the real children of Christmas to make a corner in wheat.  The world, to be sure, tolerates still a great many things that it does not approve of, and, on the whole, Christmas, as an ameliorating and good-fellowship institution, gains a little year by year.  There is still one hitch about it, and a bad one just now, namely, that many people think they can buy its spirit by jerks of liberality, by costly gifts.  Whereas the fact is that a great many of the costliest gifts in this season do not count at all.  Crumbs from the rich man’s table don’t avail any more to open the pearly gates even of popular esteem in this world.  Let us say, in fine, that a loving, sympathetic heart is better than a nickel-plated service in this world, which is surely growing young and sympathetic.

A BEAUTIFUL OLD AGE

In Autumn the thoughts lightly turn to Age.  If the writer has seemed to be interested, sometimes to the neglect of other topics, in the American young woman, it was not because she is interested in herself, but because she is on the way to be one of the most agreeable objects in this lovely world.  She may struggle against it; she may resist it by all the legitimate arts of the coquette and the chemist; she may be convinced that youth and beauty are inseparable allies; but she would have more patience if she reflected that the sunset is often finer than the sunrise, commonly finer than noon, especially after a stormy day.  The secret of a beautiful old age is as well worth seeking as that of a charming young maidenhood.  For it is one of the compensations for the rest of us, in the decay of this mortal life, that women, whose mission it is to allure in youth and to tinge the beginning of the world with romance, also make the end of the world more serenely satisfactory and beautiful than the outset.  And this has been done without any amendment to the Constitution of the United States; in fact, it is possible that the Sixteenth Amendment would rather hinder than help this gracious process.  We are not speaking now of what is called growing old gracefully and regretfully, as something to be endured, but as a season to be desired for itself, at least by those whose privilege it is to be ennobled and cheered by it.  And we are not speaking of wicked old women.  There is a unique fascination—­all the novelists recognize it—­in a wicked old woman; not very wicked, but a woman of abundant experience, who is perfectly frank and a little cynical, and delights in probing human nature and flashing her wit on its weaknesses, and who knows as much about life as a club man is credited with knowing.  She may not be a good comrade for the young, but she is immensely more fascinating than a semi-wicked old man.  Why, we do not know; that is one of the unfathomable mysteries of womanhood.  No; we have in mind quite another sort of woman, of which America has so many that they are a very noticeable element in all cultivated society.  And the world has nothing more lovely.  For there is a loveliness or fascination sometimes in women between the ages of sixty and eighty that is unlike any other—­a charm that woos us to regard autumn as beautiful as spring.