he had not frankly confessed his whole mind to her about it; he had only told her that the oval shape might perhaps have looked better, without much diminishing the size of it, which he had all along insisted was no larger than it ought to be to give room for them all to sit around it a point he had set his heart on from the beginning.

The truth was, Mrs. Oldham, with her homely, honest way of speaking out her mind, had hurt the Doctor's feelings, without knowing it or intending it. But she had hurt them weeks before, the very first time she saw the table. And this was the way of it.

The Doctor had set his heart on having a Library table, truly and properly such, a table for a library, one to hold books, one that would allow a good many books to lie on it, and large enough for all the family to sit around it, and read and write without interfering with each other, with room besides for any friend that might chance to drop in upon them. Such was his ideal of a library table. He had long indulged his mind's eye with the pleasing image. It had grown, in fact, to be a weakness of his, something that he in a sort doted on realizing some day. So he had gone and bespoken it six months before the library was finished

for

and ready to receive it, before indeed the foundations of the newly-built part of Greystones were laid. He had ordered it to be made six feet long and three feet wide, going only by the image in his mind's eye, and guessing even at the dimensions of that without having ever measured and noted any actual table of such a width and length. He had done so too without consulting Mrs. Oldham, which was something very unusual with him; he had a high opinion of her good sense. Indeed he was wont to say, that in point of practical wisdom he thought his wife very much his superior; but in the faculty of seeing through a speculative millstone without any hole in it, he did not scruple to say he did not consider her so highly gifted as Jeremy Bentham or himself. This matter of the library table was undoubtedly a practical affair, the getting it made at least, and yet, owing, he supposed, to the pre-occupation of his mind with his ideal, he had neglected to secure her advice and sanction, I mean as to its exact form and dimensions-for he had told her, in a general and passing way, that he was going to have a library table made—but as she made no particular inquiries, not imagining it was to be ordered so long beforehand, it happened that nothing more was said.

So the table was made and brought home and set in its place. Mrs. Oldham looked at it for a moment or two, and then said:

"Husband, I don't like it. It is too large, and the shape of it doesn't please me. Altogether, it looks like a table for a bank parlor or for an insurance office."

Dear woman! She little thought how inwardly aghast her words struck the Doctor. In the placid sincerity of her womanly and wifely heart, there was the most perfect, and at the same time perfectly unreflected and unconscious confidence in the impossibility of her saying anything, or of his taking anything she could say, in any other than a kindly spirit. So she had spoken as she felt, without thinking of it even as a matter in which there might be a difference of taste between them, still less dreaming that she was giving him pain. She knew nothing of his visions and his images. She did not know this table was his realized ideal. She knew nothing of all he had been dreaming about so long, and which of late, as the time of fulfilment drew near, had so filled his mind's eye. He had never told her; although he is one of the most open-hearted persons I ever knew, and communicative to a fault, as his wife often told him,

and as he himself has had too many occasions to be conscious of, when he has, in his frank, confiding way, laid himself open to the stupid, the brutal, or the malicious. Yet he had never told anybody, not even her. You may think this strange, but I do not. On the contrary, I think it altogether natural; for always in your dreaming, speculative natures, like the Doctor's, there are some cherished fancies which, with all their frankness and unreserve, they are shy of revealing to any human creature-from a half consciousness of their weakness about them and their inability to bear any exposure of it to the unsympathetic, and yet an instinctive sense of the impossibility of anybody but themselves fully sympathizing with them. You may think this an over deep and wise lesson in human nature to bring in here to explain such a trifling thing as the Doctor's not telling his wife his secret fancies about a table. But it is a true lesson, and one that everybody ought to learn; one that will explain a great many other things besides the Doctor's silence; and you ought to be thankful for a lesson of wisdom, however trivial the occasion that leads me to give it to you.

But so it was, the Doctor had never told even his wife,-not, of course, from any deliberate pur

pose of concealment, but unconsciously, from the influence of the feeling I have mentioned; and so she could not know what she was trampling upon. She would not have hurt his feelings for the world. But she had. She had demolished his ideal; she had shattered his vision. He could not stand up against her opinion. He never could in such matters. He had never been able all the time they had lived together to think right well of anything that did not suit her taste.

But now the shock was great. He could not bring himself to show how much he was wounded. He tried to hold up. He even defended his vilified ideal.

"Too large, my dear? Why, it is only large enough for us all to sit about it of an evening in that comfortable pleasant way, which I am sure you think so nice. Besides, see here!" turning her attention away from the size of the table, "here are six drawers, one for each of us, three on one side and three on the other. This one is for me; that opposite is yours; here is Phil's; ; there Fred's; this is Lilly's; and this is for Cousin Kitty when she comes. It is so pleasant to have one's own drawer to put one's things into which one does not wish to leave lying on the table, and yet wants to have always near at hand.”