A String of Amber Beads | Page 6

will not be long before the orchestra fills up and the music is in full blast. The cricket is getting ready to throw aside the green baize that has held his piccolo so long, and before the middle of the month there will not be a tuft of grass nor a shelter of low-lying leaves that is not alive with the shrill, complaining sweetness of his theme. The goldenrod has lighted the candles in the candelabra that skirt the borders of the wood, and the aster has already hung out her purple gown and her yellow laces upon the bushes that follow the windings of the steep ravine. Only six weeks to frost! Only six weeks to the time for the unbottling of the year's vintage and the exchange of tea for sparkling wine. Hasten forward, then, oh, days of radiant life and sparkling weather! We are tired of torrid waves and flies; of snakes, hornets and cyclones.

XIV.
A PLEA FOR MEN.
A more or less extended experience as a bread-winner has taught me a noble charity for men. I used to think that all the head of a family was good for was to accumulate riches and pay bills, but I am beginning to think that there is many a martyr spirit hidden away beneath the business man's suit of tweed. Wife and daughters stand ever before him, like hoppers waiting for grist to grind. "Give! Give!" is their constant cry, like the rattle of the upper and nether stones. This panegyric does not apply to the man who frequents clubs and spends his money on between-meal drinks and lottery tickets. It applies rather to the unselfish, hardworking father of a family, who works early and late to keep his daughters like lilies that have no need to toil, and to help maintain the ostentation of vain display upon which depends the social success of a worldly and frivolous wife. It would be far more to those daughters' credit if they did something in the line of honest and honorable toil to support themselves, rather than live on the heart's blood of an unselfish and overworked father; and as for the wife who exacts the income of a duchess to keep up the silly parade of Vanity Fair, there may come a day for her, when, shorn of the generous and loving support of a good husband, and forced to earn her own livelihood, as the penniless widows of bankrupt men are sometimes forced to do, she will appreciate, too late, the blessing that Heaven has taken from her.

XV.
WHAT I'M TIRED OF.
I am tired of many things. I am tired of the miserable little god, "worry," shrined in every home. I am tired of doing perpetual homage to the same black-faced little wretch. I am tired of putting down pride and curbing a righteous indignation. I am tired of keeping my hands off human weeds. I am tired of crucifying my tastes, and cultivating the nickel that springs perennial to meet my needs. I am tired of poverty and all needful discipline. I am tired of seeing babies born to people who don't know how to bring them up. I am tired of folks who smile continuously. I am tired of amiable fools and the platitudes of unintelligent saints. I am tired of mediocrity. I am tired of cats, both human and feline. I am tired of being a soldier and marching with the advance guard. I am tired of girls who giggle and of boys who swear. I am tired of married women who think it charming to be a little giddy, and of married men who ogle young girls and other men's wives. I am tired of a world where love is like the blossom of the century plant, unfolding only once in a hundred years. I am tired of men who are worthless and decayed to the core, like blighted peaches. I am tired of seeing such men in power. I am tired of being obliged to smile where I long to smite. I am tired of vulgarity which glides forever through the world like the snake through Eden. I am tired of women who bear the hearts of tigers, and of men who roar like lions, yet show the valor of mice. I am tired of living shoulder to shoulder with my pet antipathies. I am tired of the everlasting inveighing against capital, when any idiot knows that capital is the king-bolt that holds the world together. I am tired of wearing shabby clothes, and meeting folks who judge of a parcel by the quality of wrapping paper it is incased in. I am tired of being well-behaved and decorous when I want to fling stones and make faces. I am tired of smelling the game dinner