language strong enough with which to denounce her.  On the principle that a strawberry is quicker to spoil than a pumpkin, it takes less to render a woman obnoxious than to make a man unfit for decent company.  I am no lover of butter-mouthed girls, of prudes and “prunes and prism” fine ladies; I love sprightliness and gay spirits and unconventionality, but the moment a woman steps over the border land that separates delicacy of feeling, womanliness and lovableness, from rudeness, loud-voiced slang and the unblushing desire for notoriety, she becomes, in the eyes of all whose opinion is worth having, a miserable caricature upon her sex.  It is not quite so bad to see a young girl making a fool of herself as to see an elderly woman comporting herself in a giddy manner in public places.  We look for feather-heads among juveniles, but surely the cares and troubles of fifty years should tame down the high spirits of any woman.  Chance took me into a public office the other day, largely conducted by women.  Conspicuous among the clerks was a woman whose age must have exceeded fifty years.  She was exchanging loud pleasantries with a couple of beardless boys upon the question of “getting tight.”  Noble theme for a woman old enough to be their grandmother to choose!  As I listened to the coarse jests and looked into her hard and unlovely face, I could but wonder how nature ever made the mistake to label such material—­“woman.”  It would be no more of a surprise to find a confectioner’s stock made up of coarse salt, marked “sugar,” or to buy burdock of a florist, merely because the tag attached to it was lettered “moss rose.”

LII.

The only way to conquer A hard destiny.

The only way to conquer a cast-iron destiny is to yield to it.  You will break to pieces if you are always casting yourself upon the rocks.  Sit down on the “sorrowing stone” now and then, but don’t expect to last long if you are constantly flinging yourself head first against it.  If life holds nothing nobler and sweeter than the routine of uncongenial work, if all the pleasant anticipations and lively hopes of youth remain but as cotton fabrics do when the colors have washed away, if good intention and noble purpose glimmer only a little now and then from out the murky environments of your lot, as fisher lights at sea, accept the inevitable and make the best of it.  Nothing can stop us if we are bound to grow.  We are not like trees that can be hewed down by every chance woodman’s axe; death is the only woodman abroad for us, and he does not hew down, he simply transplants.  God is our only judge; to him alone shall we yield the record of life’s troubled day, and isn’t it a great comfort to think that he so fully understands what have been our limitations, and how we have been handicapped and baffled and hindered?  If jockeys were to enter their horses for the great Derby with the understanding that the road was rough and the horses blind, do you think much would be expected of the finish?  And is heaven less discriminating than a horse jockey?