634

The Gospel of Exercise.

My rising hour has long been from seven to half-past (I wish it were earlier), and retiring, anywhere from half-past seven to halfpast nine; but when traveling, it has been about ten. I regard that hour as the dead line of recuperation, vigor and sustained mental activity. Eight hours of writing and study, all of them between breakfast and tea, has been my rule. After the evening meal at six o'clock I will not work-lecturing, of course, excepted. In this field I have studied the non-dramatic style, because it is less wearing and fully as well adapted to purposes of information and conviction. Illustrations can be used that involve but little acting, thus keeping the circulation normal, avoiding the exposures that attend perspiration, and the reaction resulting from undue fatigue.

My manner of life has recently been changed from peripatetic to stationary, and my purpose is, for the next ten years, at least, should God spare my life so long, to live in my quiet cottage. home at Evanston, in the suburbs of Chicago, with my mother and a dozen secretaries, and help to spread the temperance propaganda by pen instead of voice. I expect, as a rule, to sit at my desk from 8:30 or 9:00 A. M., until 6:00 P. M., daily, with a halfhour's interval from 12:30 to 1:00 o'clock, with the exception of an outing of about half an hour. The tricycle for open air purposes and Dr. Dio Lewis's home exerciser within doors, are my basis of gymnastic operations. Walking I delighted in when I could go unimpeded; but from the sorrowful day when my nair was first twisted up and long skirt twisted down, I have never enjoyed that noble form of exercise, and I have met very few women in this country who really walk at all. Wrigglers, hobblers, amblers, and gliders I am familiar with among the ways of women, but walking is an art hereditarily lost to our sex.

"'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity is, 'tis true!"

I never touch the pen after tea, and ten o'clock finds our house dark as a pocket, silent as a tomb, and restful as a cradle. To this single fact more than all others, excepting fortunate inheritance, I attribute my life-long good health and cheery spirits.

I have not jotted down these personal items because I think my methods specially noteworthy or by any means faultless. Hoping that we may learn the health decalogue of our Heav

Heaven Speed the "Dress Reform."

635

enly Father so thoroughly, and be so loyal to it that we shall all become as hearty and as happy as, I am sure by the analogies of Nature and the teachings of grace, He meant us to be, I hereby declare myself willing to live a century and work right on.

But I must confess that after my long day's task with the pen, I say to myself often, "If I could put on a hat, button a coat around me, and step off freely, how delightful a walk would be." But no; there are intricate preliminaries before a woman can do anything so simple as take a constitutional. In my own case, the easy wrapper that I wear at my work must be changed for a street dress, with its long, heavy skirt; the slippers, for shoes to be buttoned up; a bonnet affording no protection from light, wind, or observation, must be "tastefully" put on; tight-fitting gloves drawn to their places, and then only, with skirts to be lifted at every step until one's knees grow weary, the airing may begin. A man would have two things to do-put on his coat and crowd a hat over his eyes; a woman has three articles to take off (wrapper and slippers), dress to draw on, collar and cuffs to adjust and pin, shoes to button, wrap to fasten, bonnet to tie, and then all of their burdens and constrictions to endure.

So, for the thousandth time, I return to my room, actually too tired to "get ready" and then "get over the ground," though Lake Michigan's splendid expanse stretches away to the east, and there are cool, shady nooks, and tempting by-ways all about me. I recognize joyfully the progress we have made since I was a student, when no girl was really "stylish" who wore less than eight white skirts trailing on the ground after her; but how slowly we move when women of refinement will wear bustles, lace themselves as of old, pinch hands and feet, bare their heads to the blast that their tufts of bonnets may be "like the rest," and simper their criticisms on "dress reform." Near me on the walls of my study hang Annie Jenness-Miller's picture and engravings of her new costumes. I look up at them with a prayerful heart, saying, "How long, O Lord, how long?"

Instead of the walk I would like to take, had I the old-time conditions-the modest, simple, short dress, loose jacket, and broad-rimmed hat of auld lang syne-I pen this jeremiad, and bid God-speed to the earnest-hearted woman who, in roaring Gotham, plans for us women a costume that hints at better days.

636

The Mind-cure.

"PROVE ALL THINGS."

I am often asked what I think about the mental method, mindcure, Christian science, or whatever may be the most appropriate term, and I have been warned repeatedly against it by excellent and trusted friends. However, I cannot see in it the danger that many do. We live in a strangely materialistic age, when thought is declared to be a secretion of the brain, and revelation looked upon as nothing but a myth. Thousands of well intentioned persons had come to the end of the rope and were beating their heads against a stone wall, finding no mode of egress into the upper air of spirituality and faith. It seems to me that just because the world had gone so far, and had so largely become a victim to the theory that only seeing is believing, the Heavenly Powers brought in this great reaction, which declared that the invisible is ail and in all, that thoughts are the real things and things are but effervescent shadows; that there is no escape from what is infinitely good and infinitely immanent in everything created; that evil is a negation and must pass away; that to be carnaily minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. I have never studied the question seriously, because I have not had the time, but from conversation with experts in this study, who are also among the best men and women I have ever known, I have certainly felt that it would be disloyalty to God and to humanity for me to speak against this new era. That some who have entered upon it are not genuine; that some cases of cure are not actual, must necessarily be, in so great a movement; there must be a counterfeit beside the real, but I am confident that if Christians will take what is good in this new evangel and eschew what is evil, it may become a mighty power for the triumph of Him who said: "My words are spirit and they are lue."

Something analogous to this seems to be true of theosophy, and the occult studies that have come to us from those wonderful religions of the East, that furnished the soil cut of which grew the tree of life-Christianity. "God hath not left Himself without a witness" anywhere. A philosophy that takes immortality as its major premise must conduct toward a good life, as opposed to the materialism that says, "I was not-I lived and loved-I am not❞ -the saddest epitaph ever penned.

If I have a virtue in the world, it is loyalty to old memories and old friends, and nothing rejoices me so much as to have this trait believed in by those who walk with me the path of life. One dear lady who had been my teacher thirty years before, died in 1886, and her son wrote me that she had mentioned to him in her last days, her belief that I would gladly write the notice for our church paper. The request came to me with a sense of solid satisfaction that she had so believed in me when we had hardly once met since I was her scholar in the little district school near Forest Home. It did my heart good to turn aside from my pressing cares to write the In Memoriam she had desired.

With my naturally adventurous disposition I fear that but for a strenuously guarded girlhood I might have wandered into hopeless unbelief. But I recall only one reckless friend in all my life, and I was with her but a single term at school. Christian women have been my constant and intimate associates throughout my pilgrimage and Christian men have been like loyal brothers to me always. Beyond every other influence outside my home, I reckon that of a circle within which I have moved for well-nigh fifty years, made up of persons who were chaste, totally abstinent, truth-telling, philanthropic and devout.

"Tell me with whom thou goest and I'll tell thee what thou doest." No precept was ever more frequently repeated and enforced by my parents than this. In guarding Mary and me from illiterate and harmful associations my father evinced a solicitude that many of his friends considered n.orbid. But he would smile and say, "These are 'Two forest nymphs that dwell in the depth of the woodland shade,' and I propose to keep them innocent." So we never went anywhere except with our parents until I was sixteen, and almost never, after that, until fully fledged and flown. Even my brother was eighteen years of age before he ever spent an evening away from home. Around the fireside we were always busy with books, pencils and plans until the early hour of bed-time

638

My First Inamorata.

came. We were literally never left alone with children or work people; there was always quiet but careful supervision. "Heredity may count for much, but environment is next of kin to destiny;" these are my mother's words at eighty-four, the outcome of her observant and reflective life. Who, then, have entered the inner circle of my confidence in fifty years? I ask myself and answer with deep thankfulness: All who have done so meant to be good, sought after goodness, lifted their eyes toward the heights rather than lowered them to the level of the depths. Only two persons, one of them a child and one a girl in her early teens, ever said to me things that were calculated to mar the purity of my thoughts in the formative years of my life, and these were neither of them persons who had influence with me or the ability to determine my actions or opinions. To their everlasting honor be it said that the many men and women who worked in our home and on our farm, never tried in word or deed to lead us astray. But I have always felt that he who is forewarned is best forearmed, and wished that my first ideas concerning the mysteries of being had come early to my observant spirit from my dear mother's lips, which were closed by her reticent New England habitudes.

Meanwhile, there was the heart, the ardent, impulsive heart of childhood and of youth, with its perpetual instinct of bestowment, what did it do? I remember with pleasant pain how early, how vigorously and often that truant heart went forth, seeking rest and finding none! I was hardly six years old when the flame of the ideal burned in my breast for a sweet girl of sixteen, Maria Hill by name, daughter of "Secretary Hill," an English gentleman who was a central figure in the College Board at Oberlin. Her coming meant a new world, her going shrouded my little life in gloom, but she never dreamed of this-she only saw an impetuous child whose papa had (as was the custom in those days of the hygienic revival) induced the little one not to eat butter, and paid her a penny a week for such sacrifice, and who was so determined "to give her pennies to Miss Hill" that when the young lady declared that she could on no account accept them, the child flung them after her retreating form upon

*Margaret Ryan, an Irish girl that lived with us for years, was an exception to this rule, but then she was as refined as she was good "and her uncle was Bishop of Limerick!”