tends to the contact with the "wart-toadstool" in New Hampshire, and to the touch of the excrescences that have the appearances of warts on trees in New England. From Marquette, Michigan, comes a cure for warts in three weeks by killing a toad and putting its blood on them. Rubbing them on a toad impaled on a short stick is a cure for warts noted by Black. That killing a toad brings as many warts as the animal has spots, and that it dries up the milk of cows, are sayings still heard in New York and New England.

The secretion of an acrid fluid used by them in defending themselves is suggested by some as the basis for the widespread belief in the poisonous character of the toad. In Macbeth its "swelter'd venom" came from sleeping thirty-one days and nights under coldest stone, and it was the first thing the witches put in the cauldron. In Othello the toad is said to live on the vapors of a dunghill. Dryden told of a woman bad enough to squeeze a toad in her husband's wine. Spenser made envy ride upon a wolf and chew a venem us toad between his cankerous teeth. Richard III. was "the foul hunch-backed toad," and Milton squat Satan like a toad close to the ear of Eve, assaying with his devilish art to reach the organs of her fancy.

Malays say it is dangerous to approach a horned toad of the jungle and wherever it takes up its abode trees and plants die. To injure one Tuscan witches tied a hair from his head to the left leg of a toad, and death followed the death of the toad. Conjurors in Georgia put the powdered head of a dried toad-frog in the victuals of one they would injure, which comes to life in the stomach and eats up the victim, while the Cherokee witch can change the food in a man's stomach into a frog. When the death-dealing cockatrice was believed in it was hatched by a toad from a cock's egg. Yet if you treat kindly and feed on bread and wine a toad in the house it may prove to be some powerful genius or lord under a curse, who, if not well treated, may come

at night and spit on the offender's eyes, wounding them so that they never heal.

The fossil bufonite was long supposed to be obtained from toads. Shakespeare wrote of the toad ugly and venomous with a precious jewel in its head, and Ben Jonson of a saffron jewel with a toadstone in it. Toadstone was credited with the power of protecting newborn children from the fairies. Joanna Baillie wrote to Walter Scott that one had been repeatedly borrowed from her mother for that purpose. Immersed in water and the water drunk it cured diseased kidneys. Worn in a ring it protected the wearer and detected the presence of poison by perspiring and changing color. It was supposed to be found most commonly in the heads of male toads, but was most difficult to obtain. If the stone was genuine and it was held before a toad the animal leaped after it. It was sought after by many devices. Boethius is said to have watched in vain a night through for a toad to drop the stone from its head on to a scarlet cloth upon which he had placed it.

St. Augustine, who divided all creatures into the useful, harmful and superfluous, placed frogs among the last, but centuries earlier they were medicine for the morals if the old Roman author is correct, who said that a live one applied to a woman's heart while she slept made her tell the truth. There is a similar saying from the Weish, only it is man instead of woman that is brought to confession.

As a healer the small, unattractive batrachian has lost its prestige, but verily the toad has come into its own heritage. We know that it has never harmed child or man. It is the friend of farmer, fruitgrower and florist, and the foe of everything living that is noxious and destroying. which is small enough for it to eat, and it has really earned, by its great service in the destruction of pestilence-bearing insects, honorable mention as a potent factor in preventive medicine.

BY THEIR WORKS

YE SHALL KNOW THEM.

By Henry Young Ostrander, M.D.

He was an artist by instinct and aspiration; a painter and decorator by necessity. and a Lutheran evangelist by conviction and belief. His avocation as sign and banner designer afforded a pleasurable exercise of the more aesthetic ambitions of his pictoria! profession; his vocation provided him with a comfortable competence, by income derived from a steady trade employment; and his religious faith found a full and vigorous expression for the ardor of its enthusiasm by performing a militant song service in the choral ranks of a local Salvation Army.

He had been busily engaged for nearly a week in staining the shingles covering the roof and belfry of a neighboring church, and many a faithfully attending communicant of the vicinity had gazed with unconcealed pride and admiration at the glorifying effect which was being so signally achieved upon the external appearance of that sacred edifice. Many a passer-by, in fact, whose artistic education had been so vulgarly neglected as to deprive him of that visual delight from indulging his asthetic sensibilities in the chromatic harmony of such blending color-schemes, would yet pause to listen with rapturous attention to the enchanting concords of improvised offertory which were wont to accompany, with a veritably picturesque enhancement. the beatific "laying-on" of those spiritually appropriate pigments.

When the transfiguration of that House of Worship (at least upon the outside) was closely approaching the time of its full accomplishment, a unanimous vote of approval was accorded him, and the congregation voiced with universal acclaim its gratitude in unstinted approbation. Solicitations for his membership were importunately proffered, and the more sanctified scions of the flock impatiently awaited his advent within the élite shelter of their "exclusive" fold.

Now, it so happened, when this designing magician and wizard of the brush was thus working during these days of his sojourn among them, that this little Church of God was situated in a thickly populated, tenement-house district whose occupants and locality boasted proudly of their distinction in teeming with taverns dedicated to the patronage of the "Golden Buck."

The evangelistic policy of its resident ecclesiastical Settlements seemed to be that of intrusive aggression, and since the inhabitants of these debauched denizens of depravity would surely not come to them to get the Message, their mission must certainly be to carry its good tidings of great joy down unto those most desperately in need of it.

And so it came to pass, upon one of these regenerative expeditions of militant, gospel campaigning (a sort of belligerent crusade of conversion and martial siege of sin's citadels unto salvation) that this same worker of miracles in the realm of ornamentation was discovered by one of his former Chapel admirers, studiously concerned with the most exquisite, technical disposition of beaten gold-leaf upon the richly embossed letters of a Ballantine's Lager-Beer sign!

Yes, down on his knees, sweating at the devil's work, there they found him—consecrating the glory of his godly gift to the garish glamour of that "gilded hell!" Put there was no singing this time attending the performance; no sanctifying ecstasy of improvised voluntary held the casual passer-by rapturously entranced by psalmodic melody-for the operation was executed in grim and sombre silence. The hands of the trained artisan plied diligently at their "golden" task; but the fulvid opus was unhaloed by the aureole ring of a Soul accompaniment!

The skill of craftsmanship displayed was indisputably consummate, but the curse of its misapplication and perversion was a criminal offense. Yea, verily, he had stained the shingles of his Church unto loveliness and beauty, in the one case; but

he had “stained" the Soul of His Spirit's tabernacle-by attractively decorating a saloon-unto perdition, in the other!

Deacons, elders, and trustees howled forth their righteous protestation against the impious infamy of such ignoble conduct, and officially excommunicated him from within the pale of their holy sanctuary. The infallible discernment and forbidding dignity of that decorous body had been implacably insulted, and by sacred edict he was peremptorily expelled. "bill of charge" for "services rendered" was immediately demanded, in order that the ledger of the Saints might bear no standing indebtedness incurred by any employment of a sinner!

His

Now, be it truly known, that this innocent man was a fervent-hearted, humbleminded worshipper, and it pained him sore

Exaltation of Heart

May bless Life by its Art, As our Vision of Beauty enlarges;

But such Labor of Love

Is "paid" only Above,

For the job of the Soul knows no "charges."

'Taint so much what we doNor where it is doneThat either avails or impales us;

It's the work we perform Which is invoiced as "Song" That truly reveals and exhales us.

So, maybe there'll be

A FORGIVENESS for me,

When the Master learns how I've aspired; Life's secret is told

By what's "given" not "sold"— LOVE'S service can never be "hired"!

THE THREE KINDS OF MEN. ROUGHLY speaking, there are three kinds of

his life had been "weighed" (and "found wanting!") by the means and method of his living; that the Message of his Creed had been appraised and interpreted upon a level with the labor of his craft! A vindictive retaliation for him was impossible, as the passion of vengeful resentment had been utterly unprovided for in the "Loving-Kindness" of the Galilean's philosophy; and so, in a chastening and mortifying humility, he suffered himself to be "despised and rejected."

After long years following the occurrence of this unfortunate episode, my friend had occasion, by sad necessity, to examine the accounts of his departed companion, and no written record whatsoever could he find of any "bill of charges" having been presented to this Church in question for "services rendered" in the capacity of "painter and decorator"; but there was a memorandum itemized as follows: "Received from Satan's Palace of Vice $25.00 for embellishing a Ballantine's Brewery advertisement, which sum I donated ANONYMOUSLY to the Holy Covenant of the Self-Sanctified Elect for the conversion of Home Missionaries"-and to this mutely eloquent inventory were carelessly appended these three significant stanzas:

are People; they are the largest and probably the most valuable class. We owe to this class the

chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and indeed (when we come to think of it) we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance to their family, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a desolation both to their family and also to mankind. Of course, the classifications sometimes overlapse like all classifications. Some good people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research.

The class called People, to which you and I, with no little pride, attach ourselves, has certain casual yet profound assumptions which are called commonplaces, as that children are charming, or that twilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting three is a fine sight. Now these feelings are not crude; they are not even simple. The charm of children is very subtle; it is even complex, to the extent of being almost contradictory.

It is, at its very plainest, mingled of a regard for hilarity and a regard for helplessness. The sentiment of twilight, in the vulgarest drawingroom song or the coarsest pair of sweethearts, is, so far as it goes, a subtle sentiment. It is strangely balanced between pain and pleasure; it might be called pleasure tempting pain.

The plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire a man fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately; it means many things-pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight in experiments, and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really very subtle ideas; but the mob does not express them subtly. In fact, it does not express them at all, except on those occasions, now only too rare, when it indulges in insurrection and massacre. Now this accounts for the otherwise unreasonable fact of the existence of Poets. Poets are those who share these popular sentiments, but can so express them that they prove themselves the strange and delicate things that they really are. Poets draw out the shy refinement of the rabble. Where the common man covers the queerest emotions by saying, "Rum little kid," Victor Hugo will write "L'ait d'etre grandpère;" where the stock broker will only say abruptly, "Evening's closing in now," Mr. Yeates will write "Into the twilight;" where the navvy can only mutter something about pluck and being "precious game," Homer will show you the hero in rags in his own hall defying the princes at their banquet. The Poets carry the popular sentiment to a keener and more splendid pitch; but let it always be remembered that it is the popular sentiment that they are carrying. No man ever wrote any good poetry who showed that childhood was shocking, or that twilight was gay and farcical, or that a man was contemptible because he had crossed his single sword with three. The people who maintain this are the Professors or Prigs.

The Poets are those who rise above the people by understanding them. Of course, most of the Poets wrote in prose; Rabelais, for instance, and Dickens. The Prigs rise above the people by refusing to understand them, by saying that all their dim, strange preferences are prejudices and superstition. The Prigs make the people feel stupid; the Poets make the people feel wiser than they would have imagined that they were. There are many weird elements in this situation. The oldest of all perhaps is the fate of the two factors in practical politics. The Poets who embrace and admire the people are often pelted with stones and crucified. The Prigs who despise the people are often loaded with lands and crowns. In the House of Commons, for instance, there are quite a number of prigs but comparatively few poets. There are no people there at all.

By poets, as I have said, I do not mean people who write poetry, or indeed people who write anything. I mean such people as, having culture and imagination, use them to understand and

share the feelings of their fellows, as against those who use them to rise to what they call a higher plane. Crudely, the poet differs from the mob by his sensibility; the professor differs from the mobs by his insensibility. He has not sufficient finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob. His only notion is coarsely to contradict it, to cut across it, in accordance with some egotistical plan of his own; to tell himself that, whatever the ignorant say, they are probably wrong. He forgets that ignorance often has the exquisite intuitions of innocence.

Let me take one example which may mark out the outline of the contention. Open the nearest comic paper and let your eye rest lovingly upon a joke about a mother-in-law. Now the joke, as presented for the populist, will probably be a simple joke; the old lady will be tall and stout, the hen-pecked husband will be small and cowering. But for all that a mother-in-law is not a simple idea. She is a very subtle idea. The problem is not that she is big and arrogant; she is frequently little and quite extraordinarily nice. The problem of the mother-in-law is that she is like the twilight; half the one thing and half another. In fact, a mother-in-law mixes up two incompatible ideas-law and a mother. Now this twilight truth, this fine and even tender embarrassment might be rendered, as it really is, by a poet, only here the poet would have to be some very penetrating and sincere novelist, like George Meredith or Mr. H. G. Wells, whose “Ann Veronica" I have just been reading with rapture. I would trust the fine poets and novelists because they follow the fairy clue given them in "comic cuts." But suppose the Professor appears and suppose he says (as he almost certainly will). "A mother-in-law is merely a fellow citizen. Consideration of sex should not interfere with comradeship. Regard for age should not influence the intellect. A mother-in-law is merely Another Mind. We should free ourselves from these tribal hierarchies and degrees." Now, when the Professor says this, as he always does. I say to him, “Sir, you are coarser than 'Comic Cuts.' You are more vulgar and blundering than the most elephantine music-hall artiste. You are blinder and grosser than the mob. These vulgar knockabouts have, at least, got hold of a social stage and real mental decision, though they can only express it clumsily. You are so clumsy that you cannot get hold of it at all. If you really cannot see that the bridegroom's mother and the bride have any reason for constraint or diffidence, then you are neither polite nor human; you have no sympathy in you for the deep and doubtful hearts of human folk." It is better even to put

the difficulty as the vulgar put it than to be pertly unconscious of the difficulty altogether. The real difficulty is not of course that the mother-in-law must be very bad. It is that she has to be very good.

The same question might be considered well enough in the old proverb that two is company and three is none. The proverb is the truth put popularly; that is, it is the truth put wrong. Certainly it is untrue that three is no company. Three is splendid company; three is the ideal number for pure comradeship, as in the “Three Musketeers." But if you reject the proverb altogether; if you say that two and three are the same sort of company; if you cannot see that three is a wider abyss between two and three than between three and three millions-then I regret to inform you that you belong to the third class of human beings; that you shall have no company either of two or three, but shall be alone in a howling desert till you die.

G. K. CHESTERTON, London Daily Mail.

LIFE AFTER DEATH.

WHATEVER we may begin with we almost inevitably go on, under the discipline of life, to more or less resigned acceptance of the grim fact that "science" takes no account of the soul, the principle we worry about, and that, as however nobly thinking and feeling creatures, we are abjectly and inveterately shut up in our material organs. We flutter away from that account of ourselves, on sublime occasion, only to come back to it with the collapse of our wings, and during much of our life the grim view, as I have called it, the sense of the rigor of our physical basis, is confirmed to us by overwhelming appearances. the mere spectacle, all about us, of personal decay, and of the decay, as seems, of the whole being, adds itself formidably to that of so much bloom and assurance and energy-the things we catch in the very fact of their material identity. There are times when all the elements and qualities that constitute the affirmation of the personal life here affect us as making against any apprehensible other affirmation of it. And that general observation and evidence abide with us and keep us company; they reenforce the verdict of the dismal laboratories and the confident analysis as to the inter-convertibility of our genius, as it comparatively is at the worst, and our brainthe poor palpable, ponderable, probeable, laboratory brain that we ourselves see in certain inevitable conditions-become as naught.-HENRY JAMES, in Harper's Bazar.

KARMA ON THE JOB.

PUT in everyday English, Karma is the law that whatever you have coming to you is bound to catch up with you sooner or later, and you can't sidestep it. It may be good, or it may be bad, or it may be a little of both, but it will find you, no matter how many times you have moved away without leaving your new address. And whatever it is it will be exactly what your own actions have made you deserve. Not an ounce more, nor an ounce less, nor a fraction thereof.

Some people call this law Nemesis. Some call it by other names. Some don't call it at all, but they don't need to. It comes without calling. Some people say they don't believe in it, and some scoff at it. But the law goes right on minding its own business and saying very little. Probably the majority of thinking people agree on this much-that somehow or other things are to be evened up in the long run; that we are all going to get our just deserts before the final gong sounds, if there is any. So suppose we let the word Karma stand for that idea and go ahead to see how the thing works out in the realm of modern business.

The principle that we are punished by our sins, not for them, is pretty evident anywhere, but if you want to see it working hard and fast and all the time just take a look into the average commercial concern. For quick returns in this Karma business, commend me to the marts of trade.-NAUTILUS.

A MAN does not come into the world to mould circumstance as though he were an outside force. He is himself part of circumstance; he was moulded by circumstance at his birth, and in the plastic years before he thought of self-management. On the whole, the scheme of things tends to produce beings that are useful to itself.-JOHN o' LONDON in T. P.'s Weekly.

NOTED TEA DRINKERS.

NAPOLEON, like Johnson, was a hardened tea drinker, and so, a century later, was Mr. Gladstone, who confessed "he drank more tea between midnight and 4 o'clock in the morning than any other member of the House of Commons, and that the strongest brew of it never interfered with his sleep."

The dish of tea was one of the most important factors in Johnson's life. Proficiency in the gentle art of tea brewing was regarded by him as an essential attribute of the perfect woman, and there