true values and sees it is externals which have been most at fault in the other world. It is a delicate passage, indeed, where she sheds all the verbal fungus about love, marriage and children she has acquired as a rich woman's secretary, and stands naked before her own need. Here Mrs. Norris has touched highwater mark with an intimate understanding of all that is elusive and all that is bold when love speaks. Then Margaret reads a rhythm into what seemed commonplaceness, the sordidness and care of her mother's life, which has been so repellent to her, and she finds, too, how the joy of motherhood for its own sake is its own compensation, giving a selfish satisfaction to what many would call sacrifice.

And Margaret had sometimes wished, or half formed the wish, that she and Bruce had been the only ones Good God! that was what women did, then, when they denied the right of life to the distant, unwanted, possible little person! Calmly, constantly, in all placid philosophy and self-justification, they kept from the world—not only the troublesome new baby, with his tears and illness, his merciless exactions, his endless claim on mind and body and spirit- but perhaps the glowing beauty of a Rebecca, the buoyant, indomitable spirit of a Leo, the sturdy charm of a small Robert, whose grip on life, whose energy and ambition were as strong as Margaret's own! Margaret stirred uneasily, frowned in the dark. It seemed perfectly incredible, it seemed perfectly impossible that if Mother had had only two—and how many thousands of women didn't have that! - she, Margaret, a pro

nounced and separate entity, traveled, ambitious, and to be the wife of one of the world's great men, might not have been lying here in the summer night, rich in love and youth and beauty and her dreams!

THE BABY

BY JANE TAYLOR

Safe sleeping on its mother's breast

The smiling babe appears,

Now sweetly sinking into rest;
Now washed in sudden tears:
Hush, hush, my little baby dear,
There's nobody to hurt you here.

Without a mother's tender care,
The little thing must die,
Its chubby hands too feeble are
One service to supply;

And not a tittle does it know

What kind of world 't is come into.

The lambs sport gaily on the grass
When scarcely born a day;
The foal, beside its mother ass,
Trots frolicksome away,
No other creature, tame or wild,
Is half so helpless as a child.

To nurse the Dolly, gaily drest,
And stroke its flaxen hair,

Or ring the coral at its waist,
With silver bells so fair,

Is all the little creature can,

That is so soon to be a man.

Full many a summer's sun must glow
And lighten up the skies,

Before its tender limbs can grow

To anything of size;

And all the while the mother's eye

Must every little want supply.

Then surely, when each little limb
Shall grow to healthy size,

And youth and manhood strengthen him.
For toil and enterprise,

His mother's kindness is a debt,

He never, never will forget.

THE MOTHER IN DRAMA

BY HENRY BARRETT HINCKLEY

In no period of the drama in Europe does motherhood seem frequently to have been an important theme. Numerous dramatic situations where motherhood is an essential motive might have been devised. And indeed the frequency with which the slaying of Clytemnestra by her children has been made the subject of a play, there are not less than nine Electras in Greek, Latin and French alone-shows that the

theme has certainly its appeal. Yet for some reason situations and plots involving motherhood are rather rare in the literature of the stage. And no satisfactory explanation of the fact has occurred to me.

Homer has left us two striking pictures of motherhood, one where Hecuba on the wall implores her son Hector to come inside the city and avoid the onset of Achilles, the other where Andromache and her little son Astyanax take leave of Hector ere he goes to battle. This latter has ever been justly conceded to be one of the truest and most beautiful of all pictures of domestic affection and it might seem as if the Attic dramatists would often have vied with it. But the position of woman in the great days of Athens was lower than in the Homeric age, and tender motherhood is by no means a conspicuous theme of the tragedians even in Euripides. In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Clytemnestra, with majestic insolence and withering scorn, refers to the daughter whom her husband sacrificed at Aulis, and whose shade will meet him and kiss him in the world below. Among the titles of lost dramas none is more tantalizing than the Niobe, found among the fragments both of Aeschylus and of Sophocles, but it is impossible from the few extant lines to form any idea how either dramatist developed the character of the mother whose pride drew the vengeance of the gods. Clytemnestra and Medea are both vengeful murderesses, though the art of the dramatist keeps them human. But Euripides, in his Women of Troy, harking back to Homer, has given us far and away the most affecting picture of mother

hood ever presented on the stage of antiquity. Here are Andromache and Astyanax essentially as in Homer, but now the evil day of slavery has befallen them. The play lacks unity. But it contains some of Euripides' thoroughly representative work, expressing with tender beauty his characteristic sympathy for the weak, the helpless, the disregarded. Even here, though Hector is dead, Andromache is pictured largely as the faithful and devoted wife, observant of every least propriety toward her husband. But the climax expresses her feelings when she takes leave of her child, whom the Greeks have decided to slay, lest he should become a second Hector. Talthybius, who informs her of the decision of the Greeks, does his cruel errand as humanely as the terrible circumstances will allow, especially cautioning Andromache not to resist, nor to utter any execrations lest the Greeks after slaying the child should leave its corpse unburied — a horrible thing according to Greek ideas. The situation will remind every reader of Chaucer's Griselda being deprived of her babes. Andromache's farewell begins with splendid dignity and self-command. Toward the end she does give way to some ejaculations which apparently Talthybius is considerate enough not to repeat to the Greeks; for the little body is returned for burial. The play was written in 415 B. C., in the midst of the great Peloponnesian War, and it is hard not to believe that Euripides desired principally to give a picture of the sufferings that war brings upon women, and especially upon mothers. It is one of those extraordinary works in which Euripides ex