St. Theresa seems to have been a sort of Moyen-Age Hedda Gabler; no better than an ecclesiastic flirt. Go through the whole list and the story is always the same. One never hears of a person with a sense of humour--which implies a sense of proportion--setting up as a saint. The breath in the nostrils of these gentry is the stare of the unthinking multitude, who are awed by anything out of the ordinary. And yet it takes so much finer patience, so much greater self-abnegation, to do the plain duties of life. I feel far more like crossing myself when I look at the humble commuter, who has sat on a stool all day, and travels with his arms full of parcels to that cheap, draughty cottage in the cold dusk of Lonelyville, to listen patiently to Emily's recitals of Johnny's cut finger and Mary Ann's impudence. It is upon such as he that civilization and the world's happiness and sunshine depend. He has done a man's duties; upon him depends a helpless woman, and innocent children. His tedious, petty drudgeries rise to nobility compared with the lives of these fat and lazy grubs with their complines and sexts and primes. St. Theresa seems vulgar to me contrasted with the anxious Emily cheapening chops at the butcher's, and fighting around the bargain counter to make her laborious commuter's meagre salary stretch over the needs of her family. It requires a finer and sweeter, a more saintly nature to walk the floor patiently with a teething baby than to pose as a saint on the floor to no one's benefit but one's own. Ah, those humble, lovely souls bearing the whips and scorns of Time, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes--their commonplace daily halos make the saints' diadems look like imitation jewels. January 1, 1900. The Zeitgeist. Back from the gates of the City of Life there runs a great highway, whose beginning is in the land--east of the sun and west of the moon--where the unborn dwell. It is a broad and well-trodden road; beaten smooth by the feet of the hurrying generations that tread sharp upon one another's heels as they press forward out of grey and airless nothingness into the warm atmosphere of existence. By the side of this road lies a chimæra, with woman's breasts couched upon lion's paws. It is the old direful Questioner of Thebes; the Propounder of Riddles; the prodigious Asker of Enigmas. Before entering the gates of the City the jostling multitude must pause in their furious haste towards life and listen to her as she propounds to each generation her problem. Every generation guesses at the riddle with fear or hope, with timidity or courage, as its nature may be, and then rushes on within the gates, not knowing if it has guessed aright, but with the task laid upon it of living out its life by the light of that answer, let the result be what it will.