day dinner reflected in the restful face as well as materialized
in the basket can hardly fail to elicit a gentle thought from the
sternest Sabbatarian's heart.

With the excursion-season comes another phase of our little idyllic
studies, as we watch the groups and couples intent upon a picnic at the
sea-side or among the Jersey villages. Here is a representative family
party which I followed with my eyes, and still farther with my
imagination, on their way to Coney Island on a fine, fresh summer
morning. There was the grandma, a bright-eyed, beaming old lady,
beginning to bend somewhat with years, but as pleased with the day's
outing as any of them. There was the mother, sharing her responsibility
with the neat and pretty young-lady daughter. There was a youth,
somewhat of the Abel Garland type, who might have been the young lady's
brother, but who was a happy man even if he was not. There was a small
boy; and who need be told what a day that was for him? Lastly, there
were two charming little ringleted girls, who walked hand in hand in the
prettiest way, with eyes that fairly danced and feet that could hardly
help doing so. There was no baby to utter a discordant note or to hang
as a Damocles' sword of apprehension over the heads of the group. But in
so affectionate and well-regulated a family I am not sure that its
presence would not have constituted a new source of happiness. And by
and by, as the afternoon waned, I could imagine the father meeting them
at the beach, with perhaps the real brother (or would it be the real
not-brother?), and coming home with them in the cool evening and the
sweet moonlight.

On Saturdays there is an earlier current of home-going working-people;
and it is easy to detect a quite different air about them from what they
wear on other days. There is no shadow of next morning impending over
them. One realizes anew the Sabbath as made for man,--the man who
works,--and blesses the Son of Man who is "Lord also of the Sabbath."
This is the evening when they carry home their reading for the week, as
well as their Sunday dinner. I wish more could be said for the general
quality, intellectual or moral, of this literature. But most of it is
better than mental vacancy, and a great advance on the illiteracy in
which these classes were sunk not so very long ago. And it must be borne
in mind that the transient and sensational reading which so many of us
carry in cars and cabins, or buy at news-stands,