me
sweet pleasure slain by the hand of sacrifice. It bristles with thorns
planted by the fingers of envy and hate, and as we climb the rugged
heights, behind us lie our bloody footprints, before us tower still
greater heights, scarred by tempests and wrapped in eternal snow. Like
the edelweiss of the Alps, ambition's pleasures bloom in the chill air
of perpetual frost, and he who reaches the summit will look down with
longing eyes, on the humbler plain of life below and wish his feet had
never wandered from its warmer sunshine and sweeter flowers.

FROM THE CAVE-MAN TO THE "KISS-O-PHONE."

But let us not forget that it is better for us, and better for the
world, that we dream, and that we tread the thorny paths, and climb
the weary steeps, and leave our bloody tracks behind in the pursuit
of our dreams. For in their extravagant conceptions lie the germs
of human government, and invention, and discovery; and from their
mysterious vagaries spring the motive power of the world's progress.
Our civilization is the evolution of dreams. The rude tribes of primeval
men dwelt in caves until some unwashed savage dreamed that damp caverns
and unholy smells were not in accord with the principles of hygiene.
It dawned upon his _mighty_ intellect that one flat stone would lie on
top of another, and that a little mud, aided by Sir Isaac Newton's law
of gravitation, would hold them together, and that walls could be built
in the form of a quadrangle. Here was the birth of architecture. And
thus, from the magical dreams of this unmausoleumed barbarian was
evolved the home, the best and sweetest evolution of man's civilisation.

John Howard Payne touched the tenderest chord that vibrates in the
great heart of all humankind when he gave to immortality his song of
"Home, Sweet Home;" and thank God, the grand mansions and palaces of the
rich do not hold all the happiness and nobility of this world. There
are millions of humble cottages where virtue resides in the warmth and
purity of vestal fires, and where contentment dwells like perpetual
summer.

The antediluvians plowed with a forked stick, with one prong for the
beam and the other for the scratcher; and the plow boy and his sleepy
ox had no choice of prongs to hitch to. It was all the same to Adam
whether "Buck" was yoked to the beam or the scratcher. But some noble
Cincinnatus dreamed of the burnished plowshare; genius wrought his dream
into steel and now the polished Olive