PETTICOAT PHILOSOPHY

Evening Star, Issue 14184, 8 October 1909, Page 1

PETTICOAT PHILOSOPHY

There are stages in the contemplation and endurance of great sorrow which endow men with the same earnestness and clearness of thought that in some of old took the form of prophecy. To those who have large capability of loving and suffering, united with great power of firm endurance, there comes a time in their woe when they are lifted out of the Contemplation of their individual care into a searching inquiry into the nature of their calamity, and the remedy (if remedy there be) which may prevent its recurrence to others as well as to themselves.—Mrs Gaskoll. There are all sorts of loves sent to us. We fall in love with pursuits and good works—and friends sometimes—and places, or leaders of ideas, very often. And these things cost other things—always do; sometimes we have to give them up, and then it tears one’s heart out; but these loves make up life. People have lots of little love stories besides the great ones—so-called —and we pay a p/icc for each of them. The struggle of life must cost something. But sometimes Ldo believe that the price people pay for the privilege of doing a great deal of necessary unnoticed routine work in the world is not only that they live in dull places and give up amusements, but fiat their faculties do to a certain extent get dulled too.—C. R. Coleridge. Human beings—human children especially—seldom deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing, even though that power consist only iu a capacity to make others wretched: a pupil whose sensations are duller than those of his instructor, while his nerves are tougher, and his bodily strength perhaps greater, has an immense advantage over that instructor, and he will generally use it relentlessly, because the very young, very healthy, very thoughtless, know neither how to sympathise nor how to • spare. Those who are reckless for themselves are generally ten times more so for their friends.—Charlotte Bronte. The reserve of a young man is more impenetrable than that of a maiden; on |v to a woman, and that a woman with whom, consciously or unconsciouslj’, he is more than half m love, does he break through it. It is more difficult to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil before acquaintance than after. The world for the young means only material suecess m life; the flesh, nnagiuation made' fact; and the devil, that fertility and ingenuity of the intellect which, as it did of old, promises the crown of godhead. All is seen dimly. The young man m rejecting it is rejecting a' thousand tunes more than the man who has tested everything and found it wantmS;. One brings a dead past to the sacrifice; the other a living and alluring future.—Mabol Dearmer.

f Tommy, aged fourteen, arrived home foi the holidays, and at his father’s request produced lus account book, duly kept in school Among the items “S.P.G.” figured hnajriv and frequently. “ Darling boy,” fondly exclaimed his doting mother, “ see how good he is, always giving to the ndsaonanos.” But Tommy’s sister knew him better than even his meter did,.and took the first-oppor-tunity of privately inquiring what those mystic letters stood for. Nor was she surprised ultimately to find that they presented, not the venerable Society Propagation of the Gospel, but “Sundries. Probably Grub.” - - ■. r r’U