the court are doubtless clearly reflected in the volumes of the dramatists. Considering these things, it seems strange rather that there is so little than that there is so much coarseness in Shakspere, and not at all strange that in the lesser dramatists like Middleton there should be so much. As Landor says of the other writers of

the time

"They stood around

The throne of Shakspere, sturdy but unclean." While we should commend the plays of Middleton to the student of dramatic literature for the frequent display of great poetic genius, a lofty imagination, pictures

of deepest passion, and at times passages of the highest moral dignity, we should greatly hesitate to put any volume of these works, or even any one play into the hands of youth, whose minds and hearts are easily hurt by coarseness of allusion and by indelicacy of expression. It may be that we should not decline ambrosia though offered in an earthern vessel, but we want it certain that the vessel, though roughly made, yet shall not give its earthy taste to the heavenly food, but give it up clear and pure and uncolored as the water from an earthly spring.

Once I told a lie. A black, downright lie. Not one of the cultured untruths of a mendacious civilization. Not one of the flaccid, whitey-gray, wriggling things that are spawned every day in millions-by people who are too cowardly either to tell the truth or to own to themselves that they have told a falsehood. Mine was a sort of epochmaking lie, and I will tell you how it came about.

I was going over to San Francisco one day to learn the fate of some manuscript of my own left at a newspaper office;-to get the manuscript, I said to myself;-to get the money for it, a shy hope whispered in my ear.

As the Piedmont lurched against the slip, I woke from an only half pleasant dream about the fast nearing Christmas. I hurried forward, and just at the top of the steps missed my sealskin cape (misleading remnant of "better days"). Going back to the empty saloon, I found it, and my eye fell at the same instant upon a tiny parcel on the carpet. I picked up the bit of knotted gray silk, and it was so heavy, I felr sure it

must contain gold. On my way out, I un tied it, and found three ten dollar coins, and the half of a German thaler piece, with an unintelligible monogram engraved on one side of it. As I tied them up again, I wished vainly that I could find my husband's brother Sam, who had been on the boat somewhere, and who could save me the trouble of leaving the parcel at the Company's office for restoration. Sam was gone however, and I thought it best to stop on my way up from the ferry and advertise my little "find" in the columns of a daily paper.

Then I went to the office of the Hesperian Weekly, and I paused on the stairs. there, and asked myself with pretended sincerity where I should take my manuscript next, in case it should have been found like its predecessors, to be "unavailable; and it was not until the polite young edito had handed me my familiar roll with courteous depreciation of his own action in so doing, that I realized how completely hope had won my ear, when I was not lis tening to her,

Not till then, either, did I realize how many things I had bought with the sum I must receive for my little story. In truth, my feet turned unconsciously toward the bookstore where I was to make my first purchase; a book of reference indispensable to the dear invalid at home, in the literary work by means of which he tried to ignore pain and to forget defeat and disappointment and the untimely wreck of a life that had spread such gallant canvas to the winds of fate.

Then there was the new cloak for patient little Phyl. Poor Phyl-so ready, with her nine years, to accept. unchildish tasks as a pleasure because mamma shared them with her. She was the only one death had left us of three little girls adopted while our argosies were still safe, and we were childless, and full of pity for the unmothered babes all about us.

With our poverty had come our own baby. Precious White Rose ! thrown in by a relenting clemency of destiny to sweeten an else too bitter draught.

But Rose would not miss any Christmas gift she might lack. So long as her adoring and adorable grandmother lived, neither impecuniosity nor the slights of Santa Claus could chill the charmed atmosphere about that spoiled baby.

This beautiful grandmother, however, was my mother-in-law! Hateful name! Forgive me, dear mother, that I have used it once. I only wanted to say, that beautiful and sweet-hearted and wise as she was, and of an unthinkable altruism, it was her image nevertheless that helped to make my disappointment poignant. She was gently and mutely skeptical of my success.

Sam too-my husband's brother-had only smiled at my aspirations as an authorkin, and had said: "Take care, Sis! Don't spoil an ideal cook to make a sloppy story hack. Be satisfied with your gastronomic triumphs."

I thought my triumphs might be greater with more war material, but I did not say so, for poor Sam was straining every nerve to keep us in bread and meat, and I knew would have done so even if he had not been urged thereto by a sense of long unpaid pecuniary obligation to his brother.

But most depressing image of all, today, as I mechanically walked up Market Street with my manuscript in my handthere was Sam's wife. She was-oh! I do declare a new word would have to be coined to tell what she was. What does God let such women exist for? They are worse than

worse ones.

Mo

She had no measure but success. tives, intentions, efforts, all went for nothing with her if the aim was not reached—and the aim must be material, too. She sniffed at all that was implied in "plain living and high thinking." She claimed, it is true, to love the Beautiful; but she did not-it was the Costly she loved. For her the best things were what could be bought with money. She went about the house with an injured, upward curve of the eyebrows, and performed the solitary task left to her-the care of her own room-with a daily fresh air of surprise and resentment that it should have been expected of her.

We did what we could to appease her thirst for the unnecessaries of life; in truth the only extravagancies of the family now-adays were perpetrated to placate Maria; and now! I could already see her look of contempt when I should bring home another rejected manuscript.

By this time I had wandered far up Market Street. I now turned quickly, and pulling myself together, started for home.

On the boat I remembered the money I had found. I suddenly thought: What if I should take it home and pretend I sold my manuscript? It was as much as I expected for the story in my bag, and if the loser turned up, I could replace the appro

priated sum by the sale of a small sapphire ring I had long since devoted to some emergency.

I put the suggestion aside, and although it recurred often during my long horse car journey far out into the foot-hills, yet when I reached our gate I was fully determined to tell the simple truth, and to own my mortifying incapacity to write anything that anybody would want.

Phyl was watching for me in the dusk by the ivy-arched gate, and strained me to her passionate young heart with a love which I knew could never be shaken by misfortune, failure, or even crime.

Tea, too, was waiting for me; the dear mother had laid the table, and was sitting near it, smiling at Rose with something of the rapt gravity of a mediaeval Madonna.

Maria was on the lounge. Not lying down comfortably, as she did when she was reading novels in her own room, but reclining at a distressing angle, This meant: "I am not able to sit up, but I will come as near it as I can."

As I entered the room they all looked at me expectantly, but nobody spoke until after I had kissed them as usual, when Maria asked-a languid mockery overtoning her unusual interest:

66

'Well, what did you get on account for your brain crop?"

I opened my bag, and without a word, took out the gold coins and laid them on the table. I was entirely miserable when I had done this-I felt that I was a coward and a thief and an impostor all at once. My dear husband gave me a precious, sympathetic smile, and mother patted my hand with a loving: "I am so glad, dear!" While Sam shouted: "Well, by Jupiter Tonans! It really seems that the breadmaker can also be a bread-winner. Hurrah for the Warfields! We may be as prolific in authors as the Trollopes yet."

As for Maria, I did not even look at her. I felt that she had precipitated me into the

pit which, although I had dug it with my own hands, I had determined not to descend into.

Oh, what a mean thing I felt myself to have done! But there is no use dwelling on my feelings. The next thing was how to keep from being found out.

As time should go on, and my story never appear, surprise and speculation would arise in the domestic circle, and Maria, after suspicion was once excited, would, with her buzzard instincts, come very near unearthing my wretched little lie.

Confession was out of the question. It was that sort of a lie that takes its place in your history as a deed done, and not to be altered or annulled by repenting of it.

Meantime, I used the money. I did not mean to touch it until a week after advertising it, but that same night when I went into the kitchen to make my bread ready for to-morrow's baking, Sam followed me and said: "You are such a capitalist, Beth, would you mind lending your poor brother ten dollars ?"

I felt, in spite of my guilt, a throb of joy at being able to do it, and I answered: "So gladly, you know, Sam dear."

And then I spent the rest for Christmas things, and I doubt if I ever in my life spent twenty dollars to such an advantage, or procured therewith more genuine gratification for my family.

Christmas would have been bare enough but for those poor little gold pieces, lost, possibly, as I often felt, by some one poorer than myself. (I had left an address at the ferry office also in case the loser applied there.) No one else in the family had a cent to spend for superfluities, and I pitied poor Sam with all my heart, when he had to meet, empty handed, Christmas and Maria together. Her eyebrows were worse than ever, and she hardly spoke to him for weeks.

My penance began from the very day after I committed my sin. I knew my only

salvation from discovery would be found in the having something accepted and published by somebody; and so the lie I told became a whip of scorpions to scourge me to the work of writing.

I thoroughly disliked sedentary, and especially solitary tasks. Nature had put one equivalent too much of motion into my composition for a writer, and unless under some special spur, it is probable that not even poverty would have compelled me to my desk after the several rebuffs I had received at the hands of certain inexorable editors.

Now, however, I must write, and write acceptably, or be exposed as the liar and sham that I was. So at seven o'clock every evening I said a reluctant good-night to my dear ones, and went into unwilling exile in the little room in the tower, where I worked without interruption until eleven o'clock every night for months. I hated my banishment-I suffered cruelly under it, but I did not quail, and I did not pity myself in the least.

My work seemed to me very worthlessthat was the worst of it; and it did not seem to grow less so as time went on. I tried to improve, and yet I was not sure that improvement, according to a high literary standard, was what was wanted. "Availability"-that was the thing I had been told I lacked. Was it a thing I could some way trap, and imprison in my poor little sketches?

I read all the short stories in the California journals, and tried to surprise the secret of their acceptability-but I am bound to say the most of them inspired me -and still inspire me-with perplexity and wonder. But good or bad, I knew I must despatch some of my work somewhere; I dared not postpone the effort longer. I sent accordingly to the Hesperian Weekly, to the Golden Gate Monthly, and to a couple of dailies; and then I waited, feeling I fancy, very much as a man feels who knows that an application has been, sent to the

Governor, asking his reprieve from hanging, One afternoon Maria and I had gone out into the grounds and were tidying up a little the prodigal winter roses, while we waited for the postman. I had been enjoying silently from many points of view the picture made by our stately house, with its beautiful setting of palm and oak and eucalyptus trees, with its flower-fringed great lawnwith its stained glass mullions and its perfumed conservatory.

We were utterly ruined in fortune, it is true, but we were not in debt, and thus were spared that most corrosive and unendurable form of poverty; and this lovely home was mother's and thus as free to us as was the balmy air that laved it.

I remarked to Maria, that if we must be poor we were very fortunate in being poor in this thrice lovely spot where Nature--California Nature—seemed to be outdoing herself to stand to us instead of a gardener; and she had said in reply that she supposed Louis must have foreseen that his mining ventures would break up his whole family some day, when he gave the place to his mother as a refuge to which he might fly himself when he needed a roof. Having planted this sting, she went on without pausing, and apparently apropos of the postman's approach:

"Those newspaper people have evidently changed their minds about wanting your story. I suppose they are rich, though, and find it more comfortable every once in a while to pay for something they don't want, than to see the same person forever coming back."

Oh, I thought, why did Sam ever marry this woman? I did not answer her, for the postman was just crossing the pretty rustic bridge across our creek, and we took the letters from his hands and returned to the house in silence. My heart bumped against my side when I saw that I had letters from each of the periodicals to which I had sent stories.