"Work is worship," said the old monks who carried the cross into the Western wilds despite all hardships, in defiance of all dangers--men for whom life was no Momusmasque, but a battle and a march, men who sacrificed all for other's sake, accepting without a sigh disease and death as worldly reward. Those monks were real men, and real men are ever the world's heroes and its hope. The soul of a real man is never hidden behind the cowardly superficies of policy or expediency--his heart is an open book which he who runs may read. Deceive he cannot, for the lie blooms only on the lips of cowards. Public opinion he may treat with kingly contempt, but self-respect is dearer to him than life, though dowered with a monarch's scepter and all the wealth of Ormus and of Ind. There's something in the words of a woman, spoken during the civil war, which indicates that despite all artificiality and folly, beneath the cheap gilding and showy lacquer of life, the heart of the race still beats steady and strong; that above the infinitude of goose-speech and the trumpeting of tin- horns on the housetops may still be heard "the ever-pealing tones of old Eternity." From out the mad hell of the fight a wounded hero was borne to the hospital. Neither pain nor approaching death could break the courage of that heart of oak, but a prurient little preacher, one of those busy smooth-bore bigots whose mission seems to be to cast a shadow on the very sun, convinced the stricken man that he was an awful sinner, whereupon he began crying out that he was doomed to be damned. The nurse, a muscular woman who believed with the old monks that "work is worship," took the parson by the pendulous 8 x 10 ear, led him aside and sweetly said: "Mr. Goody Two-Shoes, if I catch you in this ward again I'll throw you out of the window." The brimstone peddler felt that he had an urgent "call" to other fields. He stood not upon the order of his going, but hit the dim and shadowy distance like Nancy Hanks. He couldn't even wait to pray for his persecutor or take up a collection. In vain the nurse strove to soothe her patient by telling him that the man who gave his life for his native land cannot miss heaven's mercy--he but wailed the louder that he was lost. "You came to me a hero," she cried, "and you shall not leave me a coward. If you must go to hell, go like a man." If Romans nursed by a she-wolf became demigods, what might not Americans be sprung from the loins of such a lioness! Milton has almost made Satan respectable by endowing him with an infernal heroism, by making him altogether and irremediably bad, instead of a moral mugwump--by giving him a heart for any fate instead of picturing him as willing to wound and yet afraid to strike. . . .