I sail through the realms of the long ago,
Wafted by fancy and visions frail,
On the river Time with its gentle flow,
In a silver boat with a golden sail.

My dreams, in the silence are hurrying by
On the brooklet of Thought where I let them flow,
And the “lilies nod to the sound of the stream”
As I sail through the realms of the long ago.

On the shores of life’s deep-flowing stream
Are my countless sorrows and heartaches, too,
And the hills of hope are but dimly seen,
Far in the distance, near heaven’s blue.

I find that my childish thoughts and dreams
Lie strewn on the sands by the cruel blast
That scattered my hopes on the restless streams
That flow through the mystic realms of the past.

Pointers for the Lords of Creation

Some wit has said that the worst vice in the world is advice, and it is also quite true that one ignorant, though well-meaning person can sometimes accomplish more damage in a short time, than a dozen people who start out for the purpose of doing mischief.

The newspapers and periodicals of to-day are crowded with advice to women, and while much of it is found in magazines for women, written and edited by men, it is also true that a goodly quantity of it comes from feminine writers; it is all along the same lines, however, the burden of effort being to teach the weaker sex how to become more attractive and more lovable to the lords of creation. It is, of course, all intended for our good, for if we can only please the men, and obey their slightest wish even before they take the trouble to mention the matter, we can then be perfectly happy.

A man can sit down any day and give us directions enough to keep us busy for a lifetime, and we seldom or never return the compliment. This is manifestly unfair, and so this little preachment is meant for the neglected and deserving men, and for them only, so that all women who have read thus far are invited to leave the matter right here and turn their attention to the column of “Advice to Women” which they can find in almost any periodical.

In the first place, gentlemen, we must admit that you do keep us guessing, though we do not sit up nights nor lose much sleep over your queer notions.

We can’t ask you many questions, either, dear brethren, for, as you know, you rather like to fib to us, and sometimes we are able to find it out, and then we never believe you any more.

We may venture, however, to ask small favours of you, and one of these is that you do not wear red ties. You look so nice in quiet colours that we dislike exceedingly to have you make crazy quilts of yourselves, and that is just what you do when you begin experimenting with colours which we naturally associate with the “cullud pussons.”

And a cane may be very ornamental, but it’s of no earthly use, and we would rather you would not carry it when you go out with us.

Never tell us you haven’t had time to come and see us, or write to us, because we know perfectly well that if you wanted to badly enough, you would take the time, so the excuse makes us even madder than does the neglect. Still, when you don’t want to come, we would not have you do it for anything.

There is an old saying that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” – so it does – of the other fellow. We don’t propose to shed any tears over you; we simply go to the theatre with the other man and have an extremely good time. When you are very, very bright, you can manage some way not to allow us to forget you for a minute, nor give us much time to think of anything else.

When we are angry, for heaven’s sake don’t ask us why, because that shows your lack of penetration. Just simply call yourself a brute, and say you are utterly unworthy of even our faint regard, and you will soon realise that this covers a lot of ground, and everything will be all right in a few minutes.

And whatever you do, don’t show any temper yourself. A woman requires of a man that he shall be as immovable as the rock of Gibraltar, no matter what she does to him. And you play your strongest card when you don’t mind our tantrums – even though it’s a state secret we are telling you.

Don’t get huffy when you meet us with another man; in nine cases out of ten, that’s just what we do it for. And don’t make the mistake of retaliating by asking another girl somewhere. You’ll have a perfectly miserable time if you do, both then and afterward.

When you do come to see us, it is not at all nice to spend the entire evening talking about some other girl. How would you like to have the graces of some other man continually dinned into your ears? Sometimes we take that way in order to get a rest from your overweening raptures over the absent girl.

We have a well-defined suspicion that you talk us over with your chums and compare notes. But, bless you, it can’t possibly hold a candle to the thorough and impartial discussions that some of you get when girls are together, either in small bevies, or with only one chosen friend. And we don’t very much care what you say about us, for a man never judges a woman by the opinion of any one else, but another woman’s opinion counts for a great deal with us, so you would better be careful.

If you are going to say things that you don’t mean, try to stamp them with the air of sincerity – if you can once get a woman to fully believe in your sincerity, you have gone a long way toward her heart.

Haven’t you found out that women are not particularly interested in anecdotes? Please don’t tell us more than fifteen in the same evening.

And don’t begin to make love to us before you have had time to make a favourable impression along several lines – a man, as well as a woman, loses ground and forfeits respect by making himself too cheap.

If a girl runs and screams when she has been caught standing under the mistletoe, it means that she will not object; if she stiffens up and glares at you, it means that she does. The same idea is sometimes delicately conveyed by the point of a pin. But a woman will be able to forgive almost anything which you can make her believe was prompted by her own attractiveness, at least unless she knows men fairly well.

You know, of course, that we will not show your letters, nor tell when you ask us to marry you and are refused. This much a woman owes to any man who has honoured her with an offer of marriage – to keep his perfect trust sacredly in her own heart. Even her future husband has no business to know of this – it is her lover’s secret, and she has no right to betray it.

Keeping the love-letters and the offers of marriage from any honourable man safe from a prying world are points of honour which all good women possess, although we may sometimes quote certain things from your letters, as you do from ours.

There’s nothing you can tell a woman which will please her quite so much as that knowing her has made you better, especially if you can prove it by showing a decided upward tendency in your morals. That’s your good right bower, but don’t play it too often – keep it for special occasions.

There’s one mistake you make, dear brethren, and that is telling a woman you love her as soon as you find it out yourself, and the most of you will do that very thing. There is one case on record where a man waited fifteen minutes, but he nearly died of the strain. The trouble is that you seldom stop to consider whether we are ready to hear you or not, nor whether the coast is clear, nor what the chances are in your favour. You simply relieve your mind, and trust in your own wonderful charms to accomplish the rest.

And we wish that when the proper time comes for you to speak your mind you’d try to do it artistically. Of course you can’t write it, unless you are far away from her, for if you can manage an opportunity to speak, a resort to the pen is cowardly. And don’t mind our evading the subject – we always do that on principle, but please don’t be scared, or at least don’t show it, whatever you may feel. If there is one thing a woman dislikes more than another it is a man who shows cowardice at the crucial point in life.

Every man, except yourself, dear reader, is conceited. And one particular sort of it makes us very, very weary. You are so blinded by your own perfections, so sure that we are desperately in love with you, that you sometimes give us little unspoken suggestions to that effect, and then our disgust is beyond words.

Another cowardly thing you sometimes do, and that is to say that we have spoiled your life – that we could have made you anything we pleased – and that you are going straight to perdition. If one woman is all that keeps you from going to ruin, you have secured a through ticket anyway, and it’s too late to save you. You don’t want a woman who might marry you only out of pity, and you are not going to die of a broken heart. Men die of broken vanity, sometimes, but their hearts are pretty tough, being made of healthy muscle.

You get married very much as you go down town in the morning. You run, like all possessed, until you catch your car, and then you sit down and read your newspaper. When you think your wife looks unusually well, it would not hurt you in the least to tell her so, and the way you leave her in the morning is going to settle her happiness for the day, though she may be too proud to let you know that it makes any difference. Women are quick to detect a sham, and they don’t want you to say anything that you don’t feel, but you are pretty sure to feel tenderly toward her sometimes, careless though you may be, and then is the time to tell her so. You don’t want to wait until she is dead, and then buy a lily to put on her coffin. You’d better bring her the lily some time when you’ve been cross and grumpy.

But don’t imagine that a present of any kind ever atones for a hurt that has been given in words. There’s nothing you can say which is more manly or which will do you both so much good as the simple “forgive me” when you have been wrong.

Rest assured, gentlemen, that you who spend the most of your evenings in other company, and too often find fault with your meals when you come home, are the cause of many sorrowful talks among the women who are wise enough to know, even though your loyal wife may put up a brave front in your defense.

How often do you suppose the brave woman who loves you has been actually driven in her agony to some married friend whom she can trust and upon her sympathetic bosom has cried until she could weep no more, simply because of your thoughtless neglect? How often do you think she has planned little things to make your home-coming pleasant, which you have never noticed? And how often do you suppose she has desperately fought down the heartache and tried to believe that your absorption in business is the reason for your forgetfulness of her?

Do you ever think of these things? Do you ever think of the days before you were sure of her, when you treasured every line of her letters, and would have bartered your very hopes of heaven for the earthly life with her?

But perhaps you can hardly be expected to remember the wild sprint that you made from the breakfast table to the street-car.

Transition

I am thy Pleasure. See, my face is fair —
With silken strands of joy I twine thee round;
Life has enough of stress – forget with me!
Wilt thou not stay? Then go, thou art not bound.

I am thy Pastime. Let me be to thee
A daily refuge from the haunting fears
That bind thee, choke thee, fill thy soul with woe.
Seek thou my hand, let me assuage thy tears.

I am thy Habit. Nay, start not, thy will
Is yet supreme, for art thou not a man?
Then draw me close to thee, for life is brief —
A little space to pass as best one can.

I am thy Passion. Thou shalt cling to me
Through all the years to come. The silken cord
Of Pleasure has become a stronger bond,
Not to be cleft, nor loosened at a word.

I am thy Master. Thou shalt crush for me
The grapes of truth for wine of sacrifice;
My clanking chains were forged for such as thee,
I am thy Master – yea, I am thy vice!

The Superiority of Man

Without pausing to inquire why savages and barbarians are capable of producing college professors, who sneer at the source from which they sprung, we may accept for the moment the masculine hypothesis of intellectual superiority. Some women have been heard to say that they wish they had been born men, but there is no man bold enough to say that he would like to be a woman.

If woman can produce a reasoning being, it follows that she herself must be capable of reasoning, since a stream can rise no higher than its fountain. And yet the bitter truth stares us in the face. We have no Shakespeare, Michelangelo, or Beethoven; our Darwins, our Schumanns are mute and inglorious; our Miltons, Raphaels, and Herbert Spencers have not arrived.

Call the roll of the great and how many women’s names will be found there? Scarcely enough to enable you to call the company mixed.

No woman in her senses wishes to be merely the female of man. She aspires to be distinctly different – to exercise her varied powers in wholly different ways. Ex-President Roosevelt said: “Equality does not imply identity of function.” We do not care to put in telephones or to collect fares on a street-car.

Primitive man set forth from his cave to kill an animal or two, then repaired to a secluded nook in the jungle, with other primitive men, to discuss the beginnings of politics. Primitive woman in the cave not only dressed his game, but she cooked the animal for food, made clothing of its skin, necklaces and bracelets of its teeth, passementerie of its claws, and needles of its sharper bones. What wonder that she had no time for an afternoon tea?

The man of the twentieth century has progressed immeasurably beyond this, but his wife, industrially speaking, has not gone half so far. Is she not still in some cases a cave-dweller, while he roams the highways of the world?

If a woman mends men’s socks, should he not darn her lisle-thread hosiery, and run a line of machine stitching around the middle of the hem to prevent a disastrous run from a broken stitch? If she presses his ties, why should he not learn to iron her bits of fine lace?

Some one will say: “But he supports her. It is her duty.”

“Yes, dear friend, but similarly does he ‘support’ the servant who does the same duties. He also gives her seven dollars every Monday morning, or she leaves.” Are we to suppose that a wife is a woman who does general housework for board and clothes, with a few kind words thrown in?

A German lady, whom we well knew, worked all the morning attending to the comforts of her liege lord. In the dining room he was stretched out in an easy chair, while the queen of his heart brushed and repaired his clothes – yes, and blacked his boots! Doubtless for a single kiss, redolent of beer and sausages, she would have pressed his trousers. Kind words and the fragrant osculation had already saved him three dollars at his tailor’s.

By such gold-brick methods, dear friends, do men get good service cheap. Would that we could do the same! Here, and gladly, we admit masculine superiority.

Our short-sightedness, our weakness for kind words, our graceful acceptance of the entire responsibility for the home, have chained us to the earth, while our lords soar. After having worked steadily for some six thousand years to populate the earth passably, some of us may now be excused from that duty.

Motherhood is a career for which especial talents are required. Very few women know how to bring up children properly. If you don’t believe it, look at the difference between our angelic offspring, and the little imps next door! It is as unreasonable to suppose that all women can be good mothers as it is to suppose that all women can sing in grand opera.

And yet, let us hug to our weary hearts, in our most discouraged moments, the great soul-satisfying truth that men, no matter what they say or write, think that we are smarter than they are. Otherwise, they would not expect of us so much more than they can possibly do themselves.

In every field of woman’s work outside the house, the same illustration applies. They also think that we possess greater physical strength. They chivalrously shield us from the exhausting effort of voting, but allow us to stand in the street-cars, wash dishes, push a baby carriage, and scrub the kitchen floor. Should we not be proud because they consider us so much stronger and wiser than they? Interruptions are fatal to their work, as the wife of even a business man will testify.

What would have become of Spencer’s Data of Ethics if, while he was writing it, he had two dressmakers in the house? Should we have had Hamlet, if at the completion of the first act Mr. Shakespeare had given birth to twins, when he had made clothes for only one?

The great charm of marriage, as of life itself, is its unexpectedness. The only way to test a man is to marry him. If you live, it’s a mushroom; if you die, it’s a toadstool!

Or, as another saying goes: “Happiness after marriage is like the soap in the bath-tub; you knew it was there when you got in.”

Man’s clothes are ugly, but the styles change gradually. A judge on the bench may try a case lasting two weeks, and his hat will not be hopelessly behind the times when it is finished. A man can stoop to pick up a fallen magazine without pausing to remember that his front steels are not so flexible this year as they were last.

He is not distressed by the fear that some other man may have a suit just like his, or that the neighbours will think it is his last year’s suit dyed.

We women fritter ourselves away upon a thousand unnecessary things. We waste our creative energies and our inspired moments upon pursuits so ephemeral that they are forgotten to-morrow. Our day’s work counts for nothing when tested by the standards of eternity. We are unjust, not only to ourselves, but to the men who strive for us, for civilisation must progress very slowly when half of us are dragged by pots and pans.

A house is a material fact, but a home is a fine spiritual essence which may pervade even the humblest abode. If love means harmony, why not try a little of it in the kitchen? Better a perfect salad than a poor poem; better a fine picture than an immaculate house.

The Year of My Heart

A sigh for the spring, full flowered, promised spring,
Laid on the tender earth, and those dear days
When apple blossoms gleamed against the blue!
Ah, how the world of joyous robins sang:
“I love but you, Sweetheart, I love but you!”

A sigh for summer fled. In warm, sweet air
Her thousand singers sped on shining wing;
And all the inward life of budding grain
Throbbed with a thousand pulses, while I cling
To you, my Sweet, with passion near to pain.

A sigh for autumn past. The garnered fields
Lie desolate to-day. My heart is chill
As with a sense of dread, and on the shore
The waves beat grey and cold, and seem to say:
“No more, oh, waiting soul, oh nevermore!”

A sigh for winter come. No singing bird,
Nor harvest field, is near the path I tread;
An empty husk is all I have to keep.
The largess of my giving left me bare,
And I ask God but for His Lethe – sleep.

The Average Man

The real man is not at all on the outskirts of civilisation. He is very much in evidence and everybody knows him. He has faults and virtues, and sometimes they get so mixed up that “you cannot tell one from t’other.”

He is erratic and often queer. He believes, with Emerson, that “with consistency a great soul has nothing to do.” And he is, of course, “a great soul.” Logical, isn’t it?

The average man thinks that he is a born genius at love-making. Henders, in The Professor’s Love Story, states it thus:

“Effie, ye ken there are some men ha’ a power o’er women… They’re what ye might call ‘dead shots.’ Ye canna deny, Effie, that I’m one o’ those men!”

Even though a man may be obliged to admit, in strict confidence between himself and his mirror, that he is not at all handsome, nevertheless he is certain that he has some occult influence over that strange, mystifying, and altogether unreasonable organ – a woman’s heart.

The real man is conceited. Of course you are not, dear masculine reader, for you are one of the bright particular exceptions, but all of your men friends are conceited – aren’t they?

And then he makes fun of his women folks because they spend so much time in front of the mirror in arranging hats and veils. But when a high wind comes up and disarranges coiffures and chapeaux alike, he takes “my ladye fair” into some obscure corner, and saying, “Pardon me, but your hat isn’t quite straight,” he will deftly restore that piece of millinery to its pristine position. That’s nice of him, isn’t it? He does very nice things quite often, this real man.

He says women are fickle. So they are, but men are fickle too, and will forget all about the absent sweetheart while contemplating the pretty girls in the street. For while “absence makes the heart grow fonder” in the case of a woman, it is presence that plays the mischief with a man, and Miss Beauty present has a very unfair advantage over Miss Sweetheart absent.

The average man thinks he is a connoisseur of feminine attractiveness. He thinks he has tact, too, but there never was a man who was blessed with much of this valuable commodity. Still, as that is a favourite delusion with so large a majority of the human race, the conceit of the ordinary masculine individual ought not to be censured too strongly.

The real man is quite an expert at flattery. Every girl he meets, if she is at all attractive, is considered the most charming lady that he ever knew. He is sure she isn’t prudish enough to refuse him a kiss, and if she is, she wins not only his admiration, but that which is vastly better – his respect.

If she hates to be considered a prude and gives him the kiss, he is very sweet and appreciative at the time, but later on he confides to his chum that she is a silly sort of a girl, without a great deal of self-respect!

There are two things that the average man likes to be told. One is that his taste in dress is exceptional; the other that he is a deep student of human nature and knows the world thoroughly. This remark will make him your lifelong friend.

Again, the real man will put on more agony when he is in love than is needed for a first-class tragedy. But there’s no denying that most women like that sort of thing, you, dear dainty feminine reader, being almost the only exception to this rule.

But, resuming the special line of thought, man firmly believes that woman cannot sharpen a pencil, select a necktie, throw a stone, drive a nail, or kill a mouse, and it is very certain that she cannot cook a beef-steak in the finished style of which his lordship is capable.

Yes, man has his faults as well as woman. There is a vast room for improvement on both sides, but as long as this old earth of ours turns through shadow and sunlight, through sorrow and happiness, men and women will forgive and try to forget, and will cling to, and love each other.