And so I maintain that women have a right to look towards dramatic representations as offering them a legitimate recreation and as affording also, in many instances, in connection with "amateur theatricals," an opportunity for some one with an exceptional dramatic gift to "point a moral, and adorn a tale."

And this leads me, not unnaturally, to remember that there are other arts: painting and sculpture and music and their like, which might perhaps more appropriately be discussed as accomplishments, but which are also, most truly, to many women delightful recreations. I entreat that they be cherished as recreations, and I trust that the time may never come when to carry a kodak or to pump wind into a mechanical piano may take the place of sketching and modelling and the mastery of some musical instrument! It is, of course, easy to urge the technical superiority of the hand-organ or the photograph; and that even these may have a "personal note" in connection with their execution is not improbable; but one can never see a traveller with a sketch-book, or a musician with a violin as her companion, without feeling how much keener must be the pleasure, and how much closer the contact with higher emotional life, which must come from these rather than from any mechanical toy, however clever its imitations may be. "Do you call that sketch of yours a reproduction of that exquisite view?" said one girl, looking over the shoulder of another. "By no means," said the other, with a rare discernment of the higher value of her art; "nobody can be more sensible than I of its imperfections as a picture; but it will preserve to me, as nothing else could, a delightful impression; and my lines will preserve to me not what it really said, so much as what I tried to record that it said." It is impossible not to recognize that, no matter 'what the art or instrument with which we strive to express that which beauty, whether in nature or in a musical conception or composition, has said to us, the effort to translate or to transcribe it is a supreme pleasure!

And all this which is true of art is no less true in the kindred realm of letters. "It is estimated," said some cynic in the realm of criticism," that of ten women who read a particular book it would be a large assump

this contemptuous gentleman was well answered by some one who said: "You are speaking of books written with some substantial purpose, I suppose and would you mind saying how much of all of them most men understand?" For, in truth, the point of the issue is just here. No one ever read a book which conveyed to him the whole of the writer's meaning, nor grasped it; but the power which books exercise over us consists in this, that somewhere in them there were thoughts that, to use Dr. Busnell's admirable phrase, "found us." And just here there comes into view that standard, in the measurement of literature, which is final. A girl reads such and such a book because it diverts her; and seeks another by the same author, with the same result. But the time is very apt to come when the works of this or that clever novelist, or critic, or chronicler of ancient or modern personalities no longer interest, and this for the very simple reason that the mind is made like the body-it soon tires of gingerbread and doughnuts and sponge-cake, though at first they are more appetizing than a crust of bread.

But, on the other hand, the time sooner or later comes when a really great book awakens great aspirations, speaks to high impulses, kindles noble enthusiasms. And though we may never be able to realize any of these, their companionship is an increasing delight, and the fuller life-the life of thought, of the imagination, of best intellectual fellowships-becomes real and glowing. Says Thackeray, in one of his Lectures on the English Humorists: "There is a little girl in my household who when she is a sad reads Nicholas Nickleby; when she is glad reads Nicholas Nickleby; and when she is dull reads Nicholas Nickleby; and who said to me, not long ago, 'Papa dear, why can't you write books like Mr. Dickens?' Ah, ladies and gentlemen, who can write books like Mr. Dickens?" And no one, I think, who has felt the charm of a favorite writer as he has led the mind into delightful and stimulating companionship, can fail to understand the feeling of that young lady! It was said of Southey, as some of my readers will remember, that when the time came that with broken health and enfeebled sight he could no longer read, it was his wont to have the books that he best loved brought to his bedside so that, as he said, he "could at least caress them."

But there are other feminine recreations which, in their higher value, stop a long way this side of the companionship of books, of which I may not omit to speak. A friend propounded to me the other day this interesting psychological question: "How do you account for that singular transformation in the opinions of women concerning a motorcar, when once they have ridden in one?" Concerning the universality of any such transformation there may be room for debate, but concerning the psychological fact which it affirms there can be none. We may say, if we choose, that men and women alike abhor and decry a motor-car until they possess one; which, of course, is only another way of saying that their opinions are, so far as they are hostile to motor-cars, only the product of envy. But the fact which I have stated exists quite apart from any such condition. Who of us, in other words, has not known women within whose easy reach, all the while, has been a motor-car, who have resented its existence as a personal outrage, until one day somebody persuaded them to ride in it, when, straightway, their mental attitude to a motor-car has undergone a complete revolution! And it has not been, in such a case, merely that of opinion, which comes from knowing something by experience that we had previously only seen through the thick veil of ignorant prejudice. Something much more startling than this has happened. The prejudice of ignorance has given way, as some one has described it, "to the passion of experience," and to rush through streets, and in and out of country villages, at a pace which is a menace to the pedestrian and a peril to all other travellers, becomes a delight in which, so far as I have observed, the pleasure of women is quite as keen as that of men. Now, here is a fact of large and ominous suggestiveness, and it is to reach it that I have used this long and, as some may account it, circuitous preamble. There are, I believe, in a great many natures depths that are not easily stirred, but which, when awakened, issue often in a kind of frenzy. And this-alas, that it should be so!-is as true of our recreations as it is of our malignant passions. Malice, revenge, resentment of an injury, and their like, we are wont to say may inflame one so that, for the moment, he is a madman. In precisely the same way, as we may easily discover, it is possible for any keen and intense

excitement to take possession of the whole nature and to make it, for the time being, quite reckless of consequences.

That is a most dramatic illustration of such a fact which is being afforded to us just now in the wide-spread prevalence of the "obsession" known as the game of bridge whist. No recent history of the infatuation of a recreation can, I think, quite equal it. Of cards and card-playing we all know more or less, and of the possible dangers that threaten the inveterate card-player. But of cards most people have come to reason as they have of dancing, and to believe that they can only be justly forbidden when they awaken unworthy or undisciplined desires. I am told (I do not know the game myself) that bridge whist is a most interesting and agreeable game per se, and only becomes dangerous when it is made a means of gambling; but by others I am assured that what is called the gambling element in it is alone that which makes it attractive. If this is so, there can be no doubt that it is wholly evil.

For gambling is an infatuation as to the effects of which upon character there can be no doubt. When on the Riviera, last winter, I found myself in a charming Mediterranean town within an hour of Monte Carlo. Some one put into my hands an earnest and thoroughly well-meant argument, by a European divine, on the sin of gambling, the fervor of which, however, was more noteworthy than its logic; and I could not help saying to myself, "O my brother, why did you not ignore the abstract question of the guilt of games of cards, and simply point to their effects upon those who play them?" Of these there were examples on every hand, and no one could observe them, however casually, without a melancholy impression of the effects of playing cards for money.

Can anybody pretend that those effects are absent from the bridge-whist playing circles? Whenever one ventures a criticism of the prevailing craze for bridge whist he is told that all that is said may be true of people who play bridge whist for money, but that people, "as a rule," do not play for money. "As a rule" is a large and elastic phrase; and if, indeed, it is true of the average bridge-whist player, then it is "up to" that vast majority who do not play bridge whist for money or prizes-to explain how it is that a simple game of cards produces such fierce excitements, such flushed and perspir

ing faces, such hot speech, and often rude and imperious exactions as are the frequent characteristics of bridge-whist parties? A young girl, as I have been told, was asked out, not long ago, to dinner. She went, innocently supposing her invitation to mean what it said. But the dinner was hurried through, the card-tables were immediately afterwards set out, and the guests, and this young girl among them, were peremptorily called to take their places. It was in vain that she pleaded her ignorance of any game of cards. She was swiftly made to understand that neither ignorance of the game nor scruples as to playing it could be accepted as an excuse for refusing to "take a hand." When, after an hour or two, she rose to take leave of her hostess, she had lost seventy-five dollars, and on stating that she had no money wherewith to pay her gambling debts she was bidden, rather abruptly, to "go home and get it." She meekly did so, and then her father told her to go to bed-that he would send the money by a servant. He did so, but he made out his check for one hundred dollars, saying in his note to the hostess who had so successfully "bled" his child, "Pray allow me, while I am settling my daughter's gambling debts, to pay for her dinner." The rebuke was just and timely. If every youth who accepts hospitality is menaced with a demand which many youths are pecuniarily unable to meet, then we had better transfer our social recreations to a commercial basis. And it is just here that the argument against card-playing or gambling in whatever form seems to have the most force. The commercial note in our modern life is the most arrogant, the most obtrusive, and the most unutterably vulgar note that it illustrates. There was a time when high-bred people sought to minimize and subordinate it; and there is many a one who can remember hospitalities whose supreme charm consisted in profuseness without prodigality, and in splendor without ostentation. But nowadays it is observable that we are rarely or never told of an entertainment in which the caterer's art and dining-room are invoked without such financial details of the entertainment as make of the whole a huge and vulgar "splurge"! My dear lady, you are one of the people they tell me who "set set the pace." Don't you think it would be worth while for you to strive for a social life that should not recall Mr. Canfield?

For at this point we come abreast of the higher aspects of our theme. The recreations of woman ought surely to have one note that is her is her supreme charm and adornment-I mean the note of unselfishness. When, in Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Miss Angela Messenger, that eccentric heiress who, having inherited a vast fortune made out of beer, goes voluntarily to live in the neighborhood of the Messenger Brewery and to start a dressmaker's establishment which shall begin by making the lives of the girls who work in it a little less dreary and exhausting, she sets out by introducing into the morning's drudgery a play hour," and leads her sewing-girls from the workroom to a tennis-court. Some of my readers will remember the alarm and suspicion with which this "trick," as they are disposed to regard it, is regarded by some of the workinggirls; but, as they turn to their young mistress, standing there with a tennis-racket in her hand and giving them a little talk about the value of exercise in the open air, it isn't her talk that wins them, but her face, shining with the joy of a new pleasure, the pleasure of sharing her own pleasure with somebody else; and, best of all, of being the instrument whereby those whose lives are starved of all wholesome recreation are brought into the sunshine of its joyous medicine!

There are some of us whose recreationsmusic, drawing, reading, and the like-must be isolated and solitary. And for all such, let me say, in passing, those who are otherwise placed ought to have a very tender consideration. There is, of course, the type of girl or woman who prefers to be alone, and whom we can best serve by leaving her there! But do we ever think of the involuntarily lonely-that tragic flotsam and jetsam of our modern life in which great cities especially abound-which has been flung up by the destructive waves of some disastrous financial or domestic catastrophe, and which, helpless and stranded, must struggle in some forgotten corner of the world's great life, living, it may be, on the miserable pittance that has been snatched from the ruin of some great enterprise, or the bankruptcy of some great fortune?

"What do you do with your afternoons?" I happened, in an elevator, as, not long ago, I was being shot up to the top story of one of those huge caravanseries that in New York are called "homes," to hear one lady say to

another. "Twice a week, rain or shine, hot or cold, I see you going out with a little basket, carefully covered." "Alas!" said the other lady, who knew that she was talking to a Pharisee of the Pharisees-" alas! that my sin has found me out! The basket, if you had lifted the little napkin that has piqued your curiosity, would have been found to contain a small bottle of wine and a pack of clean cards. There are two old ladies of my acquaintance who come under the head of that descriptive phrase which calls them reduced gentlewomen.' They were, long ago, friends and schoolmates of the dear mother whom I have lost, who loved them tenderly. She and they had been young girls together, the children of prosperous parents, by whom they were cherished and nourished with every possible luxury. But the days of the prosperity of these two old ladies ended long ago. The friends who once knew and honored them have almost without exception vanished from the stage, and they are left to struggle with penury, neglect, and broken health. I may not tell you where they live-nor how; but twice a week I go to them, on one day to one of them, and on another to the other, and cheer, if I can, a little their starved and bloodless lives as best I may. I suppose you think it a droll and dreary occupation; but, do you know, I look forward to it as bringing me the keenest pleasure that I know. For, after all, is not to give pleasure the keenest pleasure?" There can be but one answer to that question-happy she who has found it out. And at this point we touch an aspect of our subject which is its gravest. When we are talking about recreation, whether for men or for women, has it ever occurred to us to consider to how small a proportion of the human race the phrase has any meaning? Out of a city of many hundreds of thousands it would be interesting to ascertain by statistical inquiry how many of them are, in one form or other, wage-earners, and then how many of these wage-earners, especially if they are women, have any leisure, or place, or means to command either, when the workday is done, in which to find recreation. I have heard people inveigh against what are known as the recreation piers in New York. Did you ever see a recreation pier, especially of a hot summer's night, when it is crowded by people men, women, and children-who have swarm

ed out of the stifling rooms in which they will swelter all night, to get a breath of fresh air, and, mayhap, while the band is playing, a few moments of pleasure? And you begrudge them that, and the additional burden in your taxes that it may involve, when, doubtless, you have sent your family off to the mountains or the seaside for the summer? If you can, my brother, stroll down to the end of the pier and study the faces that you pass! Can it be that this is God's world, and yet there be in it so many sad and sorrowful ones, with countenances so worn and weary, with stupor and inanition-marked by that loss of zest in life and joy in human companionships that comes from incessant and exhausting tasks? Can it be, you ask, that this is the family of a gracious Father into whose faces you are looking?

Well, my sister, if God is their Father, then they are of close kin to you and me, for He is our Father too! And so we may not think of our play hours and methods without thinking of theirs! The place of recreation in human life is of far more consequence than most of us recognize; and its relation to the rest of life-to our tasks and achievements and our varied efficiency in both of them-far closer than we are wont to realize. We do well, therefore, to be concerned about them, and that shamefacedness with which some of us allow to ourselves some hours for rest and play, is as unintelligent as it is mischievous. But the moment that we have recognized that truth for ourselves it becomes us to think of our fellows. The great majority of human beings are so placed that unless we think and plan, just here, for them, they can do little or nothing for themselves. What we call progress in our modern life does not make it easier for the wage-earner to earn a chance to play, but harder. Those splendid achievements of which we are wont to boast do not often give the toiler for his day's wage more freedom to live a free life and to mix it with recreation. I am not sure that, with every step that we take away from the life of the primeval savage we do not make it harder for him!

And if this be true, my sister, then plan and contrive and provide for your own recreation first, and then find some others less favored than yourself, and plan and provide for theirs!

AM thirty-eight years old, an age at which the majority of women have seasonably subordinated the filial relation to the conjugal and maternal. The minority, however, is large enough to form a not negligible class, to merit, as it were, a separate report. Its problems are, perhaps, not so vital to the world's progress as how to keep one's husband's interest or how to win one's children's confidence, yet they are not entirely trivial. How far to defer to one's mother's prejudices without slavishly sacrificing one's right of judgment may be a question unrelatable, by any intellectual agility, to posterity, and the future of civilization, but it is a very present puzzle in the existence of unnumbered middleaged daughters misnamed independent. And I am referring now not to women lacking in forbearance, in tact, and the usual concomitants of affection and good-breeding.

Take, for example, my own case, which sundry intimate tête-à-têtes lead me to believe a typical one. My love and admiration for my mother are equalled, I am sure, only by hers for me. I look back upon the record of her life and am speechless before its fine sincerity, its simplicity, its bravery in poverty, its cheerfulness in hardship, its noble resignation in heart-breaking loss. The vision of my mother rises before me whenever I think of Stevenson's lines:

I knew a silver head was bright beyond compare; I knew a queen of toil with a crown of silver hair,

Garland of valor and sorrow, of beauty and renown,

Life, that honors the brave, crowned her himself with the crown.

As destiny has used me she is my dearest interest, the one person in all the world who deeply needs me. The years are linked together, life has its unity, in thoughts of her. I am a child hurrying home from school with a merit-card in my moist palm; her merry, loving, brown eyes shine on me from the window, light the garden path to the door. I am a young girl, dashing into the house to ask, breathless with rapture, for permission to go pleasuring. The sure tender smile awaits me. The years pass. To-day I walk sedately down the street. At the end of it she will be sitting by a table in the early lamplight, her clear eyes as loving, as expectant as ever.

But, alas! When the child hurried in with the eager request or the boast, the mother was the arbiter, the court of final decision. Today, except in so far as courtesy and love defer to her, she is only the critic, the chorus of the drama. Once when I asked, "May I go to Molly's?" she refused, and I pouted until I was told, logically, that such outward show of my disappointment would send me into solitary confinement for the rest of the afternoon. Now I announce that I am going