the native elegance of American women and the inelegance of American men. My father represented another school of national thought, that of the instinctive distrust of "style." In my maternal grandfather as well I saw the flowering of this deeply American tendency. One of my grandfather's favorite stories it seemed to him brilliantly satirical-was about a man who in a fatal moment allowed his wife to buy a new Brussels carpet for the parlor, with the result that gradually everything in the house had to be replaced in a style that "went with" the fashionable Brussels, until in the end the wretched protagonist of the ominous yarn had dissipated his fortune and ruined his life. The anecdote, though it was always excessively agreeable to induce grandfather to tell it, had never exerted much influence over the ladies of his family. You may be sure that at the earliest opportunity my grandmother had secured a floor covering purporting to come from Belgium's capital. American women were long ago on the march. Even in the little villages of northern Ohio they meant to move with the times.

Why do American—indeed, any women dress well? The question is old and there is no pretension here to having found a new answer to it. I would not say that my mother dressed for either men or women, but merely because it was the nice thing to do, just a natural and pleasant instinct. Of course she was not like a woman of whom I knew later, who was content to dress superbly in a hotel sitting room, have her dinner in this magnificent solitude, and conclude a

night. Mother would have preferred that her children at least should see her if she were well dressed. But, broadly speaking, she had no other social end in view.

To dress well and to live becominglythis does not mean ostentatiously— seemed to my mother in those days part of woman's duty; she never questioned it. In these matters no qualms troubled her did they trouble anyone then?as to other women fated to dress less well and live less becomingly. We hear a great deal of talk of such qualms in these days, but do social and radical ideals seem to abate at all our twentiethcentury ladies' love of dress? However, I may as well admit that my mother had little social consciousness, as we understand the phrase in these days of the reconstruction of the world. And she was typical of the greater part of the good women of her day-a day that already to us seems centuries ago. It is because so many of our mothers were like this that I venture to speak of mine.

She was incapable, I take it, of thinking other than kindly of any class in the community in the sense that she wished them to have no suffering and to enjoy a suitable degree of comfort. She was, when I was a small child, I can remember, as active as her health permitted in the local Dorcas Society. Dorcas Society, indeed! Does that not date the ladies enlisted in it? Does it not almost bring back the eighteenth century with ladies-bountiful themselves carrying baskets of calf's-foot jelly or arrowroot to

old Goody Two-Shoes in her humble. cottage? My mother never consciously put forth much of a plan for the betterment of the world, beyond kindness to the deserving poor who came near your gate.

She represented, as do now all the women of that time, a point of view which to modern people seems to savor of a dark age. And yet miracles do not exactly happen overnight in a nation's consciousness. I would urge that something in the social attitude of that day is not so remote from the most characteristically American thought of our day. For example, my mother strongly disapproved of all slums; she detested even passing through them. But, oddly enough, as we of the younger generation thought even then, she did not waste time censuring landlords and municipal authorities; she merely blamed the poor for living in such horrid places. And if we chaffed her about Marie Antoinette and cake for the starving in Paris, she replied, with some show of justice, that the poor ought to go to live in the suburbs, where there were cottages and gardens, and that they should be educated to do that. Perhaps you couldn't destroy slums, she thought, but you could destroy the willingness to live in them. Isn't this sound, characteristically American, and really very modern doctrine?

She had that very American belief in the advantages of raising the standard of living, and when she came to live a good deal in the South she extended this doctrineas is not always done to the colored race. She believed that if the negro lived better he would have to work harder and to her both seemed desirable. She was pleased when her children became interested in a school for black girls in our village, and she sent her prettiest slippers, when they grew ever so little rusty, to one of the colored teachers, an elderly woman herself, who had a very appealing elegance and quiet, ladylike distinction. If we had suggested to our mother that her lovely slipper buckles might stir unduly luxuri

ous ambitions in some young black girl's breast, she would have answered that if the girl really wanted such things she would, when she left school, work harder to get them. And in this point of view I have noted with amusement and pleasure that she was lately joined by Miss Pankhurst in England when the spendthrift tastes of the London workingwoman were under discussion.

It never irked my mother that some of the modern social doctrines eluded her. As I grew older and observed the modern tendencies in myself with pride, I wondered a little that, since my mother kept abreast of the times in so many ways and almost seemed to grow younger as she grew older, she did not see, with me, that alleged wider horizon. Now that she is gone, I am inclined to be wholly grateful to the lack of social consciousness which permitted the women of her generation so to concentrate themselves upon their homes and their children. I do not urge it upon the mothers of to-day. I only feel that it is well to find what we can that is lovely and touching in each period of the world's development, and that if it were a fault of my mother's which left her the leisure to be more intimately my friend I will not now complain.

She would, however, in a way, have been the first to recognize that the restrictions put in her girlhood on women's activities had resulted in serious losses to the world-notably in her own case. She could have been-and she knew itan excellent boss carpenter or mason or builder or contractor. Not that she did anything with her own hands-and is this not of the very essence of Americanism?-but that she knew how things should be done. I remember once discovering her directing a bricklayer.

"Why, mother," I said, "I didn't know you knew how to lay brick!”

"I don't," she answered, with an agreeable crispness which increased in her with years. "But I observe and I have used my mind."

She had a passion for alterations and

remodeling; it gave her more pleasure to fix over a house than it would have given her to build a new one. She was always wanting to cut a window or "throw out" a bay or find space for a new bathroom, and our tiny house in Florida was always in metamorphosis.

Directing labor seemed to her an admirable occupation for women. I remember how proud she was of my sister once when a black boy who had been beating carpets and so forth said:

"Mis' Rhodes, if Miss Margaret had enough of us colored boys she could jes' clean up the whole world."

I am putting off as long as I can the confession that in all mechanical arts I was, as my father had been before me, a bitter disappointment to my mother. How intolerably must competent women like her suffer from men who are not "handy" about the house! It has always been the prerogative of the male, the proud insignia of his sex, that he could drive a nail straight. Indeed, perhaps it will always be. And here we had failed her. Sometimes it must have seemed to her my worst fault. It was not my worst fault-she must have known that-but it was a fault that almost until my coming of age she could not be silent about.

My worst fault really was, at least in the childish period to which I seem instinctively to be reverting again, "being a good boy." It is the most unpleasant confession I have to make; it is perhaps the most degrading anyone can have to make. I say this not only because it is the truth, but because, I admit, I hope thereby to rouse interest in this rambling writing which will otherwise be to the end so lacking in sensational disclosures. I feel that I am not wholly lacking in a certain startling courage in admitting how good a little boy I was. My mother cannot have deceived or flattered herself, she must have known I was, yet she bore with me with the utmost patience.

The Autobiography of a Good Boy, if it could be written with brutal honesty, might stir readers, though they would

think it too depressing and morbid, as it needs would be. I have no intention of setting down in completeness such a narrative here. But I would like to protest in behalf of all unfortunate good little boys that no one need think that good boys enjoy being good! They almost always feel what bad style it is, how offensive to any true worldliness or cultivated taste. They despise good children when they read of them in edifying books, and they think nothing of them when they encounter them in real life. But if a child is naturally honest, for example, or not quarrelsome, no one but those who have been good children can know how tragically hard it is for him to be bad. In vain the child tells himself how cowardly it is to be good-even at my present distance from childhood I have something of this feeling. The conscientious good child goads himself on to badness, not knowing, poor wretch, that badness is a gift from God which no struggles on his part can bring within his reach.

The parent of a good child is most unhappily situated. A mother especially can scarcely venture on urging a child to be bad, even though she secretly. knows it ought to be. This will explain, I suppose, why my mother never very strongly urged me to be good and never very bitterly reproached me when I had attained a mild, tame half badness. I remember how I once desperately engaged with several other boys in my first theft (I might perhaps pretend that this was the beginning of a splendid series, but I may as well admit that so far as I know I have only stolen twice). We nabbed two pigeons belonging to some boys with whom we were in feud, inhabiting a contiguous but inferior street. So far so good; indeed, some details of the raid were to the credit of my inventive talent. But almost at once vengeance overtook me. The miserable birds we incarcerated in the loft of a disused barn at the back of our back yard. This accomplished, the whole affair ceased to interest anyone but me.

I, their jailer, had to feed the dreadful greedy things, since my too tender heart would not let them suffer. Of course I was soon longing to release them, but, alas! all too cleverly, we had clipped their wings and made flight impossible. I had to purloin food from the house and buy grain with my pocket money; none of the other boys, who knew and despised me as good, would contribute a penny. I had constantly to invent pretexts for slinking to the barn. And, worst of all, the pigeons seemed to be growing tame and fond of me. This was more than could be borne, and at the end of perhaps a fortnight I sobbed out the whole absurd story to my mother.

What she really thought I suppose it was out of the question that I should know; to the end of her life my goodness -fortunately a little mitigated with the years—was still a subject upon which, in the interests of our friendship, we both preserved a decent reticence. I remember I asked wildly what, oh, what should I do, expecting, perhaps, reproof for my badness. But I know she only smiled a little and said that she should think that I would merely put the pigeons back in the place they came from and say no more about it. She even helped me make a plan whereby I, unaided by my former accomplices, could convey the birds in secrecy, and so, incognito, make restitution.

It was years before I had courage to steal again. This time it was from the house at the seashore which we took furnished. There I purloined, with the knowledge and, I suppose, the acquiescence of my mother, a corkscrew, presumably from gay Paris, the handle of which was made by a lovely pair of female legs striped crosswise as if they wore a maillot of bright green and black. I trust it was with satisfaction that my mother observed my now greater aplomb and ease in badness. But even now I have occasional twinges of conscience, and if the lady from whom we took the house, whose legs they are, will write to me, I will send them back.

VOL. CXLV.-No. 865.-14

I promised earlier that this should be a paper somewhat about gardens. But it can only be about one very small and unpretending garden; there is enough to say about that tiny patch to fill all the space I can venture upon taking. I do not envy people with large gardens; their riches of ground and their individual rose bushes can never mean so much to them as they do to a more modest Candide. It is almost incredible that there should be so much lore concerning just a village back yard.

There is a sort of summerhouse at one side, overhung by a myrtle tree, thatched with palmetto leaves, and overrun with honeysuckle. The myr

tle is a lovely tree with drooping, wandering branches, but it is not, on the whole, as romantic as its name. Its real usefulness is that a spray of it in leaf, placed in a room, will drive away fleas. So they say. My mother once thought that the ownership of such a tree made it possible for her to permit a Boston terrier named Doctor to sleep in her bedroom. But she decided ultimately that the myrtle was loveliest growing in the garden and protecting the summerhouse-if it could, indeed, so protect from a too abundant insect life.

The summerhouse is really called the bosquet, because at a small fishing village near Trouville they used to call small green inclosures in the garden that. We wanted to call it after the chief pride of the Hôtel des Parisiens, Le Parasol de Robinson—(Crusoe is understood). But we couldn't in decency do this, because our bosquet was not really a parasol, which is inclosed on all sides by green. coming down to the very ground, and entered by a small opening on one side, while our bosquet was accessible on two whole sides.

In a small-enough garden small events become great; I am sure there is some great secret of happiness hidden here. Bridging the ditch, or covering an already existent bridge with a pergola upon which 2 Cloth-of-gold rose grew, used to attain the importance to my mother which the