young Palmyrene empress; "Probus" and the Christian life in the midst of splendid, persecuting paganism, -a gorgeous, mysterious, tremendous phase of antiquity, in rolling panorama, illustrating earth, events, persons, as by map and chart and picture, in lines and colors that palpitated and shifted before the inner sight, and waked the inner thought to an understanding of what sort of world it was that Christianity came to change and illumine with the eternal light, and how that light struggled with the darkness, and flashed and broadened, and conquered. All this came in the absorbed perusal of William Ware's volumes. It was an epoch of itself in reading.

Upon these followed and joined "Stephens' Travels in Egypt, Arabia, Petræa, and the Holy Land," and near in association ranged Scott's "Crusaders" and Madame Cottin's romance of Malek Adhel, brother of Saladin, in "The Saracen;" making up a certain whole to youthful apprehension of Orient region and chronicle, sacred and profane.

Is there any speed of communication, after all, any joining of times and hemispheres, like the links of the shelves of a

library, where a child, sitting in home sunshine, can reach down and take to herself things like these one day, or even hour, and the next be in Merrie England in the reign of good Queen Bess; or spring at a leap across centuries and waters, and enter into the conflicts and grand wilderness-taming, through which was born our new nation, by opening the covers of Cooper's works? Of this alternating sort was my happy study in those days.

I have not come to Shakespeare yet; he was in verse, and I loved the passive luxury of prose; the dreamy, unbroken perception through the words, rather than the measured reminder of the words. Measured reminder!

I am exceeding my space. I must break off right here.

IV

ABOUT OUTLOOKS OF LITERATURE

IT has been the fashion with certain lecturers to put a prelude to their stated topic of some current or casual suggestion, of which they would disburden themselves, or by whose means they would touch a passing mood or need, before taking up the solid earnest of their regular subject. These impromptu bits will flit across our most orderly programmes of thought, feeling, action; sometimes, perhaps, they are worth seizing at the critical instant by the sprack sprinkling of a little ready salt upon their tails.

I was just about to sit down and take up my talk of books where I left it last time when I was called to look at a light swing-door which a carpenter was hanging for me at the head of a staircase. The high space overhead had been filled with pretty paneling, the door itself having a glass panel at the top. Now,

the moment I glanced at it I saw, and said: "That glass is not set evenly. It is nearer the top on one side than on the other. It makes the whole thing look askew." Then the carpenter arose in his rectitude of square and level and explained unto the walrus: "It could n't be helped. You see, maʼam, the ceiling above is n't quite level.. I had to make my panels square, and when I came to the door, and made my measures from edge and edge, four inches and five eighths top and bottom, it came so. It had to come somewhere, can't crowd glass, you know. It is just three sixteenths of an inch out of level at the top, as you say, but 't was n't possible to help it, and I guess nobody else will notice it." "I shall notice it as long as I live in the house," I answered with the severe persistence of a walrus. "I shall have to hang a curtain over it. Why was n't everything square from the beginning?" And I walked away thinking my own words over.

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Things were n't quite level at the beginning, and the difference had to come somewhere." If I could make that a lesson in life beforehand, to you girls, I wouldn't care for

my out-of-plumb glass-light. It would even be a pleasant thing to look at, thinking that by recompense some little initial crookedness, and after inharmony, might be spared in some woman's history. Now, in your girlhood, is your time; you are setting your beams of life and character: set them true; go on to cover them, in every stage of work and shaping, of use or ornament, with even-measured perpendiculars and levels; and then, whatever in growth of building issues and depends, will be true fitted to the true; nothing can go awry. Otherwise, there must come and show somewhere an ugliness, a falseness; your house will have a visible, telltale flaw in it. That is what "out of plumb" means; the manifestation of a wrong in first essentials.

Everything we do is a part of housebuilding, so talking of that is not talking aside from anything. A little more about it will bring us to where our concern with books comes in again.

"House is one of the great words of the Word; it signifies dwelling and dwelling-place. Life-building is the framing of the "house not made with hands," the habitation