his hands in, who has to exercise brain and arm. It is not the jackdaw with the peacock's feathers tied on to his tail, who flaunts them round so overpoweringly, on whom they ever grew. "Let no man deceive you, O Oom and Tante; it is not the men and women revelling in a surfeit of the material products of the labour of others, and scorning you because you have them not, who ever made the very material civilization they boast of. It is not the people scorning your little simple work and life, who could do even that which you can do. It is not the woman lolling back in her double-springed carriage who has the knowledge or invention or perseverance to originate or manufacture one of all those endless materials which cling about her; it was the Hindoo with a cotton cloth about his loins toiling at his loom for twopence a day who made the diaphanous muslin she wears; and the loom on which it was woven and the thread of which it is made were invented by his swarthy-skinned ancestors generations ago. The fairy frill upon her petticoat was sewn on by a needle-girl between snatches of weak tea and bread and butter and fits of coughing. It is not the general, gorgeous in gold lace and trappings, who could make even the jacket he wears; the fine steel dust from the sword at his side cost the life of the man who made it; it is the general's to sport, nothing more. It is out of the labour of hands grimed and hard as yours, and the toils of brains more weary than yours have ever been, that this material civilization is built up. If you accept it for you and yours, know what it is you are accepting. _Do not mistake the cat that laps the milk for the cow that gave it._ When you open a wild bees' nest and find inside a Death's-head moth, you are never fool enough to believe it had anything to do with the making of the honey: you know it is there to feed and--destroy. O Oom, O Tante, do not mistake the Death's-head moths of our civilization for the makers of its honey, or for the honey itself. "Art, literature, science, the mastery over material conditions, whatsoever there is in this nineteenth-century civilization that strengthens the arm, or widens the heart, and broadens the intellect, and makes fuller the joy of life--extract it and make it yours. "In our nineteenth-century civilization there is a little kernel of things rare and good and great, that have come down to us through the centuries, and that brave souls of labour have added their little quota of matter to even in our day. If you must crack the nut of our nineteenth-century civilization, we pray of you eat only this little kernel and throw away the great painted shell. For God's sake, do not try to eat the shell and throw away the kernel.