It was an equal partnership, after all.  “She—­was—­a—­good—­wife—­to—­me.”  Oh, man! man!  Why not have told her so when her ears were not dulled by death?  Why wait to say these words over a coffin wherein lies a wasted, weary, gray-haired woman, whose eyes have so long held that pathetic story of loss and suffering and patient yearning, which so many women’s eyes reveal to those who weep?  Why not have made the wilderness in her heart blossom like the rose with the prodigality of your love?  Now you would give worlds, were they yours to give, to see the tears of joy your words would have once caused, bejeweling the closed windows of her soul.  It is too late.

  “We have careful thoughts for the stranger,
    And smiles for the sometime guest,
        But oft for own,
        The bitter tone,
    Though we love our own the best.”

ODD-FELLOWSHIP AND THE FUTURE

There is infinite and perennial fascination in the contemplation of the future.  The past is a fixed province, the finished result of an ever-moving present.  The future is the province of the poet, the prophet and the seer.  The past is adamant, the future is plastic clay.  The past is with God alone; the future is with God and man.  We toil for it; dream of it; look to it; and all seek so to

    * * * “Forecast the years,
  As find in loss a gain to match,
  Or reach a hand through time to catch
    The far-off interest of tears.”

Let us consider the future as a field and Odd-Fellowship as a force.  The future is a field, billowing with the ripening harvest of golden possibilities.  It is as wide as the world, for the world is the field.  It comprises every zone and clime; every nation and tribe; every island of the seas.  Wherever we find one of our fellow-men in darkness and in chains, there is our field.  It is as long as from now to the coming of Christ.  A moment’s survey of the field will convince us that the greatest conquests are yet to be made.  There is battle ahead, great interests to be gained, great incentives to heroic effort.  The times call for men—­broad-browed, clear-eyed, strong-hearted, swift-footed men.  Odd-Fellows, not behind you but before you, not in the past but in the future, lies the widest and richest field of Odd-Fellowship’s possibility.  Turn your faces, not toward the waning light of yesterday, but toward the growing radiance of a better morning.  The force is commensurate with the field.  The cry of every true Odd-Fellow ought to be the cry that leaped from the heart of Isaiah when his lips were touched with the coal from off the altar:  “Here am I, Lord, send me.”  Our order is no longer a puny and helpless infant, but a lusty giant, panoplied in the armor of truth and clad in the strength of perpetual youth.  We have riches untold.  We have institutions for the care of the old, and the orphan, the equal of any of which the world can