the forest, dwelling now in tents, and now in some rude cabin, being a
wanderer upon the face of the earth--until, when children came, she
remained behind and dwelt apart. At last the naturalist came home
after long absence to fulfill the long-cherished dream of years of
quiet study with wife and children, but found that the mice had eaten
his drawings and destroyed the sketches he had left behind. Then was
he dumb with grief and dazed with pain, but it was his brave wife who
led him to the gate and thrust him forth into the forest and sent him
out upon his mission, saying that there was no valley so deep nor no
wilderness so distant but that his thought, turning homeward, would see
the light burning brightly for him. And in those dark days when our
land trembled, and a million men from the north tramped southward and a
million men from the south tramped northward, and the columns met with
a concussion that threatened to rend the land asunder, there, in the
battle, midst the din and confusion and blood, women walked, angels of
light and mercy, not merely holding the cup of cold water to famished
lips, or stanching the life-blood until surgeons came, but teaching
soldier boys in the dying hour the way through the valley and beyond it
up the heavenly hills. These all fulfilled their mission and
"remembered those in bonds as bound with them."

This principle also has been and is the spring of all progress in
humanity and civilization. Our journalists and orators pour forth
unstinted praise upon the achievements of the nineteenth century. But
in what realm lies our supremacy? Not in education, for our schools
produce no such thinkers or universal scholars as Plato and his
teacher; not in eloquence, for our orators still ponder the periods of
the oration "On the Crown;" not in sculpture or architecture, for the
broken fragments of Phidias are still models for our youth. The nature
of our superiority is suggested when we speak of the doing away with