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Rh, without reflection—"whitewash it, that's the way to improve it." She looked out of the window; there stood a pail of paint just handy, so she took it and did the deed; and in half an hour she had hidden from the sight of his posterity the loving, painstaking labour of a man who was dead and could not rise to interfere. Because somebody else improved a dirty wall with white-wash, she thought she could improve a dirty carving in the same way; because somebody else hid accidental scratches with whitewash, she hid, with paint, marks made by the loving care of a skilled carver.

Now if the woman's own father had carved the chest, if she remembered seeing him, when she was a child, working at it evening after evening, then, after he was dead, when it grew dirty and the dust began to clog the pattern, she would have carefully and lovingly brushed out the dust so as to make the pattern show. But she had not actually seen any one at work on it therefore it never occurred to her to remember that somebody must have thought it worth while to spend time over the doing of it. It never occurred to her that she was blotting out the memory of the carver by destroying his work.

Here, then, is one clear principle by which to judge when to destroy memorials of the past, and how to refresh such as we decide to preserve. We should cultivate "that power of imagination which forms so large a part of the Divine Charity," by learning to think sometimes of our remote ancestors as if they were our immediate parents, and of the ancestors of others as if they were our own. We reverently consign to the fire many things possessed or made by our own parents, which had