unintelligent saints.  I am tired of mediocrity.  I am tired of cats, both human and feline.  I am tired of being a soldier and marching with the advance guard.  I am tired of girls who giggle and of boys who swear.  I am tired of married women who think it charming to be a little giddy, and of married men who ogle young girls and other men’s wives.  I am tired of a world where love is like the blossom of the century plant, unfolding only once in a hundred years.  I am tired of men who are worthless and decayed to the core, like blighted peaches.  I am tired of seeing such men in power.  I am tired of being obliged to smile where I long to smite.  I am tired of vulgarity which glides forever through the world like the snake through Eden.  I am tired of women who bear the hearts of tigers, and of men who roar like lions, yet show the valor of mice.  I am tired of living shoulder to shoulder with my pet antipathies.  I am tired of the everlasting inveighing against capital, when any idiot knows that capital is the king-bolt that holds the world together.  I am tired of wearing shabby clothes, and meeting folks who judge of a parcel by the quality of wrapping paper it is incased in.  I am tired of being well-behaved and decorous when I want to fling stones and make faces.  I am tired of smelling the game dinner of my neighbor and sitting down at home to beans and bacon.  I am tired of many more things, the enumeration of which would take from now until the day after forever.

XVI.

Nothing like A good laugh.

Do you know, my dear, that there is absolutely nothing that will help you to bear the ills of life so well as a good laugh.  Laugh all you can, and the small imps in blue who love to preempt their quarters in a human heart will scatter away like owls before the music of flutes.  There are few of the minor difficulties and annoyances that will not dissipate at the charge of the nonsense brigade.  If the clothes line breaks, if the cat tips over the milk and the dog elopes with the roast, if the children fall into the mud simultaneously with the advent of clean aprons, if the new girl quits in the middle of housecleaning, and though you search the earth with candles you find none to take her place, if the neighbor in whom you have trusted goes back on you and decides to keep chickens, if the chariot wheels of the uninvited guest draw near when you are out of provender, and the gaping of your empty purse is like the unfilled mouth of a young robin take courage if you have enough sunshine in your heart, to keep a laugh on your lips.  Before good nature, half the cares of daily living will fly away like midges before the wind; try it.

XVII.

Hold!  Enough!!

The other evening it chanced that a combination of disastrous circumstances wrought havoc with my temper.  I lost my train; my head hummed like a bumblebee with weary pain, and the elastic that held my hat to its moorings broke, so that that capering compromise between inanimate matter and demoniac possession blew half a block up street on its own account, and was brought back to me by a youthful son of Belial, who took my very last quarter as reward for the lively chase.