A friend of mine who has written long, much, and, so far as I can judge, always profitably, told me that in 1865 she wrought out what was, to her apprehension, the most powerful book she ever composed,—­a story of the Civil War.  She was a Unionist in every thought and sentiment, and this she proclaimed; she had had unusual opportunities of seeing behind the scenes of political intrigue, and she had improved them.  When the last chapter was written she carried the MS. into her husband’s study at dusk one evening, and began to read it aloud to him.  She finished it at two o’clock a.m.  Her auditor would not let her pause until then.  Hoarse, but with a heart beating high with excitement, she waited for the verdict.  The husband walked up and down the floor for some minutes, head bent and hands clasped behind him, deep in thought.  Finally he stopped in front of her.

“That is a marvelous book, my dear,—­strong, true, dramatic.  It will sell well.  It will make a noise in the world.  But—­cui bono?”

Chagrined, mortified, angry, the author took the words with her to her room, and her brain tossed upon them as upon thorns all night.  At dawn she arose and put the MS. into the fire.

“I shudder to this day in thinking what would have been had I acted differently,” she says.  “What I had written in a semi-frenzy of patriotism would have been hot pincers, tearing open wounds which humanity and religion would have taught me to heal.”

Into many lives comes some such crisis, when the text I would bind upon my reader’s mind would act as a breakwater, and save more than one soul from sorrow, perhaps from destruction.  In the everyday life of everybody, crises of less moment accentuate experience, and tend to make the nature richer or poorer.

I incline to the belief that nine-tenths of the remorseful heartaches which most of us know only too well, might be spared us did we pause to repeat to ourselves the Latin or English sentence.  It may be a relic of barbarism, but it is an undeniable trait of human nature that all of us feel the longing to “answer back,” or, as the children put it, to “get even with” the man or woman whose speech offends us.  The apostle showed marvelous knowledge of the weakness of sinful mortals when he affirmed that the tongue was an unruly member, for it is easier to perform a herculean feat, to strain physical strength and muscle to the utmost, than to bite back the sharp retort, or repress the acrid reply.  And there is such a hopelessness in the sentence once uttered!  It is gone from us forever.  We may regret it and show our repentance in speech and action, but we cannot blot the memory of the cruel words from our minds, or from the mind of the person,—­perhaps a mere acquaintance, oftener bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,—­in whose heart the barbed arrows of our eloquence rankle for months and years.  The dear friend may forgive freely and fully the bitter censure or unjust reproof, but a scar is left which, if touched in a moment of inadvertence, will pulse and throb with the remembrance of pain.