LXI.

God bless ’em!

Every morning just at 7 the entire neighborhood turns out to see them pass.  She is a demure little lady with a face that makes one think of a blush rose, a little past its prime, but mighty sweet to look upon.  She wears a mite of a white sun-bonnet, clean as fresh fallen snow, and starched and stiff as the best pearl gloss cap make it.  The cape of this cute little bonnet shades a round white throat, and the strings are tied beneath the chin in a ravishing bow that stands guard over a dimple.  She has been married quite ten years, and they say that the two little children who were cradled for a few happy months on her soft breast are waiting and watching for her coming the other side of the river of death.  He is a matter-of-fact looking man, with a resolute face and a constant smile in his eyes.  He always carries a lunch-basket in one hand and with the other guides the steps of the faithful little woman who accompanies him part way on the march of his daily grind.  He works downtown in a big warehouse and he makes hardly enough money each week to keep you in cigars, my good friend, or your wife in novels.  Though it rain, or though it shine, though the winds blow or the winds are low, whatever betide of chance, or change, or weather, there is not a morning that he goes to work that she does not walk with him as far as the corner, and in the face of men and angels, grip car conductors and clerks, shop girls and grimacing urchins, kiss him good-bye.  She stands and watches until he is well on his way, then waves him a final farewell, and trips back home in the serene shadow of her little bonnet.  Now you may ridicule that love and call it “spoony” and “silly,” but, I tell you, a legacy of gold or a hatful of diamonds could not begin to outvalue such love in a man’s home.  God bless the two, say I, and roll round the joyful day when love and its free and beautiful demonstration shall shine athwart the heresies of conventionality as April suns dispel the winter’s fog with the splendor of their broadcast shining.

LXII.

“Unto one of the least of these.”

I was riding up-town in a cable car not long ago late at night.  The moon was at its full and all the ugliness of the city was shrouded, like a homely woman in a bridal veil of shimmering lace.  We skimmed along on a smooth and unobstructed track, like a sloop with every sail set, heading for the open sea.  There were no idle chatterers aboard, and from the stalwart gripman at his post of duty, to the shrinking little girl passenger, who was half afraid and half delighted to be abroad so late alone, everybody and everything was in harmony with the hour and scene.  Suddenly there fluttered into the car a snowy moth, astray from some flower garden in the country and quite