right, even if plain speech did offend, than be a coward and a woolly mouth.  Somebody once lived upon earth, the example of whose thirty odd years of mortal environment we are taught to pattern our own lives close upon.  How about his politeness when he talked with the hypocrites and rebuked the pharisees?  How about his policy when he drove the money-changers before a stinging whip, and championed the cause of the sinful woman?  Oh!  I tell you, the soul that is always looking out for the chance to score one for the winning cause, and throw up its hat with the crowd that makes the most noise, is poor stock to invest in.  In the time of need such a friend would turn out worse than a real estate investment in a Calumet swamp.

XXVI.

The most dangerous woman.

Shall I tell you plainly, and without any mincing, what type of woman I think the most dangerous?  It is not the virago, the wounds of a sharp tongue are hard enough to bear, but there is a balm for them.  Mother may be overworked, or sister may be fretted; something is the matter with the digestion, often, when the one we love scolds and is excessively disagreeable in manner and speech.  The harshest word is soon excused and overlooked by the smile and the caress that are sure to follow.  So, bad as a scolding, nagging tongue may be, it has its alleviations, and somewhere there is an excuse made to fit it.  But what palliation is there for the offense of the woman who seeks by blandishments and artifices of the evil one’s own concoction to steal the affection of a man away from his wife?  There are more such people in the world than you can imagine (and the evil is not confined to the one sex either.) An intriguing woman (or man) who steals into a happy home and seeks to undermine it, deserves to be stoned on the highway.  She may steal your purse, your diamonds, or your checkbook, and, while love reigns on its rightful throne, the home will be happy; but let her seek to discrown love, and entertain a clandestine passion in its place, and the foundation of the stoutest home that was ever founded on the rocks of time will tumble in ruin about her ears.  Avoid the intriguing, fascinating, dangerous, designing woman, then, who recognizes no sanctity in wedded honor, and by her wiles and witcheries lets in a thousand devils to the heart and home she curses with her presence.

XXVII.

Sermons from flies.

I chanced to stand the other day in a stuffy little room, the only window of which was shaded by a ground glass light.  Before the gray void of this cheerless window a few flies darted hither and thither in consequential flurry, while I myself, for the time being a most blue and down-cast mortal, was battling with the thought that life, after all, was hardly worth the living, and the outlook for anything better in a dim and uncertain future, too dubious to be entertained.  But all at once my vision seemed to pierce the shaded pane that intervened between me and the great, rushing, riotous world, and such a conception of all that lay the other side the ground glass window overflowed my soul, that I felt rebuked as by an audible voice.