great disaster will class it as archaic and outgrown ; as a matter of fact, it is one of the really fundamental stories of the season. The OUTLOOK has already summarized its simple plot: a young girl taken from a pinched and crowded home full of love and devotion into an atmosphere of luxury, idleness, overfeeding, over-drinking, over-dressing, and nervous endeavor to be free by escaping from the care of children, the responsibility of the home, and going back to the old familiar ties which, since society began to be civilized, have bound men and women alike to duty, honor, and unselfishness, and to the searching and redeeming education of work and service and self-denial, which have been rejected and cast aside as outworn whenever society has reverted to the barbarism of physical ease and spiritual poverty.

The author of "Mother" has not written from a place of shelter; she has made her own way and has learned in the school of life those primary lessons which, like the old-fashioned drill in reading, writing and arithmetic, train the mind for the freedom that comes through strength. She has been a bookkeeper, librarian, settlement worker, and reporter, as well as a wife and mother; and has therefore seen life from many sides. She has kept a clear sense of values, a sane view of the supreme things, a resolute grip on the fundamental realities. The rush for freedom has not taken her off her feet; nor has the moral confusion through which society is passing, on its road to that real freedom which is based on self-denial, subordination of self, and a clear, joyful acceptance of duty,

blinded her. "Mother" is a story of a girl who was saved from the shipwreck of mistaking luxury for happiness and escape from duty for freedom; in pleasureloving America, with its increasing class of women of leisure, such a story, in a quiet way, has a real service to render.

And so has Mrs. Riggs's " Mother Carey's Chickens " a story of real boys and girls with a real mother, who faces a great crisis in the life of her little family with saving good sense and with the courage that is half the battle. There is no high tragedy in the retreat of a fatherless family into the country, no dramatic staging of the fight with poverty; there are loyal affection, clear perception of real values, plenty of humor, and that wholesomeness of tone and spirit which breed health, courage, and character.

These two unpretentious stories are good examples of the kind of reading which serves as an anti-toxin at a time when many demoralizing, relaxing, enervating stories are in the hands of young girls who know nothing about life, and are in danger of losing their footing on those fundamental principles sometimes covered with foam and spume, but never moved from their indestructible bases. In a time in which there is a wide and inspiring movement toward real freedom there are many who are in danger of falling victims to a false idea of freedom, only to find when it is too late that, instead of escaping from bondage to reality into a beautiful idealism, they have flung themselves against immutable laws, and the drama of emancipation has turned into cheap farce or pitiful tragedy.

If a record could be kept of the "affinities" and "soul unions" reported by the newspapers and of their results five years later, the tinsel romance would turn to tawdry melodrama.

MATERNAL GRIEF

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Departed Child! I could forget thee once
Though at my bosom nursed; this woeful gain
Thy dissolution brings, that in my soul
Is present and perpetually abides

A shadow, never, never to be displaced
By the returning substance, seen or touched,
Seen by my eyes, or clasped in my embrace.
Absence and death how differ they! and how
Shall I admit that nothing can restore
What one short sigh so easily removed? -
Death, life, and sleep, reality and thought,
Assist me, God, their boundaries to know,
O teach me calm submission to thy Will!

The Child she mourned had overstepped the pale
Of Infancy, but still did breathe the air
That sanctifies its confines, and partook
Reflected beams of that celestial light

To all the Little-ones on sinful earth

Not unvouchsafed—a light that warmed and cheered Those several qualities of heart and mind

Which, in her own blest nature, rooted deep,

Daily before the Mother's watchful eye,
And not hers only, their peculiar charms
Unfolded, beauty, for its present self,
And for its promises to future years,
With not unfrequent rapture fondly hailed.

Have you espied upon a dewy lawn
A pair of Leverets each provoking each
To a continuance of their fearless sport,
Two separate Creatures in their several gifts
Abounding, but so fashioned that, in all

That Nature prompts them to display, their looks,
Their starts of motion and their fits of rest,
An undistinguishable style appears
And character of gladness, as if Spring
Lodged in their innocent bosoms, and the spirit
Of rejoicing morning were their own?

Such union, in the lovely Girl maintained
And her twin Brother, had the parent seen
Ere, pouncing like a ravenous bird of prey,
Death in a moment parted them, and left
The Mother, in her turns of anguish, worse
Than desolate; for oft-times from the sound
Of the survivor's sweetest voice (dear child,
He knew it not) and from his happiest looks
Did she extract the food of self-reproach,
As one that lived ungrateful for the stay
By Heaven afforded to uphold her maimed
And tottering spirit. And full off the Boy,

Now first acquainted with distress and grief,

Shrunk from his Mother's presence, shunned with fear
Her sad approach, and stole away to find,

In his known haunts of joy where'er he might,
A more congenial object. But, as time
Softened her pangs and reconciled the child
To what he saw, he gradually returned,
Like a scared Bird encouraged to renew
A broken intercourse; and, while his eyes
Were yet with pensive fear and gentle awe
Turned upon her who bore him, she would stoop.
To imprint a kiss that lacked not power to spread
Faint color over both their pallid cheeks,

And stilled his tremulous lip. Thus they were calmed
And cheered; and now together breathe fresh air
In open fields; and when the glare of day
Is gone, and twilight to the Mother's wish
Befriends the observance, readily they join

In walks whose boundary is the lost One's grave,
Which he with flowers had planted, finding there
Amusement, where the Mother does not miss
Dear consolation, kneeling on the turf
In prayer, yet blending with that solemn rite
Of pious faith the vanities of grief;

For such, by pitying Angels and by Spirits
Transferred to regions upon which the clouds
Of our weak nature rest not, must be deemed
Those willing tears, and unforbidden sighs,
And all those tokens of a cherished sorrow,

Which, soothed and sweetened by the grace of Heaven