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Show IN THE HEAT OF YOUTH & Novelist's Recollections of Days Whea. Women Were All Queens. Why is it, I wonder, that we come Into the world so ill equipped for its exploration? ex-ploration? It seems to m6, as I look back upon my youth, that, in a certain way, my senses were fresher and keener then than they are now. And yet they wer& continually particularly in the matte? of girls playing the most unwarrani-able unwarrani-able pranks on me. Some alien fluid, of an intense and fiery kind, got mixed with them and made them subject to all sorts of unaccountable aberrations. It is a notorious fact that an electric ourrent will make the most excelleni compass behave in an irresponsible fash-Ion. fash-Ion. And yet, though the disturbing fluid which made my compass worthless was nearly always there, it has guidod me somehow wish tolerable safety a long distance across the trackless main. And I am not by any means sure that I would exchange it for a truer instrument, instru-ment, subject to fewer aberrations. Foi I take this very sensitiveness to electric influences to be a -proof of its exceeding fineness and excellence. Life would be a horrible dreary affair if theso magnetic currents which mako the needle tremble and swerve were banished or nonexistent nonexist-ent The dull, dead, stupid sanity whioh has no sympathy with folly and no gleam of potential madness is no doubt a stanch and reliable rudder, but I cannot forbear questioning whether to the soul thus equipped the voyage is worth making. Ulysses of 51d, middle aged though he was, had to stuff his ears with was lest he steer his ship into the jaws oi perdition, when the sirens sang so deli-ciously, deli-ciously, and hb did not exactly cover himself with glory during his visits to Circe and Calypw. But what very red blood he had, and how humanely his heart beat in every one of his manifold adventures! He never, like his ship mates, became a swam, and how nonl and manly was his bearing in the presence pres-ence of the lovely Nausicaa 1 There is something almost touching to me in seeing tho same sentiment which stirs my own bosom recorded thousands of years ago. And, truth to tell, the man whose pulse is aubject to no irregularities and whose judgment registers no aberrations in the presence of a beautiful woman is, in my opinion, "fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. " H. H. Boyesen in Lippincott'a |