was not worth beginning.

A friend of mine who has written long, much, and, so far as I can
judge, always profitably, told me that in 1865 she wrought out what
was, to her apprehension, the most powerful book she ever composed,--a
story of the Civil War. She was a Unionist in every thought and
sentiment, and this she proclaimed; she had had unusual opportunities
of seeing behind the scenes of political intrigue, and she had
improved them. When the last chapter was written she carried the MS.
into her husband's study at dusk one evening, and began to read it
aloud to him. She finished it at two o'clock a.m. Her auditor would
not let her pause until then. Hoarse, but with a heart beating high
with excitement, she waited for the verdict. The husband walked up and
down the floor for some minutes, head bent and hands clasped behind
him, deep in thought. Finally he stopped in front of her.

"That is a marvelous book, my dear,--strong, true, dramatic. It will
sell well. It will make a noise in the world. But--_cui bono?_"

Chagrined, mortified, angry, the author took the words with her to her
room, and her brain tossed upon them as upon thorns all night. At dawn
she arose and put the MS. into the fire.

"I shudder to this day in thinking what would have been had I acted
differently," she says. "What I had written in a semi-frenzy of
patriotism would have been hot pincers, tearing open wounds which
humanity and religion would have taught me to heal."

Into many lives comes some such crisis, when the text I would bind
upon my reader's mind would act as a breakwater, and save more than