bewildered and lost in the barren city.  The beautiful creature fluttered into a lady’s face and she screamed and struggled as though attacked by a rabid beast.  “Oh, kill it! kill the horrid thing,” she cried, while her attendant beat the air with his cane and sought to drive the dangerous interloper away.  It rested for a moment upon the gripman’s cap, where it looked like a feather dropped from a wandering bird.  At last it settled upon the breast of a little child sleeping in its mother’s arms.  The mother brushed it away with her handkerchief as though its presence brought defilement.  A gentleman who was seated near me caught the bewildered thing and with a very tender touch held it for a block or so until we came to one of the pretty parks that make our city so attractive.  Stepping from the car, he loosened his grasp upon the captive moth near a big syringa bush that adorned the entrance way.  He watched the dainty white wings flutter down into the cool seclusion of the blossom then turned and boarded the car and pursued his homeward way conscious, let us hope, of a very pretty and graceful deed of kindness to a most insignificant claimant for protection and succor.  Sentimental, was it?  Well, God help the world when all sentimentality of this kind is gone out of it.

LXIII.

Taking inventory.

How poor the most of us prove to be when we take inventory of the soul’s stock!  We have lots of bonnets, and plenty of dresses, and no end of lingerie, we women, but how are we off for the things that count when the dry goods and the furbelows shall be forgotten?  How about love, of the right kind, the love that ennobles rather than degrades, and how about loyalty, and patience, and truth?  If one of Chicago’s big firms should close its doors to take inventory of stock in January and find it had nothing but the labels on empty bales to account for, its poverty would be as nothing to the poverty of the soul we are going to schedule shortly behind the closed door of the grave.  What slaves we are to passion; how we hate one another for fancied or even actual slights, when we have such a little moment of time in which to indulge the evil tempers!  How we bicker, and lie, and betray, the while the messenger stands already at the door to bid us begone from the scene of our petty conflicts.  For my part, the interest we take in things that pertain to this perishable life, when we are so soon going where these are not to be; the choice we make of ranks and reputations, shams and seemings, dinners and wines, jewels and fabrics; the importance we attach to bubbles that break before we reach them; the allurements that draw us far from the ideals we started out to gain; the way we content ourselves with the environments of evil and forego forever the voice that calls us away to partake of things which shall be as wine and honey to the soul, frightens me; startles me as the sudden thunder of the surf might startle one who sojourned by an unseen sea.