When one comes to know an animal well--say a horse or a cow or a dog--and sees how sensibly it acts, following the rules of conduct laid down by the wisdom of its kind, one cannot help wondering how much happier, and healthier, and better, human beings would be if they used the discretion of the animals. For ages men have been taught what is good for their bodies and their minds and their souls. There has been no question about the wisdom of being temperate and industrious and honest and kind; and the folly of immoderation and laziness and chicanery and meanness is so well known that a geometrical proposition has not been more definitely proved. Yet only a few people in any community observe the rules of life, and of these few no one observes them all; and so misery and pain and poverty and anguish are as a pestilence among men, and they wonder why they are living in such a cruel world. It was Eli Martin who, back in the seventies, won the prize in the Bethel neighbourhood for reciting more chapters of the Old Testament than any other child in Sunday-school; and the old McGuffey's Reader that he used on week-days was filled with moral tales; but someway when it came to applying the rules he had learned, and the moral that the stories pointed, Eli Martin lacked the sense of a dog or a horse. Once, when the paper contained an account of one of Red Martin's police court escapades, George Kirwin recalled that, when we offered a prize during the Christmas season of 1880, for the best essay by a child under twelve, it was Ethelwylde Swaney who won the prize with an essay on the Weakness of Vanity; and she married Eli Martin when she and the whole town knew what he was. Naturally one would suppose that two persons so full of theoretical wisdom would have applied it, and that in applying it they would have been the happiest and most useful people in all the town; but instead they were probably the most miserable people in town, and Mrs. Martin, whom we knew better than Red, because she once had worked in the office, was forever bemoaning what she called her "lot," though we knew for many years that her "lot" was not the result of the fates against her, but merely the inevitable consequence of her temperament. Before we put in linotypes and set our type by machinery it was set by girls. Usually we employed half-a-dozen, who came from the town high school. They kept coming and going, as girls do who work in country towns, getting married in their twenties or finding something better than printing, and it is likely that in ten years as many as fifty girls have worked in the office, and be it said to the credit of the girls--which cannot be said of so many of the boys and men who have worked in the shop--that they were girls we were proud of--all but Ethelwylde Swaney.