thing told him that he had best not go there again that day. So he sauntered listlessly toward the city. He took a little detour which carried him by the old willow where he had listened a few weeks before to the evangelist. Mr. Herrick himself, by some chance, was in the neighborhood, as if looking for plants from any seeds he might have dropped. His tall, ungainly figure was more grotesque because of an immoderately long black coat which he wore; a coat that seemed to be a compromise between the professional dress of some ecclesiastical brotherhood and the ordinary dress of a man of the world. Mr. Herrick looked hard at Arkwright, as if he had seen him somewhere before, and Arkwright, as if to rouse himself from his mood, stepped up to him, and said:

"Do you recognize me? I am the young man who had great possessions and went away from your preaching under the willow a few weeks ago. You think I am not willing to give up my great possessions?" The evangelist looked a little puzzled.

was no instrument and no performer. He thought of Alice Garden, and if there were time, he really believed he would choose to go to her and ask her for some music. She certainly played and sang charmingly. He wished he had gone there when he left the shop, after all. The hour before dinner passed uneasily,-the more so that he knew he should be examined by his mother, aud he dreaded the ordeal. To bring his business home with him, to eat it and drink it and have it tossed back and forth between him and his mother was growing intolerable to him. The only hour when he could thoroughly shake it off was the short hour before bed-time. Thanks to the game of chess that intervened, his mind was by that time swept and garnished. That complete change of occupation was a rest which he never solicited and indeed rather dreaded, but back to which he looked with gratitude.

"What brought you home so early? asked his mother, when they were seated at table.

"Thank you," said Arkwright, “I don't feel in need of spiritual advice this afternoon. I only want to ask you one question. Did it never occur to you that the young man went away sorrowful because he had great possessions, not because he wanted to keep them?" and with that he turned on his heel, leaving the evangelist looking after him.

"I wonder if the evangelist regards his life as enviable," thought Arkwright as he left the man behind. "I suppose I can take refuge in the commonplace that every one's life has its own perplexities." There was still some time to spare before dinner, and Arkwright, unused to leisure at this hour, took up one book after another, and tried in vain to interest himself in them. Literature seemed poor and out of reach. It was busied about nothings, he exclaimed, and was a poor enough solace to any one needing solace. Pictures were no better. He thought he should find music possessed of some charm, but he had no skill himself and in the dull house where he lived there

generalities.

"And particular dissatisfaction with your

self?"

"Yes."

"You must not run away from your guns, Edward. You will only run into the enemy's fire."

"I sometimes think that would be preferble to being continually knocked over by the kicking of one's own battery."

"You are out of humor, Edward. Something has gone wrong."

"That is not logical, mother. I notice that sometimes, after a most virtuous day, I am oppressed with a sense of my ill-humor. Humor is in the blood, not in the fortune. We have an Irishman, one of our foremen, Mahaffy, who is an irrepressible fellow, and I believe he could dance over my grave without meaning any disrespect to me. The fellows like him. I think they like to be bossed by one of their own set. They are proud of him as a representative Irishman, and he orders them about as if he was born to rule. He is not nearly as capable as his predecessor, a quiet, dignified Ameri

can, but the men like him better and obey him better. There is a great deal in class feeling, and the Irishman has it in him very strong. Coming to America seems to inoculate him with freedom. He takes it skin deep and never after has the real disease. Mahaffy tells a funny story, and tells it well; I can't imitate him. You should see the man to appreciate the Irish humor of the telling. He says that he and Tim Cassidy were from the same town in Ireland and agreed to emigrate to America. They went to Dublin and found two ships ready to sail for New York, and quarreled as to which they should take. They quarreled and fought so about it that it ended in Tim's taking the Erin and Mahaffy the Connaught. The ships were pretty equal in speed, but the Erin was a little the faster, so that she got into port about twelve hours ahead of the Connaught. It was the evening of the third of July when Tim landed from the Erin, and the next morning the Connaught arrived. Mahaffy was in the crowd waiting to land, and they all heard a great din of a noise, bells ringing, guns firing, and the whole town apparently in a great hubbub. It was all astonishing to them. Mahaffy spied Tim on the dock, strutting up and down, with his hands under his coat tails, and his hat cocked on one side. Tim was spitting tobacco juice right and left, and tipped a wink at Mahaffy in an easy-going

way.

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"Begorra, Tim,' said Mahaffy, 'what's all this racket for? I never heard anything loike it, at all, at all.'

"Och, blazes,' said Tim, standing on his heels and swaying up and down, with his thumbs in his waistcoat arm-holes, 'it's the day we cilibrate!' Mahaffy tells the story as if it happened to himself, but I suspect it's an old story made to do service in this fashion." Arkwright rattled on, talking against time and hoping to divert his mother from the business of the day, but she had too steady a purpose for that.

"Has Whitcomb been to see you to-day?" "Yes. He was in this afternoon."

"How did he say the new tariff was working at his place?"

"Did you tell him any of our difficulties with the men?"

"Yes, I told him of the complaints that had been made."

"And what did he say he meant to do? will he stick to the tariff?"

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I don't think he said in so many words just what he would do. He asked me my opinion."

"He wanted to find out what we were going to do, did n't he?" "Yes."

"And he took pains not to say what he would do, eh?”

"Yes," said Arkwright, slowly. "We talked the whole thing over, mother."

"So I see. That is, you talked and he asked questions. Edward, I had hoped you would learn one thing by this time. Your frankness and candor are good business qualities, if they go along with a clear sense of the proper time for frankness and candor. Whitcomb has plainly gotten everything out of you that he wanted, and you have nothing to show for it. My son, never talk about your business except to your mother. I can't give you any rule but that. Be as harmless and as unsoiled as a dove if you will, but be as wise and as watchful as a serpent. Business is like a man's wife; no man will allow his wife to be discussed by other men; least of all will he discuss her himself. In such cases he has everything to lose and nothing to gain." Edward sat silent, balancing his fork on his forefinger. "I suppose you think your old mother need not be lecturing you, and I should not be if you had your father or your brother Job. Simon is a good man in many respects, but he has no more ideas than his inkstand. He has committed to memory other people's ideas and he can draw them out of his little files with great readiness, but he is good for nothing in an emergency. Edward, just tell me as nearly as you can remember what mistakes were made to-day." The young man groaned.

"It would be easier to recount the few things that went straight, mother. I never knew a day that was so at sixes and sevens." "That is what people say when they stub

had that stone to be there! It's a wicked, utterly depraved stone.' But begin, Edward. I want to hear the whole wretched catalogue." Arkwright obeyed, and for a couple of hours he was engaged in discussing the various contretemps of the day. Mrs. Arkwright listened to him and questioned him, probing the wounds in each case.

"Is that all?" she asked finally, as he closed with the accident in the pouring.

"Would you like any more? If you want to look at any more failures, look at me." Madamı Arkwright was silent, but knitting rapidly; she paid no attention, apparently, to his last word.

"We have seen," she said finally, "that the accidents were such as could have been prevented, in most cases. I do not think even so many accidents in one day necessarily convicts any one, but in all your brother Job's business life I doubt if so many happened all told. I don't like this Whitcomb matter, either. Whitcomb is going to look out for himself. I don't blame him for that, but it looks as if we should find no friends in that quarter. Edward!" and she laid down her knitting and put her hand on her son's knee. "That business has come down from your grandfather and is in your

hands. There never was a better chance for you, not merely to keep and make a good old business, but to make yourself. Business makes the man. It has been hard for you. You are being tried, as by fire. Stay in the fire till all the dross is burned out of you, and you will rejoice in the good gold afterward. God set you in that place and you must not flinch. There is peril coming. I am sure of that. Prove yourself of the right stuff-the old Arkwright stuff." Madam Arkwright took a prodigious sniff from her aromatic bottle. "Don't talk about it; think about it. It's too late for our chess to-night. I don't know when I've missed a game. One thing more, which I had forgotten to ask.” She said this with her hand on the door. "How is Garden?" "He is quite well again and back at his work."

"Then you will not need to go there again-to his house, I mean."

“What do you mean, mother?”

"I think you might possibly go once too often, and it will be better for you to stop now-better for everybody. Good-night, Edward." She walked erectly away from him, and his eye followed her stately figure through the passage.

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his mother's milk," and reasoned about it in this way: "The law indeed says that we must not seethe a kid in his mother's milk, but lest the people should ever be tempted to do this, let us prohibit also the cooking of the flesh of any quadruped with any kind of milk; moreover lest they should be tempted to cook any quadruped with milk, let us also prohibit the cooking of birds with milk; and again lest they should be tempted to cook birds with milk, let us forbid also the eating of any kind of flesh with any kind of milk: one thing so easily leads to another that it will be a great deal safer to fence up the law with this general prohibition."

Again they found in the law of Moses the command, "On the sixth day they shall prepare that [the manna] which they bring in." This they understood to prohibit the preparation of any food on the Sabbath. Now as an egg laid on the day following the Sabbath was deemed to have been "prepared" on the Sabbath, (in the hen, of course.) the eating of such an egg was forbidden as a violation of the Sabbath. And not satisfied with this, as many festival days fell upon the day after the Sabbath, (though not all,) it was thought best by these fencemakers to prohibit the eating of all eggs laid on any festival day, whether such festival followed the Sabbath or not. If men would only obey this general prohibition, they would be kept from any infraction of the law.

Such were the fences to the law erected by the Pharisees of old. It is not difficult, as we think of them, to understand why Christ spoke of these men with such severity of denunciation as those who bound heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and laid them on men's shoulders, but would not themselves move them with one of their fingers.

And yet, even in this nineteenth century of the Christian era, we have our moral fence-makers, who seem to be doing pretty much the same thing as the Pharisees of old. Here for example is the sinful practice of gambling. Every true Christian abhors it, feels it his duty to refrain from it and to lead others to do the same. It is generally conceded that the law of Christian morality

forbids such a practice as gambling. But many Christians are not satisfied with the law as it stands. In their estimation it is so fragile that we must needs fence it about with other prohibitions. And so they call it an "inconsistency" in Christian people to play a game of whist purely for recreation and amusement, because, forsooth, the cards used in that game are also numbered among the favorite implements of the gambler. The reasoning amounts to just this: If you use cards in playing whist for recreation, you will be more easily tempted to use them in playing faro for money; or if you are not tempted yourself, your example will be apt to tempt somebody else.

Again, association with evil companions in haunts of wickedness is a practice universally condemned as inconsistent with true Christian morality. One would suppose that the unwritten law forbidding this practice would be sufficiently clear and strong to stand on its own merits without the protection of any outside fence. Not so, however; for there are Christians who say that because the game of billiards is recognized by some evil men as a sufficiently interesting game to use in drawing young men to their evil haunts, therefore Christian people should never think of using the same game to induce the young people of their families to spend their evenings at home. Some Christians even build a second fence outside of this, and say that the game of croquet, inasmuch as it resembles billiards in the use of round balls propelled by wooden implements, must also be proscribed.

Immodest behavior is another offence justly condemned by the law of Christian morality. In conformity to this law Christian people recognize the duty of refraining from certain kinds of dancing which are open to the charge of immodesty. A portion of their brethren, however, claim that this law should be fenced by the prohibition of all dancing whether modest or not, and consequently the modest cotillon and Virginia reel are placed under the same ban as the Parisian can-can.

The sweeping prohibition of all works of fiction and of all dramatic representations might also be used in illustration of our