Fate Ironical

They were a merry party at the dinner-table, and the Reverend Silas Geary amused them greatly by his discussion of that absorbing topic, is golf worth playing? He himself, good man, deplored the fact that several worthy persons who, otherwise, would have been working ten or twelve hours a day as Cabinet ministers, deliberately toiled in the sloughs and pits of the golf course.

"The whole nation is chasing a little ball," he said; "we deplore the advance of Germany, but, I would ask you, how does the German spend his day, what are his needs, where do his amusements lie? There is a country for you--every man a soldier, every worker an intellect. In England nowadays our young fellows seem to try and find out how little they can do. We live for minimums. We are only happy when we have struck a bat with a ball and it has gone far. We reserve our greatest honors for those who thus excel."

Alban ventured to say that beer seemed to be the recreation of the average German and insolence his amusement. He confessed that the Germans beat his own people by hard work; but he asked, is it really a good thing that work should be the beginning and the end of all things? He had been taught at school that the supreme beauty of life lay in things apart and chiefly in a man's own soul. To which Gessner himself retorted that a woman's soul was what the writer probably meant.