ht experiences of his own. The
Gallery Man, calling himself, with a burst of imagination, 'Gentleman and
Christian,' wrote indignantly that he considered the agitation of the
subject to be both impious and indelicate, and added he was surprised
that a paper holding the exalted, and deservedly popular, position of
_The_ --- should have opened its columns to the brainless vapourings of
'Mother of Six' and 'Working Man.'

"The topic had, however, fallen flat. With the exception of one man who
had invented a new feeding-bottle, and thought he was going to advertise
it for nothing, the outside public did not respond, and over the
editorial department gloom had settled down.

"One evening, as two or three of us were mooning about the stairs,
praying secretly for a war or a famine, Todhunter, the town reporter,
rushed past us with a cheer, and burst into the Sub-editor's room. We
followed. He was waving his notebook above his head, and clamouring,
after the manner of people in French exercises, for pens, ink, and paper.

"'What's up?' cried the Sub-editor, catching his enthusiasm; 'influenza
again?'

"'Better than that!' shouted Todhunter. 'Excursion steamer run down, a
hundred and twenty-five lives lost--four good columns of heartrending
scenes.'

"'By Jove!' said the Sub, 'couldn't have happened at a better time
either'--and then he sat down and dashed off a leaderette, in which he
dwelt upon the pain and regret the paper felt at having to announce the
disaster, and drew attention to the exceptionally harrowing account
provided by the energy and talent of 'our special reporter.'"

"It is the law of nature," said Jephson: "we are not the first party of
young philosophers who have been struck with the fact that one man's
misfortune is another man's opportunity."

"Occasionally, another woman's," I observed.

I was thinking of an incident told me by a nurse. If a nurse in fair
practice does not know more about human nature--does not see clearer into
the souls of men and women than all the novelists in little Bookland put
together--it must be because she is physically blind and deaf. All the
world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; so long as we
are in good health, we play our parts out bravely to the end, acting
them, on the whole, artistically and with strenuousness, even to the
extent of sometimes fancying ourselves the people we are pretending to
be. But with sickness comes forgetfulness of