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These Essays are reprinted by permission of the

New York Evening Post

By C.

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I. A Tuft of Hepaticas i

II. The Eve of the Easter Festival .... 12

II II

LIFE, life, everywhere life is the token that Easter Even is here ! The sym- ^bolic egg, the chrysalis, and the butterfly, the whole world of color and of blossom, enrich the gay windows of the shops. The cheerful crowd upon the streets, even though hurrying through a sharply cold atmosphere and, perchance, this year sprinkled with snow-flakes in place of April showers, are gay with flowers at buttonholes or as a breast-knot.

Even to those to whom Lent is a word without meaning and Holy Week chiefly noticeable as a dull time at the theatres, there comes a vigorous intimation that the great majority of persons are glad about something and that there is a stir of rejoicing in the air. To the dullest brain, or to him whose ideas of immortality are either only philosophic dreams akin to Plato's peradventures, or mere dim, savage intuitions which bring thoughts of " happy hunting grounds " as the fate of a human soul more probable than annihilation, there is a quickening sense that the life of man means something more than a few brief years of anxious existence and an exit like the going out of a candle.

The perfect blossom from the husky bulb, the soft catkin pushing through its horny cerements, the peeping chick beside its broken shell, the fluttering rainbow wings of the emancipated butterfly say strange things to the least reflecting of the throng upon the street, and bring a sense of pleasure which he does not stop to define.

And in the midst of this joyous display and expressive material cheerfulness, the church makes ready to cry " laud and hosanna " ; alleluias ring out with every word of highest praise that man can catch from all the spoken tongues of earth. They sing the risen Christ triumphant over death.

But in and out among the hurrying and gift-laden people in the street pass women with faces veiled with crape, and conspicuous in the gayly dressed congregation stand blackrobed figures that seem like perpetual protestants against hope and happiness, amid the bright freshness of the typical costumes, flowery and bright, of those who do not mourn. They seem to gaze at the newly opened blossoms on the altars as if they knew not what they meant. Their hearts seem to be dead within them, and to have lost the power to be glad.

"There is no flock, however watched and tended. But one dead lamb is there ; There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended. But has one vacant chair."

The bitterness is past our telling, the loneliness unspeakable, the loss not to be weighed in scales of man's creation. Nor does time, which brings composure and builds up a resisting armor behind which expression can hide itself, do more than make the heart realize that submission to the inevitable is the only safeguard of a sane mind. The hourly, daily routine of duty and work is the conserving power which maintains the brain and body in healthful equipoise.

Let us find some still place where we may speak of what the healing spirit of " the God of Patience and Consolation" brings to those who mourn. The " comfortable words " of the divine compassion are better heard where the world does not enter. Perhaps some one who sits with a trembling hand resting on the arm of a newly vacant chair, may care to listen to such natural and practical suggestions as have made a lonely life better worth living to others, her sisters, who also have been desolate through grief. That ample chair, so comfortable in its cushioned softness, where marks of use are sacred because made by hands now still and by a dear head which rested there after much wearing thought, shall act as reliquary of a saint and make a place of sanctuary for us.

When our beloveds go a little way, across the sea perhaps ; when they are absent for a time, a year or two it may be, how do we speak of them ; how do we feel towards what they loved and purposed .'' Do we drop their names from the general family speech ; do we shut the light from the room they occupied ;

do we count it an evidence of love towards them to live a life against which they would vehemently protest, and abruptly put an end to what they fostered and enjoyed ?

Why should the mightier loss, the absence, which for lack of fitter word we call eternal, cause us to do these things ? If the life which has ended has been that of a bright child to whom a sunbeam was a playfellow and a dark day a misfortune, is it not rational and fitting that the light it loved, the cheerful things it enjoyed most, should be conserved in memory of its radiant life ?

I knew a mother who had held close to her devoted heart a little child blind from his birth ; when the beautiful sightless eyes closed in death, she dressed herself in white and kept tears from off her cheeks. In the great peradventure which her soul held to be truth, it might be that her boy could see his mother ; if happily this should be so, his spiritual eyes must see her looking lovely and lovable. His mother must look sweet to him. Faithful and faithless can surely see the beautiful reality of perfect love in this : let us live for

i6 our dead such lives as would gladden them on either side the veil, and be, even as regards the little things of everyday existence (such as the clothes we wear, the smile with which we cheer our neighbor or our friend), as nearly as we may what would have pleased them best.

When the head and pillar of the house is removed from his place, and the wife's name is changed to that saddest title borne by woman, widow, the truest honor to his life is surely to let his law rule in the household he built up. If his has been a cordial, hospitable reign, glad to welcome stranger and friend, and his voice been of good cheer, let him still dwell under his own roof in the presence of these qualities. If his genial spirit, his cheering views of life's problems have lifted men out of " the slough of despond," and his laugh been like a prophylactic against foreboding fear, do not shut out his influence from his home, but let it be a monument to his lovable nature. So he desired it to be, so let it be ! Downcast eyes and silence at his board, and closed doors, and neglect of festival observance were abhorrent to him ; let her with whom he shared his rule

2 17 see that his spirit and his will are present as long as she can order the methods by which his home is governed. Let it be her joyful pleasure to nurse and keep alive every trace of his personality, and be herself his memorial among men and to his children. Can grief be healed by subverting all the course of a good man's life, and darkening his home, and disregarding all the order of his noble endeavor ?

There is a conquest over death, a possible triumph over its grim and destroying majesty, by the force of love so strong that it loses itself in the persons beloved, and does not need to see and hear and touch in order to live for them ; a love that orders its daily walk in noble calmness and outgiving goodwill to man ; that dwells in the sunshine and radiates warmth, because of its supreme devotion to the unseen life, and is in unison, so far as shadow can accompany light, with the measureless happiness it believes the departed to enjoy.

Amusement, study, travel, change cannot help the bereaved to smile, nor bring peace

i8 out of tribulation ; they all begin and end in the self from which we would fain escape. We are not laboring to keep green a beautiful memory, nor to bless the world ; all these are to better our own condition, and will be as fruitless as self-prompted labors always are. The only power by which the awful vacuum can be filled is the active principle of a love so intense that it is, in itself, an evidence of something undying, and this love must make itself known in benefits to humanity. Let the widow, who has first made her home life beautiful by devotion, pass outward to where her sister women bear, not only grief, but want, and put her shoulder to the double burden. Nor let her dream it a small, or even to herself a profitless thing, to carry good cheer to the dreary, even if they dwell in the luxury which only adds to their sorrow by leaving them idle. The quickly transmitted spark of enkindling interest in life will warm her own heart, and there will invariably come a touch of joy which will be her part of the festival brightness.

To let our special form of grief carry us where in memory of the departed we become the strength of the weak or the good cheer of the forlorn in similar relation, is a wonderful transmutor of sorrowful experience. A childless mother, carrying in her baby's name maternal solicitude to motherless children, and expending her tenderness on those who have no one left to gladden their young lives, goes like one specially equipped and sent to relieve a grievous need. To soothe and help a little one crying for an absent mother cannot but make happy a woman whose arms are emptied by death.

The young girl, yearning for the touch of a mother's hand and the counsel of a mother's voice, will expand as a flower in the sunshine if to some aged woman, from whose home marriage and loss have carried away her daughters, she brings again a child's fond care and service. "In memory of" is easily carved on very stately monuments, on which wet eyes look hopelessly; to make a human heart glad in remembrance of one unseen, but whom love cannot let die, is to turn bereavement into a conduit of refreshment by which the lost-to-sight continue actively present with us day by day.

Losing some splendid vitally endowed young son, a parent's soul is only wrung with keener anguish while it shrinks away from boyish laughter, and dreads to hear of progressing manhood, and of goals attained towards which their lad had struggled. O ! rather keep every link bright ; let not a comrade fail to know that he has a place in your heart for the dead boy's sake; let memories of his temptations guide you when and how to aid a stumbling foot ; let social warmth invite those he loved to continual companionship in the house to which he first drew them into intimacy ; keep him living in your heart and theirs —

** But when the forest is full of ashes.

While still the flame round the old nest flashes ; 'Tis a brave bird sits on a charred bough and sings,"

True, but it is only the " brave bird " who can keep her heart alive !

Easter, glad feast of life, belongs only to those who are alive in soul, and heart, and mind. Hearts buried in graves have but little share in its resurrecting thrill of joy. Love which holds on, which lives for its own, and makes each day a fruitful memorial instead of a measure of repining, has a foretaste of the immortality it believes in, through its conquest of death's power to destroy.

III

FOR every conceivable avocation, profession, or even graceful accomplishment, youthful aspirants are schooled. They are taught to catch every " coigne of vantage," to avoid each possible chance of defeat and disaster ; but when young girls and men approach the time when they may naturally expect and hope to marry, it is a rare thing to find for either sex that the slightest preparatory teaching has been attempted regarding those things which are to mar or make the joy or wretchedness of two human lives, bound with an irrevocable bond. " It is not," said a wise woman to a daughter who was weighing a suitor in the balance, " whether you could be happy with this man, but whether you could be happy without him ? " It was like an electric-light thrown upon a picture : life could be very tolerable to the young, joyous girl, even if her pleasant partner in many a merry dance was to fade out of sight.

Position, income, personal attractiveness, are also discussed, as debutantes and possible " eligible parties," pass in the great processions of May Fair, but rarely does a mother out of the deep experiences of her own life show to her children that the marriage vow means self-abnegation, mutual patience which has no limit, suppression of temper, resistance of irritable influences, the adapting of individual habits, and the preference of mutual benefit. Seldom is a girl taught that she is responsible for a righteous use of her husband's means, and that she is a partner of his labor. How many girls have been warned that to adorn themselves with dress and ornament, which become burdensome to their husbands' purses, is a cruel wrong ?

" Some day, in your own home, dear daughter, you will need to remember this," ought to be an easily attractive preamble to a mother's helpful words. And to her sons, surely every joy and every disappointment of her own life ought to furnish her a means of helping them not to enter " lightly or unadvisedly " into that vowed responsibiHty which is to control the happiness or misery of a woman's destiny.

The present heartbreaking frequency of separations and divorces cannot but make thinking men and women tremble for the steadfastness of those foundations upon which their children are building the walls of home. It seems easily possible that many of these broken vows and wrecked lives have met their fate because of the improper way in which they were originally united. These people have built for themselves dwellings uncemented by faithful purpose, and ceiled them with a covering of tinsel gauze.

In view of what is an inevitable and integral certainty of married life and responsibility, it would seem that it could not be hard for a mother to question her daughter whether while she encouraged the devotion of her suitor she realized that if she accepted him as her husband, it involved honor and obedience, and readiness to do the will of this man as his wife. Yet it seems that common custom causes mother and child to talk much of the material gain, of fair dwellings, and social enjoyment, and little of the words in that solemn sequence of promises, " for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness as well as in health, until death doth us part." Do the parents of the belle of the season, gayly choosing from half-a-dozen wooers, ever ask : " Will this one man's love and admiration satisfy your hitherto fickle heart and you be able to * cleave to him only ' ? "

Marriage seems to be regarded as a sort of open gate to more and more indulgence and gayety, and an indefinite promise of luxury. " Can and will you be ready to suffer for and with this man ? " never seems to be a query put by the lips of loving parents to a would-be bride.

Behind the scenes, with some old friend, and yet more frequently in confidential talks with her father, the mother is apt to say : " I am very anxious about Annette, she has been so indulged and never had any responsibility ; I am afraid she will never be able to take life seriously." Why should it be a sealed subject between mother and daughter, that to be a good wife means a bended will and a tenderly considerate self-forgetfulness ; to be a good mother means pain of body, unending faithfulness to absorbing duty, and the offering of mind, and soul, and heart on the altar of maternal devotion ?

Who teaches the young girls of to-day that motherhood is the crown of a woman's life, and that its pains and self-denials are as nothing in the scale of its unutterable bliss and dignity ?

What father tells his son, " If you are sure you love this girl, remember that you will have to yield all your previous habits to make her happy ; she will not bear to have you put your profession first, you will have to curtail study, go into society with her, and provide the amusement which she has been dependent upon from her babyhood ? Do not ask her to give herself into your keeping, until you have weighed her in the balance. Is she worth to you the alteration of every line in your past life ? "

Nine out of ten young people are fully convinced that the faults and peculiarities they see in their best beloved can easily be changed "after we are married." Why marry what must be altered to make you happy ? This is a strange, yet ever present and active factor in the majority of marriages, and alas ! the cause of many a broken hope, the misery of many a disappointed heart.

" The girl is so recklessly extravagant that I fear you can never meet her demands," says a friend. The lover smiles triumphantly : " Oh ! she will give all that up as soon as we are married," is his confident reply.

Does it often happen that a father takes into his confidence, his boy, whom he sees steadily progressing toward an attachment which must end in matrimony, and lay bare to him what he must look forward to if he is to be a true head to a household, a loyal, helpful husband, a faithful, forbearing guide and provider to a dependent family ? Rather will he in privacy bewail his child's imprudence and want of forethought, and look discouraged and annoyed when the young people about him jest over the visible growth of an amusing love affair, and never feel that his open and wise counsel might have steered these young lives into a safer channel.

Parents advise about health, business, travel, amusement, but on this most important, most awful crisis of life, they are reticent, they are often culpably silent. Of course, we every day know of downright and often unreasonable opposition which brings forth wrath and feud and every evil consequence, but helpful, considerate advice is a rare gift from a father to his son under these circumstances. There surely must be a way in which, man to man, a son and father, can, even if the elder is not of the same mind, be affectionately open with each other and the boy gain strength and wisdom as the result.

But there is an earlier influence possible, which is yet more rarely brought to bear. Surely this " new era " of light regard for marriage-bonds might be checked in its inroads upon the happiness of our generation, if at their own firesides children found that their parents dealt vigorously with the terrible intrusion of divorce cases into the common conversation of the family, and that a light or joking allusion to broken faith and wrecked homes was treated as a desecration.

If the ignominy of conjugal infidelity was shown in every tone and action with which the current gossip of the day was met in the family circle ; if the girls learned at their mother's side that the faithfulness and love which bear and forgive, and uplift and endure, and adhere in darkness and through evil report give to women an empire out of which disgrace and dishonor fled in fear, they would take into their young hearts the realization that when they came to their own time of trial these were their legitimate weapons of defence. They would learn that it is a glorious thing to win back an erring or even a trifling heart to a true allegiance, and that to magnify a trifling difference into a dividing chasm is the work of the wholly unworthy women of the world.

A girl who has so learned from babyhood that the first duty of a woman is to guard and build up and repair the bulwarks of

3° home, does not lightly quarrel or wantonly offend even a trying or an erring husband. And if from her earliest recollection she has been taught to despise the levity and extravagance and vanity which come between wives and their offended husbands, she is not likely to fall into the snares these evils set for her.

And from the mother to her sons may come those gentle unveilings of the nature of feminine hearts which shall help them to realize, before experience teaches, their mysterious, inexplicable fancies and desires. Here may they be taught to be tender of nervous fears, forgiving of the exactions made by a love so eager that it is never satisfied with less than all, gentle to the demands which are not meant to be selfish and extravagant, but arise simply from ignorance of values either of time or money.

She, too, can best teach how needful it is to ambitious and loving womanhood that it should be a helpmeet, a sharer of man's struggle. She can show her son that if he would raise his young wife to her highest attainable level, he must not put a veil between his trials and her co-operation, but let her meet them with him, learning courage as she goes onward.

In life's stern school we leave our children to learn bitter lessons suddenly and discern sad truths by the blows of misfortune, for which we might have armed them ere they entered, and many and many a time have spared them a hardening cruel experience, by pointing out the true defence against the coming danger.

We cannot raise too high a standard regarding marriage and its duties in our children's minds ; we cannot teach too ardently the blessedness of home, nor exalt too highly the triumphs of that love which is neither blind nor fickle, but strong enough to conquer death itself.

There might be a revolution which achieved for our threatened family life as great a victory as ever was won for liberty or other human right, if our weddings could mean the joining of lives which approached an indissoluble union, strong in the strength of minds prepared and hearts determined to bear and forbear, and conscious that marriage means that they are ready to meet sorrow and trial as freely for love's sake, as to drink its brimming cup of joy.

IV My Son's Wife And My Daughter's Husband

WHEN the wedding procession comes down the aisle, and the bride advances — either, after the end-of-the-century fashion, gayly looking about and dispensing smiles, or, after the gentler, elder usage, passing nervously under the fire of critical eyes, with strong traces of awe and emotion on her young face — habit has long made me lose sight of this central figure of attraction, while I look for the mother, and try to learn what she is thinking. Once started on this interesting study, there is little doubt but that you will pursue it, and it is a curiously varied and an unusually easy way to read a chapter of human experience and feeling. The least attractive type is the elated and satisfied matron, full of the " success " of the match, the splendor of the display, the notoriety of the whole affair.

The richness of her own gown, the costliness of the bride's, the well-known names of the maids and ushers, are filling her with pride, and she is material satisfaction incarnate. Then there is a pathetic type, never failing to touch the heart of her sister-women, the widowed mother, who trembles lest, lacking a father, her child has decided unwisely, and to whom the marriage means another vacant place. But the most beautiful phase of this many-sided exhibition of motherhood comes in the loving large-hearted woman, in whose whole carriage and expression one discovers overflowing sympathy with her child's happiness, tender belief that she is the loveliest of brides, which brings that fascinating, transparent look of pride into her moist eyes, and yet allows one to read about the trembling lips realization of what it means to have heard her take that marriage vow, which covers such unutterable possibilities, such certain assurance of sorrows shared and trials undergone.

There is a solemnity in the marriage service which makes the gaping crowd and restless effort to see, and the whispered comments in a fashionable assembly, exceedingly out of place. After the chimes have clamored their congratulation, and sunlight and open air relieve the nervous tension, or when at the home, social hilarity and indispensable congratulation scatter doubts and leave only room for the joyous hope that all your good wishes will be more than fulfilled, weddings become mirthful and full of rejoicing; but while the ceremony is in progress, the irrevocableness is appalling to one who thinks and knows what life means, and the possibilities seem to rise and fill the space above the bowed heads, like the vast, mysterious incense-cloud which escaped from the lamp of the genie.

For the woman bent on insuring what is technically meant as a " good match " for her son or daughter, even the careless world feels no sympathy, whatever she may reap as a harvest besides the wealth and social eminence which she sought. If after a time her child is as conspicuous for unhappiness or bad behavior as at the beginning for luxury and power, no one grieves for her who sought and assisted to make the union. It is for the mother who, having unselfishly given up her child, sees mistakes she cannot remedy, and troubles she cannot avert, arising constantly, and entangling the young feet, that one sighs in sympathy.

No other relation demands such total suppression of self, and makes such large claim on sound judgment, and surely none compares with it in requirement of such justice as we only expect to find complete in divinity. If it is but the wholly, the blessedly natural desire of the married lovers to live for each other, and to resent intrusion into their new world, where they are learning each other's characters by the light of affection and mutual experience, it is a sharp trial for a mother to find herself de trop, where she has been indispensable. Let it be no more than some petty whim of taste which causes the daughter to discard a favorite dress of the mother's choosing, because her husband does not think it becoming ; let it be only the sharper cut of seeing the son cheerfully abandoning some hitherto immovable habit, with the unconcerned ease of a mere nothing, it impinges on the very citadel of the mother-heart, and wears its furrow there. Mayhap it is the cigarette, which he has been unceasingly besought to abandon for year after year unavailingly ; to-day he says, as if it were the merest trifle : " Oh, I gave those up as soon as I was married; my wife made quite a point of it." Magnanimous mother indeed is she who can say without an inward twinge of jealousy or influence, " How glad I am."

In the ordering of the household, in the choosing of friends, in the management of children, how difficult is it to avoid active intermeddling, how almost impossible not to resent the rejection of advice ! The swift revolution of opinion in all things seems to find the very hub of its progress in the ruling of domestic life, and the regimen and discipline in the parents' nursery, from which the young father and mother have emerged well-developed, well-mannered men and women, has been replaced by ideas based on wholly subversive laws ; many a grandmother is as much at a loss in a place ruled by a modern trained nurse as if her progeny had been lambs and her daughters were young lions.

It is said that every " soul must work out its own salvation," and surely it is true that every man and wife must hew out their own pathway through life's tangle, and be a law unto themselves. No woman, however wise and forbearing, however tender and self-effacing, can rule another woman's household and family, nor can she judge altogether justly even for her own child. To hold one's peace is as hard as for a sailor to see a ship drifting landward in a storm and not to take the helm ; but blessed is she who, while keeping loving watch, does not fan a slight disturbing breeze into a tempest by interference.

Surprised to see that the foundation for a new building was being laid where a garden had beautified the ample house in which a widowed mother and a son had lived, I asked the owner how she could give up her flowers. " My son is soon to be married," she said ; " the new house is for him and his bride." " But why not have them live with you ? '

" Oh, I love them far too much for that," was her clever reply, which made us both laugh, though the deep-rooted wisdom and large unselfishness were patent enough in its few words.