SENTIMENT AND STORY
Oh, what a wonderful magician and what a tyrant king is Love, the King of Kings!
Look at the care-worn faces in the offices and counting rooms and on the business marts of the world. Look out yonder at the millions in the factories and fields, with beaded brows, and knotted muscles, and calloused hands, coining thought into gold, and sweat into silver. There is a mighty power moving on those restless tides; they are sowing and reaping for the helpless and the innocent; Love hath written his name in every heart, and in every life there is a love story. Now look yonder in the purple glow of eventide, how the millions dissolve and vanish among the shadows. The law of the King has been obeyed, and labor finds its sweet reward in the palace of love, by the brawling brook of laughter, on the brink of the river of song.
But, Lord, how soon the palace crumbles! And how surely the vibrant streams run dry when labor leaves his task undone, or toil takes his gold to other shrines!
If you would keep the loom of love in motion, you must be a flying shuttle of industry by day and spend your evenings at home. The shuttle delivers the thread; you must deliver the bread and grease the bobbins with butter.
The shuttle is always in its place. Art thou, O King? When the light is smiling through the window out into the darkness, and thy home is ringing with the laughter and song of children within, art thou there to laugh and sing with them? And when the baby cries in the dead hours of the night, dost thou meekly wear thy yoke of love and walk the floor and sweetly sing to thy screaming progeny?
Alas! too often thou art found where sherry glows and champagne flows and the night is very, very merry, O King!
I saw a truant old gentleman vanish from his labors to a carousal one evening, and that night he went home as drunk as a lord, with unsteady steps and slow, dreading the storm within, and softly singing to himself as he went:
“I wish my wife was an angel, far, far away!”