Newspaper Page Text
10
UNDER THE SILVER STARS.
I stood and watched the twilight change
From purple into gray,
Its misty veil stretched far and wide,
O’er hilltops far away;
The western sky gleamed soft and bright,
With crimson sunset bars,
While far above, methinks I caught
The light of silver stars.
The daylight faded, soon the night
Fell softly o’er the hills,
And shadows crept athwart the vale
And lingered by the rills.
Earth’s turmoil ceased, my heart was free
From life’s consuming cares.
While on me shone the mystic light
Os gleaming silver stars.
How soft and sweet the night wind sighed
Around the sleeping flowers,
While insect voices rose and fell
Through all the darkening hours;
And while I stood and dreamed sweet dreams,
Beside the meadow bars,
A gentle radiance drifted down
From twinkling silver stars.
Dear witching hours, I’ll ne’er forget
The vigil kept with thee,
While night, in dark browed beauty veiled
The islands and the sea;
Unto my lonely heart came peace
And strength to meet life’s cares;
While, dreaming and alone, I stood.
Under the silver stars.
Belleview, Ga. MAY E. McMILLAN.
*
CHAT.
Quite a variety of matters are talked about by
our friends of the Household today. Some are new
comers, who have interesting things to tell or help
ful suggestions to make. B. H. Watts, I am with you
heart and soul in your ideas about beautifying our
surroundings through the means with which Nature
supplies us so abundantly. Every one who has a
little plot of ground may make it a thing of beauty
all the year round, while the grounds around our
school houses and churches and the cemeteries,
which should be sacredly visited and cared for, may
be set out with trees from the forest and riverside
and planted in clumps of flowering shrubs to delight
the eye and uplift the thoughts. Nothing is more
morally educative than beauty. The sight of Nature’s
loveliness leads up to reverently loving thoughts of
Nature’s God. It is wonderful how much may be
done with a little bit of ground. You remember
that Pope's wonderful garden was of tiny extent,
though the winding walks and the clumps of bloom
ing shrubbery gave the effect of quite a large spot.
He had rockeries, clambered over with vines and
grottoes lined with shells, and many little summer
houses and small pavilions—inexpensive but beau
tiful when covered with vines. Give a Japanese or
a Chinese gardener a few yards of earth, and he
will make it a little fairy land.
As we all like to combine utility with beauty, the
small garden may be a source of revenue as well as
a joy forever. Flowers are more and more in
demand in cities and towns, and many vegetables
can be growm on a small plot of ground, if that is
made fertile and planted in something else as soon as
one kind of vegetable has had its day.
Cora Littleton, you take me back to dear old New
York. I think I know most of its points of interest,
as one of my tasks while I lived there was to write
up these in as graphic and lively a manner as possi
ble. 1 had a dear young comrade, full of youthful en
thusiasm, a worker on a daily newspaper, who ac
companied me in these wanderings. She was such
a cheery little body and so trim in her modest browm
street dress that she reminded me of a partridge and
I called her Bob White. Under this pet name she
figured in all my sketches. We visited the picture
galleries and libraries, but found more of human in
terest in the many and various institutions of char
ity, with which New York abounds —the home for
children and old people, for respectable girls in
search of work and for reclaiming poor girls who had
lost their claims to respectability, the baby shelters,
and the foundling establishments, where there were
little ones by the thousand, some newly born and
THE HOUSEHOLD
4 "Department of Expression For Those Who Teel and Think,
The Golden Age for July 2, 1908.
brought the night before, other chubby darlings
nearly ready to be sent out for adoption. Crossing
over to the green islands, upon which New York
pushes off so much of her disease and crime and
misery, we visited the asylums, poor houses and pen
itentiaries, all ordered on the reform lines of kind
ness and recreation —with gardens and flower yards
about them in which all who could worked several
hours in the open air—the prisoners on these islands
seeming to enjoy this as much as did the mentally
diseased. To think that formerly one w r ho was called
“crazy” was shut up, feared and shunned, often
chained in darkness and solitude, while criminal pris
oners were starved and chained and treated as
brutes! Now, the spirit of broader charity and broth
erhood has changed all this. Rev. Harrison Cooley—
who left the ministry and a large salary because he
felt he could do more good as a director of charities
and correction--says there is practically no criminal
who has not some good in his nature and who may
not be redeemed. Mr. Cooley is back of the farm
colony of criminals and lunatics, near Cleveland.
Ohio, which is working out one of the greatest of so
cial problems by putting prisoners and the mentally
deranged upon farms to raise vegetables, flowers,
poultry, and live stock. On the two thousand acres
they now have, they have made a most gratifying
success, taking a number of premiums for farm prod
uce, fine calves, etc., at the state fair. In the
department for consumptives, there is every facility
for improving or getting well, among these an im
mense glass sun house, and beautiful little parks and
orchards in which to walk. Half a mile of space in
tervenes between the department for consumptives
and the other colonies. Each kind of colony has
separate grounds.
Our friends, new and old, are cordially welcome.
We are sincerely glad to greet them and thank each
one for contributing to the interest of our Household
I want to tell those of you who desire to add to their
library or to give a beautiful and helpful present to
remember our dear Margaret Richard's book, Virgin
ia Vaughn, exquisitely bound, and a pure and lovely
story in verse. Her address is Newberry, South Car
olina. She is, as you know, an invalid and to help
one so noble, sweet and brave should be a privilege.
Wtb ®ur Correspondents
SIGHT SEEING IN NEW YORK.
1 am writing to the Household of The Golden Age
seated at a window overlooking a part of beautiful
Central Park in New York City. I am a little Geor
gia public school teacher and I am enjoying my hol
iday in the way I have been planning for all the year.
I saved money for this delightful and improving visit
to the Household by doing without tempting articles
of dress, ribbons, laces, etc., shunning theaters and
boxes of French candy and making and often laun
dering my own shirtwaists. This is my first visit to
New York and oh, how much I have seen and en
joyed! I had never before seen the ocean and you
may guess how delightful to me are the trips to Co
ney Island, Glen Island, Long Beach and other sea
side resorts. At Long Beach, one sees the finest
stretch of beach in the world, so I am told, with the
waves breaking upon it in snowy spray, making the
surf bathing a perfect joy. 1 have been several times
to the Metropolitan Art Museum and the Museum of
Natural Science in Central Park. 1 spend hours in
these rich treasuries of art and nature’s wonders
and forget the flight of time. Nothing to me was so
wonderful as the sight of the large skeletons of the
i•re-historic animals that inhabited this world in the
i. r dim ages of the past. The enormous skeletons of
the Dinosaur that were dug up in the Dakotas and
the greii reptiles, resembling huge lizards, that are
swung on high, nearly the length of the very long
rooms and the bones of the mighty animals that were
entombed in the earth in some such convulsion as
shattered its thin crust and engulfed the mighty
forests of that era, turning them into coal for the use
of man.
Wonderful, too, was it to explore the large depart
ment in which are specimens of the birds of the
world, grading from the immense Condor ostrich,
eagle and great auk, down through hundreds of va
rieties to the tiny Brazilian humming bird —no lar
ger than a bumble bee. There is a section given
to varieties of these living gems of the feathered
world. I never dreamed there were so many different
kinds; the glass enclosure glows with their irides
cent colors as though a dozen rainbows had been
sheltered there. .Their nests and eggs are shown—
some of the eggs no bigger than a garden pea,
amusingly insignificant when contrasted with the
great ivory globes of the ostrich or the immense
eggs of the Condor. Many of the birds are beau
tifully mounted and look in their surroundings of
green flowering shrubs exactly as though they were
alive.
Os the beauties and glories of the Museum of Art,
I must try to tell a little another time. Yesterday,
we, my cousin and I, went to see the aquarium, with
its world of fishes, a wonderfully interesting and in
structive part of the generous provision New York
has made for nature study. Tomorrow, we are going
to the city’s newest and grandest possession—the
Bronx park—'that immense inclosure of wood and
lake and river, with its roaming herds of buffalo
and deer, its extensive gardens of wild flowers, its
big rock caverns for the bears and its glass-enclosed
trees and ponds for the birds. I may tell you what
I thought of this bit of Arcady after I have seen it,
if the subject is not too vast and grand for my inex
perienced pen. CORA LITTLETON.
*
AT DAWN.
Hushed and sweetest hour of all
Ere the birds begin to call.
Faintest pink the east sky bars,
Slowly fade the silver stars.
See, a space more glowing far,
As though heaven’s gate were set ajar.
And —do I dream? Far down the sky
There floats a strain of melody.
Afar and faint, but swelling higher.
The chant of the celestial choir,
Uttering a holy jubilate
As through heaven’s dazzling open gate
Passes some soul from lower earth,
Which at the dawn had heavenly birth;
Faint and more faint the welcoming strain,
And now ’tis silent, and again
I stand w'ith eyes to heaven turning:
For that far sound of music yearning.
Kingston, Tenn. ANNICE LYBARGER.
R
NONE OF US IS WITHOUT INFLUENCE.
Owen Meredith, in his charming poem “Lucile,”
said:
“No stream from its source flows seaward, how
lonely soever its course,
But that some land is gladden’d.
No star ever rose and set without influence some
where.
\\ ho knows what earth needs from earth’s lowest
creature?
No life can be pure in its purpose and strong in
its strife,
And all life not be purer and stronger thereby.”
A speaker recently asserted: “Influence is an
awful thing.”
I often feel that it is better to have no influence
than to lead others wrong, yet
“I think I should mourn o’er my sorrowful fate
If sorrow in heaven could be,
If no one should be at the beautiful gate
Conducted to glory by me.”
MATTIE HOWARD.
THE HEN AGAINST THE TYPEWRITER.
I was amused some time ago by the charge made
against me in a Household letter, signed Eve, that I
was ignorant about domestic matters. I wish Mrs.
or Miss Eve could see me in my homo. Though I
have the misfortune (?) to be a bachelor, I am not
a know-nothing in regard to the art of housekeep
ing, and as to poultry raising, I flatter myself, I am an
expert. I have made more profit by selling eggs and
chickens than I have in any other way, according to
the amount invested. Statistics show that the hum
ble domestic hen, when well kept, makes her owner
a clean profit of $1.50 every year. They will lay 150
eggs from one Christmas to another. But if those
eggs are set and only half of them hatch and grow
up to broiler age, then a much larger profit accrues
from the hen, for broilers bring forty cents in the
market, very often more. J think poultry raising
