A Rose of Yesterday

e is an age at which most of us unexpectedly come across the truth about ourselves, and sometimes about

childhood carries us along at a speed of which we have no idea, in the little boat which is the immediate and undeniable reality of near surroundings, the child's cradle afloat upon a fiction which is wide and deep and strong, and sometimes we are grown men and women before our small craft strikes upon a shoal of truth, with a dash that throws us from the thwart, and frightens the bravest of us. There we stick fast upon the ro

sents them bitterly. Even in daily living, few men can bear to be roughly ro

t it could deceive her. She had built on it, as it dictated; she had trusted it, as it suggested; she had lived, and loved to live, for its sake; and now it had betrayed her. It had not been in earnest, all the time, but had somehow made her think that s

owed her the colonel as he would be in another ten years, a picture founded upon the tired look she had just seen in his face. She was ashamed of herself, and furious against herself for being ashamed,

apan which she had not answered. Indeed, she was not sure that she had read every word of it, for it had only come this morning. Life had been too short for reading letters on that day. But there it was, on

superior in them, but full of something she liked and understood and instantly longed for. Her heart was not laugh

orced longing for equality of years between herself and her ideal had fleetingly expressed itself in her face by shadows, where there could not yet be lines. But as the illusion sank down into the storehouse of

f living roused by the thought of youth. For youth is the elixir of life, and the touch of old age is a blight on youth, when youth is longing to be old; but youth that is willingly you

under a microscope, he would surely be profoundly interested in the movements of the letter-bacillus, as he might call it. He might question whether it is generated spontaneously, or is the result of an act of will, more or less aggressive, but he would marvel at the rapidity of its motion and at the strength of its action upon the human animal through the eye. It would be very inexplicable to him; least of all could he understand the instant impulse of man to tear off the shell of the bacillus as soon as it reaches him, for he would no doubt notice that in a vast number of cases the sight of it produces discontent and pain, and he might even find a few instances in which death followed almost immediately. In others the bacteria produce amazingly ex

his sight his first impulse was to set down on paper all sorts of things which had very little sense in them, but made up for a famine of wisdom by a corresponding plenty of feeling. There is something almost pathetic in

gth before he has learned his weakness. Then she riots in it, recklessly, for a time, until she has hurt him. She says, 'Do this,' and he does it, like the Centurion's servant; or 'Say this,' and he says it, be the words wise or foolish, and she reckons his wisdom to herself and his folly to him, frankly, and without the least doubt of her own perfection, for a while, rejoicing senselessly in driving him. But by and by, as in a clock, the mainspring feels the gentle regulation of the swaying balance, and the balance takes its motion from the spring, till both together move in perfect time, while each without the other would be but a useless bit of machinery. Sylvia did

ved the letter, she had been a little inclined to smile at the writer's persistence, and had laid the letter aside, half read, in no great hurry to finish it. Bu

icer who had hated this hollow world with such grave conviction because Sylvia Strahan could not go home in her father's ship. She read on, and felt an unexpected thrill of pleasure when the words told her what she had already known; namely, that the squadron would be far on its way to San Fr

all about them, but she gave him her impressions of Lucerne and told him that Aunt Rachel had taken cold, but was now quite well, a piece of information which, though satisfactory in its way, was not

not crossed her mind when she had unscrewed her travelling inkstand, but which sufficiently proved that she had acted under an impulse o

dark and lingered on her lips all night,

all. There are few indeed who fall asleep happily when the fi