idea. Next, she was astonished that one house could
furnish so many. She was paying an extravagantly high bounty, and it
presently began to look as if by this addition to our expenses we were
now probably living beyond our income. After a few days there was peace
and comfort; not a fly was discoverable in the house: there wasn't a
straggler left. Still, to Mrs. Clement's surprise, the dead flies
continued to arrive by the plateful, and the bounty expense was as
crushing as ever. Then she made inquiry, and found that our innocent
little rascals had established a Fly Trust, and had hired all the
children in the neighborhood to collect flies on a cheap and
unburdensome commission.

Mrs. Clemens's experience in this matter was a new one for her, but the
governments of the world had tried it, and wept over it, and discarded
it, every half-century since man was created. Any Government could have
told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in
Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then
every patriot goes to raising them.

_From Susy's Biography of Me._

_Sept. 10, '85._--The other evening Clara and I brought down our
new soap bubble water and we all blew soap bubles. Papa blew his
soap bubles and filled them with tobacco smoke and as the light
shone on then they took very beautiful opaline colors. Papa would
hold them and then let us catch them in our hand and they felt
delightful to the touch the mixture of the smoke and water had a
singularly pleasant effect.

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon
the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of
form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little
puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that.
I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the
night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess
that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.

I remember those days of twenty-one years ago, and a certain pathos
clings about them. Susy, with her manifold young charms and her
iridescent mind, was as lovely a bubble as any we made that day--and as
transitory. She passed, as they passed, in her youth and beauty, and
nothing of her is left but a heartbreak and a memory. That long-vanished
day came vividly back to me a few weeks ago when