L.
I SHALL MEET HIM SOME DAY.
I shall meet the man who ties his horse's nose in a bag, some day, in single combat, and there will be only one of us left to tell the tale of the encounter. Wouldn't I love to see that man forced to take his dinner while tied up in a flour bag! I should love to deal out his coffee through a garden hose, and serve his vegetables through a long-distance telephone. There is nothing like turn about to incite justice in the human breast. While we are afflicted with such an epidemic of strikes, why not have one that has some sense in it. Let the overworked horses, straining themselves blind with terrible loads, go on a strike. Let the persecuted dogs, deprived of water and scrimped for food, stoned and hounded as mad when they are only crazed by man's inhumanity, go on a strike. Let the cattle, and the countless thousands of stock, prodded into cars and cramped in long passages of transit, blinded with the crash of fellow-victims' horns while crowded together in their inadequate quarters, trampled under riotous hoofs, and kept without food and overfilled with water to make them look fat, go on a strike. Let the chickens and geese and all the live feathered stock on South Water Street, kept in little bits of coops and flung headlong and screaming down into dark cellars, trundled over rough roads in jolting wagons and utterly deprived for hours at a time of a drop of water to cool the fever of their terrible fear, go on a strike. Let the horses of these fat aldermen, left all day in the court house alleyway without food and checked tight with head-check lines, go on a strike. Let the patient nags that stand all day by the curbstone and are plagued and annoyed by mischievous boys, go on a strike. In such a strike as any of these the Lord himself might condescend to take sides with the oppressed against the oppressor.
LI.
A MANNISH WOMAN.
There are many disagreeable things to be met with in life, but none that is much harder upon the nerves than a mannish woman. With a strident voice and a swaggering walk, and a clattering tongue, she takes her course through the world like a cat-bird through an orchard; the thrushes and the robins are driven right and left before the advance of the noisy nuisance. A coarse-tongued man is bad enough, heaven knows, but when a woman descends to slangy speech, and vulgar jests, and harsh diatribes, there is no language strong enough with which to denounce her. On the principle that a strawberry is quicker to spoil than a pumpkin, it takes less to render a woman obnoxious than to make a man unfit for decent company. I am no lover of butter-mouthed girls, of prudes and "prunes and prism" fine ladies; I love sprightliness and gay spirits and unconventionality, but the moment a woman steps over the border land that separates delicacy of feeling, womanliness and lovableness, from rudeness, loud-voiced slang and the unblushing desire for notoriety, she becomes, in the eyes of all whose opinion is worth having, a miserable caricature upon her sex. It is not quite so bad to see a young girl making a fool of herself as to see an elderly woman comporting herself in a giddy manner in public places. We look for feather-heads among juveniles, but surely the cares and troubles of fifty years should tame down the high spirits of any woman. Chance took me into a public office the other day, largely conducted by women. Conspicuous among the clerks was a woman whose age must have exceeded fifty years. She was exchanging loud pleasantries with a couple of beardless boys upon the question of "getting tight." Noble theme for a woman old enough to be their grandmother to choose! As I listened to the coarse jests and looked into her hard and unlovely face, I could but wonder how nature ever made the mistake to label such material—"woman." It would be no more of a surprise to find a confectioner's stock made up of coarse salt, marked "sugar," or to buy burdock of a florist, merely because the tag attached to it was lettered "moss rose."
LII.
THE ONLY WAY TO CONQUER A HARD DESTINY.
The only way to conquer a cast-iron destiny is to yield to it. You will break to pieces if you are always casting yourself upon the rocks. Sit down on the "sorrowing stone" now and then, but don't expect to last long if you are constantly flinging yourself head first against it. If life holds nothing nobler and sweeter than the routine of uncongenial work, if all the pleasant anticipations and lively hopes of youth remain but as cotton fabrics do when the colors have washed away, if good intention and noble purpose glimmer only a little now and then from out the murky environments of your lot, as fisher lights at sea, accept the inevitable and make the best of it. Nothing can stop us if we are bound to grow. We are not like trees that can be hewed down by every chance woodman's axe; death is the only woodman abroad for us, and he does not hew down, he simply transplants. God is our only judge; to him alone shall we yield the record of life's troubled day, and isn't it a great comfort to think that he so fully understands what have been our limitations, and how we have been handicapped and baffled and hindered? If jockeys were to enter their horses for the great Derby with the understanding that the road was rough and the horses blind, do you think much would be expected of the finish? And is heaven less discriminating than a horse jockey?