It was owing to his kindness that I found myself one blustery, raw day, ringing the door-bell of an ordinary well to-do brick house. Houses now and then carry on their fronts an inkling of their occupants. A door was opened, my card handed to a feminine hand; the aperture was not as yet wide enough to catch a glimpse of the face. The card was a power. “Come in,” said a woman’s voice, and the door was wide open. I followed the guide, and was soon in a plain, well furnished room, in presence of a motherly-looking woman. She was knitting; at least that is part of my memory’s picture. Near her hung a mocking-bird, whose notes now and then were peculiarly sad. Despite the graceful lines of the Cavalier Lovelace, iron bars do a prison make for bird and man. And the songs sung behind these bars are but bits of the crushed-out life. I was welcomed, and during busy years have held the remembrance of that visit with its hour of desultory chat and a mocking-bird’s broken song. The motherly-looking woman, with her strong Celtic face freshly furrowed by sorrow in the loss of beloved children, was a charming talker and a good listener, things rarely found in your gentle or fiery poetess. She had just published, under the initials M. A. B., a volume of children’s verse, and, as is natural with an author who had finished a piece of work, was full of it. The pretense of some authors that they are bored to speak of their own books is a sly suggestion to praise them for their humility. Mrs. Blake—for that is the motherly-looking woman’s name—spoke of her work without any hiccoughing gush or false modesty. Her eyes lit up, and the observer read in them honesty. She was deeply interested, as all thinking women must be, in the solution of the social problems that have arisen in our times, and will not be downed at the biddance of capitalist or demagogue. With her clear-cut intellect she was able to grasp a salient point, purposely hidden by the swarm of curists with their panacea remedies, that these problems must be solved in the light of religion. Man must return to Christ, not the “cautious, statistical Christ” paraded in the social show, not “The meteor blaze That soon must fail, and leave the wanderer blind, More dark and helpless far, than if it ne’er had shined,”