lifted above commonplace affections for sister or brother, and governed only by stern duty.

Imagine what a shock it was to her when at her tenth visit in one week for religious guidance, Mr. Paton said abruptly:

"My dear young woman, it is not God you are worshiping, it is Jane Parmelee. You have set your Self up, to make a perfect creature of it, just as Prometheus did with his clay figure, and all you want of God is fire from heaven to give life to it."

"I selfish? I?" gasped the girl. "What shall I do? What cure is there for me?" secretly elated at finding another besetting sin to combat.

The old man hesitated. "The real cure for the woman," he told his wife afterwards, "would be a husband and half-a-dozen children, to drag her out of herself into work for others, but I could not tell her that."

"I have thought," she suggested, "of going out as a Bible reader or lay preacher."

"Very good discipline for some people, but not for you. I should advise you to put your à Kempis on the topmost shelf, stop your fasting, get your liver and nerves into good working order, and then go to your sister and help her with her ten boys and girls. The woman is going to the grave fast from overwork. You can teach the twins, make the girls' dresses, nurse Bob through the measles. Try that prescription for six months and you will not need to come to me to know what to do next."

But there were not many of this class in St. Matthew's. Mr. Paton was an unpopular preacher with Christians whose religion confined its manifestations to church-going and strict observances of duty. They dropped off into other parishes, where the work was less exhausting than that portioned out by the fervid little man to his people.

Still, even among the leading, most zealous men of St. Matthew's, there was a wide divergence of opinion and practice concerning the best mode of helping their less fortunate brethren.

Notably was this the case with two of the vestrymen, George L. Kensett, and Colonel Rodman. Both were men of great wealth; both, as it happened, without heirs, and

both anxious to use their money in the way most helpful to the world. They differed, however, much as to the way.

There never was a more genial soul born into the world than old Father Kensett, as he was called in the parish. There was something in the bald head, the florid, beaming face, the fat little figure cased in the blue coat, brass buttons and nankeen waistcoat of the last generation, when he appeared on the streets, that attracted beggars and tramps as would a glowing fire set on the frozen highway. They beset the old gentleman by night and day with their tales of woe; they attacked him with tears, prayers, circulars, letters; they came as starving paupers, discharged criminals, needy authors, reduced gentlewomen. The old fellow scolded and blustered, made them promise to go to church, and handed out whatever money they wanted. His heart was more tender than that of any woman in St. Matthew's; he found each fresh case one of peculiar hardship. He acknowledged he had been swindled a thousand times, but "this last poor devil has truth written on his face."

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Everybody said it was scandalous to leave a man to be so preyed upon, and that he was no more competent to direct his charity than a child. Men like Mr. Kensett are very apt to be influenced by what everybody says. He suddenly set his face against indiscriminate alms-giving, and denounced everything in the shape of a beg gar. Keep them out, Tom," he told his servant; "I'll not see a widow or orphan of the lot. Individual charity is the bane of society. It is the nursing mother of pauperism." He had been reading the views of certain political economists. "The only sure way," he told Colonel Rodman, "to deal with this mass of wretchedness below us, is to deal with it as a mass, through organized charities. I propose to give my money in that way, and not to dribble it any longer, here and there, ineffectually, to this cripple or that idiot. But I want them to keep out of my sight, sir,-out of my sight."

He knew his own weakness, and that he would trust any of them on sight. He simply handed over his absolute trust from the

crippled and orphaned beggars, to the managers and superintendents of homes for orphans and cripples, quite forgetting that the one class were human beings, just as well as the other, and that his money was a temptation, and his credulity material out of which a comfortable support could be gained for both. He gave, therefore, every half-year large sums to an Orphan Asylum, and a House of Refuge and Reform School; sums so large that he was very soon appointed a director of both. The germ of every such institution is usually hatched out of the brain of some noble enthusiast, who has found in it, he thinks, the cure for all the world's diseases. It was the case in these. The founders were attracted by Father Kensett; they found in him an eager disciple. Whatever was their plan, he was quite ready to believe that it was the one means by which the world, the flesh, and the devil, were to be put to the rout for all future time, and just as ready to give his money to aid it. The actual management of the institutions, however, was consigned to practical men who made the control of these large bodies of paupers and juvenile criminals as much of a business as other men did the importing of dry goods, or manufacture of hogsheads. Mr. Kensett had a lofty faith in the wisdom and humanity of these superintendents. When with the other directors he partook of the usual dinner, or made a formal round of the monstrous establishments, he regarded them with awe, as men set apart for a great work. He looked with delight at the exquisite cleanliness of the floors, and at the vast apparatus in the kitchens and laundries.

"Can any one doubt that the world moves?" he cried. "Look at what science and humanity are doing for these poor creatures!'"

The poor creatures were reviewed in battalions. They did not look particularly happy or grateful for the blessings showered upon them, which was noted by the, directors as a proof of the depravity of their class. No attempt was ever made by these directors, or the men and women who contributed to support the institutions, to come in personal contact with these children, or to find

what effect the discipline was having upon their hearts or lives. Individual influence was totally unknown to any of these hundreds of little ones. They worked in gangs, they played in gangs, they slept in gangs; at the tap of a bell they ate; at the tap of a bell they stopped eating.

Mr. Kensett's old heart ached as he walked through the rows of wistful little faces; even the dreadful uniformity of the brown coats which they wore irritated him. "Poor little chap!" he said, putting his hand on the head of one puny fellow. "If you only had a mother to hug you and spank you and take you in her arms and tell you the story of Jesus!"

The superintendent smiled the smile of a philosopher indulgent to human weakness. "You must not think their religious education is neglected," he said, and tapped the bell once.

They declaimed the, creed, holding up their hands.

He tapped it twice.

They howled out the Lord's prayer, clasping their hands.

"I do not think you can find any fault with our system there," he said loftily.

In short, with each visit Mr. Kensett was more abashed and awed by these superintendents. They were experts in training souls. They trained them in masses, built up the body politic with them precisely as a bricklayer builds a house; gave to each brick precisely the same handling, struck off every uneven part, slapped them down in a row, put in a dab of mortar. If these human souls with their balked affections and stormy passions would not lie in order like lumps of baked clay, whose fault was it? The system Mr. Kensett was convinced was perfect. The only wonder was how the world had got along at all with the old plan of mothers and homes.

When he died, so absolute was his confidence in these managers that he left all his property in equal shares to the two institutions.

The first, an orphan asylum, came prominently before the public two or three years ago. Some women-mothers, who were not awed by the reputation of the managers for

wisdom or philanthropy-suspected that all was not right; an editor, eager at once to do battle for the right and to get a first-class sensation in his paper, pushed the investigation and brought to light a system of swindling and cruelty which roused the indignation of the whole country. The children had been fed on tainted meat and rotting potatoes; had been barbarously neglected, while the managers embezzled the funds. The superintendent was dismissed, the children scattered and the asylum finally closed. Of the House of Refuge there have been many complaints whispered about. It is asserted that vicious and innocent children are there herded together and come out criminals alike; that the managers, by dint of dealing with them by mechanical rules in gangs, have hardened out every individual human trait; they know nothing of home, of pleasure, of affection, or of piety. The strongest impression made upon them during their childhood being that of incessant intolerable constraint, they dash it aside when they regain their freedom and rush into the wildest excesses.

The Bureau of Charity and committees from the Legislature have been appointed to visit the House and examine into the truth of these reports. They made stated visits. The floors were immaculately clean; so were the beds. The laundry was run on a new and admirable plan; the children ate, played and prayed in chorus; how could any exception be found to an organization so impeccable? The cap and crown of all was the reputation of the managers. Were they not known all over the country as philanthropists? Were they not members of the Prison Reform Association? Bureaus and Committees dared not attack such reputations for the sake of vicious children who were bound to go to the bad at any rate; they laid their hands over their awed mouths and were silent.

Mr. Paton and Colonel Rodman held many and anxious conferences over this matter. "I confess myself baffled," said the clergyman. "Here, on one side, is a large body of wealthy Christian people ready and anxious to give their money to help their

poorer brethren, and on the other are the poor asking for help. Yet somehow the help never reaches them."

"I will not presume to solve the whole problem," said the Colonel; "but the mistake which the wealthy class makes, as it seems to me, especially such men as Kensett, is that of too much confidence. They put a premium on fraud. They either give their money to sorry beggars without personal investigation and so develop beggary, or they hand it over to gigantic charitable organizations and so put temptation in the way of their managers."

"You do not mean to say these men are all tempted to steal?" cried Mr. Paton, indignantly.

'No, only the lowest class of them are affected by the actual money. The temptation to the majority is that of unlimited power. Men or women, honest, sincere, humane in the beginning of their work, take charge of one of these mammoth organizations, with hordes of inferior human beings to control. Rules and system are necessary; it becomes to them presently a mere matter of rules and system; they handle these human souls en masse, until their own hearts become hardened and mechanical. That is the effect upon the finer natures. A coarser man, placed in this position of absolute power, is tempted to cruelty and fraud every hour of his life. For my part I should not trust one of them with the control of these unfortunate creatures, without a close, constant, legal watch upon them. I remember that no Christian church has ever stood the test of arbitrary power without falling into cruelty or corruption."

Very few of the people of St. Matthew's coincided with the Colonel; even Mr. Paton held him to be an extremist in his views. He never gave a dollar to any charitable society. "I want to see with my own eyes where my money goes," he said. He never gave a penny in downright alms to beggars. "You shall have help if you pay for it in work afterwards," was his rule. In fact he had little patience with the helpless unable poor.

"There are plenty of Kensetts to carry that dead weight," he said. "My business

He had made his own money; he had no kinsfolk to be his heirs, and he avowed his intention not to leave a dollar of it to any institution to mismanage when he was dead. "I mean to help the world with it, and help it now," he said.

His usual plan was to burrow into haunts of vice and poverty until he found a child born with some capital of talent, fine instincts or honesty of nature, out of which a useful man could be made. This child be came then his charge. He educated him for whatever trade, profession or business he was fitted, and placed him in it. How many men helping the world upwards today are his instruments, carrying out his ideas, only he knows, and God. Another favorite whim of the Colonel's was to enable the poor to help each other. He would lend money to an energetic woman to start a laundry or a small shop, provided she gave employment to other women, poorer than herself. When an orphan fell into his charge, he placed it not in the asylum, but in the family of some worthy, needy couple, who would care for it kindly. They were the gainers by the money; the child had a home. The Colonel borrowed, too, from the Quakers, many of their shrewd practical modes of helping men who help themselves. He founded a training-school for nurses; an Industrial school for adult mechanics; an

When the present hard times began, Colonel Rodman was one of the first to see that the only chance of escape for the surplusage of unemployed workmen in the cities, was to open up the rich waste lands of the country. He bought up a large tract of forest in one of the older states near to a market at a low price, chose himself about fifty sober, industrious laborers and mechanics, who were out of work and on the verge of starvation, and advanced the money to take them and their families to it, and to feed them for six months.

"Measure off your farms, clear and plant them, and pay me the cost price in eight years," he said.

The men went to work as those who have been called back from the edge of the grave. Last July, when the labor strikes held the country paralyzed, they were quietly reaping their harvest, well fed and well clothed.

"How does your colony succeed?" somebody asked the Colonel the other day. "They hold their own. They have paid their second installment to me-to a dollar."

"A hard man, Rodman!" said his questioner when he was gone. "Strange that a Christian should have no better idea of true charity!" Rebecca Harding Davis.

I MUST Confess to a weakness which draws me with peculiar love towards those storytellers, the stones, -and what eloquent story-tellers they are! In the popular speech the stone is commonly used as the symbol of some depressing state. To carry a stony heart in one's breast, to be petrified by fright, to be pitiless as stone, to be a stumbling stone,-these and many more are figures far from pleasing. Even in the dear old fairy tales, the stone has a diabol

ical character-from the Devil's stone on the windy height of the Blocksberg, to the horrible Gallows stone, or Raven's stone, which grins by moonlight. Castles and strongholds, woods and gardens, lakes and streams with all their dwellers, are suddenly turned into hard, ringing stone by the power of an evil spell; and forced to tarry until some good fairy releases them by one right word, and the old life leaps again out of the senseless rock into the light of day. The turning

to stone is a curse and a punishment; as Lot's wife was changed to a pillar of salt, when she yielded to her curiosity and turned to cast a farewell glance at the blazing ruins of Sodom.

We modern Epigoni, dissecting everything with our scientific criticism, take a far less poetic view of the inorganic world than our forefathers, who stood much nearer than we to the dead stone-world, and even honored certain stones with an almost divine worship. Were not the egg-shaped or semi-circular Oracle stones held sacred at Delphi, in the desert temple of Jupiter Ammon, and in many other places? And even in our own times, has not the Stone of the Kaaba at Mecca, so often kissed and grown so black with the sins of mankind, faithfully preserved its ancient name and fame?

A legend went among the Greeks that after the flood people sprang out of the stones which Pyrrha and Deucalion cast behind them. We may note in passing, that an old German fable declares the German race to have grown out of trees; and an old Indian myth asserts that men were drawn out of the waters by the Great Spirit. Homer makes the elders in his assemblies take their places on simple seats of stone "within the holy circle." At Athens it was the custom in the markets and public squares for the orators, the heralds and plaintiffs to speak "from the stone;" and every Thesmothete took the sacred oath in the market place "by the stone." And indeed, if we may be allowed to put any faith in etymological skill, the Greek word, basileus (a king), means literally one who mounts on a stone. This suggests, again, the old German and Keltic custom that the king should show himself before the assembled people on a high stone, when he succeeded to the crown; and also the tradition of the old historic King's stone, supposed to be hidden in the English throne.

I might add many more examples, but this will be enough to prove the deep sig nificance of stones in earlier days contrasted with the modern view.

"If the stones could speak, what stories they would tell us!" is an almost proverbial

expression. I, who have had a far closer acquaintance with thousands of stones than those who merely walk over them, have never been quite satisfied with this phrase. It fails to convey the whole truth, and our common language has felt this. It says "dumb as a fish," but seldom "dumb as a stone." Surely the stones do speak, and tell many stories of which the vulgar mind never dreams. They speak not with sounds but with signs, whose interpretation to-day only needs the magic wand of the scholar. Even if the inscription do not always denote the hand of a master in calligraphy, it is nevertheless now and then characteristic in the highest degree. The brief words, "Route de Paris," which a grenadier with great difficulty inscribed in an idle hour on a wall of the famous temple of Isis at Philae, when the French army held it at the beginning of the present century, are as descriptive of the invincible grande nation, as the countless mementoes scratched on every stone by a French adventurer, who a few years since ran over nearly the whole of Asia with unsheathed sword and military hat: "I, M. Legran, the pride of the human race, have been here also."

Social man seeks his fellows everywhere, and thankfully hails the presence of humanity even in the meagre records of the past. Neither the charm of the landscape nor the most stately cliffs in a foreign land, can exert so mighty a spell over the wanderer as the unlooked for sight of a speaking stone.

Once, after wandering for weeks at the head of a caravan over the rocky and desolate plateau of Southern Persia, I found myself in a lovely spot near Murgâb, undisturbed by the presence of any human being. Only the screaming eagle and the vulture wheeled over my head. I stood in the midst of a dreary and forsaken heap of stones, betraying the traces of the human hand, when suddenly my eye fell on a block of marble, bearing in relief the winged image of an ancient Persian king. But when I read the few simple words above it: "I AM CYRUS THE KING, THE ACHEMENIAN," then my heart began to glow, for