Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: native poets—one to whose genius and true womanhood even royalty has done grateful honor ; a woman who ' has used her' every ' talent to her own and her friends' advantage' in more ways than one. She had a call one day from a neighbor, an eminent professor, learned in dead and spoken tongues. In the passage of the conversation from trifles to weightier matters, it chanced that she differed in opinion from him upon two points. He refused to believe that potatoes could ever be made into a palatable sweet by any ingenuity of the culinary art, and he took exception to her rendering of a certain passage of Virgil. In the course of the afternoon he received from his fair neighbor a folded paper and a covered dish. Opening the former, he read a metrical translation of the disputed passnge, so beautiful and striking he could no longer doubt that she had discovered the poet's meaning more truly than had he. The dish contained a delicious potato custard. A foolscap page of rhymed thanks went back with the empty pudding-dish. It was mere doggerel, for the pundit was no poet, and meant his note for nothing more than jingle and fun, but his tribute of admiration was sincere. I forget the form of its expression, except that the concluding lines ran somewhat thus:— " From Virgil and potatoes, too, You bring forth treasures rich and new." Am I harsh and unsympathetic when I say, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, if a woman has genuine talent, she will find time to improve it even amid the clatter of household machinery ? I could multiply instances by the thousand to prove this, did time permit. But what of the poor rich woman who throws away her life in the vain endeavor to bring servants and children " up to time ?" Two things. First, she dies of worry, not of work—a disti...