A SHAKESPEARE CALENDAR.

Lake County Press, Issue 1063, 7 May 1903, Page 6

A SHAKESPEARE CALENDAR.

The aptness of Shakespeare's remarks, their fitness to the exigencies of life, causes mo to regard his calendar with a superstitious awe. Time nut of iniud he has hit the nail of the situation on the head with a precison that has startled me. He has advised, eon soled, reflected, and eveu predicted in a way that has mado me exclaim, '" Surely this Shakespeare Calendar must have been com piled for nie, and me alone!" Sometimes he has commented with a sort of grave reproof after the event; thereby producing the impression that he had watched the course of tho day, and, pondering over it. pronounced his dictum. An instance of this comes to my mind. I was spending an hour, on a wet, gloomy, afternoon, waiting for a train at Woking Junction. As I sat on one of the station seats, watching the rain drip on the line, I noticed a little group coming along the platform towards me. It consisted of a couple of policemen and a handcuffed convict. The convict wore a parti-coloured garb—one leg yellow and the other grey, if I remember rightly, and had a round, bullet-shaped, closely-cropped head. But it was his face that seized and l lvetted my attention. Mute misery, the terror of the -hunted beast, and the despair of the human soul, were foeussed into a look that stabbed straight into tho vitals of my feelings. Such a direct appeal did the look make to me that a chord responded and vibrated in my innermost being. I was seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to say something. The dire irrevocableness of his fate, the wild, hopeless feeling that all the world was against him, seized hold of me so forcibly that as he passed I got up involuntarily, compelled to follow him, my whole soul shaken with compassion and the impulse to comfort. But no words came. 1 looked.at him. He looked mutely at me, as if searching for a pin-point of hope. The policemen just then quickened their Bteps ; 1 fell behind, and iu a minute they were out of sight. Au earthquake had heaved in my soul, and loft me pale and trembling. I sat down on the seat, and by degrees the tumult calmed down, and the voice of reason made itself heard, " What business had you to speak to that criminal ? What could you have said even if it had been your business '/' All through my homeward journey tho man's face haunted me. "If I could only have said something VI thought. And again, '' What could 1 have said ?" When I reached home, I went mechanically to my caleudar, and this is what I read—'Tis all men's office to speak patience To those that wring under the load of Borrow. —"The Diary of a Dreamer," by Alice DewSmith.