He opened his eyes and looked at the figure with a brave smile. "One moment, madam, before I give judgment," he said. "I see you were indeed a friend of Margaret's. be my friend?"

Will you

The judge rose with difficulty from his chair and stretched out a hand to the beautiful figure before him. Gladly she placed her cold hand in his, and there was joy in both their faces. The Cornhill Magazine.

He fell back slowly in the chair. "You are entitled to judgment," he murmured, "the rule nisi will be made absolute."

There was a pause, and he spoke as if he was passing away into sleep. "Judgment. Yes, and the costs. No!... No! . . I remember. The Angel of Death does not ask for costs." Edward A. Parry.

ACT I.

The Editor's Room in the Office of "The Lark." Two walls of the room are completely hidden from floor to ceiling by magnificently bound books: the third wall at the back is hidden by boxes of immensely expensive cigars. The windows, of course, are in the fourth wall, which, however, need not be described, as it is never quite practicable on the stage. The floor of this apartment is chastely covered with rugs shot by the Editor in his travels, or in the Tottenham Court Road; and in some cases, presented by admiring readers from abroad. The furniture is both elegant and commodious.

William Smith, Editor, comes in. He is superbly dressed in a fur coat and an expensive cigar. There is a blue pencil behind his ear, and a sheaf of what we call in the profession "type-written manuscripts" under his arm. He sits down at his desk and pulls the telephone towards him.

Smith (at the telephone). Hallo. is that you, Jones? . Yes, it's me. Just come up a moment. (Puts down telephone and begins to open his letters.)

[Enter Jones, his favorite sub-editor. He is dressed quite commonly, and is covered with ink. He salutes respectfully as he comes into the room.]

Jones.

The circulation is still going up, chief. It was three million and eight last week.

Smith (testily). How often have I told you not to call me "chief," except when there are ladies present? Why can't you do what you're told?

Jones. Sorry, sir, but the fact is there are ladies present.

Smith (fingering his moustache). Show them up. Who are they?

Jones. There is only one. She says she's the lady who has been writing our anonymous "Secrets of the Boudoir" series which has made such a sensation.

Smith (in amazement). I thought you told me you wrote those.

Jones (simply). I did.
Smith. Then why-

Jones. I mean, I did tell you. The truth is they came in anonymously, and I thought they were more likely to be accepted if I said I had written them. (With great emotion) Forgive me, chief, but it was for the paper's sake. (In

Smith (nettled). In that case I shall certainly tell the master of the workhouse. To think that there should be a thief in this office!

Jones (with great pathos). Chief, chief, I am not so vile as that. I have carefully kept all the cheques in an old stocking, and

Smith (in surprise). Do you wear stockings?

Jones. When I bicycle. And as soon as the contributor comes forward

Smith (stretching out his hand and grasping that of Jones). My dear boy, forgive me. You have been hasty, perhaps, but zealous. In any case, your honesty is above suspicion. Leave me now. I have much to think of. (Rests his head on his hands. Then, dreamily) You have never seen your father; for thirty years I have not seen my wife Ah, Arabella!

Jones. Yes, sir. (Rings bell.)

Smith. She would split her infin

[Exit.]

plain to her about the money. Jones. Right you are, Sir. [Smith leans back in his chair and stares in front of him.]

Smith (to himself). Arabella!

[Enter Boy, followed by a stylishly dressed lady of middle age.]

Boy. Mrs. Robinson. [Exit.] [Mrs. Robinson stops short in the middle of the room and stares at the Editor; then staggers and drops on to the sofa.] Smith (in wonder). Arabella! Mrs. Robinson. William! [Curtain.]

Smith. Yes, yes, it's the least I can say And now, dear, what shall we do? Shall we get married again quietly?

Arabella. Wouldn't that be bigamy? Smith. I think not, but I will ask the printer's reader. He knows everything. You see, there will be such a lot to explain, otherwise.

Arabella. Dear, can you afford to marry?

Smith. Well, my salary as editor is only twenty thousand a year, but I do a little reviewing for other papers.

Arabella. And I have-nothing.

How can I come to you without even a

trousseau?

(Sud

Smith. Yes, that's true denly) By Jove, though, you have got something! You have eight thousand pounds! We owe you that for your articles. (With a return to his profes: sional manner) Did I tell you how greatly we all appreciated them? Excuse me a moment, love. (Goes to telephone.) Is that you, Jones? Just come here a moment. (To Arabella) Jones is my sub-editor; he is keeping your money for you.

[Enter Jones.]

Jones (producing an old stocking). I've just been round to my rooms to get that money-(sees Arabella)-oh, I beg your pardon.

Smith (waving an introduction). Mrs. Smith-my wife. This is our sub-editor, dear Mr. Jones. (Arabella puts her hand to her heart and seems about to faint.) Why, what's the matter?

Punch.

Arabella (hoarsely). Where did you get that stocking?

Smith (pleasantly). It's one he wears when he goes bicycling.

Jones. No; I misled you this afternoon, chief. The stocking was all the luggage I had when I first entered the Leamington workhouse.

Arabella (throwing herself into his arms). My son! This is your father! William-our boy!

Smith (shaking hands with Jones). How are you? I say, Arabella, then that was one of my stockings?

Arabella (to her boy). When I saw you on the stairs you seemed to dimly remind me

Jones. To remind you dimly, mother. Smith. No, my boy. In future, nothing but split infinitives will appear in our paper. Please remember that. Jones (with emotion). I will endeavor to always remember it, dad. [Curtain.]

A. A. M.

Some sense of composition and some study of perspective are necessary if our view of life is to be either true or pleasant, and at the bottom of both these arts lies the art of overlooking. A great many people nowadays seem to think that monotony is the chief cause of discontent. We should doubt it; but it certainly does account for a good deal of unhappiness, and it can be very largely corrected by a resolution to overlook. Each day contains for every one a large proportion of sameness enlivened by certain quite new experiences. People with a gift for happiness accentuate these, and contrive to overlook the parts that are already too well known. Memory is not altogether a mechanical record. We can resolve to remember part of a day as we resolve to remember part of a book.

We cannot forget at will, but where slight impressions are concerned there is such a thing as crowding out. Monotony is a matter of the past. If as we look back it is variety which has been recorded, we shall hardly feel dull in the present. To look at the matter from another point of view: nobody can live long in the world and not admit that the words "Nothing for nothing" contain a sad amount of truth. He is of course a fool who does not count the cost so far as the future is concerned; but scarcely less a fool is he who does not overlook past costs. If we have any good or delightful thing in this life, at all hazards let us not taint our enjoyment by considering what we gave for it. Was it more than we could afford?. Never mind; we have afforded it, we have made our pur

chase. Let us take off the ticket with the price and burn the receipt. There are items in life's ledger which must be overlooked unless we would spend all our days in balancing closed accounts.

We have heard it said that the greatest landscape-painters have been men whose eyesight was bad for details. Nature dazzles the eyes she would enchant. The seer misses many sights. The men who open the eyes of the world know when to close their own. We are not likely to find very much feeling for Nature in a gifted watch maker. Whether this theory is actually true or no, it is certainly true metaphorically. The microscopic view of life is always an unhappy one. Sometimes one is tempted to believe that almost all beauty is built up of ugly atoms. It ought to be one of the first objects of life not to see them separately. The whole is as real as the part, and we may surely choose which reality we will consider.

Success in life-however we like to define it depends upon our relations with our fellow-creatures, and those relations depend for each individual upon his ability to judge character. We all begin life surrounded by sealed books, by human documents which we must learn to read. It is every man's business and nearly every man's pleasure to get at their contents as fast as he may. If a man does not know how to skip, he will never be well read; he will be always studying and never attaining to knowledge. If a man has learnt how to tear the heart out of a book, he has had a liberal education. There is no limit to what he can learn. If a man knows how to distinguish the essence of character from its accidents, he is, whatever his position in life, a man of the world. All real scholars have a sense of direction. They can keep upon the main track of an author's intention though a hundred bypaths may attract their thoughts.

Much the same thing is true in regard to the study of character. There are so many false indications to be overlooked, superficial qualities which have no meaning, tricks of mind of no more significance than tricks of manner, copied mechanically from early associates, of which both mentally lazy and mentally over-worked men neglect to break themselves. Some serious men take hold of every subject first by its lighter side, smallest part foremost as it

were.

The habit is perhaps in reality an expression of modesty, and comes of a dread of the "daws" who peck at exposed hearts; but the censorious critic who misses nothing is sure to set it down as cynicism or silliness. To others every conversation is a friendly contest, though on further acquaintance they are neither cantankerous nor without convictions. Others, again, approach every subject with the statement of a preconception. It fades at the first touch of a fact. They are not prejudiced in the ordinary sensethat is, they are not mentally obstinate -but they have a horror of all uncertainty. During the omniscient period of youth they laid in a large stock of ready-made conclusions, taken over wholesale from their forbears very likely, and they must spend their lives in dissolving instead of forming them. It is not easy at first to follow the motion of their minds, for they seem to be working backwards. All these are caprices of character, inherited or contracted. Only those who can overlook them ever arrive at the real man. The temptation to mistake excrescences for the real stuff of personality comes very often from self-indulgence in a sort of spurious satire which feeds upon details. All men believe themselves to be humorous. It is perhaps the only delightful gift openly claimed nowadays without even a pretence at modesty. A power of minute and contemptuous observation is often mis

taken by the unlucky owner for satiric humor; and not only by the owner. Often a circle of empty-headed friends share his delusion. Petty spite is confused with satire by men who confuse mimicry with acting, or who regard the truth of a portrait as consisting in minute reproduction of defects of feat

ure.

But the art of overlooking is useful in far more serious connections than those we have been enumerating. Unless he will diligently practise it, a thoughtful man will with difficulty avoid that attitude of suspicion, or even of despair, which makes usefulness impossible. Unless we can keep in mind The Spectator.

the great opposing ideals which do really lie at the root of party strife, we shall begin to think that party strife presents nothing but a confused welter of self-interested ill-nature. The man who perpetually dwells upon the "atrocities" perpetrated by his opponents never succeeds in grasping the issue. Every detail of the fray sends him off at a tangent.

For most of us the great things will not hold our attention unless we determine that they should do so; indeed, it is doubtful whether we shall ever see them at all unless we will learn to overlook. An aptitude for detection is inimical to insight.

In his new volume of narrative studies, "Broken Earthenware" (Hodder & Stoughton), Mr. Harold Begbie discusses one of the deepest problems of applied psychology. He read Professor William James's remarkable volume on "The Varieties of Religious Experience," and went down into a London slum to test and verify the Harvard philosopher's observations. His papers give the actual records of some of the "broken earthenware," the shards of cracked and soiled human crockery, he picked up on this deplorable rub bish-heap. These stories are told with the novelist's practised skill, and with vivid picturesqueness, and a realism that is redeemed from repulsiveness by the eloquent purity of the author's style. As a collection of authentic human documents the volume is of absorbing interest; a piece of pathological investigation, scientific in its keen analysis, but irradiated by a poetical imagination and a glow of sympathetic emotion. And, in a way, it is pioneer work, since it points to a fresh and fruitful method of handling social prob

lems. On the one hand we have had the student in his library tabulating data and statistics, and conducting a priori researches into the causes of want, misery, and crime; on the other side, the writer of fiction and the descriptive journalist are content to give merely graphic pictures of the results. Mr. Begbie shows them a new use for their talents. The literary observer might do for the economist and the sociologist what the explorer does for the scientific geographer. He might give him the material to support or disprove his hypothesis, and establish or refute the theory by an examination of the facts. It is valuable to have Professor James's speculations on the philosophy of conversion applied to actual cases of "saved" drunkards and criminals drawn up from the depths of London slumdom.

Mr. Begbie's pictures of these vessels of grace are terribly graphic. The Potter's Thumb seems to have slipped badly in making this shattered earthenware. All the specimens are of the worst type known to our civilization,