society, to crush wrong and elevate right, was never before so bravely fought, on so many fields, by so many people as to-day. But because our lovers and heroes no longer brag to the world of their doings; no longer stand in the moonlight, and sing of their ‘dering does,’ the world assumes that the days of tourneys and guitars were the only days of true love and noble deeds. Even our professed writers of romance join in the cry. ‘Draw life as it is,’ they say. ‘We find nothing in it but mediocrity, selfishness, and money-loving.’ By all means let us have truth in our novels, but there is truth and truth. Most of New York’s firemen presumably sat down at noon to-day to a dinner of corned-beef and cabbage. But perhaps one of them at the same moment was fighting his way through smoke and flame, to save life at the risk of his own. Boiled dinner and burned firemen are equally true. Are they equally worthy of description? What would the age of chivalry be, if the chronicles had recorded only the brutality, filthiness and coarseness of their contemporaries? The wearing of underclothing unwashed till it fell to pieces; the utter lack of soap; the eating with fingers; the drunkenness and foul-mouthedness that drove women from the table at a certain point, and so inaugurated the custom, now continued merely as an excuse for a cigar? Some one said once that a man finds in a great city just the qualities he takes to it. That’s true of romance as well. Modern novelists don’t find beauty and nobility in life, because they don’t look for them. They predicate from their inner souls that the world is ‘cheap and nasty’ and that is what they find it to be. There is more true romance in a New York tenement than there ever was in a baron’s tower—braver battles, truer love, nobler sacrifices. Romance is all about us, but we must have eyes for it. You are young people, with your lives before you. Let me give you a little advice. As you go through life look for the fine things—not for the despicable. It won’t make you any richer. It won’t make you famous. It won’t better you in a worldly way. But it will make your lives happier, for by the time you are my age, you’ll love humanity, and look upon the world and call it good. And you will have found romance enough to satisfy all longings for mediæval times.” 

 “But, dear, one cannot imagine some people ever finding anything romantic in life,” said a voice, which, had it been translated into words would have said, “I know you are right, of course, and you will convince me at once, but in my present state of unenlightenment it seems to me that—” the voice, already low, became lower. “Now”—a moment’s hesitation—“there is—Peter Stirling.” 

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