cheap and charming holiday on the open sea.

_October, 1887._




_WAR._


The brisk Pressmen are usually exceedingly busy in calculating the
chances of a huge fight--indeed they spend a good part of each year in
that pleasing employment. Smug diplomatists talk glibly about "war
clearing the air;" and the crowd--the rank and file--chatter as though
war were a pageant quite divorced from wounds and death, or a mere
harmless hurly-burly where certain battalions receive thrashings of a
trifling nature. It is saddening to notice the levity with which the
most awful of topics is treated, and especially is it sad to see how
completely the women and children are thrust out of mind by belligerent
persons. We who have gazed on the monster of War, we who have looked in
the whites--or rather the reds--of his loathsome eyes, cannot let this
burst of frivolity work mischief without one temperate word of warning
and protest.

Pleasant it is to watch the soldiers as they march along the streets, or
form in their superb lines on parade. No man or woman of any sensibility
can help feeling proudly stirred when a Cavalry regiment goes by. The
clean, alert, upright men, with their sure seat; the massive war-horses
champing their bits and shaking their accoutrements: the rhythmic thud
of hoofs, the keen glitter of steel, and the general air of power, all