oomed ones who cannot purchase even a furlough from burning
pavements baskets of fragrance and sweetness. I pleased myself with
pretty conceits. To one who toils early and late in an official Sahara,
that the home atmosphere may always be redolent of perfume, I would send
a bunch of long-stemmed white and crimson rose-buds, in the midst of
which he should find a dainty note whispering, "Dear Fritz: Drink this
pure glass of my overflowing June to the health of weans and wife, not
forgetting your unforgetful friend." To a pale-browed, sad-eyed woman,
who flits from velvet carpets and broidered flounces to the bedside
of an invalid mother, whom her slender fingers and unslender and most
godlike devotion can scarcely keep this side the pearly gates, I would
heap a basket of summer-hued peaches smiling up from cool, green leaves
into their straitened home, and, with eyes, perchance, tear-dimmed, she
should read, "My good Maria: The peaches are to go to your lips, the
bloom to your cheeks, and the gardener to your heart." Ah me! How much
grace and gladness may bud and blossom in one little garden! Only
three acres of land, but what a crop of sunny surprises, unexpected
tendernesses, grateful joys, hopes, loves, and restful memories!--what
wells of happiness, what sparkles of mirth, what sweeps of summer in the
heart, what glimpses of the Upper Country!

Halicarnassus was there before me (in the garden, I mean, not in the
spot last alluded to). It has been the one misfortune of my life that
Halicarnassus got the start of me at the outset. With a fair field and
no favor I should have been quite adequate to him. As it was, he was
born and began, and there was no resource left to me but to be born and
follow, which I did as fast as possible; but that one false move could
never be redeemed. I know there are shallow thinkers who love to prate
of the supremacy of mind over matter,--who assert that circumstances are
plastic as clay in the hands of the man who knows how to mould them.
They clench their fists, and inflate their lungs, and quote Napoleon's
proud boast,--"Circumstances! I _make_ circumstances!" Vain babblers!
Whither did this Napoleonic Idea lead? To a barren rock in a waste of
waters. Do we need St. Helena and Sir Hudson Lowe to refute it? Control
circumstances! I should like to know if the most important circumstance
that can happen to a man isn't to be born? and if that is under his
control, or in any way affected by h