purchase even a furlough from burning pavements baskets of fragrance and sweetness.  I pleased myself with pretty conceits.  To one who toils early and late in an official Sahara, that the home atmosphere may always be redolent of perfume, I would send a bunch of long-stemmed white and crimson rose-buds, in the midst of which he should find a dainty note whispering, “Dear Fritz:  Drink this pure glass of my overflowing June to the health of weans and wife, not forgetting your unforgetful friend.”  To a pale-browed, sad-eyed woman, who flits from velvet carpets and broidered flounces to the bedside of an invalid mother, whom her slender fingers and unslender and most godlike devotion can scarcely keep this side the pearly gates, I would heap a basket of summer-hued peaches smiling up from cool, green leaves into their straitened home, and, with eyes, perchance, tear-dimmed, she should read, “My good Maria:  The peaches are to go to your lips, the bloom to your cheeks, and the gardener to your heart.”  Ah me!  How much grace and gladness may bud and blossom in one little garden!  Only three acres of land, but what a crop of sunny surprises, unexpected tendernesses, grateful joys, hopes, loves, and restful memories!—­what wells of happiness, what sparkles of mirth, what sweeps of summer in the heart, what glimpses of the Upper Country!

Halicarnassus was there before me (in the garden, I mean, not in the spot last alluded to).  It has been the one misfortune of my life that Halicarnassus got the start of me at the outset.  With a fair field and no favor I should have been quite adequate to him.  As it was, he was born and began, and there was no resource left to me but to be born and follow, which I did as fast as possible; but that one false move could never be redeemed.  I know there are shallow thinkers who love to prate of the supremacy of mind over matter,—­who assert that circumstances are plastic as clay in the hands of the man who knows how to mould them.  They clench their fists, and inflate their lungs, and quote Napoleon’s proud boast,—­“Circumstances!  I make circumstances!” Vain babblers!  Whither did this Napoleonic Idea lead?  To a barren rock in a waste of waters.  Do we need St. Helena and Sir Hudson Lowe to refute it?  Control circumstances!  I should like to know if the most important circumstance that can happen to a man isn’t to be born? and if that is under his control, or in any way affected by his whims and wishes?  Would not Louis XVI. have been the son of a goldsmith, if he could have had his way?  Would Burns have been born a slaving, starving peasant, if he had been consulted beforehand?  Would not the children of vice be the children of virtue, if they could have had their choice? and would not the whole tenor of their lives have been changed thereby?  Would a good many of us have been born at all, if we could have helped it?  Control circumstances, forsooth! when a mother’s sudden terror brings an idiot child into the world,—­when the