The Life That Now is Sermons

ruit trees in a young orchard. Each tree may get an equal care, and appear to have the same natural advantages, but one will spring out into an early fruitfulness, while another holds back, summer after summer, and perhaps, only when the husbandman begins to despair of its ever doing any good, it bears fruit. It is so with boys. One lad will be bright and .promising, the joy of his tutor, and the pride of his mother, right from the start; no one can tell exactly how he learned his letters ; they seemed to come to him by instinct; he knew them when he saw them, or, as Plato would say, he recollected them. But another lad, on the same form, perhaps in the same family, is dull and backward; he has quite forgotten his first letters before he learned the last. But after a good while there is the dawn of a new day; then the backward boy has a whole sunrise to himself, and opens out into an equal manhood with the best of his brighter fellows, It is so again with woman in the experiences and life of the heart. A shrinking, retiring, near-sighted woman waits and waits among the Yorkshire hills, saying, wistfully, to herself, " Vhat shall I do ?" It has been a long, sore trial to wait and watch as she has done. In her life-time she has known not a few of her own age who have long since solved that problem : some are wedded and happy in their homes; others have foundtheir true place as teachers, writers, or artists, and are crowned already with honor. This woman has... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.