It is part of my good fortune in life to know a beautiful and lovable woman. She is as sweet, it seems to me, as any woman can be who has come into this world. She is good. She is not very rich, but she helps the needy as far as she can from her moderate purse. I have known her to attend at the bedside of a poor dying person when the doctor had told her that the trouble might be smallpox. I should say, at a venture, that this woman will go to heaven when she dies. But she will not go to heaven unless ignorance is an excuse for wickedness. If she does go there, it must be as the savage goes who knows no better than to do things which thoughtful people, to whom what is good has been taught, count as cruel and merciless. As the savage is a murderer, so is she the accomplice of a murderer, although it is possible that by the Great Judge neither may be so classified at the end, because of their lack of knowing. I met this lovable woman on the street the other day, and we walked and talked together. She had only good in her heart in all she was planning to do. She had taste for outlines and color, and she was very fair to look upon. Her dress--"tailor-made," I think the women call it--set off her perfect figure to advantage, and her hat was a symmetrical completion of the whole effect. It was a neat, well-proportioned whole, the woman and her toilet, which I, being a man, of course, cannot describe. One of her adornments was the head, breast, and wing of a Baltimore oriole, worn in her hat. I met this same woman again a day or two ago in another garb not less charming and artistic. We ate luncheon together, and it made life worth living to be with a creature so fair and good. In her hat this time was a touch of the sky when it lies over a great lake. It was the wing of a bluebird. I know--or knew--four birds, and to know a fair bird well is almost equal to knowing a fair woman well, though they have different ways. Two of these birds that I knew were orioles and two were bluebirds. The two orioles and the two bluebirds were husbands and wives. I stumbled upon them all last year. The bluebirds had a nest in a hole in a hard maple stump in a clearing in St. Clair County, Michigan. The orioles' nest was well woven in pear shape, dangling from close-swinging twigs at the end of an elm limb which hung over a creek in Orange County, Indiana. The male oriole attended faithfully to the wants of his soberer-hued wife sitting upon the four eggs in their nest. He was gorgeous all over, in his orange and black, and as faithfully and gallantly as the male bluebird did he regard his mate, and he was, if possible, even more jealous and watchful in his unwearied care of her.