vine. More truly it may be said that the Sun has never left the Earth.

No prodigal can really leave the Father's house, any more than he can leave himself; coming to himself, he feels the Father's arms about him-they have always been there - he is newly apparelled, and wears the signet ring of native prestige; he hears the sound of familiar music and dancing, and it may be that the young and beautiful forms mingling with him in this festival are the riotous youths and maidens of his far-country revels, also come to themselves and home, of whom also the Father saith: These were dead and are alive again, they were lost and are found. The starvation and sense of exile had been parts of a troubled dream-a dream which had also had its ecstasy, but had come into a consuming fever, with delirious imaginings of fresh fountains, of shapes drawn from the memory of childhood, and of the cool touch of kindred hands upon the brow. So near is exile to home, misery to divine commiseration so near are pain and death, desolation and divestiture, to" a new creature," and to the kinship involved in all creation and re-creation.

Distance in the cosmic order is a standing-apart, which is only another expression of the expansion and abundance of creative life; but at every remove its reflex is nearness, a bond of attraction, insphering and curving, making orb and orbit. While in space this attraction is diminished - being inversely as the square of the distance and so there is maintained and emphasized the appearance of suspension and isolation, yet in time it gains preponderance, contracting sphere and orbit, aging planets and suns, and accumulating destruction, which at the point of annihilation becomes a new creation. This Grand Cycle, which is but a pulsation or breath of the Eternal life, illustrates a truth which is repeated in its least and most minutely divided moment-that birth lies next to death, as water crystallizes at the freezing-point, and the plant blossoms at points most remote from the source of nutrition.

ANNE REEVE ALDRICH.

ALDRICH, ANNE REEVE, an American poet and novelist; born in New York, April 25, 1866; died there, June 22, 1892. She was the author of "The Rose of Flame" (1889); "The Feet of Love," a novel (1890); and "Songs about Life, Love, and Death" (1892).

MINE OWN WORK.

I MADE the cross myself whose weight

Was later laid on me :

This thought is torture as I toil

Up life's steep Calvary.

To think mine own hands drove the nails!

I sung a merry song,

And chose the heaviest wood I had
To build it firm and strong.

If I had guessed - if I had dreamed
Its weight was made for me,
I should have made a lighter cross
To bear up Calvary.

A SONG OF LIFE.

Did I seek life? Not so: its weight was laid upon me;
And yet of my burden sore I may not set myself free.

Two love, and lo, at love's call, a hapless soul must wake:
Like a slave it is called to the world, to bear life, for their love's
sake.

Did I seek love? Not so: love led me along by the hand.

Love beguiled me with songs and caresses, while I took no note of

the land.

And lo, I stood in a quicksand, but Love had wings, and he fled: Ah fool, for a mortal to venture where only a god may tread!

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

ALDRICH, THOMAS BAILEY, an American journalist, poet, and novelist; born at Portsmouth, N. H., November 11, 1836. He entered the counting-house of his uncle, a New York merchant, where he remained three years; began to write for various periodicals, and subsequently acted as proof-reader in a printing-office. He became connected with the Boston "Atlantic Monthly," of which he was editor from 1883 to 1892. His poems include: "The Bells" (1855); "Baby Be" (1856); "Cloth of Gold" (1874); "Flower and Thorn" (1876); "Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book" (1881); "Mercedes and Later Lyrics;" also a household edition of his complete poems (1885); "Wyndham Towers" (1889); "The Sisters' Tragedy and Other Poems" (1891); and "Unguarded Gates and other Poems" (1895).

MISS MEHETABEL'S SON.1

I. THE OLD TAVERN AT BAYLEY'S FOUR-CORNERS.

You will not find Greenton, or Bayley's Four-Corners as it is more usually designated, on any map of New England that I know of. It is not a town; it is not even a village: it is merely an absurd hotel. The almost indescribable place called Greenton. is at the intersection of four roads, in the heart of New Hampshire, twenty miles from the nearest settlement of note, and ten miles from any railway station. A good location for a hotel, you will say. Precisely; but there has always been a hotel there, and for the last dozen years it has been pretty well patronized — by one boarder. Not to trifle with an intelligent public, I will state at once that, in the early part of this century, Greenton was a point at which the mail-coach on the Great Northern Route stopped to change horses, and allow the passengers to dine. People in the county, wishing to take the early mail Portsmouth

1 Copyright, 1885, by T. B. Aldrich. By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

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