TAKE TO DRINK, OF COURSE!
What would a man do, I yonder, if things went so irretrievably wrong with him as they do with some of us women? Why, take to drink, of course. That is a sovereign consolation I am told for many ills. A woman has no equivalent for whisky. She must needs clench her hands and set her teeth and bear her lot. And yet you tell us a man is the stronger. I tell you, my dear, I know a dozen women who could discount any soldier that ever fought in the Crimean wars, for downright heroism and pluck. Where do you find the man who is willing to wear shabby clothes and old boots and a seedy hat that his boys may go fine as fiddles? Where do you find a man who will get up cold mornings and make the fire, tramp to work through snow, pick his way through flooding rain, weather northeast blasts and go hungry and cold that he may keep the children together which a bad and wayward mother has deserted? First thing a man would do in such a case would be to board the children out with convenient relatives while he looked around for a divorce and another wife! How long would a man brace up under the servant question? How long would he endure the insolence and the flings of cruel and covert enemies because the children needed all he could give them, and, only along the thorny road of continual harassment and trial might he attain the earnings needed to render them happy and comfortable? If a man is insulted he settles the insult with a blow straight from the shoulder and that is the end of it; he would never be able to endure, as some women do, a never-ending round of persecution that would whiten the hairs on a sealskin jacket!
XLII.
A WARNING TO GIRLS.
There is one thing we sometimes see in the face of the young that is sadder than the ravages of any disease or the disfigurement of any deformity. Shall I tell you what it is? It is the mark that an impure thought or an unclean jest leaves behind it. No serpent ever went gliding through the grass and left the trail of defilement more palpably in its wake than vulgarity marks the face. You may be ever so secret in your enjoyment of a shady story, you may hide ever so cunningly the fact that you carry something in your pocket which you purpose to show only to a few and which will perhaps start the laugh that, like a bird of carrion, waits upon impurity and moral corruption for its choicest feeding, but the mark of what you tell, and what you do, and what you laugh at, is left behind like a sketch traced in indelible fluid. There is no beauty that can stand the disfigurement of such a scar. However bright your eyes, and rosy-red your color, and soft the contour of lip and cheek, when the relish of an impure jest creeps in, the comeliness fades and perishes, as lilies in the languor of a poisonous breath from off the marshes. I beg of you, dear girls, shun the companion who seeks to foul your soul with an obscene story or picture, as you would shun the contagion of smallpox. If I had a daughter who went out into the world to earn her bread, as some of you do, and any one should seek to corrupt her purity by insidious advances, I would get down on my knees and pray God, to take her to himself before her fair, sweet innocence should sully under the breath of corruption and moral death. Nobody ever went to the devil yet by one big bound, like a tiger out of a jungle or a trout to the fly; it is an imperceptible passage down an easy slope, and the first step of all is sometimes taken when a young girl lends her ears to a smutty story or a questionable jest. Then let me say again, and I wish I could borrow Fort Sheridan's bugle to blow it far and wide, that every girl might hear: Close your ears and harden your hearts against the insidious advance of evil. Have nothing to do with a desk-mate or with a comrade who seeks to amuse or entertain you with conversation you would not care to have "mother" hear, and which you would be sorry to remember, if this night the death angel came knocking at the door and summoned your soul away upon its lonely journey to find its God.
XLIII.
A FROG MAY DO WHAT A MAN MAY NOT.
A bull-frog in a malarial pond is expected to croak and make all the protest he can against his surroundings. But a man! Destined for a crown and sent upon earth to be educated for the court of the King of kings! Placed in an emerald world with a hither edge of opaline shadow and a fine spray of diamond-dust to set it sparkling; with ten million singing birds to form its orchestra; sunset clouds and sunrise mists to drape it, and countless flowers to make it sweet while the hand of God himself upholds it on its way among the clustering stars, what right has a man to find fault with his surroundings, or lament himself that all things do not go to suit him here below? When it shall be in order for the glow-worm to call the midday sun to account, or for the wood-tick to find fault with the century old oak that protects it; or for the blue-bird to question the haze on a midsummer horizon because, forsooth! it is a little off color with his own wings, then it will be time for man to find fault with the ordering of the seasons and the allotment of the weather in the world he is allowed to inhabit.