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ND it's oh, for an echoless silence!' When I was younger than I am now," went on the

Business Woman, "I started a scrapbook composed chiefly of newspaper verse. Among the poems chosen was one beginning with that quotation; and though I liked it, I could not then agree with the sentiment expressed. Silence! Fresh from the convent school where the goddess Silence sat grandly enthroned with the many obsequious hours to pay her homage, back to the farmhouse in the heart of the great country where silence was supreme ruler.-no, at that time, I could find nothing in silence to make me desire an 'echoless' one. But now-”

The Business Woman sank on the garden bench, and closed her eyes. Thinking she had come to seek the silence she had once disregarded, I said nothing. Anyhow my mind was filled with other things, as you would readily have supposed, could you have beheld the garden that special day.

"But now," resumed she, after a long moment, "the silence that was before the first act of creation, alone, at times, would be satisfying. It is not my work that is wearing me to a frizzle, for work is the best gift to humanity, and my work is in every way agreeable to me. It is the noises that exhaust, not the work. And of all noises, I here solemnly declare the most disagreeable is the noise of human voices. Clatter, clatter, clatter! I think of the monkeys at the Zoo, and am ready to embrace Darwinism!"

"It is too bad!" I exclaimed, in my softest tone, trusting my voice was not suggestive of what was proving such a source of discomfort.

"Bad! It's awful!" she answered in a hollow voice. "And there is no escap

ing it-that is the worst part of it-unless I grow deaf, and then I should have to quit my business. The severest trial is on the street cars, where I must spend three-quarters of an hour every morning. and night. At the corner the little group is chattering-and you know in the trees around the robins are essaying their short flights of song-if only one could listen to them! Then into that crowded car, with its voices, male and female, low and high-mostly high-nasal, guttural, twanging, dictatorial, harsh, voluminous-and the last is of all the most disagreeable. Its tones pour over you like a sheet of hail. There is no escaping it. Effort is useless, and you sit there in your mute agony until the end of the journey is reached.

"I take a book along, not that I desire to read that early, for does not the clever Elizabeth of the 'German Garden' say the soul is not fully awake before ten o'clock? But the words of my author are at least words of sense and wit, in both of which qualities the words to which I must perforce listen are lacking. I sweep the car with my eyes on entering, and if selection is possible, I choose a seat by one similarily provided with reading matter. At least, I promise myself, this noise, which I dread as well as detest, will not beat directly on my ears. The next stopping brings my precaution to naught, as a giddy girl enters and, taking a place before us, orders my companion to close her book and talk; and as upon my defenseless brain beats their jargon, I ask myself why speech was invented. This is the beginning of the all-day torture, ending with the three-quarters of an hour in the street car which repeats the racket of the morning.

"If the conversation were in any particular way of benefit to the parties en

gaged in it, I should grin and bear it,' as the boys say, for, whatever the cost to myself, I hope I should never want selfishly to come between good to my fellow creature. But it isn't, you know. On the contrary, more often than not it is harmful, either to health or morals. Gossip always injures three persons: the one whom it concerns, the one who hears and the one who speaks; and gossip makes up a goodly portion of the talk heard in a street car-and its majority of passengers is not feminine, you must know. Who makes gossip a purely womanly occupation shows woeful ignorance of the conduct of man. After much experience I am convinced that while the gossip of woman is more frequent, that of man is more injurious. When a woman hits a fellow creature her intuitive knowledge of human frailty tempers the blow with sympathy; but a man strikes to kill every time.

"But even when the talk is morally harmless, it is physically hurtful, for it is that much vital energy needlessly wasted. The girl who chatters all the way to work takes to her work less strength than the girl who maintains silence, always provided, of course, the latter's thoughts are not of a kind destructive to spiritual power, for thoughts are as forceful as words for good or ill. In the conversation something may have come up to furnish her with disturbing thoughts for the entire day, and the one who tries to work with a mind in conflict, one train of thoughts tending to the occupation, another driving in the opposite direction, is more speedily exhausted than the one who does harder work, but who employs mind as well as hands. Or words may have been spoken to wound the heart of the hearer, causing anger to come into being, and words to be spoken which sow a fruitful crop of regret. All these things, and more, may happen, and the persons are the sufferers thereby in ways other than

that which results from work inefficiently done.

"Nor is that all the harm I have noticed resulting from this constant talking and laughter. There is still another -the great injury one does to one's good looks. Watch a young woman talking and laughing, and note the elevation of the brows, the frowning, the screwing up of the eyes, the lines made around the mouth, and calculate the effect this proceeding, carried on each day for teir successive years, will have on that countenance. It isn't necessary to work every muscle of the face with the muscles of the tongue, and it is inane to laugh with every second sentence; and the one who does these things-and how few do not do them?— is laying up for herself hours of future anguish of soul, and hours of labor before the looking-glass with cold cream and a book of massage treatment for her guide.

"There are, of course, other noises, and as unnecessary as those of human voices," concluded the distressed Business Woman, dolefully, "and were I to begin to enumerate them, you would flee from me and your garden. We are a noisy people, but I see hopeful signs of an improvement in that direction, in that some thinking men and women are beginning to utter public protests. against them. I read somewhere that the teachers of public schools are drawing attention to the trial the noises of the streets are to the children, whose minds are distracted by them, and whose nerves are on the rack because of this distraction, and the fear of what must result from their unconscious inattention. Perhaps we shall have an Anti-noise Society, but I want it first to be put in operation against needless speech where working people assemble."

of a certain magazine, sent abroad for the purpose of ascertaining the treatment accorded the stranger within the gates by the various Protestant churches, is not without its lesson for those places of worship not included by the young woman in her itinerary. It was interesting to note the editorial comment of some of the religious papers, especially the non-Catholic ones. They seemed to feel that they had been spied upon, and resented it, while one was honest enough to say such a thing could not have happened in Catholic churches, for people went there to pray, not to engage in social intercourse.

One of the things that must always strike one as strange is the appearance a Protestant church presents at the close of the services. It suggests more a theatre, when the show is over, than anything else, with the late worshippers talking and laughing, shaking hands and giving introductions. And yet, when you come to think of it, is not the spectacle our own city churches present toward the close of Mass infinitely worse? There are many people who seem to think they have fulfilled the obligation of hearing Mass on Sunday and holidays if they remain until the Consecration. There are a great many more who seem to think the rising of the people who intend to communicate is the signal for the close of the service, while the majority hold the last Gospel and the prayers said afterward are intended solely for the priest and the altar-boys. The sight and sound of our city churches at the early Masses are not edifying by any means, and one wonders. what sort of consciences those people have. If it is considered an indication of bad manners to leave one's seat in the theatre until at least the curtain begins to fall, what shall we call this exit from the House of God during a time so solemn as the giving of Communion? It does appear that if one can spare the time to spend twenty-five minutes in

the church, one could wait another five or ten minutes longer-that the priest, to say nothing of the religious aspect of the case, is entitled to as much respect as is given to the star actor or actress. Often noting this outrush from the church, I have wondered what could be the pressing business that interfered with the manners, not less than the sacred duty, of these people. When I, too, reached the outside I beheld it, seeing the men lined up along the curbstone, the women waiting below the steps.

That these are wasted words, I realize keenly, having had to witness the efforts heroically made by a certain pastor to prevent the engrafting of city behavior on his carefully tended flock, and weekly beholding the dismal failure attending

them.

If people will go out of the church at Communion or the benediction, they will do it, and nothing short of a cordon of police at the door will prevent it; and it is not likely that pastors will resort to that measure to teach reverence and politeness.

Realizing the uselessness of this, let us talk of something else, and which the experience of the young woman sent by the magazine suggested. While it is true, as the editor of the religious paper observed, Catholics go to church to pray and not to form social ties, it should also be remembered religion has its social side also, received directly from the Founder Himself. We cannot think of the Lord Jesus without the little company of devout men and women who immediately recognized His sacred mission; and if the Gospel shows us the Master teaching in the synagogue or by the seashore, it follows up the picture with the Guest at the dinner prepared for Him, or the Friend resting under a hospitable roof.

Can we honestly declare that this other feature of the Church in its inception characterizes it to-day? In country places it may exist, but in the larger

towns, in the city parishes, do the people holding seats in the same pew know one another? Do they make an effort to do so? They may be among the oldest members of the congregation or the latest arrived, for aught we know or care. So they are orderly during the twenty minutes or half hour we kneel or sit with them is all we ask. But, you say, it would be impossible to know every one in the parish. But, really, would it, if every other one. wanted to know you likewise? There is nothing in the world easier than to get acquainted with people when both are willing. But it would not be desirable, you add. Exactly! I was waiting for that. It is not the impossibility of the undertaking but the undesirability of it. And you call yourself a follower of Christ, who object to knowing a fellow follower? There were "undesirables" in the day of Christ, you remember, and yet, singularly enough, it was those very ones He went out of His way to know, even to looking for them in the branches of the sycamore tree. And the Pharisees complained to His disciples that their Master ate with the publicans and sinners; but it is not recorded that Christ ever pointed to the publican and sinners with the warning cry, "Woe to you!"

O fellow Christians! we have so little of Christ in us!

But the dwellers in the parish, whether they be long settled there or newly arrived, are not such great objects of concern when they are united in the bond of the family. Their friends are somewhere in the city, and even if they are actual strangers in it, the companionship to be found under the rooftree is a saving anchor. It is those without such close associates, the boy and girl, the young man and woman, and those in their declining days, whose condition should make us pause. I have known of men and women going month after month to a church, and not so

large a one either, without meeting so much as a glance of recognition from the other members of the congregation. They were strangers not only in the parish but in the city, with their social life no less than their fortune to make. If the young man were invited to the Y. M. C. A. can you blame him so greatly that he went, when the officers of the church society were too engrossed with the petty business of its government to seek out the stranger and give him a brotherly welcome? Unless very unobservant, any member of the parish who attends services regularly for one year recognizes the stranger when he appears; and plainly enough it is that stranger who should become the object of solicitude. He may be worthy of it, in which case the congregation has acquired another valuable member; if otherwise, who shall say what this friendliness of his fellow worshipper may not effect?

There is so much loneliness in the city, a loneliness far crueller than that known in the most deserted places of the country. In the country you do not expect that the birds and the wild animals shall forsake their natural ways to keep you company; but when in the midst of your fellow men you receive only silence and the glance of coldness, -ah, then you drink the cup of loneliness to its dregs! And, I daresay, if we could but read hearts as God reads them, we should see the first letters of the sin we deplore, the crime we shudder at, traced by the fingers of loneliness. A man must have great resources within himself to be able to meet this loneliness and loneliness and not finally be conquered by it.

As you sit to-night in the happiness of your family or in the pleasant society of your friends, think of the men and women in the cheerless, lonely lodginghouses. They are separated by miles, perhaps by an ocean, from their loved ones and the friends of their youth.

Strangers they are in the land of the stranger. Not theirs the duty to make the first advance toward relieving the ghastliness of their situation, but yours, to whom these streets and people and that church yonder, where you and this stranger worship side by side, are the associations of a lifetime. It is not asked of you to open the door of your own social world to that unknown person until you have tested his worthiness, for we owe something to our own protection; but it is asked of you to accord him the treatment due a fellow being, and not that allowable in dealing with a creature of a different order from our own.

And yet I sometimes wonder if that very prudence which those who claim to be so wise caution us to exercise in our dealings with those who fail to carry with them a gilt-edged letter of recommendation, is not rather the policy of fools. If it had guided the actions of the Lord Jesus would He have sought the strange man, small of stature, amid the foliage of the sycamore tree, and bade him to hasten down as He must sup in his house that day? Would He have called unknown and rude fishermen to leave their nets and become catchers of men, or propounded the deepest of His doctrines to the Samaritan woman by Jacob's well? Nay, by every law of prudence that we follow, these were not the people to be selected. But, you may object, Christ was the All-Wise. He knew. O my

run

friend! was it not rather that Christ trusted? Did He not trust that the desire which prompted Simon to ahead and climb the tree under which the new Teacher must pass struck deeper than curiosity, and thus He met that awakening soul with swift recognition? that He sought for love and loyalty behind the rude exterior of the Galilean fishermen, and the truth that lay below the deceptive appearance of the woman at the well? Always, always, you find Christ trusting those with whom He came in contact. Was not Judas to the very last admitted to the Upper Chamber?

That is the trouble with us Christians; we mistrust our fellow Christians. We have not gotten over the feeling that made our forefathers invent the loving cup, which the guest must grasp with both hands, to show he carried no dagger for us behind his back; the feeling that was born when Cain lifted his hand against Abel, and which will remain with us so long as we continue to cherish it. If all the sin that curses this earth were reduced to its first cause, it would spell distrust. Be cautious, man, of thy brother, is the warning whispered into every ear, and though we may not obey it to the letter, the echo of it never dies in our heart. The result-we are those islands Matthew Arnold beautifully compares us to, speaking to one another across the water, conscious all the time of the knowledge that we were once parts of a great contient.