THERE are no dear old grandmothers, with sedate gowns and modest caps, in these days. They died out with the idea that after forty a woman had no place in the world, but must crawl into a corner and wait for death with whatever patience could be mustered. The patience had to be sustained by employment for brain and body, so she took charge of the family mending, knit socks and mittens for the men and children of the household, and read the bible by way of recreation. She was supposed to have no interest in worldly affairs, so the daily papers and the chat of the day were given to others.

Grandmother has her calling list and at home" day, her subscription to the circulating library, her club, her amusements. She takes them all moderately and therein she is wise. She extracts every drop of comfort and pleasure from life, her experience serving to show her the

way.

The matinee audiences at the play-houses are largely composed of elderly women. The same faces can be noted week after week, keen and alert with interest. They are a factor in the success of plays, and they know it. The managers know it also, else there would be no matinees, for the masculine patronage is not large enough to consider. If these women do not always come out in overwhelming numbers they talk about the plays and keep alive a public interest in them, when they please, or turn the stream of patronage in an opposite direction.

No men of their time dared compare themselves in literary power with Tennyson or Carlyle, Victor Hugo or Von Ranke, and they all reached the age which the author of "Ecclesiastes" declared to be marked only by labor and sorrow, as also did Prof. Owen, whose life was one long labor in scientific inquiry, and so has Sir William Grove, one of the most strenuous thinkers whom even this age has produced. We might lengthen the list indefinitely, but to what use, when we all know that the most intellectual among lawyers, historians, novelists, theologians, physicists, politicians, and naturalists survive their contemporaries, usually with undiminished powers.

RECENTLY Thomas Sidney Cooper died in London. He measured his life by his achievements, not years. He was a truly great painter, and his first picture was hung in the academy in 1853. He was a man then, and age didn't hinder his hand, for his last painting found its place in the academy in 1900. He finished it at the age of 97, and died at 99. The achievements of old men, the virility and ambition that last almost till the gates of the cemetery are opened, are the wonder of modern times.

I REFLECTED that the true life of man is within him, while that which he derives from without is only adventitious and subservient. He is immeasurably more influenced by objects in accordance with the circumstances in which they find him than in accordance with their

own nature.

It is the faculty of far-reaching sensibility to derive more intense delight from its own impressions than from positive enjoyments; the latter make known their limits, but those which promise this sentiment of an illimitable power are vast like it, and seem to body forth that unknown world which we are forever seeking.

How little is essential for the man who is anxious merely to live, and how much for him who would live in contentment and make use of his days.

Thus, in hearts that are made for love, love adorns everything and permeates all nature with delight.

While spring is a more beautiful spectacle of nature, man has so ordered himself that autumn is sweeter in his eyes.

What is good of itself, or at least indifferent, becomes evil when self-love prompts it.

Obermann.

TO THE FRINGED GENTIAN.

THOU blossom, bright with Autumn dew
And colored with the heaven's own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night;

Thou comest not when violets lean
O'er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o'er the ground-bird's hidden nest.

Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.

I would that thus, when I shall see
The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.

William Cullen Bryant.

THE mighty oak's concentric ring
Counts well each oft-recurring spring;
The sands, when dropping from the glass,
Hold back the seconds as they pass;-
The time-worn clock in yonder tower
Reluctant tolls each passing hour,
And nought but man, by reckless haste,
Permits one precious hour to waste,
Nor, like a spendthrift, seeks to borrow
For use today, hours of the morrow.
Will such a squanderer ever learn
His lamp of life to wisely burn,
So that the oil shall feed its ray
To light his feet at close of day?

John H. Flagg.

THERE'S no mistake about it. To be young, to be in the first flush of youth, is no longer fashionable.

The fashionable age now for a woman is between thirty and forty. Have not their majesties, the king and queen of England, given notice that the young person is not to monopolize social attention?

The doctrine of middle age is being preached in London, and from the innermost centres of Mayfair exclusiveness to the outer circles of Bohemianism the women who are the most popular are those who have lived. The same is true of New York.

It is hard to get at the reason for this inversion of fancy. Somebody says it is because the girls of the present day are older and more world-worn than the women who have passed the first stages of real youth. Whatever the reason, the chief interest seems to centre about women who have left the white muslin stage and crept out to the once dreaded verge of maturity.

The women of whom most is heard, whether in New York or in London, have certainly no longer any right to be considered young. They are frankly middle-aged, and they seem to glory in it.