spended the
healthful affections, or charmed into danger the wide-awake soul of my
Amy. When she rocks in its cradle the babe the young parents intrust to
her heed; when she calls the kine to the milking, the chicks to their
corn; when she but flits through my room to renew the flowers on the
stand, or range in neat order the books that I read, no spell on her
fancy could lead her a step from the range of her provident cares! At
day she is contented to be on the commonplace earth; at evening she and
I knock together at the one door of heaven, which opes to thanksgiving
and prayer; and thanksgiving and prayer send us back, calm and hopeful,
to the task that each morrow renews."

I looked up as the old man paused, and in the limpid clearness of the
Australian atmosphere, I saw the child he thus praised standing by the
garden-gate, looking towards us, and though still distant she seemed
near. I felt wroth with her. My heart so cherished my harmless,
defenceless Lilian, that I was jealous of the praise taken from her to
be bestowed on another.

"Each of us," said I, coldly, "has his or her own nature, and the uses
harmonious to that nature's idiosyncrasy. The world, I grant, would get
on very ill if women were not more or less actively useful and quietly
good, like your Amy. But the world would lose standards that exalt and
refine, if no woman were permitted to gain, through the indulgence of
fancy, thoughts exquisite as those which my Lilian conceived, while
thought, alas! flowed out of fancy. I do not wound you by citing your
Amy as a type of the mediocre; I do not claim for Lilian the rank we
accord to the type of genius. But both are alike to such types in this:
namely, that the uses of mediocrity are for every-day life, and the uses
of genius, amidst a thousand mistakes which mediocrity never commits,
are to suggest and perpetuate ideas which raise the standard of the
mediocre to a nobler level. There would be fewer Amys in life if there
were no Lilian! as there would be far fewer good men of sense if there
were no erring dreamer of genius!"

"You say well, Allen Fenwick. And who should be so indulgent to the
vagaries of the imagination as the philosophers who taught your youth
to doubt everything in the Maker's plan of creation which could not
be mathematically proved? 'The human mind,' said Luther, 'is like a
drunkard on horseback; prop it on one side, and it falls on the other.'
So the man who is much too enlight