Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 95.djvu/219

Rh a taste for literary work may find here a pleasant way of beginning her literary career. These places came to me only after many years of the hardest kind of newspaper work. There has been a great influx of women into newspaper offices within the last decade, but I believe they will never be so numerous as reporters again. The life is too hard and too hardening. Women are not fitted for the rush-at-all-hours a reporter's life demands. There will always be a chance for them as editorial, fashion, household, society, and critical writers, but the time is soon coming when the reporters' ranks will be filled from the men's schools instead of from the girls'. Meanwhile the young woman of literary proclivities will work her way, either from the editor's desk, or from the quiet of her own particular corner at home,—as I should have done. Look around you and see if the women who have really succeeded with the pen have not been those who have kept off the newspaper staff.

I said, better off financially. But, after all, I doubt it. Had I remained in my country town, living sanely, thoughtfully, and helpfully to myself and others, I could have lived on less than half of what it has cost in the city. I should have had leisure for reading, walking, driving, and enjoying things, with ample time to write at regular hours. I should have arrived sooner at the point where I could command good prices for my work, and at the same time have given better, more enduring work. And I should have been younger in spirit, better in health, and more plethoric of pocket than I am to-day.

of a dewy morning the cow, Prudence, driven by Angelica and Willy Flint, came by the house of Mrs. Jerolamon on the Salem road, and, reaching over the fence, ate the tops off the geraniums which stood in brown pots in a row on the edge of the porch. Also she nosed over two of the pots, while Willy Flint looked on and argued as follows:

"Mrs. Jerolamon 's a scratch cat. She 'll lay for us pretty good."

Mrs. Jerolamon was in the barnyard out of sight, Orphan Jane was in the kitchen. Prudence lumbered innocently up the Salem road, with ruin behind her and pleasure before, namely, the browsings in high pasture below the Cattle Ridge. A half hour passed, and nothing more yet happened at the Jerolamon house.

So it is in this world. Your lumbering and milky instinct upsets your orderly potted plants, devours with large warm mouth your careful blossoms, and goes its guileless way to other pleasures; and therefore if your desires are set on things of fragile artifice, let there be some space between your picket fence and your porch, for life goes vagrantly on the high-way.

Prudence, the cow, then floated up the Salem road, and turned through the bars into the cattle lane that led past Cumming's alder swamp and the parti-colored meadows to the hill pastures. Angelica and Willy Flint walked behind her, forgetful almost of Mrs. Jerolamon's geraniums. They plotted how society might be tempted to other explosions.

Angelica had yellow hair, and a taste for swift emotions. Willy Flint had an industrious intelligence, which kept him experimenting with the eruptive forces that lay hidden in nature and society.