myself in the labyrinth, all the while groping about, but quite unable to find the exit.  Theseus was most fortunate in having an Ariadne to furnish him with the thread to guide him.  But there seems to be no second Ariadne for me, and I must continue to grope with no thread to guide.  There in the Tate Gallery I was standing enthralled before pictures by Watts and Leighton, and paying small heed to the Turners, when the story of my friend held a mirror before me, and as I looked I asked myself the question:  “Don’t you wish you could?”

Those Barbizon chaps, artists that they were, used to laugh at Corot and tell him he was parodying nature, but he went right on painting the foliage of his trees silver-gray until, finally, the other artists discovered that he was the only one who was telling the truth on canvas.  Every one of my dilemmas seems to have at least a dozen horns, and I stand helpless before them, fearful that I may lay hold of the wrong one.  I was reading in a book the other day the statement of a man who says he’d rather have been Louis Agassiz than the richest man in America.  In another little book, “The Kingdom of Light,” the author, who is a lawyer, says that Concord, Massachusetts, has influenced America to a greater degree than New York and Chicago combined.  I think I’ll blot out the superlative degree in my grammar, for the comparative gives me all the trouble I can stand.

Everything seems to be better or worse than something else, and there doesn’t seem to be any best or worst.  So I’ll dispense with the superlative degree.  Whether I buy new-laid eggs, or just eggs, I can’t be certain that I have the best or the worst eggs that can be found.  If I go over to Paris I may find other grades of eggs.  Our Sunday-school teacher wanted a generous contribution of money one day, and, by way of causing purse-strings to relax, told of a boy who was putting aside choice bits of meat as he ate his dinner.  Upon being asked by his father why he was doing so, he replied that he was saving the bits for Rover.  He was reminded that Rover could do with scraps and bones, and that he himself should eat the bits he had put aside.  When he went out to Rover with the plate of leavings, he patted him affectionately and said: 

“Poor doggie!  I was going to bring you an offering to-day; but I guess you’ll have to put up with a collection.”

I like Robert Burns and think his “To Mary in Heaven” is his finest poem.  But the critics seem to prefer his “Highland Mary.”  So I suppose these critics will look at me, with something akin to pity in the look, and say:  “Don’t you wish you could?” Years ago some one planted trees about my house for shade, and selected poplar.  Now the roots of these trees invade the cellar and the cistern, and prove themselves altogether a nuisance.  Of course, I can cut out the trees, but then I should have no shade.  That man, whoever he was, might just as well have planted elms or maples, but, by some sort of perversity or ignorance, planted poplars, and here am I, years afterward, in a state of perturbation about the safety of cellar and cistern on account of those pesky roots.  I do wish that man had taken a course in arboriculture before he planted those trees.  It might have saved me a deal of bother, and been no worse for him.