When Helen prayed in the silence of her soul that evening, it was not that Elsie’s life might be spared.  She dared not ask that as a favor of Heaven.  What could life be to her but a perpetual anguish, and to those about her an ever-present terror?  Might she but be so influenced by divine grace, that what in her was most truly human, most purely woman-like, should overcome the dark, cold, unmentionable instinct which had pervaded her being like a subtile poison:  that was all she could ask, and the rest she left to a higher wisdom and tenderer love than her own.

* * * * *

GYMNASTICS.

So your zeal for physical training begins to wane a little, my friend?  I thought it would, in your particular case, because it began too ardently and was concentrated too exclusively on your one hobby of pedestrianism.  Just now you are literally under the weather.  It is the equinoctial storm.  No matter, you say; did not Olmsted foot it over England under an umbrella? did not Wordsworth regularly walk every guest round Windermere, the day after arrival, rain or shine?  So, the day before yesterday, you did your four miles out, on the Northern turnpike, and returned splashed to the waist; and yesterday you walked three miles out, on the Southern turnpike, and came back soaked to the knees.  To-day the storm is slightly increasing, but you are dry thus far, and wish to remain so; exercise is a humbug; you will give it all up, and go to the Chess-Club.  Don’t go to the Chess-Club; come with me to the Gymnasium.

Chess may be all very well to tax with tough problems a brain otherwise inert, to vary a monotonous day with small events, to keep one awake during a sleepy evening, and to arouse a whole family next morning for the adjustment over the breakfast-table of that momentous state-question, whether the red king should have castled at the fiftieth move or not till the fifty-first.  But for an average American man, who leaves his place of business at nightfall with his head a mere furnace of red-hot brains and his body a pile of burnt-out cinders, utterly exhausted in the daily effort to put ten dollars more of distance between his posterity and the poor-house,—­for such a one to kindle up afresh after office-hours for a complicated chess-problem seems much as if a wood-sawyer, worn out with his week’s work, should decide to order in his saw-horse on Saturday evening, and saw for fun.  Surely we have little enough recreation at any rate, and, pray, let us make that little un-intellectual.  True, something can be said in favor of chess—­for instance, that no money can be made out of it, and that it is so far profitable to us overworked Americans:  but even this is not enough.  For this once, lock your brains into your safe, at nightfall, with your other valuables; don’t go to the Chess-Club; come with me to the Gymnasium.