told his son, as he did, that people liked humbleness. There is

nothing annoys them more, as a rule. Rows are half the fun of life,
and you can't have rows with humble, meek-answering individuals. They

turn away our wrath, and that is just what we do not want. We want to
let it out. We have worked ourselves up into a state of exhilarating

fury, and then just as we are anticipating the enjoyment of a vigorous
set-to, they spoil all our plans with their exasperating humility.

Xantippe's life must have been one long misery, tied to that calmly
irritating man, Socrates. Fancy a married woman doomed to live on

from day to day without one single quarrel with her husband! A man
ought to humor his wife in these things.

Heaven knows their lives are dull enough, poor girls. They have none
of the enjoyments we have. They go to no political meetings; they may

not even belong to the local amateurparliament; they are excluded
from smoking-carriages on the Metropolitan Railway, and they never see

a comic paper--or if they do, they do not know it is comic: nobody
tells them.

Surely, with existence such a dreary blank for them as this, we might
provide a little row for their amusement now and then, even if we do

not feel inclined for it ourselves. A really sensible man does so and
is loved accordingly, for it is little acts of kindness such as this

that go straight to a woman's heart. It is such like proofs of loving
self-sacrifice that make her tell her female friends what a good

husband he was--after he is dead.
Yes, poor Xantippe must have had a hard time of it. The bucket

episode was particularly sad for her. Poor woman! she did think she
would rouse him up a bit with that. She had taken the trouble to fill

the bucket, perhaps been a long way to get specially dirty water. And
she waited for him. And then to be met in such a way, after all!

Most likely she sat down and had a good cry afterward. It must have
seemed all so hopeless to the poor child; and for all we know she had

no mother to whom she could go and abuse him.
What was it to her that her husband was a great philosopher? Great

philosophy don't count in married life.
There was a very good little boy once who wanted to go to sea. And

the captain asked him what he could do. He said he could do the
multiplication-table backward and paste sea-weed in a book; that he

knew how many times the word "begat" occurred in the Old Testament;
and could recite "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" and Wordsworth's

"We Are Seven."
"Werry good--werry good, indeed," said the man of the sea, "and ken ye

kerry coals?"
It is just the same when you want to marry. Great ability is not

required so much as little usefulness. Brains are at a discount in
the married state. There is no demand for them, no appreciation even.

Our wives sum us up according to a standard of their own, in which
brilliancy of intellect obtains no marks. Your lady and mistress is

not at all impressed by your cleverness and talent, my dear
reader--not in the slightest. Give her a man who can do an errand

neatly, without attempting to use his own judgment over it or any
nonsense of that kind; and who can be trusted to hold a child the

right way up, and not make himself objectionable whenever there is
lukewarm mutton for dinner. That is the sort of a husband a sensible

woman likes; not one of your scientific or literary nuisances, who go
upsetting the whole house and putting everybody out with their

foolishness.
ON MEMORY.

"I remember, I remember,
In the days of chill November,

How the blackbird on the--"
I forget the rest. It is the beginning of the first piece of poetry I

ever learned; for
"Hey, diddle diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,"
I take no note of, it being of a frivolouscharacter and lacking in

the qualities of true poetry. I collected fourpence by the recital of
"I remember, I remember." I knew it was fourpence, because they told

me that if I kept it until I got twopence more I should have sixpence,
which argument, albeit undeniable, moved me not, and the money was

squandered, to the best of my recollection, on the very next morning,
although upon what memory is a blank.

That is just the way with Memory; nothing that she brings to us is
complete. She is a willful child; all her toys are broken. I

remember tumbling into a huge dust-hole when a very small boy, but I
have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again; and if

memory were all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to believe I
was there still.

At another time--some years later--I was assisting at an exceedingly
interesting love scene; but the only thing about it I can call to mind

distinctly is that at the most critical moment somebody suddenly
opened the door and said, "Emily, you're wanted," in a sepulchral tone

that gave one the idea the police had come for her. All the tender
words she said to me and all the beautiful things I said to her are

utterly forgotten.
Life altogether is but a crumbling ruin when we turn to look behind:

a shattered column here, where a massiveportal stood; the broken
shaft of a window to mark my lady's bower; and a moldering heap of

blackened stones where the glowing flames once leaped, and over all
the tinted lichen and the ivy clinging green.

For everything looms pleasant through the softening haze of time.
Even the sadness that is past seems sweet. Our boyish days look very

merry to us now, all nutting, hoop, and gingerbread. The snubbings
and toothaches and the Latin verbs are all forgotten--the Latin verbs

especially. And we fancy we were very happy when we were hobbledehoys
and loved; and we wish that we could love again. We never think of

the heartaches, or the sleepless nights, or the hot dryness of our
throats, when she said she could never be anything to us but a

sister--as if any man wanted more sisters!
Yes, it is the brightness, not the darkness, that we see when we look

back. The sunshine casts no shadows on the past. The road that we
have traversed stretches very fair behind us. We see not the sharp

stones. We dwell but on the roses by the wayside, and the strong
briers that stung us are, to our distant eyes, but gentle tendrils

waving in the wind. God be thanked that it is so--that the
ever-lengthening chain of memory has only pleasant links, and that the

bitterness and sorrow of to-day are smiled at on the morrow.
It seems as though the brightest side of everything were also its

highest and best, so that as our little lives sink back behind us into
the dark sea of forgetfulness, all that which is the lightest and the

most gladsome is the last to sink, and stands above the waters, long
in sight, when the angry thoughts and smarting pain are buried deep

below the waves and trouble us no more.
It is this glamour of the past, I suppose, that makes old folk talk so

much nonsense about the days when they were young. The world appears
to have been a very superior sort of place then, and things were more

like what they ought to be. Boys were boys then, and girls were very
different. Also winters were something like winters, and summers not

at all the wretched-things we get put off with nowadays. As for the
wonderful deeds people did in those times and the extraordinary events

that happened, it takes three strong men to believe half of them.
I like to hear one of the old boys telling all about it to a party of

youngsters who he knows cannot contradict him. It is odd if, after
awhile, he doesn't swear that the moon shone every night when he was a

boy, and that tossing mad bulls in a blanket was the favorite sport at
his school.

It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our
grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden;

and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense
for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the

good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's
fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will

find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as
did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga