Page:Pacific Monthly volumes 9 and 10.djvu/73



The Home

TKe Sinreet Aroma of I^ove—

It is partly true that the home life of the present day is not what it was in a former generation. No human life can be, under present conditions, what it was seventy-five or fifty years ago. Even the Chinaman is forced into the places and the ways of modern civiliza- tion.

No human being can live today as his grandfather. and great-grandfather lived. Civilization has been progres- sive. It stands today for something very different from that for which it stood in the years of the fathers. And the real home, in every generation, is found where there is the best type of civilization. It is in this view that home life has changed. There is much in modes of living today which is not conducive to home-making. The trend of business is fearfully exacting. The husband and father sleeps at the home. That is about all. Life in our over- crowded cities is artificial, it is not nat- ural.

Now, that which makes home real can never change. From the home at Bethany to that of the best type in the middle ranks of society as found today there have entered into the home the same never-changing elements. They need hardly be named. There can be no home without the sweet aroma of sacrificial love.

Geo. M, Gage,

TKe McCorRledx Veranda- Mr. McCorkledy and his neighbor, Mr. Martin, were sitting on the veranda steps in the bland after-glow of a mel- low October sunset, holding what they were pleased to call a "mothers' meet- ing,'* in other words, a conversation such as they often indulged in, with no other outcome than the helpless con- clusion that girls were girls, and their

mothers knew best how to manage *em — probably.

Breaking in upon this meeting, Do- ran Josephine came home in a rush, breathless and hungry, for it was long after dinner time. At this moment Mrs. McCorkledy appeared in the doorway, anxiously looking for them. A shower of admiring exclamations greeted her: "Mamma McCorkledy, how lovely vou look! That's your swell new gown! Where Ve you been ? Who've you seen ^ Did you have company at dinner?"

"Company! Well, I should say!" said Mr. McCorkledy, and Mrs. Mc- Corkledy, rosy herself, and eager as a girl, hurried on with the story. "Only think! It was an unexpected visit from my old friend, Elizabeth Earle, and her sister. Miss Boone Greene, from New York, on their way to Singapore. We hadn't met for years, you know; but they're just the same as ever, and it made twenty years ago seem like yes- terday to us all. Then we went to the train to see them off, which prolonged the precious visit by that much."

Doranjosephine wailed: "Oh, oh, oh! The real Elizabeth Earle! The one that wrote the great story! The one that everybody talks about! The one you went to school with! We could have seen her and talked with her. And Miss Boone Greene — the great Miss -Boone Greene — oh, why didn't you send for us ? We don't want any dinner now!"

"But you telephoned in the afternoon that you could not possibly get home to dinner, you know," said Mrs. McCork- ledy, gently. "You said you had a thou- sand places to go before seven o'clock, on that Sorority business, and couldn't put it off. And of course I could not send for you, for how could I tell where you were?"

Doranjosephine plunged into the house, in the direc^Jpi^d^f @G©ning