in affliction, support in misfortune, ease in torment, light in darkness, and better than all, something when the final summons came that made it less dreadful to go down into the valley of the shadow and cross over that wonderful river, which in all lands and in all tongues has been called the river of death.

We do not say anything about the admirable quality of the scholarship manifested in the version of the New Testament, for no doubt that was very high and perfect; but the new translation itself was an impossible thing from the start if the intention was to make it root out the version that it pretended to correct and beautify. It makes no difference what a man may want with his Bible, how he may use it, how explain, how expound, how interpret it, he is only solicitous to know that it is his father's Bible, and that the refiners, the agnostics, the tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee fellows of the last half of the nineteenth century have not laid their hands upon that. If that is intact all the balance is easy. The denominational procession can go forward thereafter as it pleases. Anchored fast to his old-fashioned Bible, even the very gates of Greek shall not prevail against his old-fashioned belief in fire and brimstone.

THE GERMAN SUCCESSION.

[Kansas City Times, June 14, 1887.]

If the Crown Prince of Germany is at all superstitious—and most thorough soldiers aree-and if he reads half the occult stories told about him, and half the predictions made as to what his fate is likely soon to be, the chances would be good to send him to a premature grave through sheer nervous irritation and worriment.

First, when his father was quite a young man, unmarried and sowing his wild oats plentifully, a gypsy told his fortune. He was to be king and wear three crowns. He was to have a male heir, but the heir was not to succeed him.

Later on the young man married, and was soon made king of Prussia. Afterward of Hanover, then of all Germany. Here was the three crowns the gypsy predicted. Still later on, and yet a little while before the Franco-Prussian War, the Emperor William again had his fortune told. Another gypsy cast his horoscope. He would live, the old Zingaree said, until his ninety-second year, and that when he died he would be succeeded, not by his son, but by his grandson. The son would die before his father. This son is the present Crown Prince, whose life even at this moment is in imminent peril. The physicians in attendance upon him-and he has some that have a world-wide celebrity-have not yet determined what to call the morbid growth in his throat. If it is cancerous, like General Grant's, no power short of the Lord Almighty can save him from a speedy death.

The old Emperor William, his father, recalling the two gypsy prophecies, is reported as being firmly of the belief that it is cancer, and that his son and heir will die within the year.

Then again the weird, the haunting, the evil-foreboding White Lady has been seen again at the Berlin palace. She was never known to appear except to indicate some sudden calamity to the house of Hohenzollern-most generally death. Since the serious illness of the Crown Prince the fact seems to be pretty well authenticated that she has been seen twice, and each time with a look of terror and anguish on her face. She first made her appearance during the reign of the Emperor's mother-the beautiful, the unfortu

nate and the broken-hearted Louise-and has been part of the imperial household ever since. Does her last visit bode evil to the Crown Prince? Who knows?

A NEW REVISION OF THE BIBLE.

[Kansas City Times, July 23, 1887.]

A brief cable dispatch announced the other day the fact that quite a number of denominational people, whatever that may mean, had met in London and discussed freely the ways and means of preparing another translation of the Bible. They adjourned to meet again shortly.

Make it, gentlemen-make it by all means. Rub up your Hebrew and your Greek. Get quickly at your roots, your verbs and your conjugations. Print a plentiful supply. Go upon the principle that Mark Twain" did when dealing with the lightning-rod man: 'Certainly I will take a rod, ten, fifteen, fifty. Put half a dozen on the house, twenty on the barn; put them everywhere. One on the servant girl, one on the cow, six on the woodshed and then come back to me for further orders. Lightning-rods are great things to have in a family."

But, seriously, what earthly use is there for another translation of the Bible? The last one, not yet four years old, fell still-born. A few cranks discussed it pro and con, and then it dropped out of the public sight forever. Here and there a few enthusiasts proclaimed it from the housetops, but the people went by on the other side. Once in a while a sweet geranium leaf of a youngster sought to open with it his first call to preach, but his congregation drew the line at sheol, and he quickly had to hunt another translation considerably more ancient.

People are afraid of new Bibles. Education is everything in the matter of faith. Once well set in his religious ways and the average man or woman will stick at the crater of Vesuvius, even though an eruption is off only the distance of an hour. Habit also fills a great space. To be able to find certain texts at the places assigned to them is much more potential than to be able to interpret them. People cry out against superstition, but it has been one of Christianity's handmaidens. It has done a powerful sight of good and a powerful sight of harm, but its good deeds are legion as to one bad one. So, also, with Christianity itself. About the old Bible there is a sort of superstition that enshrines it and makes it invincible. Of course many things enter into the superstition to harden and crystallize it, but it exists and can not be cast aside or ignored, hence the folly of another translation no matter how perfect of the Holy Scriptures.

THE REVISED BIBLE.

[Kansas City Times, July, 1888.]

The English publishers of the revised edition of the Bible, especially the revised New Testament, complain very much that the venture, in a business point of view, is a dead failure. There is no demand for this revised Bible, either in part or in whole. Much money has already been lost, they say, more will be lost, and they profess not to be able to understand why the sales are not larger and the profits more reassuring.

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A blind man might see why. The masses of the people do not want the revised Bible, will not have it, will not buy it, have no faith in it, no respect for it, no tolerance for it-aye, for it, in fact, they have only supreme contempt and bitter mockery.

With every human creed, belief, or spiritual profession there always goes a certain amount of superstition. It is not the superstition of ignorance. It is not the creed superstition which leads to violence, bloodshed and murder. It is not the fanatical superstition which takes the sword in one hand and the crucifix in the other. It is not the proselyting superstition which mistakes the shadow for the substance, and seeks to bring about universal brotherhood by extirpating all freedom of thought and independence of action. It is rather the sentimental superstition which believes old things to be better than new; the faith of the old days more holy than the faith of the new; the old ideas of futurity more reverent than the new agnosticism, which does not know; the old Bible, as our fathers taught it, more sacred than anything a broader learning can fashion, or a higher education make more pliable to modern thought and insipid forms of expression.

Especially does the unvexed and unexpurgated Bible take hold of the human imagination and do with it as it pleases. It has been handed down from generation to generation. The family's genealogical tree has taken root thee. In sunshine it has sung praises to the Lord; in shadow it has poured ointment into the hurts and tempered the wind to the shorn lamb. Birth saw its precious depository busy with the record, and death knew that however the stealth of its bereavements, something would be writ to tell of what had been given and what had been taken away.

And then what delightful memories of childhood cluster about the old Bible. Call it the King James version, or the Douay version, or whatever other version you please, so only it is the old Bible, to childhood it is a sentient thing. It has life and breath and speech and motion. For every doubt it has an explanation, and for every wound a Gilead full of balm. Its promises are articulate, and it soothes as it promises. To doubt its inspiration in those halcyon days would have been to doubt a father's care or a mother's tenderness. Somehow, no matter how, it grew about the heart and became chief among its holy household gods. Every line in it was taken literally, interpreted literally, and acted upon literally. It provided for a future. It robbed death of the severity of its sting; it denied to the grave the exultation of its victory. As one grew older it took upon itself shape after shape that had not before been discovered, because to be more and more of a necessity. It was historical, theological, polemical, scientific, hygienic, geological and prophetic. It was a single volume and a library. Day after day it gathered unto itself new strength; reading after reading it revealed unto the student new beauties of thought and new avenues of investigation. All in all, it was to him the most satisfying book ever printed, and so when he went out into the world for himself, along with the faces of the other near ones and dear ones, there went also the form and the face of the idolized old family Bible.

No wonder, therefore, that the work which would cut and carve this precious instrument is almost universally looked upon as sacrilegious work, receiving bitter denunciations instead of indorsment, or so completely ignored as to entail heavy financial losses upon those who, through much learning, vainly imagined that they could saturate the Word of God with their Greek and Hebrew refinements

and force it upon the recognition of those who yet believe in the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures

MARRIAGE OF CAPTAIN COLLINS.

[Kansas City Times August, 1888.]

So this wary old campaigner has been captured at last. So the old veteran battery commander, who never lost a gun in all the four years' war, in one swift moment lost both his heart and whatever may be looked upon as the blessedness of single life. So this splendid cannoneer, whom General Jo Shelby took as a boy and left as a giant, has become as pliant as a woman's necklace in as tender a pair of hands as ever threaded the strands of life with the golden beads of purity and devotion. Ah! love! love!

There are thousands of the comrades of Captain Collins this day all over Arkansas, Texas and Missouri who will rejoice that such a destiny has come at last to one who has deserved so much at the hands of fortune-deserved so much because of truth, courage, generous manhood, steadfastness to friendship, perfect honor and a faith that will fail not till the end.

Then if these old comrades of his could have seen his beautiful bride-so modest, so gentle, so refined, the dew of the morning of her young life yet glistening upon the roses in her cheeks, their congratulations would have been sent up to him twice, once because of the resolution which made him draw near to such a shrine to offer incense, and once because the priestess who presided there had so many of the qualities of splendid American womanhood as to fit her perfectly for adoration.

And now the two go out into the world hand in hand together. Perhaps it may be dark sometimes. Perhaps in some mornings no birds may be heard to sing. Perhaps fate's hand may now and then smite hard and smite the things which are tenderest. Perhaps across the home threshold some shadows may fall which can be lifted never more until the light that never was on shore or sea lift them beyond the wonderful river; but stand up, old comrade, tender and true. You are the oak. It is for you to sit sentinel by the hearthstone, for you to make holy with devotion the perfect shelter of the roof-tree. Everything that is touching in woman's confidence has been reposed in you. The perfect purity of a sinless and stainless life is yours for the cherishing. The sun has risen on this newer and fuller existence, and that journey has been entered upon which must go forward to its final abiding place of domestic happiSince it has been begun, may the good God send to bless it those bountiful things which make the flowers to bloom for you, and the green sward to be gracious for your feet, and soft winds to blow for you, and a perfect possession to come unto you, as the gentle night-dews come to a summer's hill.

ness.

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.

[Kansas City Times, October, 1888.]

The Boston Herald asks with more plaintiveness than the subject demands, it seems to us, when the great American novel may be expected. Before such a question could be answered one would have to understand what is meant by the great American novel. If it is to be a "Les Miserables" of a book, the answer would be easy,

for it would consist of the single word never; but until a book in some degree approaching this is produced this side of the Atlantic it is not worth while to talk about any really distinctive or representative work of American fiction.

The American novels, now being printed by the carload and scattered broadcast over the country, furnish the best possible evidence that the Herald's question must remain in abeyance for a satisfactory answer if not for a whole century at least for the half of one. There never was such a ruck of simper, insanity and gush. There was never such a reign of platitude, idiocy and drivel. No power anywhere. No imagination. No hand that can paint a picture to interest, much less to haunt one. Nothing that forces a sigh, much less a shudder. Nothing that casts athwart the sky of a perfect imbecility a single lurid flash to tell that the sun of genius is about to lift itself above the horizon.

The old novels, by far the best ever published in this country, are no longer read. Who to-day sets any store by James Fenimore Cooper? and yet he was as much of an American as the American eagle. The forests at his touch took any hue or color. They were green like green seas, or desolate like snow wastes in December. They were jocund with bird songs, or hushed as though the vast presence of the Angel of Silence brooded in all their branches. He put his hand upon the streams and, as they hastened on to the sea, they had a speech which he interpreted. He dramatized the wigwam and the Indian, the trapper and the scout, and gave to the civilization of the border the terse, picturesque form of expresIsion which even to this day, dialect though it be, still retains all of its pathos and intensity. His pictures of pioneer life were perfect. The hunter, the trapper, the scout, the guide, the red warrior, the warpath, the block-house, the ambushment, the butchery-they are as well recognized now as portrayed by this wizard as they were in the days when Montcalm pitched his marquee in front of Fort William Henry, and poor old Munro, heroic Scotchman though he was, surrendered at last to French finesse and Indian deviltry.

But Cooper is forgotten. And so is Poe. And Hawthorne will be by and by. Namby-pambyism is the standard. Any situation which would make a mouse squeak is eliminated from all latter-day American novels. The end is everything, the denouement as the chirrupers like to call it. That must be a marriage, everybody happy, the hero getting a medicine chest, and a copy of Godey's Lady's Book for a wife, and the heroine getting one of Sam Jones' spider-legged dudes and a walking stick for a husband. Hysteria and hair-pin. The bustle and the pad. Tootsy-wootsy and baby-boy. Lord of Israel! what a race of chimpanzees would be born into the world if these modern American novelists could have the making of its procreators.

Coming like the white butterflies in June, and going like the white caterpillars in November, there is one funny sort of a man called Henry James, an American in the spring and an Englishman in the fall, who has had the audacity to declare that he is the great American novelist. Why, he isn't a novelist of any kind, let alone an American novelist. If truth had ever had the fashioning of a nom de plume for him it would have been insipidity. His women wheeze like people with the phthisic. Now and then he has a statuesque one, and she faints at the sight of a Japanese fan. Skilled in essences, and with a smelling bottle always handy, he will go into a drawing room and have four or five on the floor at once, some