of the impulse to do so-this is something I shall not disparage or contemn. But a life of mere self-seeking vanity and pride-engendering envy, ill will, and all evil passions-wretched if success crown not its selfish struggles, and not made blessed by any success-what a miserable thing it is! What is life worth without inward peace? Which no selfish life can give."

"But you have no life of selfish struggles, successful or unsuccessful, to look back over,” said I.

"I thank God, no," replied the Doctor; "if I have aspired to but little and done but little, I have no disappointed ambitions to embitter the recollections of the past."

CHAPTER XI.

HOW NATURE SHOWS HER GLADNESS.-JUNE AND JUNEFULNESS.-WHEN A NOSE IS A GOOD THING.IS IT AN ORGAN FOR THE BEAUTIFUL. THE GLORIES OF OCTOBER. NATURE'S PICTURE GALLERY.-ART AND ITS LIMITATIONS.-MRS. OLDHAM ASKS TWO VERY GREAT QUESTIONS.

MRS. OLDHAM had been away for ten days, on a visit to her mother. The Doctor had been quite dull and stupid for the last two or three days; but his mopishness vanished with his wife's return. She came back towards evening, just at the moment when one of those wonderfully gorgeous and beautiful sunset scenes was kindling up, which we have so often up here, particularly at this season of the year.

(: See," said the Doctor, leading his wife to the west window of the library, "how glad nature is to have you back again. Not that we are not all as glad as nature is; but we cannot express it in such

a rich grand way. See, the hills and the sky across the river are all aglow with many-hued blushes of delight-blue, gold, orange-colored and purple gleams of joy mantling the old rugged weatherbeaten faces of the hills!"

"Nature is very obliging, as well as you," said

Mrs. Oldham; "she is very apt to conform her expression to the mood of feeling with which one looks at her. But that is a glorious sight."

The next forenoon we were standing-Mrs. Oldham, the Doctor, and myself—in the veranda that shades the west end of the library, and which · is built around it in a corresponding semi-octagonal shape. It was one of the finest of October days. The Doctor's spirits were as brisk as a bobolink.

"Mrs. Oldham," said he, "how bright and calmly joyous nature is. What a mild satisfaction rests on her countenance. You can see it through

the thin haze veil she has

thrown over her face to

soften the light of the cloudless sun. It is all along of your return."

"What a beautiful month October is," said she. "Yes," replied the Doctor, "no month in the year, on the whole, is more agreeable to me than October mostly is in this part of the world. It has

not the special charm of May—the delicious feeling of soft, genial airs, after the sharp winds of March and the miserable chills that sometimes go through your bones and marrow in April. It is unlike June, when June is what it should be, with its ineffable, incomparable Junefulness-the blending of the rich green of its grass and foliage with its bloom and fragrance-a fragrance which makes a nose a good thing to have in the country (as Mr. Sparrowgrass might say), however undesirable it is in the city, a fragrance which almost elevates the nose into an organ for the beautiful.

"Noticeable, by the way," continued the Doctor, going off at a tangent on a new line of thought—a thing not unusual with him, and one you may always expect when you see him throw back his head and put his left hand to the back of his neck, and peer through his glasses at nothing in particular

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noticeable," said he, "that we should have no right to speak of a beautiful fragrance, any more than of a beautiful flavor-a soup or a sauce; that there is strictly nothing beautiful in the world of sense but what is so for the eye or for the earthat forms, or colors, or tones, or words, are, in some combination or other, the elements of every sensible object that we rightly term beautiful, the only ma

terials the creative power of the artist can employ to embody and express to the universal mind and heart the invisible and ineffable ideal, the beautiful in spirit and in truth.

"My friend Pelham tells me of an acquaintance of his, an eminent musical man, who denies this, who says that the fragrance of the heliotrope expresses to him precisely what certain musical tones do. He is the only man I ever heard of holding any such notion; and his experience, taking it as he states it, proves nothing to any purpose against the general doctrine. Yet I do not wonder at any one feeling reluctant to put the fragrance of flowers into the class of mere sensual delights. We do not feel so in regard to flavors. The delight of Alderman Gubbins in the turtle soup he gobbles down and in the champagne he follows it with, we know and admit is but a swinish delight-whether he call his turtle and champagne beautiful or delicious; but when the gentle Amanda puts the sprig of heliotrope, or mignionette, or the bunch of carnations to her nose and cries 'Beautiful!' dare you call it a swinish delight? do you even like to say, it is a mere delight of the senses, highly refined indeed in its quality, but still something purely and wholly sensual ?