Certain significant facts are within the purview of all but the very young and the comfortably blind.  To the woman of to-day the man of to-day is imperfectly polite.  In place of reverence lie gives her “deference”; to the language of compliment has succeeded the language of raillery.  Men have almost forgotten how to bow.  Doubtless the advanced female prefers the new manner, as may some of her less forward sisters, thinking it more sincere.  It is not; our giddy grandfather talked high-flown nonsense because his heart had tangled his tongue.  He treated his woman more civilly than we ours because he loved her better.  He never had seen her on the “rostrum” and in the lobby, never had heard her in advocacy of herself, never had read her confessions of his sins, never had felt the stress of her competition, nor himself assisted by daily personal contact in rubbing the bloom off her.  He did not know that her virtues were due to her secluded life, but thought, dear old boy, that they were a gift of God.

A MAD WORLD

Let us suppose that in tracing its cycloidal curves through the unthinkable reaches of space traversed by the solar system our planet should pass through a “belt” of attenuated matter having the property of dementing us!  It is a conception easily enough entertained.  That space is full of malign conditions incontinuously distributed; that we are at one time traversing a zone comparatively innocuous and at another spinning through a region of infection; that away behind us in the wake of our swirling flight are fields of plague and pain still agitated by our passage through them,—­all this is as good as known.  It is almost as certain as it is that in our little annual circle round the sun are points at which we are stoned and brick-batted like a pig in a potato-patch—­pelted with little nodules of meteoric metal flung like gravel, and bombarded with gigantic masses hurled by God knows what?  What strange adventures await us in those yet untraveled regions toward which we speed?—­into what malign conditions may we not at any time plunge?—­to the strength and stress of what frightful environment may we not at last succumb?  The subject lends itself readily enough to a jest, but I am not jesting:  it is really altogether probable that our solar system, racing through space with inconceivable velocity, will one day enter a region charged with something deleterious to the human brain, minding us all mad-wise.

By the way, dear reader, did you ever happen to consider the possibility that you are a lunatic, and perhaps confined in an asylum?  It seems to you that you are not—­that you go with freedom where you will, and use a sweet reasonableness in all your works and ways; but to many a lunatic it seems that he is Rameses II, or the Holkar of Indore.  Many a plunging maniac, ironed to the floor of a cell, believes himself the Goddess of Liberty careering gaily through the