wholesome, which I do now believe with more intelligence than I could bring to bear upon the subject then.

Being in need of money at one time, I wrote my publishers that if they would give me a hundred copies I would forego the ten per cent royalty on which we had agreed. This they did, and that is all that ever came to me, except that in later years I gave away a hundred or more copies furnished without charge by them. In 1885 I bought the plates and presented them to our own temperance publishing house in Chicago. This is a fair sample of the financial side of my pen-holder work.

Each new book is to me a new impoverishment; I give them away freely, never having been able to keep a book of any sort, least of all, my own, any more than I can an umbrella or a section of the atmosphere. All of my ventures combined have not netted me one thousand dollars.

From England I have encouraging accounts of the little book's success, and I have had no more welcome greeting than from those who, wherever I go, speak gently to me of the good that Mary's life has done them. So the sweet young soul lives on in minds made better by her presence, and still in artless language tries to "tell everybody to be good."

Messrs. Morgan & Scott, publishers of the English edition, courteously allowed me a royalty amounting now to about two hundred dollars.

As years go by I find that my jottings gain wider hospitality, my last two magazine articles having been for two monthlies most unlike The Homiletic and The Forum. My article for the first has been printed in full as a book entitled, "Woman in the Pulpit," by D. Lothrop & Co., Boston.

And now, to sum up what I have learned by the things sought, suffered and succeeded in, along my pathway, pen in hand, let me urge every young woman whose best vehicle of expression is the written word, not to be driven from her kingdom by impatience as was I.

1. If you can have a roof over your head, a table prepared before you and clothes to wear, let them be furnished by your "natural protectors," and do you study and practice with your pen. Read Robert Louis Stevenson's revelations of how he came to be a master of style; he worked and waited for it, that is all.

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2. If you must be self-supporting, learn the printer's trade in a newspaper office. The atmosphere will be congenial; you will find yourself next door to the great world; if you have "faculty," the inky powers will find it out and your vocation will take you into fellowship.

3. The next best outlook is the teacher's desk. A majority of our most celebrated women writers were teachers once. The life is intellectual and, though one of routine is not most favorable to the freedom that a writer should enjoy, it conduces to surroundings that enhance, rather than deteriorate, the mental powers. But imagination, that angel of mind, is a shy spirit and breaks not readily to harness; while Pegasus in the tread-mill sawing up the fire-wood of necessity is the sorriest spectacle alive.

But journalism will be a larger field to-morrow than it is to-day, and nine tenths of our literary aspirants, if they have the divine call of adaptation and enthusiasm, will enter there.

Newspapers need women more than women need newspapers. Fewer tobacco cobwebs in air and brain and a less alcoholic ink are the prime necessities of the current newspaper. Mixed with the miraculous good of journalism note the random statements given to-day only that they may be taken back to-morrow. Note che hyperbolism of heads not level, the sensationalism, the low details not lawful to be uttered, the savagery of the pugilist and baseball columns, the beery mental flavor, the bitter gall dipped from the editorial inkstand and spattered on political opponents. In brief, note that newspaperdom is a camp and not a family circle-a half sphere not a whole one.

But the journalistic temperament is almost the finest in the world — keen, kind, progressive, and humanitarian. Take away the hallucination of nicotine and the craze of alcoholic dreams, and you would have remaining an incomparable set of brotherhearted men, whose glimpses of God would be not at all infrequent. Anchor alongside these chivalric-natured experts, women as gifted as themselves, and free from drug delusions; then, in one quarter century, you will have driven pugilists and saloonkeepers, ward politicians and Jezebels from the sacred temple of journalism, and the people's daily open letter from the great world shall be pure as a letter from home.

Until the bitter controversy about the Prohibition party's

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The Politics of the Future.

relation to politics, I have been treated almost universally with kind consideration by the editorial fraternity. I attribute this to my brother's membership therein and to my own participation in journalism, also to a certain kindliness that I believe belongs to the journalistic temperament. There is much of the dramatic in these editorial brethren and the theory on which I account for the oceans of abuse that they seem to dip up out of their inkstands, is that each in thought separates his own genial personality from the dreadful pen-and-ink dragon who writes the perfunctory editorials and paragraphs.

It seems to me this is a great evil, doing incalculable harm to their own nature and character, and greatly diminishing the sum total of the world's good will. If the politics of the future can not be more reasonable, if men and women can not discuss great questions without using abusive epithets, then the true civilization is a long way off. I confidently believe that all of this sanguinary style of writing is but an unconscious reminiscence in the editorial brain of the cruel bloodshed of his ancestors when they matched spear with spear instead of fighting at the pen's point alone. Surely this will wear away and we shall learn to think and speak with the utmost personal kindliness concerning our opponents in the field of politics.