toration, and Kate found health and inspiration in her cheerful labor while aiding with her own hands in the cultivation of the soil. She was thus busily engaged one morning, in her plain dress and garden gloves, when the gate opened, and looking up, she saw a gentleman wearing the uniform of a United States colonel coming towards her. It was against her principles to faint under any circumstances, else she would surely have fainted now, as she recognized the features of Frank Harrison. It did not take him long, however, to satisfactorily explain his presence. And there, in the garden where they had passed so-many happy hours, he told her again the story which, though old, is ever new- - the story that Adam first told to Eve, far away in the world's fresh morning, among the bright flowers and fragrant breezes of Eden-the story that man has told to woman ever since, and which is as

sweet and solemn, as all-consecrating and all-comprehending now as when it was first whispered under skies which no storm-cloud had ever darkened. Mr. Elbridge was not so forgiving as Kate, and at first he sternly refused to sanction this second betrothal; but moved by his daughter's entreaties, and greatly conciliated by Harrison's bravery and loyalty, he finally gave them his blessing.

Ere long there was a quiet wedding at the old homestead, and as the bride and groom looked down the solemn aisles of the future, they felt that they were better prepared to meet the realities of earth than in the days of the past. And to-day they are standing side by side in the ranks of life, passing their bright days in quiet happiness and gratitude to the Giver of all good, whose kind hand has finally led them to the green valleys and still waters of peace.

N a page or two I want to say some

hope will read the WESTERN MONTHLY. As, for instance, what it is, indeed, to be a true reader, and then how I shall know a true book when I see it. And in doing this I will ask my reader first to consider what it really is to read a book.

After many

A man or woman is sent into this world fitted for the expression of some great truth in nature, or life, or religion. Their education and experience point to that purpose. years, and much labor, and deep emotion, they find expression through a book. The best there is in their mind and heart they pour into that, and give it to the world. I devour the book if it happens to be sweet to my taste, and then think I have got the good of it.

I

No such outrage on the deep, holy laws of life is ever permitted. I can only get the good of such a book, in its full perfection, by some such process as that in which it was given. It must break on me, little by little, as it broke on the man that made it. My mind must be as thoroughly roused to read it as his mind was to write it, and then may consider myself fortunate, if after as long a time as it took the writer to fill his work, I can exhaust it. I speak of books which are full, not of those in which we crack the nut to find only a worm and some dust. The reading of a real book must cost what it comes to; no man can be deadheaded on the way of knowledge and inspiration, or, if he seem to be, it is still declared that the line will not be responsible for his life. What you get by

devouring the best book that was ever written is, only at the best, a crude result, that may do you more harm than good.

And what true reader does not know very well, that this idea and the facts of the case are one; that coming again and again to the greatest and best books, and reading them year after year, with a loving heart and earnest mind, we still find them unexhausted and inexhaustible, growing always better and better, opening lights and meanings we never suspected, and refreshing us, as we read them, with a finer aroma and strength than they could ever give to a rude and hasty snatch at their contents.

It is no superstition that makes our Bible just what it is to millions of simple folk, and keeps them reading it all their days, to their infinite delight. Because, as Thomas Carlyle has well said, "In the poorest cottage is one book wherein for thousands of years the spirit of man has found light and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is deepest in him, and in which, for the eye that will look well, the mystery of existence reflects itself." Within all our theories of the inspiration of the Bible is this one great fact, that it is the book in which prophets and apostles, saints and martyrs, poets and psalmists, and the crown and glory of them all, Jesus Christ, have found their expression. The things are there that they waited and watched for, and worked and fought

for; that surged and stormed through their souls, or entranced them like the words and music of heaven. And so one man shall come to this book and read it through, with a lexicon and commentary at his side, and then say: The Bible! why bless you, I know all about it; I have read it through— every word of it. I devoted months to that one purpose, and now, while I will not say but there are fine things in it, the whole impression I got was not

good. It is a crude, harsh book, sir, except the gospels; not the thing to make you feel better at all.

But now, that very man will take Dante, and Shakspeare, and Goethe, and linger over them with unspeakable reverence, and find them always.opening into new wonder and beauty, and will tell you it is a shame and sin to their genius and inspiration to rush through and devour them raw. Philip Doddridge, great scholar and good man as he was, as he was writing his commentary and came to some passage that would not open to the inward sense, for all his scholarship, and yet was evidently locked into life and full of pregnant meanings, would post away to a clear-headed and purehearted old peasant, who had no other book but this Bible, and had read this through his whole lifetime, watching and waiting for its light and inspiration to break on him, bit by bit, and the old man could almost invariably lift the great doctor out of his perplexity.

How did he do it? He gave his life to find the meaning, as David, and Isaiah, and Paul gave theirs, to express the thought. He believed the book was from heaven, therefore he did not dare to rush through it as we rush through a railroad dinner. He watched and waited for its meanings to come out and shine on dark mysteries and heavy troubles, or glories and joys, that were one with the experiences out of which, at first, they were born.

But, then, this pre-supposes that the books we read, are informed and filled with a strong and wholesome life, that will assimilate kindly with our own life, and make us always stronger and better; for there are books that are as sweet as honey to the taste, or, rather, I ought to say to some tastes-that we can read with a lingering fondness and ever-growing appetite, and seem to thrive on and think we feel better for. But that acts as those subtle poisons act I have heard

of young peasants taking, in some parts of Austria, to make them look bright and rosy. The thing is done, but you have to make the drug always a little stronger to save yourself from a sudden haggard homeliness, and then you either die suddenly from an over-dose, or find yourself old, at any rate, in your prime. And there are other books that stimulate just as wines stimulate, of which you can sip slowly, lingering over them, and feeling the glow and glamour of their spirit, to be aware, presently, that they are losing their power, and you want a fiercer fire and will have it. In that very remarkable book, "London Labor and London Poor," I remember the uniform testimony of the wretches who carry on their criminal trade in vile books there, is, that their best customers are well-dressed old gentlemen. For there is a delirium tremens and madness of the spirit, as there is of the nature, but with a still more horrible ending. And there are books that we can read as a man will take opium; that will seem to relieve our pain and shut out our desolation, and bring great visions of what looks like heaven; only the desolation that follows is always more unutterable, and the nature is bruised and broken by its fall, exactly according to the elevation it has dreamed it attained;

"Hurl'd headlong, flaming from the etherial sky."

Now, to read books of this character slowly, and make them your closet companions, is only the more certain ruin, sinful and shameful, and woful as it is, to those who will go against conscience and devour such books. If they are not devoured by them, there is a hope that the thing will turn them so sick in their souls as to cure them forever of the vice, and so far there is an end. It is bitter bad either way; but in this slow, leisurely, lingering assimilation of the poison, there is time for it to find the minutest channels of life, and to fill them full of death and hell. And, on

the other hand, there are books in great plenty, which you may devour greedily and in any quantity, that will probably do you no harm at all, except to take up invaluable time, and prompt all thoughtful persons to ask, with the wise old Scripture, Will a man fill himself with the east wind?-books in which, whatever poor measure of good grain the author may have managed to grow, or borrow, or steal, is amplified, as when children pop their corn, so that you can always eat but never be any betterthe beaten syllabub of book nurture, that is only to real books what sea-foam is to the sea. I think a man need not fear any harm in devouring this sort of book in any quantity, except the reflection that he has been a fool. Naught to naught can never make the least fraction of one.

It is also to be remembered that there is such a wide difference in the intellectual constitution of different men, that, except as to the worst and best of books, it is neither easy nor safe to say, these you must not touch and those you cannot neglect. Who has not known one to whom milk was like poison, and another just as inhospitable to meat; one nature to which an egg was a stone, and another that regarded a fish as a serpent. And so we have all wandered endlessly over the old proverb about the meat and the poison, and this man and that.

There is some such quality in our relation to all but the very best and worst book, that holds me back when I try to divide them. These perhaps, are too bad to bless, as those are too good to ban. I would not dare to burn much of Swinburne; and, if he is going to write much more like his late poem called "1866 and '7," I would not dare to endorse all of Tennyson.

Which brings me to the sure criterion by which we all are to judge, first of what, in the vast store of books in this age, is bad for us, then of what is good

for us. And these are among the sure criterions to me, of a bad book. If, when I read a book about God, I find that it has put him farther from me; or about man, that it has put me farther from him; or about this universe, that it has shaken down upon it a new look of desolation, turning a green field into a wild moor; or about life, that it has made it seem a little less worth living on all accounts than it was; or about moral principles, that they are not quite so clear and strong as they were when this author began to talk; then I know that, on any one of these five cardinal things in the life of a man, this relation to God, to his fellows, to the world about him and the world within him, and the great principles on which all things stable center, that, for me, is a bad book. It may chime in with some lurking appetite in my own nature, and so seem to be as sweet as honey to my taste, but it comes to bitter bad result. It may be food for another. I can say nothing to that. He may be a pine, while I am a palm. I only know this, that in these great first things, if the book I read shall touch them at all, it shall touch them to my profit, or else I will not read it. Right and wrong shall grow more clear; life in and about me more divine. I shall come nearer to my fellows, and God nearer to me, or the thing is a poison. It is no matter to me where I find the book, Faust, or Calvin, or Carlyle, if any one of these cardinal things is the grain and grist of the book, and that is what it comes to when I read it, I am being drugged and poisoned, and the sooner I know it the better. I want bread, and meat, and milk, not brandy, or opium, or hasheesh. Or let the book discuss, as so many now, especially in poetry and fiction,

do

the

powers and passions of our common nature and the perplexities we are landed in through their action—and as I read let me find that the spirit of what I am reading tends to rouse those good

servants but bad masters, the passions that are within me, and to give them the mastery over principles; or, in the relations of our life, to make those relations less sacred between the man and wo. man, and start those perplexities, which in their solution, are far more often the skeleton keys that pick the guards of virtue than the immovable bolts that keep it. These are not good books to

me.

They may be sweet as honey to the taste; generally they are, but they bring a dreadful bitterness at last as they lie rank and loathsome in the soul. This is the feet of clay to the golden head of Enoch Arden.

And those are bad books, that in history set up any divine rights of kings and rulers over the commonwealth of the people, or teach that the more the people have to do with their own concerns the worse it is for them; or bemoan the advancing and opening age as less hopeful than the past; books that excite and inflame my mind, but do not bring me to my feet and set me to work; books that fill me with splendid dreams of what I will do some day, and paralyze my hand toward the humble work of this day; this whole great world of books is bad for me. I am not to let them have dominion over me. But, as Milton has said, "I must have a vigilant eye how they demean themselves, and if they are proven evil, I must confine, imprison and do sharpest justice on them, as malefactors; for books are not dead things," he continues, "but do contain a potency of life as active as that soul whose progeny they are."

And so, in touching what books are good and must be read, these shadows must help me to my light. Common fame about a book can do something to guide me in my reading; very little, though, for the Gospels must have been denounced for some centuries, in the literary world, as the most thoroughly infidel and dangerous books afloat. Criticism can do something, but not much,

while most of the journals can be bought up at tariff prices to print any sort of notice. It is also a fine, subtle certainty, that a dear friend trusts to, that if there be a good new book the report of it is sure to get round to him before the year is out, so that he is never uneasy for fear he may miss one. These things all help us, but the proof of the book is still in the reading.

If the book be of religion, and brings God nearer to my heart and life; if it

THE FALLEN.-When I see and hear of the sisters around me who have sinned and suffered-fallen through their love-I wonder if God allots to them the same punishment He inflicts upon their destroyers? Does He close the gates of heaven upon them, saying, thou hast stained the mantle of thy purity, and art not fit to enter here? or, will He not say, come, thou wronged and sorrow-stricken one, enter into peace? He knows of hours of suffering, of prayer and repentance, and will not pass them by.

I do not include women who sin for the sake of doing wrong, or those whose love of dress, and whose inability to procure it in an honest way, leads them on to crime, for they seldom repent; but to those who give the last proof demanded of an idolizing and unselfish love; who brave the world's scorn to please him who is "all in all" to them, I refer. Do not blame them that they listened and fell. Ah, little do you know of the agony, the torture, the self-abasement, the natural desire to do right; and, if their love triumphed, do not censure that their strength forsook them. A woman is strong to endure, and battle with the world and fate; but when eyes she loves look fondly into hers, and when a voice, whose every tone is melody to her, breathes words of tenderness into her ear, ah, then she is a very child. Conscious only of obeying his will, she plunged into the

be of humanity, and brings me nearer to the heart and life of man; if it be of philosophy, and makes this universe glow to me with a new grace; or of metaphysics, and brings me more truly to myself; if it be poem or story, adventure or history, or biography, and I feel that it makes me more of a man, more dutiful and sincere and trustythen, no matter who wrote it, and what men say about it, the judgment is set in my own soul.

gulf of infamy. Call it what you will -madness, idolatry, idiocy-you cannot make it more than truth. Heap upon her every form of scorn and contumely; hurl at her every epithet of shame and ignominy, you cannot make her feel her own degradation more keenly. She knows a shadow has fallen upon her- -a shadow broad and long-blacker than the coffin's pall.

On her must fall all the blame; she must suffer for both. With head bowed down to the very dust, she goes through the world,

"A fixed figure for the scorn of time

To point his slow unmoving finger at."

How long must this state of things continue? The answer rings out with startling emphasis: So long as women refuse to bestow upon their "fallen sisters one feeling of sympathy, sorrow or compasion.

If each one of the women who, through their "Revolution" and their

Sorosis," prate of the wrongs of women, their "restraints," etc., were to go into the streets of our cities, and redeem from vice and misery just one poor fallen creature, they would do more toward mitigating the wrongs of women, and to elevate themselves, perform more real charity and earn more solid enjoyment, than they could ever obtain by voting, officiating as officers, or by unsexing themselves in any way, and usurping the the world-old prerogatives of man. A WOMAN.