me the knights of the
pansies, and if we let them go we shall find that at fifty it will be
difficult to find even a sprig of heartsease anywhere.

Whether I take as my text the prophet's prayer for a revival and a
revelation in the midst of the years, or the story of the man who was
more than forty years old when he fell under the spell of the
miraculous, I know how I shall close my sermon. I shall close by
telling the story of Dr. Kenn and Maggie Tulliver from _The Mill on the
Floss_. It will convince my hearers that folk in the forties have a
great and beautiful and sacred ministry to exercise. Maggie was young,
and the perplexities of life were too much for her. Dr. Kenn was
arrested by the expression of anguish in her beautiful eyes. Dr. Kenn
was himself neither young nor old, but middle-aged; and Maggie felt a
childlike, instinctive relief when she saw that it was Dr. Kenn's face
that was looking into hers. 'That plain, middle-aged face, with a
grave, penetrating kindness in it, seeming to tell of a human being who
had reached a firm, safe strand, but was looking with helpful pity
towards the strugglers still tossed by the waves, had an effect on
Maggie at this moment which was afterwards remembered by her as if it
had been a promise.' And then George Eliot makes this trite and
significant remark. 'The middle-aged,' she says, 'who have lived
through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory
is still half-passionate and not merely contemplative, should surely be
a sort of natural priesthood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated
to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of
self-despair. Most of us, at some moment in our young lives, would
have welcomed a priest of that natural order in any sort of canonicals
or uncanonicals, but had to scramble upwards into all the difficulties
of nineteen entirely without such aid.'

And after hearing that fine story my congregation of folk on the
threshold of the forties will return from the quiet church to the busy
street humming the songs that they sang at nineteen; vowing that, come
what may, the potatoes shall not elbow out all the pansies; and
congratulating themselves that the richest wine in the chalice of life
still waits their thirsty lips.

X

A WOMAN'S REASON

"Will you go with me?"

'"No, indeed; you must go alone. I shall not appear at all."

'"Why, mother?"

'"_Because!_"'

I came across the above