The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax

care for eloquence in anything. The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeks to win votes by a show of eloquence is turned down. Votes are facts, and if the votes are to be won, facts must be arra

rn minister (already cut down from two hours and a half to twenty or

around them is filled with it. The old-fashioned prayer-meeting is dying out in the modern church because it is a mere specialty in modern life. The prayer-meeting recognizes but one way of pray

way. The exterior conception of righteousness of a hundred years ago-namely, that a man must do right because it is his duty-is displaced by the modern one, the morally thorough one-namely, that a man must do right because he li

e said that it would hardly do to discover heaven with anything less than six hundred feet long. To the ancients, Galileo's instrument, even if it had been practical, would not have been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however, the fact th

r, as if he must have said a sentence. It was like saying things with pile-drivers. The machine obtruded itself at eve

tle, the Reformation came in-and the undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There is no denying that the overshot wheel is more poetic-looking-it does its work with twelve quarts of water at a time and shows every quart-but it soon develops into the undershot wheel, which shows only the drippings of the water, and t

e glistening brass knocker-pleasing symbol to the outer sense-for a tiny knob on his porch door and a far-away tinkle in his kitchen. The brass knocker does not appeal to the spirit enough for the modern man, nor to the imagination. He wants an inner world to draw on to ring a door-bell with. He loves to wake the unseen. He will not even ring a door-bell if he can help it. He likes it better, by touching a button, to have a door-bell rung for him by a couple of metals down in his cellar chewing each other. He likes to reach down twelve flights of stairs with a thrill on a wire and open his front door. He may be seen riding in three stories along his streets, but he takes his engines all off the tracks and crowds them into one engine and puts it out of sight. The more a thing is out of the sight of his eyes the more his soul sees it and glories in it. His fireplace is underground. Hidden water spouts over his head and pours beneath his feet through his house. Hidden light creeps through the dark in it. The more might, the more subtlety. He hauls the whole human race around the crust of the earth with a vapor made out of a solid. He stops solids-sixty miles an hour-with invisible air. He photographs the tone of his voice on a platinum plate. His voice reaches across death with the platinum plate. He is heard of the unborn. If he speaks in either one of his worlds he takes two worlds to speak with. He will not be shut in with one. If he lives in either he wraps the other ab

e globe is melted into the wireless telegraph. The words of his spirit break away from the dust. They envelop the earth

e X-ray, which makes spirit out of dust, and the wireless telegraph, which makes earth out of air, he delves into the deep