"If I had two loaves of bread," said Mahomet, "I would sell one of them and buy white hyacinths, for they would feed my soul." I came across that delightful saying the other day, and I thought to myself: There is another one to be hunted up when I get over yonder! I shall have to make the acquaintance of a man, prophet or not, who gave utterance to such a sentiment as that. How many of us, poor earthworms that we are, would rather spend our dollar for white hyacinths than for a big supper? How many of us ever stop to think that there is something under the sleek rotundity of our girth that demands food quite as eagerly as our stomach does, and fails and faints and dies quite as surely without it? Take less of the food that goes to fatten the perishable part of you, and give more sustenance to that inner guest who, like a captive, sits and starves with long and cruel neglect. Buy fewer glasses of beer and more "white hyacinths." Smoke less tobacco and invest in a few sunsets and dawns. Let cheap shows alone and go hear music of the right sort. So shall your soul lift up its drooping head and grow less and less to resemble one of Pharaoh's lean kine. I adore a man or a woman who has enough sentiment to appreciate what dead and gone Mahomet said, and hereafter will make it a point to buy less bread and more hyacinths.
I wonder if, when we get to the other world, we shall not occasionally stroll into some sort of a celestial museum, where the relics of our foregone existence, its wasted days and misspent years, may stare back at us from glass cases where the angels have ticketed them and put them all neatly on exhibition! There will be necklaces of ill-spent moments, like the faded brilliants exhumed from old Pompeii, with lots of broken hopes and thwarted destinies. There will be odd little freaks and unreasoning caprices, like the "What is it?" and foolish deeds of daring to turn our pulses faint with the old-time terror. There will be those tendencies which kept us heavy-footed like the fat woman, and others that made us blind, although the world was full of light. There will be the disloyal deeds that made us a constant source of care and wonderment to the angels who watched us, and the cowardice that kept us in leading strings to conformity. There will be shelves full of the little white lies we have told, all labeled and dated, like pebbles from the Mediterranean or bits of shell from the sea. There will be fragments of blighted lives ruined by wagging tongues and shafts of tea table gossip. There will be the old-time masks wherein we masqueraded, and the flimsy veils of deceit behind which we hid our individuality. There will be the memories of little children we might have kept had we been wiser, and snatches of lullaby songs. There will be jars full of love glances and pots of preserved and honeyed kisses. There will be whole bales of mistakes, a Gobelin tapestry to drape the world, and stacks of dead and withered "might-have-beens." There will be peacock feathers of pride tied together with faded ribbons of regret, and whole cabinets full of closet skeletons and family contentions. There will be pedestals whereon shall stand the "white days" we can never forget, and panorama chambers wherein shall be unrolled the pictured scroll of our journey heavenward. In cunningly devised music boxes we shall hear again the melody of our youthful laughter and the patter of life's uncounted tears. I think the shelves of that celestial museum would yield some odd surprises to the most of us, like the finding of a bauble we counted worthless and threw away glittering in the diadem of a crown, or the prize we bartered honor for turned to worthless glitter and tinsel paste!
There is no use sitting here by this window any longer and trying to believe that life is worth living. If I looked for five minutes more at this November landscape I should shave my head and hie me to a Carmelite convent. Dame Nature has forgotten her housewifely duties and gone off to gossip with the good ladies who have charge of the other planets. Where but yesterday the late asters bloomed in long rows of splendor, and the chrysanthemums fringed the sunny borders with feathers of white and gold, the unsightly stalks grovel in the clayey mold, and the frost-nipped vines drop their dismantled tendrils in the chilly wind. Fragments of old china lurk in the discovered spaces underneath the denuded lilac bushes, and out by the oleander tub a cruel cat is worrying a large and discouraged rat. That oleander tub reminds me of an ordeal that is ushered in with every change of season. Twice a year we are compelled to carry that large vegetable in and out of its winter lair. About the last week of September we begin to wrap it in bed-quilts every night, and from that time on until late autumn no delicate babe was ever more tenderly guarded. Then, as there is no man in the country who for love or lucre will condescend to the job, we begin to worry the Doctor. We tell him the oleander will be blighted by the frost, and he pays no heed. Then we ask him if he would just as lief bring in the oleander after supper. He sneaks off and is gone until the 11 p. m. train. Next we take to tears, and declare that we love that oleander as one of the family, and it breaks our heart to see it perish for want of care. We grow pale and wan and gray-headed as the days go by, and finally with flashing eyes and muttered oaths the Doctor yanks the tub and its colossal growth into the cellar, and we rest on our arms until the advent of another spring.
Well, the summer has gathered up her corn-silk draperies, put on her rose-trimmed hat, and tripped over the border land at last. From the bend in the road that shall hide her from our view forever she lingers a moment to throw back a sunny glance at September, as he comes whistling down the lane, with plume of golden-rod in his hat. A glad good-bye to you, long-to-be-remembered summer of 1890! We are so glad to see you go that we are willing to forego your blossoms and your bird songs to be well rid of you. For three long months we have endured heat without precedent, drought and discomfort, flies and mosquitos, threatened thunder gusts and devastating cyclones, and we are so tired that we feel like shaking a stick at you now, to see you lingering to coquet with September. Hasten on, oh bright autumn weather, with your comfortable nights for sleep, and your royal days of sunshine and frost. We are longing for the time to come when the lamps shall be lighted early in the parlor, and the fire-glow shall once more shed its glory upon grandma's lovely hair and upon the gold of the children's restless heads; when the cat shall have leave to lie on the best cushion, and the voice of the tea-kettle, droning its supper monologue, shall alternate with the efforts of the older sister at the piano. By the way, do you know there is lots of solace to be found in an old music book of twenty years ago? Don't tell me that the music of to-day is as sweet all through as the melodies of long ago. Who sings such soul-ravishing duets to-day as "She Bloomed with the Roses," "Twilight Dews," or "Gently Sighs the Breeze"? I declare to you, my dear, that although I shall be considerably older some day than I am now, and although I have not fallen so far into the "sere and yellow" as to count myself among the old-fashioned and the queer, yet any one of those songs just mentioned will start the tears from my eyes as showers start from summer clouds.
Two little motherless children! Do you know the thought of a baby without a mother to cuddle it always brings the tears to my eyes? Traveling to distant New England with a father who, although kind, seemed some way unfitted to his duties, as a straight-legged chair might if used for a lullaby rocker, were two bits of folks, a boy and a girl, one four, the other two years old. The careful father brushed their hair very nicely and washed their mites of faces with great regularity. When he told them to sit still they sat still, and nobody was annoyed by their antics, but, oh, how it made my heart ache to watch the motherless chicks! If mamma had been there they would have climbed all over her, and bothered her a good deal, perhaps, with their clinging arms and kisses (it's a way babies have with their mammas!), but in the presence of their dark-eyed and quiet papa they behaved like little weasels in the presence of a fox. "Papa says we mustn't talk about mamma any more," lisped the boy. "'Cause she's gone to heaven." In the name of love, whose apostle I humbly claim to be, I longed to gather those little ones in my arms and have a dear, sweet talk about the mamma who had left them for a little while, and I wanted to say to the proper and punctilious papa: "Good sir, if you attempt to bring up these motherless mites without the demonstration of love you will meet with the same success your gardener would should he set out roses in a pine forest. Children need love as flowers need the southerly exposure and sunshine. When that boy of yours bumped his head, sir, it was your place to comfort him in something the way his dead mother might have done, rather than to have bade him 'sit up and be a man.'"