thered nest without the
trouble of making it, and to keep easily in it themselves, no matter who
may turn out in the cold, is both cuckoo and woman all over; and, while
you quote Herrick and Wordsworth about them as you walk in the dewy
greenwood, they are busy slaying the poor lonely fledglings, that their
own young may lie snug and warm.

* * *

"Then everybody is a hypocrite?"

"Not a bit, child. We always like what we haven't got; and people are
quite honest very often in their professions, though they give the lie
direct to them in their practice. People can talk themselves into
believing that they believe anything. When the preacher discourses on
the excellence of holiness, he may have been a thoroughgoing scamp all
his life; but it don't follow he's dishonest, because he's so accustomed
to talk goody-goody talk that it runs off his lips as the thread off a
reel----"

"But he must know he's a scamp?"

"Good gracious me, why should he? I have met a thousand scamps; but I
never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.
Bless you, my dear, a man no more sees himself, as others see him, in a
moral looking-glass, than he does in a mirror out of his dressing-box. I
know a man who has forged bills, run off with his neighbour's wife, and
left sixty thousand pounds odd in debts behind him; but he only thinks
himself 'a victim of circumstances'--honestly thinks it too. A man never
is so honest as when he speaks well of himself. Men are always optimists
when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them."

I yawned a little; nothing is so pleasant, as I have known later, as to
display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a
trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you
are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only--What a
crib from Rochefoucauld!

_TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES._

Brussels has stones that are sermons, or rather that are quaint,
touching, illuminated legends of the middle ages, which those who run
may read.

Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of
woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.

The city has its ways and wiles of Paris. It decks itself with white and
gold. It has music under its trees and soldiers in its streets, and
troops marching and counter-marching along its sunny ave