clothes. What a shock it would give them to see the ferocious glance, the withering frown and the caustic sneer we keep for "our own" in the family circle. To hear the unmusical voice without its company inflection. Would we not be as tinkling cymbals and sounding brass? But they are not shocked, for they had pierced our subtle armor of veneering long ago. They had appraised us at our own value, and, so far as they are concerned, we could discard our whole pitiful make-up, and at least be honest brass! Then we would receive sincerity for sincerity, instead of hypocrisy for our duplicity. What are we worth? What have we for the formation of character, for the ennobling of all the powers which constitute the higher life of man. "To have known her was a liberal education," was said of a grand woman. Can we convey our education, our accomplishments, our integrity to those with whom we come in contact -- diffusing an aroma of intellectual sweetness, as we do the perfume of roses of our garments? Then, indeed, have we not lived in vain.

"Soul, be but inly bright,

All outer things must smile, must catch
The strong, transcendent light."

Mrs M. L. Rayne

he is as clearly allied to nature as he is distinct from it. The chain of being, in which he is a "distinguished " link, is as vital from below as from above. The one column of existencenature the pedestal, man the shaft, and God the capital-has much more than a mechanical connection. The life of nature is in man as surely as the life of God is. The body is bound to nature as both body and soul are bound to God. And as the soul is so interwoven with the body that even a perfect eternity is inconceivable without this reunion, nature must through the latter profoundly affect even the former and thus

influence the whole being. We are not slaves to nature, as materialism would make us; but we lie so close to it, are so fed by it and fixed in it that we cannot but feel it. Our sensations are the background of our life, and can the picture be dissociated from that into which it is painted? Because man's place in nature is so distinctly at the top, as fixed by science and religion both, he is not the less but the more affected by nature. To him nature can now come with all her finer suggestions as well as with her rougher ministries. He is not only to be fed but he can think and feel and will about nature, and every power of his varied being may be approached and enlisted. The more there is in man and the loftier the point occupied as to nature and the larger the trust for the manipulation of nature given him, the more points of contact there must be between the two and the greater the reciprocal influGod has most to do with nature and man has more to do with it the more he is like God in his position towards it. We can no more live without being influenced by nature than the root can sustain the tree without drawing upon the elements of the soil surrounding it. Thus, as Whittier writes,

ence.

nature

66 Holds in wood and field
Her thousand sun-lit censers still,
To spell of flower or shrub we yield
Against or with our will."

Nature invigorates life-physical. Contact with the soil and sun are plain conditions of race-strength. No Hercules can kill Antæus until he holds him away from the vivifying touch of Mother Earth. The modern city is in danger of becoming a Hercules. Strong bodies underlie all symmetrical development, and we are won by nature to bodily development in a thousand ways. For many, beside the wayward boy, she pries open the doors of close houses and provides