My wife is a theosophist. This fact may account for her numerous eccentricities or be simply one of them. I incline to the latter opinion, because she preferred the unbeaten to the beaten track, both in walk and conversation, long before Modern Buddhism was ever heard of in the small Western town of whose chief newspaper (circulation largest in Michigan) I have the honor to be editor and proprietor.

How such a hot-house plant as Theosophy ever took root in the swamps and sands of the Wolverine State may seem surprising at the first glance, but let the second rest upon our environment—the absence of mountain or swift-flowing river, the presence of fever and ague and half-burnt pine woods—and it will be seen that this Eastern lore with its embarrassment of symbols supplies a long-felt want to starving imagination. We of the West are forever reaching beyond our grasp, have intelligence and perception, but lack the culture necessary for discrimination, and therefore the romantic souls among us who rise above the rampant materialism of the majority go to the other extreme, and hail with enthusiasm the new-old religion.

"It's better to believe too much than too little, but you theosophists swallow an awful lot," I say to Belle when she tries to convert me.

I am well aware that many of my fellow-citizens consider me a subject for commiseration because I have lived for twenty years with so erratic a house-mate, for I have not deemed it necessary to explain to them that without the stimulus of her enlivening spirit, without the element of surprise constantly contributed by my wife's love of variety, the daily life, and therefore the daily paper, of their favorite editor would partake of that flatness which is the predominant characteristic of this western part of the State of Michigan.

Our four sons and two daughters enjoy their mother fully as much as I do, for is she not the most fascinating romancer they ever knew? Now that they are all of an age to be attending school and looking out for themselves, after the manner of independent young Americans, they require from her nothing but sympathy, for their grandmother sews their buttons on. Grandma!—Ay, there's the rub.

I have no hesitation in owning that I am Scotch by birth. My mother left her native land to make her home with us entirely too late in life to allow Western ideas regarding Sabbath observance, the rearing of children, or the amount of respect due to the opinion of elders, to become ingrafted upon Scottish prejudice concerning these matters.

Mrs. Gemmell Senior has, however, the national peculiarity of judging "blood thicker than water," and whatever her convictions may be concerning the methods of Mrs. Gemmell Junior, she restricts the expression of them to our family circle—in fact, I may say, to myself. She generally seizes me when I lie at my ease on the well-worn lounge in our sitting room, more properly dubbed the "nursery," for it is Liberty Hall for the youngsters. Two rooms have been knocked into one to accommodate their dolls' houses, bookshelves, toys, and printing machines. Belle had the whole side torn out of the house to build an open fire-place, on purpose to burn slabs, over which the children roast pop-corn to their hearts' content.

"A body wad think," said my mother one cold night five or six years ago, when I lay on the sofa, trying to send my weariness off in smoke, "A body wad think there had been nae cherritable wark dune in the toon ava, till they theossiphies set aboot it. If yer provost and baillies lookit efter things as they ocht, there wad be a dacent puirs-house for the idignant folk, an' a wheen daft leddies like Eesabel needna gang roun' speirin' at yon infeedels for their siller tae build a hoose o' refuse."

"There is a county poorhouse, mother, but it doesn't happen to be located in this city, and they won't take in anybody there that hasn't been a resident of the county for a certain time."

"Aweel! there's plenty o' kirks, though ye never darken the door o' ane. Do they no' leuk efter their ain puir folk?"

"Yes; but after nobody else's. This House of Refuge is to be non-sectarian, non-religious, humanitarian, in the broadest sense of the term. Ah! There's Belle now," and I gave a sigh of relief as I heard my wife's latch-key in the front door.

She came in with an out-of-door breeze, her dark face glowing from the wintry wind, flakes of newly fallen snow resting like diamonds upon her prematurely white hair, and her brown eyes sparkling with the animation of twenty summers rather than of forty-two.

"Children all gone to bed? That's right! Don't go, mother! I'm sure you'll like to hear about the House of Refuge. We've got it fixed at last! Those rich old lumbermen that won't give a cent to a church, or any charity connected with one, have gone to the bottom of their pockets this time. Fancy Peter Wood, Dave—five hundred dollars! And Jeff Henderson, five hundred. I have the list in my bag. Like to see it?"

"No' the nicht, thenk ye," said my mother stiffly, but I added:

"Hand it over to me, and I'll put it in to-morrow's Echo. That's what they want."

"Nothing of the kind, you old cynic! I shan't tell you another thing about it." But still she went on: "We've taken the old Laurence house on the corner of Garfield Avenue and Pine Street, and it's to be fitted up to accommodate any sort of refugees."

"Irrespective of race, creed, sex, or color," I whispered parenthetically.

"No one is ever to be turned from the door without a good square meal, and there's to be a back, outside stair erected, up which a tramp can go at any hour of the night, and find a nice clean bed awaiting him—locked away from the rest of the house, of course."

"Oh, why?" I innocently inquired. "Surely you have enough faith in your brother man to believe that he would not commit any breach of hospitality?"

"I have," replied Belle, squeezing my recumbent form further against the back of the sofa, upon which she had seated herself. "But remember we are not all theosophists on the Board."

In the words of the historic witness against Mrs. Muldoon, "That's the way the row began!" Belle was elected Treasurer of the House of Refuge, but as she knows nothing of figures, I had to keep the books of that unique institution, and was therefore enabled to form a practical estimate of its workings.

I shall not attempt a description of the numerous "cases" in which my advice, if not my pocketbook, was freely drawn upon, but shall leave them, along with the description of the many antecedent fads of my beloved better half, to some historian of longer wind, and shall content myself with recounting the particular "case"—and attachments—which most nearly affected our family life and happiness.

"This is what I call solid comfort," said Belle to me one evening late in September, as we sat in the parlor in a couple of deep, springy armchairs, fronting a huge grate fire, that would be banished by the lighting of the furnace. "Children all in school again, your mother off on a long visit, and plenty of new books on the table."

I looked up from one of the aforesaid new books.

"Just wait! The season's business hasn't begun in the Refuge yet."

"Everything is in good shape for it, though. We've had enough donations of groceries and vegetables to keep us going almost all winter. We've lots of wood for the furnace, and Mack and Hardy have given us some second-hand furniture and——"

The electric door-bell sent out a long, imperative summons.

"Who can that be, Dave, at this time of night? None of the boys locked out?"

"No; they all went up to bed a while ago."

Belle rose and walked to the door. I pulled the tidy from my chair-back over my bald head to protect me from the draught, but that did not prevent me from hearing what went on.

"Are you Mrs. Gemmell?" This from a female voice, breathless with excitement.

"I am."

"Then you are one of the trustees of the House of Refuge?" gasped another feminine speaker.

"Yes. Won't you come in?"

"No, thank you. We've just come to tell you about this young girl who has run to us for protection."

"We're school-teachers, mawm."

"She's in my class, and she hasn't a friend in the city and knew nowhere else to go."

Then followed some hysterical whispers, which roused my curiosity so much that I went to the door and peeped over the shoulder of my tall wife. The two plain, business-like young women were evidently much distressed, but between them was a fair-haired slip of a girl of fifteen or sixteen, the least disturbed of the group. The three older women might have been talking in a foreign tongue, or of someone else, so unconcerned did she appear, present danger being over.

"How did she happen to be with these people?" Belle was asking as I came forward.

"The wife of this brute of a man told us that she was nursemaid with the Ferguson Family Concert Company, but they dropped her here in Lake City without a friend or a cent."

"She took her in to help sell fruit and ice cream evenings, and she let her go to school through the day."

At this juncture the subject under discussion broke into a beaming smile, showing all her fine teeth. Her cheek dimpled and reddened, and her blue eyes, full of fun, looked straight into mine. I became suddenly aware that I had forgotten to remove the tidy, and retired in confusion, but heard Belle's conclusion of the interview:

"Just wait a second till I give you a line to the matron of the House of Refuge. You can leave the girl there till we see what can be done for her. She'll be perfectly safe, and had better keep on going to school as usual."

A week afterward I asked my wife what had become of her latest protÉgÉe.

"You mean Mary Mason? She's in the refuge yet, attending school, and we've settled that man's ice-cream saloon."

"How?"

"Boycotted him. We can't reach him any other way."

"That's rather hard on his wife, who seems to be a decent sort of party."

"The innocent often appear to suffer with and for the guilty, but if you understood the law of Karma you would know that all the evil that befalls us is really the result of some wrongdoing of our own in a previous incarnation. Mary Mason herself is an instance."

"What's the matter with her?"

"Poor girl! She's been knocked from pillar to post all her days. She hasn't an idea who her parents are, and there isn't a creature in the world she has any claim upon. She must have gone very far astray last time to have been brought into the world again with such disadvantages."

"It appears to me she has a great many advantages—lovely blue eyes, good teeth, the fashionable golden shade of hair, and the prettiest complexion I've seen for many a day."

"Don't be provoking, Dave! The poor little thing has the marks of some of her beatings on her yet. The Ferguson family were the first who ever treated her decently, or paid her any wages."

"Why did they drop her?"

"One of our Committee took it upon herself to write and ask them. They replied that the girl was of perfectly good character, so far as they knew, but she fell so ridiculously in love with Frank Ferguson, their eldest son, that she was making a nuisance of herself, and so they had to let her go."

I laughed.

"There are generally two sides to that kind of story."

"At the meeting of the trustees to-morrow it is to be decided what's to be done with her, because she says she doesn't want to go to school any more. She's never had much of a chance before to learn anything, and she's in a class with little bits of girls, and she doesn't like it—says she'd rather go to work to earn her own living."

Belle came home from that meeting with her face ablaze with righteous wrath. Her hands trembled so much over the teacups at our evening meal that even sixteen year old Watty, our eldest son, remarked it.

"What's the matter with mamma? Her trolley's off."

I knew there was trouble in the wind, so I fortified myself with a good supper and read my paper at the same time, to leave myself free for what was to follow. The children study their lessons in the back end of the nursery, and I therefore forbore to take up my usual position upon the sofa, but withdrew to the parlor with my pipe.

Presently my wife followed me, nearly walking over the furniture in her excitement.

"Go on, Belle; out with it!"

"You will listen, will you, seriously?"

"Certainly, mawm. I never had any sort of an objection to your making a scavenger barrel of me, so go ahead."

"Oh, these benevolent women, Dave! Any one of them alone is as good-hearted as can be, but lump them together on a committee, and they're as cold and cruel and grasping as the meanest business man you could name!"

"More so!" said I, approvingly, and for once Isabel did not resent the disparagement of her sex.

"The question arose, what was to be done about Mary Mason, and every one of them, David—every one of them, with young daughters of their own growing up at home, voted to let that girl go round this town selling a book."

"Was that what she wanted to do herself?"

"Yes; but think of them letting her do it! You know as well as I do what sort of a city this is, and whether it's safe for a lovely girl like that to go to men's offices, trying with her pretty looks and ways to wheedle them into subscribing for Stanley's 'Darkest Africa.' Oh, I was wild! I said to Mrs. Robinson: 'How would you like your Lulu to do it?' 'The cases are very different,' said she; 'my daughter has no need to earn her living.' 'Mrs. Constable,' said I, 'if your grandchild were left alone in the world, what would you think of the charity of any body of women who allowed her to go from under their protection to make her living in this way?' 'I don't see the connection,' said she; 'Mary Mason's been fighting the world since she was seven years old, and just because she happens to have a pretty face, you seem to think she should be put in a glass case and never do anything for herself.'"

"She had you there, Belle," said I, pulling her down to the arm of my big easy-chair. "Let the girl alone; she'll come out all right. She's too good-looking for a nurse or a housemaid, and she doesn't know enough arithmetic to be a shop girl. I don't see what else she can do."

"That's just what the ladies calmly decided," said my wife, walking the floor again. "They seemed to think that a little business training would just be the making of Mary. Oh, these Christians!"

"You see, my dear," said I, "committees are not supposed to have any conscience. They have the income of the Refuge in trust for the contributors, and they have no right to keep on supporting a girl who is willing to work for herself. How she proposes to do it is none of their business."

"That's just what it is—their business; their business to see that she doesn't meet the very fate we've saved her from once already. Oh! there's no getting these narrow-minded, orthodox, bigoted people to see more than one side of a question."

"Take care you don't become dogmatic on your own side," said I, rising to knock the ashes out of my pipe. "If it's the law of Karma that's responsible for her having been left to shift for herself at so early an age, it's the same law that's after her now, and I wouldn't interfere with its operations, if I were you."

"You don't in the least understand what you are talking about," and Belle sailed from the room to settle a noisy dispute in the nursery.