through a fish horn.  At this the insulted neighbor flops down off the tree where he lives, and says naughty words very thick and very fast.  Then five or six old ladies poke their heads over the sides of their nests and call “Police!” A squad of bluecoats comes tearing ever the border and attacks the original culprit.  He whips out his fish horn and summons a general uprising.  Very soon there is a battle royal, to which the old ladies add zest by squeaking out dire threats in shrill falsetto voices pitched at high “C.”  This keeps up until somebody arises and declaims from my open window, dancing meanwhile in helpless rage, to see how futile is the voice of august man when blue-jays hold the floor.  Talk about the English sparrow!  It is a mild-mannered little gentleman compared to the noisy jay.  Its politeness and amiability are Chesterfieldan beside the behavior of its handsomely attired but boorish neighbor.  And as for fighting, why, I verily believe a bluejay in good condition could “do up” John L. Sullivan so quickly the gentle pugilist would never know what struck him.

XXXIX.

Good health A blessing.

What roses are with worms in the bud, such are women without health.  There can be no beauty in unwholesomeness, there can be nothing attractive in a delicate pallor caused by the disregard of hygiene, or in a willowy figure, the result of lacing.  If I could now and then thread some particular bead on an electric wire that should tingle and thrill wherever it touched, or write in a streak of zig-zag light across the sky, I might, perhaps, compel attention to what I have to say.  There are certain laws of health which, if they only might be regarded, would make us all as beautiful in outward seeming as we strive to be, no doubt, in spirit.  Ever so pure and lovely a soul in an unhealthy body is like a bird trying to thrive and sing in an ill-kept cage, or a flower blooming with a blight set deep within its withering petals.  You or I can serve neither heaven nor mankind worthily if we disregard the laws of health, and bear about with us a frail and poorly nurtured body.  There are “shut in” spirits, to be sure, captives from birth to pain, the record of whose patient endurance of suffering sweetens the world in which they live, as a rose shut within a dull and prosy book imparts to its pages a fragrance born of summer and heaven; but such lives are the exception.  The true destiny of the sons and daughters of earth is to grow within the garden of life as a sapling rather than as a sickly weed, developing timber rather than pith, and yielding finally to death, the sharp-axed old woodman, as the tree falls, to pass onward to new opportunities of power and service.  The tree does not decay where it stands, nor does it often fall because its core is honeycombed by disease.  It is cut down in the meridian of its strength, because