This morning I looked from my windows upon the river. The sharp lights I had watched so often swiftly changing to shadows, the warring glances suggestive only of inner strife, with all its complexity of passion, were lost in the soft peaceful flow of the waters as they hurried on to the ultimate sea. And I thought how much of this mood is due to fancy, that untenable, mercurial, and sublimated quality of the mind, half trickery, half truth, and altogether elusive as vapor. But how profligate of that precious sense of pleasure so steadily withheld from my heart these later months! Too precious, indeed, for the operations and experiments of the mental laboratory to which I seemingly so recklessly submitted it, and so I dismissed analysis and clung to my fancies, which at least made me happy in the present. After my breakfast I prepared myself for a walk, with only my little fox-terrier for a companion. Poor little Boston, how grateful he seemed! I could see him laugh with joy as his little brown lips quivered with flexible feeling. Notwithstanding his many years, he could scarcely find footing for his bounding steps for looking back at me to search my laughing eyes. You remember who gave me my terrier, away out in Denver? how he was brought to me in two strong, guardful arms, a little loose-skinned, wise-eyed puppy, so quiet and serenely happy in the warm embrace—where was I? oh, yes! talking about Boston—so we pulled some roses, Boston and I. But never looked roses so red, or green so tender or so vivid, and I longed to find the secret of their voluptuous bloom and half-suffocating fragrance, but that I guessed all was again fancy; only an easy, translatable pinch of dust and a resolvable stain; a simple stroke of creative power and a dash of ether—only a rose. How easy seem the processes of nature with harmonized material for working out the thought! Nature never experiments; gravitation is her law, deflection is anarchy, and defiance a destroyer. Love, I deem, is only obedience to this law. Obscure as are its operations and subtle as its teachings are, any smallest portion of scholarship, leveled at the finding out, divested of preconceived ideas and personal bearings, but persistently and conscientiously agitated by scientific and organized effort, might revolutionize a world of error, and establish a sure basis for sentiment and social reform. For I believe that unhappy marriages are a direct result of ignorance. Passions called by various names go to make up the system. Sordidness, vanity, interdependence, weak abeyance to custom, contribute to the sum of human misery. But ignorance is the basis of the organized error. For what manner of men or women would deliberately entail upon themselves the shackled conditions of a loveless marriage, which has no alternative but subordination or rebellion? For only in love—another name for harmony—may be found that unity which leaves no room for sacrifice or misconceit.