graceful little terns, or "sea-swallows," fairylike creatures with red legs and bill, long pointed wings and deeply forked tail, which skim the surface of the sea or hawk over the shallows of trout streams in search of dragon-flies or small fish. It is not a very rare experience for the trout-fisherman to hook a swallow which may happen to dash by at the moment of casting; but a much more unusual occurrence was

The Outlook.

that of a tern, on a well-known pool of the Spey, actually mistaking a salmonfly for a small fish and swooping on it, only to get firmly hooked by the bill. Fortunately for the too venturesome tern the fisherman was a lover of birds, and he managed with some difficulty to reel it in gently, after which it was released none the worse for its mistake.

F. G. Aflalo.

Adolphus had entered the smokeroom with an intense look on his face. I instantly retreated behind The Daily Telegraph-which affords better cover than any newspaper in England -but he had sighted me.

"Just the very man I wanted to see," he exclaimed. "I particularly need your advice." And he sat down very close beside me.

I never knew Adolphus when he did not particularly need my advice. He goes about the world collecting advice and ignoring it. I have often thought of advising him to ask my advice.

"You see I have always regarded you as a level-headed man of the world," he began.

I looked as level-headed and worldly as possible and said, "What is it, old man?"

"It hasn't been formally announced yet, but I'm engaged."

"Ah! And you want to know how to get out of it?"

From his face I knew that I was near the mark, but he protested.

"Certainly not," he said. "It's this way. I didn't know that she was a strong politician. Of course she talks intelligently about affairs-says that Lloyd George ought to be banished to Bogotá, and so forth-but she gave me no reason to suppose that she held

exceptional opinions on politics. Well, I took her in my car to-day to see an old aunt of mine. When I brought the car home again I found that she had left her bag in it. It was merely clasped, not locked, and it felt rather heavy. I wondered if she had left her purse in it. If so, I had better take it back at once. If not, it could wait till I saw her to-morrow. Well, I opened it."

"Letters from a rival?" I interposed. "No, no. I am far too strong an attraction. What I found was a hammer and half-a-dozen pebbles." "My poor friend!" I said, and patted him soothingly on the back.

"Now what am I to do?" asked the unhappy Adolphus.

"There are various courses of action before you," I replied. "You can break off the engagement at once. You can say that as she proposes to go to prison, she ipso facto proposes to desert you. You can say that if she burned down the House of Commons or Westminster Abbey after you were married, your estate would be held responsible for the damage. Another injustice to man."

"But I don't want to break it off," said Adolphus.

"In that case you must fall into line with her. Husband and wife should

be as one. Go into the movement; become an active militant. You're quite a stone too heavy and a hungerstrike would do you a world of good. Besides, you used to have a fine throwin from the out-field. You're just the man for the Strangers' Gallery."

Adolphus shook his head. "It's not that I'm absolutely opposed to the movement, but, frankly, I never cared much for the idea of prison."

"Coward. You want to save your miserable skin. Why, when you're married you may be glad of solitary confinement. However, if you refuse either to break it off or to become a militant, my advice is to temporize. Say nothing. Let sleeping dogs lie. Of course in this case it's a woman, and awake, but the principle's the same." "Thanks very much," replied Adolphus. "I shall consider your advice very carefully. I shall do nothing hurriedly. Rely on me."

The next evening he burst jubilantly into the club library.

"Congratulate me," he cried. "It's all right. Have a drink!"

"Then she's made you join the Men's League for Women's Suffrage," I said. "Well, you'll stand a hungerstrike better than you would a drinkstrike."

"I've not joined. She's all right. There isn't a nicer girl in England. I put it to her straight, and what do you think she is?"

I hate riddles about women, and said so.

"She's just a militant anti-militant," cried the triumphant Adolphus. "She just has a shy at any militant's windows whenever she passes them."

"And I dared to suggest that you should break off your engagement to this noble girl!" I exclaimed. "Adolphus, I ask your pardon, and will myself defray the charges of the refreshment which you proposed. . . . My toast, old man! "The future Mrs. Adolphus, and more power to her elbow!'"

Punch.

The harvest of souls was probably the form in which the after-life at last presented itself to man when he reached the agricultural stage of evolution. The notion of the life to come had presented itself in other forms to nomadic peoples. The Bible shows us in language that has attained literary immortality what agriculture meant to man as he began to plan out permanent abiding places upon the earth. The promise that followed the exodus from the ark was significant of a new stage in human affairs: "While the earth remaineth, seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease." To the wanderers in the wilderness Moses bore a command to

be obeyed when the days of settlement came: "Thou shalt keep . . the feast of harvest, the first fruits of thy labors, which thou hast sown in the field: and the feast of ingathering which is in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labor out of the field . . . six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest. And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the first fruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end." Even in harvest time the law of rest shall be observed, we are taught, and moreover in that time the poor shall be specially thought of: "When ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt

not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shait not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger." Moreover, this applies also to the olive tree, while a forgotten sheaf in the cornfield "shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands." Not to the poor only and the stranger is a portion to be given, but also to the Lord: "When ye be come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then shall ye bring a sheaf or the first fruits unto the priest: and he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord to be accepted for you: on the morrow after the Sabbath the priest shall wave it."

Such was the Jewish doctrine of the harvest, a doctrine now written largely through all nations and in all lands. The perfect poetry of the language fits well the poetry of the facts, and of that faith in the perpetuity of the seasons and of the fruitfulness of the earth which underlies the whole framework of civilization. When we see Samuel calling down thunder and rain upon the wheat harvest because of the wickedness of the people, we see something of the association of ideas between the dissolution of national spiritual life and the dissolution of its physical and ordered basis. The harvest is the crown of the year, and to make it worthy the Jew is bidden to learn even of the insect: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise, which having no guide, overseer or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer and gathereth her food in the harvest." The harvest proverbs do not stop there: "He that gathereth in summer is a wise son: but he that sleepeth in harvest is a son that caus

eth shame." The pictures of the harvest field are full of beauty. We hear the singing in the vineyards, we see the joy of the harvesters, we see the bearers of snow-water hastening to the thirsty reapers, we feel the cloud of dew in the heat of harvest."

But the picture of Ruth gleaning in the barley fields of Boaz is the picture that tells us all we need to know of the Jewish harvest: we see her gleaning and gathering after the reapers among the sheaves from morning even until night. We see her drink from the vessels full of water that the reapers had drawn. We see her at the meal sitting with the reapers (such was the favor of Boaz) and eating of the bread and dipping it in the refreshing vinegar; nay, more, eating of the parched corn that Boaz gave her till she was satisfied, and rose once more to glean. We see her again gliding among the sheaves, gleaning the corn that the reapers, at Boaz's command, had let fall. Such gleaning never was before or since in the land of the Jews. The Moabitish woman, moving amid the field white to harvest, had won the eye of Boaz, and who wins the eye wins all. We see her at set of sun beating out her miraculous gleanings, no less than an ephah of barley. She became a gleaner of significant regularity: "she kept fast by the maidens of Boaz to glean unto the end of barley harvest and of wheat harvest," and, last of all, she won the heart of Boaz himself and became the ancestress of David the king.

But the conception of harvest grew to have other significance than that of national welfare, and became the key-note of tragedy. The destruction of a nation before it has reached its time of harvest is a tragic conception that Isaiah and Jeremiah set forth. The Lord of harvests is also the destroyer of harvests, Men and nations shall not reach to reaping

time. The appointed weeks of harvest come to those that fear God. "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." But there is even a more dreadful notion than that of a smitten or lost harvest. There is the national harvest of evil things, an overflowing harvest reaped to the last barley corn: "the daughter of Babylon is like a threshing floor; it is time to thresh her; yet a little while and the time of her harvest shall come." Joel takes up the note: "Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe; come get you down, for the press is full, the vats overflow, for the wickedness is great." The sickening picture derived from the most heavenly of processes is re-etched by St. John, and we see the dreadful reaping of the earth with the sickle of the Lord. The transference of the idea of harvest from the fruits of the earth to the deeds of men is no doubt natural enough, but further transference to the deeds of a whole nation is a conception not merely of literary or poetic significance, but one that brought out that sense of unity which was destined to preserve Israel as a nation, not only in the exile to Babylon, but in the not less amazing exile to the Western world.

But with Christ the word harvest took yet another significance: "the harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray ye, therefore, the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth laborers into his harvest." The harvest now is not merely physical, or The Contemporary Review.

moral, or national. The earth is a field of souls, good grain that must be garnered after the tares at last are separated and burned, burned that the fields to come may be clean. The idea of harvest is carried over to the spiritual forces that are sown of God in the heart of man. The parable is told by one who knew what seed-time and harvest meant, and he carried the analogy fearlessly into spiritual things. The Kingdom of God itself is a seed subject to the laws of growth or evolution. Indeed, much of our modern thought about evolution in individuals and institutions was intuitively appreciated by the Jews and set forth in their parables of the harvest. To less imaginative races the Bible, as literature, has been an endless source of new thoughts and hopes, and the harvest of an English countryside to-day takes on a new significance to innumerable minds in the parables of Scripture and in the utterances of prophets belonging to ages that lie at the dawn of our civilization.

The Wages of Sin, as we know from St. Paul, and an eminent lady novelist who has added her authority, is Death. There is another of the universe's economic principles, less frequently inculcated by moralists, who leave the

teaching thereof to the less august methods of every-day experience. The Wages of Hurry, I should sum it up, is Perfunctoriness. To which may be added that, as perfunctoriness implies unreality, it is, in so far, equivalent

to failure. This connection is less obvious and less insisted on than that between death and sin, because the failure in question, though spelling inconvenience or disaster to someone else, is not necessarily failure in the eyes of the person who happens to be in a hurry. Since, in many cases, hurry aims merely at the relief of an emotional strain, and such relief is quite compatible with perfunctoriness, all that you need is the contrary emotion, and that can be set going by a word or a gesture quite as well as by efficient action, and a great deal quicker. It is notoriously a sign of man's superior position in the scale of beings, of his capacity for art, philosophy, morals, and indeed of his possession of a soul, that this emotion does not always deal with realities, but often with the idea, the name of them. The Revolutionaries who cut the words "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" on the Louvre and the basement of Notre Dame, felt the full zest of being free, equal, and united, although they were dealing in a free, equal, and united manner only with chisels and mallets, and there was not much freedom, equality, or fraternity in sundry other items, such as Committees of Public Safety and the Noyades.

Indeed, there was so little of any of those three desiderata for a good many years to come, that the necessity of a new inscription was felt in 1848 and 1870. But the emotion had been there. And that, as poets sing, when love has been and is no more, that, once it has been, nobody can ever take away.

As regards our own day and our own selves, we are all of us in a tremendous hurry, and perhaps just a trifle given to perfunctoriness on the subject of what used to be called Progress, but is now spoken of as Construction. The change of word answers to a change of gesture. Progress, like the verb spelt in the same way

though pronounced differently, is what old-fashioned grammars called intransitive; it does not imply anything that is done to: for instance, pushed or pulled and hustled along. It has a suspicious air of getting on by itself, whether you want it or not. Whereas Construction implies something which gets constructed, and a person who is the nominative to that accusative, who does the constructing that is to say, acts, aims, and wills, all of these highly personal proceedings, and affording scope for that self-expression which is an essential factor in latter-day schemes for universal betterment. The world might conceivably progress without any such expression of our higher Self; in fact, what small improvement it has So far achieved shows little co-operation of the constructive sort of person, and, for obvious reasons, of you or me. But to construct the Future, or even as philosophic Tories try, to reconstruct the Past, speaks for the possession of Free Will, which shallow scepticism notoriously denies. Also there is a kind of forestalled personal immortality: Statutes, Reports, and Blue-Books. "Exegi Monumentum aëre perennius." So sang the Vates, apparently foreseeing our case. And it is mere cavilling (and old-fashioned at that) to inquire, like cross-grained Herbert Spencer, whether the extremely durable construction shall continue for men's use and delight, or as their stumblingblock-perchance a yard or so additional of city wall shutting out air and light. Neither should we ask whether the monument thus constructed by our delicate wisdom may not be usefully burnt for quicklime; or, with but little refashioning, make very proper pig-styes; or, again, being reduced to a carefully excavated ground plan, serve as valuable evidence to the anthropologists of later ages.