great distances.

The couple who live there, though Americans, once lived in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, and it was in that place that the husband fell to drinking.
The little bird above alluded to--the bird that acts as a kind of
domestic ferret--told me that, in the early years of their married life,
the wife was of an excitable, hysterical temperament, and given to
making scenes. Just here let me digress a moment to erect a warning
signboard. I have a friend who is busy mixing and administering a deadly
draught to her domestic happiness, and yet does not know it. She has
only been married a year, and she uses tears and scenes, in general, as
instruments to pull from her husband the attention, affection, and
devotion she craves. The tug waxes increasingly hard, but she has not,
as yet, sense enough to see that, and desist. She cannot realize that
the success attained by such methods is but the temporary and external
beauty, which, in reality, covers a failure of the most hopeless type,
just as the flush on the consumptive's cheek is but a pitiable
counterfeit, and covers a fatal disease.

Whether in this particular story, the report of the wife's early
blunders be t