dead, more than the living which are yet alive"? Is not the continual refrain of Job to the effect that "the day of one's death is better than the day of his birth”? Did not Ecclesiastes, Preacher and King, "turn himself to behold wisdom and madness and folly" that he might determine as to the value of life and whether it be truly worth living or no? And was it not the conclusion of so great a philosopher that it was all "a vanity and vexation of spirit"?

Can not most of us say with the readers of Rasselas, that "we have listened with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and have pursued with eagerness the phantoms of hope. We have expected that age would perform the promises of youth and that the deficiencies of the present day would be supplied by the morrow."

We have had all this fervent faith in life only to find that we have been cheated in our hopes; that its promises are but a delusion and a snare, and life itself but a vanity of vanities, as Ecclesiastes forewarned. And if it is so sore a burden, and death so sweet a rest, shall not we hail the welcome day and speed its coming? Can we not arrange for ourselves our "happy despatch"? "Tis but the tie of a

noose, the touch of a trigger, the tilt of a spoon. Why not?

The usual argument that suicide is only the resort of the coward, seems not good. The instinct of life is so strong within us all that while the thought of death is not unpleasant to us (as doubtless many of us have, more or less remotely, thought of suicide), the doing of the act, the actual killing of oneself, calls for a considerable amount of physical courage, of determination-"nerve." Who is it that is brave? He who suffers day after day with an aching tooth, or he who plucks up his spirit and goes straight to the dentist and has it out?

Again, why in summer, as statistics show, are suicides by drowning so much more common than in winter when suffering prevails far more? Only because in winter the water is cold, and the would-be suicide of faint heart is deterred by so slight an extra demand upon his courage.

No, moral courage may be denied the suicide, but, generally, he is no physical coward. The respect wherein he is a coward is in his fear for the future, his impatience of present sufferings, his want of faith in himself and in his kind, in God and in his neighbor.

Here is an old argument: consider for a moment what the state of society would be were a law enacted allowing us to destroy anyone we considered useless, would not the latitude of the permission be absurd? And would there be any difference in granting us, under like conditions, the privilege to destroy ourselves? The weakness of the law would be in the inherent fallibility of human judgment. It cannot be left to any individual to determine as to the value of his life, for so many complicated circumstances enter into it to make up the sum of its worth to himself and to mankind in general-it is so crossed with the woof and warp of other lives, that the individual cannot safely judge as to when he has outlived his usefulness even to himself. It may be said generally that no one is useless unless he has lost the possibility (not probability) of recovering himself, and this would suppose such a complete state of utter destitution as cannot be predicated of anyone. It is so frequently true that the darkest hour is just before the dawn, and so invariably true that, with God, all things are possible.

Again, generally the suicide is first of all and

above all, selfish. It is his own pains and aches and troubles and sorrows that he flees from, and in the shame and disgrace of his death he always makes somebody else to suffer that he may escape suffering. For no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself. And however isolated and alone a man may live, and however friendless and undeserving he may deem himself, it can but rarely occur that he does not leave someone to mourn him, someone to miss him, or someone at least to inherit the disgrace which is the legacy of all suicides. And where there is a single creature whom we can comfort by our presence, aid by our counsels or relieve by our bounty-anyone whose lot without us would be one whit the harder, then can we claim no right selfishly to leave him to bear life's burden without us.

Though one may be doomed to die in poverty and pain, happy is he if, as he closes his eyes, he can bravely smile and say, with Saint Paul: "I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith."

A Pretty Girl's
Shoe

FEMININE fashions, from the time when

Eve, or Adam, first introduced them, are always interesting. Since the original simplicity of costume, only two periods of modern civilization have dared to go back to the beginnings of things. They did it "under the Directory" in the last century, when, as may be paraphrased, a woman's clothes, like language, "were given her to conceal her thoughts," and they are venturing it in the present decade. The author of that clever story "The Invisible Man," might write a sequel about the "Visible Woman," or should she be called the "Disappearing Lady"? Time was when you could see her only at operas, balls and dinners, and even then you blushed for her. In bathing costume, oddly enough, the same girl blushes for herself. These days you can see her in the street cars, with all her transparencies and knots of narrow colored ribbons on a background of edgings, which a man has to