Only have a little more imagination and you will be tolerant and kindly and ready to make excuses not only for those you love, which is easy, but for those you dislike, which, as everyone knows, is a much harder matter. The “little more” will make Kate shut her mouth again the next time it flies open to let out a rude, abrupt, or unreasonable word. It will make Eliza pay that little account she has been owing for the last six months without a thought in all that time of the dressmaker needing the money. It will make Maggie give up grumbling that Beatrice writes to her so seldom, as if Beatrice has the leisure,--she the eldest of a great bunch of sisters and her mother an invalid. It will make Eva cut her visit short next time she calls on Alice, so leaving hard-worked Alice to get through her school tasks for the morrow without sitting up to all hours of the night. In fact, what will it not do in the way of giving smoothness to the wheels of life? Imagination is a first-rate faculty by which to obtain a look at ourselves, and when we get a little more of it, it is like turning up the gas to get a clearer view. We see ourselves then as others see us, and a pretty exhibition it sometimes is. If a girl is vain, frivolous, whimsical, selfish, vulgar, mean, she in this way gets to know it. There is thus always hope for the imaginative--they can realise what they are, and, without self-knowledge, what chance of reformation is there for anybody? Our friend Josephine, for example, came to us the other day, keen on being an authoress; but Josephine, it is clear, has next to no imagination. With only a few grains of it, she would have seen that becoming an authoress is for her impossible, because what she wants is publishers’ and editors’ cheques and what she does not want is trouble. A well-trained imagination--not one inclined to run riot; no, certainly not that sort of a one--is of great assistance in enabling us rightly to sum up people and things. Our critical faculties are worth little and only lead us into mischief and mistakes without it. Possessed of only a “little more,” not a few of us would often be saved from being misled by appearances and enabled to steer clear of the troubles that come from drawing wrong inferences. The world is a difficult enough world to live in, for things are but seldom what they seem, and some art, like this one we are talking about, is needed by which we can illuminate life and get at the real essence of all that interests us. Another use of imagination is in the reading of books, and on this subject no one has written better than the late Professor Blackie, who held very decided opinions about the importance of having the imaginative faculty properly trained.