“ His rapid ascent, the thin, icy air, the powerful hum of the muffled motor, the blazing sunshine, the voice and fingers of the wind, the sweep of his winged machine obeying the circular blur that showed the tractor’s power at its head, the invisible supporting strength that thrilled along the steel nerves of the great bird into his hands—all these new and strong forces registered themselves on the brain of the man, doubled the time of his heart-beats, made him quiver more with excitement than with the cold that suggested itself despite his furs. ”

“ Why increase the difference which we would all gladly lose sight of? Our ideals are the same as those of every true college woman, and the banding together into a fraternity is a help toward these ideals. Why refuse any college woman this help?
It is not merely a question of ideals and of the help of friends, but of definite social values, such as, for example, more intimate association with members of the faculty, more opportunities for meeting distinguished guests, and so on. Why should the fraternities have the monopoly of these social pleasures and assets? ”

“ We argue against the system and preach its abolition; but when Alice goes to college and is rushed by Beta and Gamma and Kappa in eager rivalry, we step down from the pulpit and rejoice with her and suffer with her anxious little heart until she is safely housed within the chapter that has the best standing.
And yet we do not call ourselves snobs. There must be a top layer. Why should not we be in it? Democracy? Yes; but that we and our children are to be on the same level with venders and hagglers and foreigners and other impossible people—absurd! ”

“ The mist was like a delicate veil, entwining everything. Lizette knew that the little procession of village folk had already passed on its way to the church. She had heard them singing a few minutes before as they went; but she had not wished to join them.
Now that she was on her way, she realized that her gaiety had deserted her, that she felt frightened. But she must not be frightened; she must have faith. It was faith that would make the miracle possible.
So Lizette came to the church after the others, and slipped into a dim corner. ”

“ A child’s vain toys cumbering his feet. His soul was set on the slip of pale girlhood, startlingly black and white, with her mass of soft hair beneath the plain, black hat, and her great pools of eyes, no longer agates or diamonds, but aglow with remote flames, who, in poor common earthliness, stood by his side, but in maddening reality was pinnacled on inaccessible heights by the love between her and the man they both loved. ”

“ He moved with a long stride in his long mantle, the moss wagged from his sleeves like the beard of a goat, and the children crowded nearer to the Woodsman; but at a turn of the road they all cried out and ran forward. Growing beside the road, with its branches full of gold and silver ornaments, snow and cranberries and gifts, was a lovely living Christmas-tree, bearing its shining fruitage in the thick forest. ”

“ Far to the south the prayer to Allah is cried from the turrets of the Russian mosque with a fervor equal to that of the dweller in the land of the Turks, and over five per cent. of the Russian people are of the Jewish faith.
To harmonize this population, successfully to maintain a centralized government of all these races, so different in character, needs, and actions, is a stupendous task. To see that every part of this great land gets its fair share of all that the Imperial Government has to give; to guard these far-reaching boundaries against continually threatened invasion ”

“ When one remembers the movement against the high-school fraternities, one is tempted for a moment to hope for a revision of popular opinion. How should what is generally condemned for the years between twelve and twenty be approved for the years between sixteen and twenty-four? Is there so wide a difference between the fraternity idea as it finds expression in the high-school girl of eighteen and the college girl of eighteen? The very women who most earnestly advocate the system in the colleges are bent upon driving it out of the high schools. ”

“ Such as he is in the lecture-room, such as he is in his books, unassuming, unpedantic, gracious, well-poised, subtle, tactful, alert, resourceful, stimulating, such Henri Bergson is in his every-day existence. In his case, and to an unusual degree, the style is the man. An easy talker, ever ready to speak freely upon all subjects,—his personal affairs, work, and politics excepted,—he nevertheless goes little into society, not because he dislikes social functions, but because he cannot contrive to make the necessary leisure. ”

“ It requires no effort of the imagination to picture the state of a great nation buried in ignorance and at the mercy of an educated and more or less unscrupulous bureaucracy, but it needs a heroic readjustment of preconceived ideas, a sweeping away of prejudices, and a wide comprehension, to grasp the potentialities of a land and a people like these when latent natural wealth is made accessible and education and comparative freedom of thought and action are given to all. ”

“ How would you like a Christmas day deep in the woods, with no tissue-paper parcels or tinsel ribbon, with the people that you know best and like best and their children, with old English carols and games and wassail-songs and morris-dances, and stockings, and a huge bowl of innocent punch, and presents that cost fifteen cents, and no more, on pain of death? ”

“ The Russian Government’s official attitude toward this action on the part of the United States Government is one of contemptuous resentment; contemptuous because it is believed that American politicians yielded to anti-Russian influences for purely selfish reasons; resentment because they find from their point of view no just cause for thus destroying in offhand manner the extremely friendly and profitable relations between two great nations—relations which have become a unique and historical example of long-continuing, unbroken, and even undisturbed friendship. ”

“ Nor, in the general largess, was the “stranger within the gates” forgotten. The tree held for Christine a fine pair of mittens from granny, a most beautiful woven coverlet from Anne, and a rosy apple each from Phœbe, Ellen, Minervy, Lukeanna, and John Jeems.
The scene was indeed a happy one. Absorbed in the joy of their offspring, and in their own gratified love of the beautiful, Goodloes and Talberts mingled freely, and melted into friendliness and cordiality. John Goodloe and Jeems Talbert alone stood apart, each by his fire, eying gloomily his orange and poke of candy. ”

“ In the case of manufactured goods, however, a nation has the markets of the world to choose from, and the American manufacturer meets the Englishman, the German, the Frenchman, the Belgian, and others in the fiercest kind of competition when he offers for sale the products of iron and steel, the textile mills, machinery, large and small, and, in fact, anything which, given the raw material, human ingenuity fashions to the hand of man. ”

“ The July sunshine streamed down, casting a queer projection of shadow from the coffin-end.
“Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”
Stella heard the chaplain’s voice as in a dream. The rattle of the earth on the coffin-lid—“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”—roused her with a shock. Below, deep in the grave, lay Unity—Unity, who had taken a human life, and had taken her own for the sake of those she loved ”

“ The fraternity spirit is simply the aristocratic impulse, the social instinct that is ever working toward the formation of class. Then, as it cannot be torn out of human nature, is it to be recognized and allowed to develop freely as in the case of the national organizations, or is it to be checked and controlled from without as in the case of the local organizations, or is it to be ignored, hidden under a cloak of theoretical democracy, as in the women’s colleges? ”

“ We are past the point where being a capitalist is the only way of becoming a politician, and we are dangerously near the point where being a politician is much the quickest way of becoming a capitalist. But while the European haute politique is hypocritical and diseased (much more so, I should say, than the American) , there is certainly less “graft” and corrupt give-and-take in the mass of minor functionaries or moderate fortunes; and this very comparative honesty in the less successful mass of Europe increases their uneasiness touching the national leadership. ”

“ Christine and Howard lifted up their voices in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” then, beginning with the youngest,—there was one infant even newer than John Jeems, a Goodloe baby of three weeks,—Anne and Luke read off the names and handed out the gifts. To children who had not seen a store doll or toy before, the simple things were marvels indeed. For every girl, little or big, there was a doll; for every boy, a toy of some kind; every person received an orange and a tarleton bag of candy; every family a large Christmas-bell. ”

“ Congress had tried constitutional amendments, and the South ignored them. It had tried civil-rights bills, which were useless without military power to enforce them. Then Congress said in effect to the Southern people: “If you have not a loyal white majority which can be trusted with the administration of civil government, we will enfranchise the black man. We must either garrison every school district with Union troops in order to protect the Negro from a peonage that is practical reënslavement, or we must give him the ballot and let him protect himself.” ”

“ Surveying all around and about me, I don’t behold but two faces here that hain’t decked out, like the love-lie tree, with Christmas joy and peace. John Goodloe and Jeems Talbert is onliest humans in all this gathering that wears gloom and darkness on their countenance. ”

“ Cold in winter, warm in summer, the seasons regular and normal the year round, this is the Siberia traversed by the Russian Trans-Continental Railroad, and which is destined as time goes on to play a part, constantly increasing in importance and seriousness, in the economics of the world. The productive power of this region is limited only by the degree of development attained, and its absorptive power will be of equally heroic measure. ”

“ The same laws of progress and development now govern Russia as have governed other countries in the past, and brought them to their present position of wealth and continuing prosperity. In all times some one nation has led the rest as the most powerful of all. It is equally true that no one nation has held this position for more than the allotted time. In the past the ascendancy of one people over another has been largely due to a greater spirit of aggressiveness or warlike tendency. ”

“ In this light it is evident that Russia is making progress toward that high destiny which is written across the face of things as they are within her imperial boundaries to-day. The great natural resources of the country are being conserved as well as developed. Method marks the cutting of timber, even with the countless miles of forest yet to draw upon, and forestration is even now a feature of treeless areas. Restrictions upon the acquisition of land are all in the interests of actual settlers. The Russianizing of the whole empire is proceeding with marked rapidity. ”

“ But they are no more representative of their class than the get-rich-quick swindlers, to whom the post-office authorities forbid the mails, represent the honest business of the land.
There is evil enough abroad in the streets. Its touch, with all that is cheap and tawdry and vulgar, from the perennial cigarette to the vile bar-room and worse that open upon it, sharpens the lad’s wits and too often tends to dull his morals. Seen from that angle, he gives the philanthropist concern with cause. Despite child-labor laws, he is on the street at too early an age and too late an hour. ”

“ THE furthest limit to which the national organizations will go in the way of outside regulation is to allow a representation of non-fraternity members of the faculty on their boards—a minority, I judge. On the other hand, they freely admit the more obvious faults of their system, and declare their earnest purpose of self-regulation. They even admit that these measures are defensive; they feel that their system is threatened. ”

“ MISS RICKERT’S article, “The Fraternity Idea among College Women,” in the November number, developed the argument that women’s fraternities like men’s are aristocratic, in that they are self-perpetuating and destructive to freedom of intercourse; that they stand for the privilege of one as against the common rights of all; that the benefits that they claim to bestow upon members are exaggerated, even in the case of individuals, and do not counterbalance the two evils which are inherent in the system and cannot be done away with by regulation from without or reform from within ”

“ From the thick branches, which were not so very high in that high place, grown people took packages marked with names. There were little Robin Hood costumes for several of the children, with feathered caps and feathered bows, and a Cupid’s dress of white gauze and filmy wings for the four-year-old cherub, and green mantles for every one, that slipped over the head, and wreaths of fresh green vines for the hair. The living tree gave up toys and tinsel and everything, as other trees, that have given up their lives, have never been known to do. ”

“ Through him the world becomes more of a kin; he opens the road to civilization with all its equalizing and protective features, and, having served as the pioneer, is then regulated through the influences which follow in the wake of his adventures. Despoiling the weak is no longer the unrebuked spirit of strong nations, and international neutralization is gradually spreading its protecting influence over a large part of the earth’s surface. It is from the point of national wealth and national character, therefore, that the near future of every country must now be judged. ”