to the physician of essential facts. She will
have learnt that she must compel the
surgeon or physician to make plain to her,
and must compel herself to understand,
her exact line of duty in each case. She will
not, through mistaken prejudices or a false
tenderness, leave the sleep of the sufferer to
cancel every duty she may owe him until it
is at an end, or be unused to join decision to
her gentleness. Finally, she will order her
speech wisely, and will know how to live
with the household out of the sick room as a
faithful, humble friend.

ETHICS OF BROADCLOTH.

I DO not often talk Latin; but I must today
be a little pedantic and give a translation
from that crabbed old tongue which has its
roots of birch and cane, and all its derivatives
compassed by rulers and impositions. In
Ainsworth's Dictionary you will find the
word coticula, Coticula; first, a little
whetstone or grindstone; second, a touchstone to
try gold. Now, translated as a hybrid, and
according to sound, coticula is a little coat,
or jacket; according to Ainsworth a
whetstone, and a touchstone to try gold: and
there is more affinity between the two
interpretations than appears on the surface.

The first jacket or coticula is an important
fact in the life of childhood, not surpassed
even by the first full-grown and long-tailed
coat; for then the bloom of perfect novelty
has been rubbed off the butterfly wings of
the soul, and it is the second time in his life
in which the boy's heart has swelled with
pride and throbbed with ambition. His
memory turns back to the day when he was
invested with his first jacket; and great as
are the glories of tails and stick-ups they do
not exceed those of waistcoats independent
of waistband buttons, and jackets with real
pockets capable of infinite extension, on that
day of coticula investiture the boy first
awakened to the condition that he was a
progressive somebody, an individual one, an
integral unit; not an incomplete atom, as
heretofore, smothered in the congregation of
larger atoms, a conservative infant destined
to perpetual frocks and trousers. When
Rienzi heard himself proclaimed Tribune by
the universal shout of Rome, he was invested
with his coticula. Massaniello, and our own
Cromwell; Napoleon, when he placed the iron
crown of Milan on his head, and trod on
dynasties and nationalities as though they
had been Kidderminster carpets spread before
him; Marius, when the purple was flung
across his breast; Darius, when his horse
neighed out the oracle of the gods; Caesar,
when crowned in the Capitol—all these, and
more than these, only consolidated in their
manhood the boy's golden haze of hope when
his first coticula lay untried and unsoiled
before him. For with the first coatee or
coatling rose up dim grand foreshadowings of
the mighty things to come; floating visions
indistinct through their colossal magnificence;
majestic imaginings; delicious anticipations;
compared with which even the reality of hope
fulfilled and ambitious endeavour attained
seem faint and poor. There is a legend in
the Talmud that an angel visits the unborn
child the moment before its birth, and reveals
to it all the events of its future life. The
jacket of modern days may stand in place of
that Talmudic angel, for by the feelings and
conduct of the youthful wearer may be
predicated the whole of his after career. This is
no strained analogy; it is the very thing I
have undertaken to show.

I well remember my first coatee. It was
dark blue, and had shining yellow buttons,
which I, in my callow simplicity, did actually
believe to be plates of solid gold. My feelings,
were beyond the range of cold, starch, stiff-
backed words: I wanted the language of
angels for my speech: for I was now a thing
of consequence—an embryo man seeing the
daylight of maturity through the thinning
eggshell in which I was still imprisoned, and
the future was too great for the tiny present
to comprehend or express. It has been
always so. Through life I have lived on
hope and nourished my soul with dreams,
believing in no evil to come, and trusting all
to the dim chances of time and luck: as I did
on the day of my first jacket. For had I
then known of all the ill of which that blue
and brass garment was the harbinger, I had
not strutted so proudly, nor talked so big
and loud. I had grand foreshadowings and
blissful anticipations truly; but schools,
birch-rods, canes, and days of faghood found
no place therein. Yet I have historic
companions, for neither did Marius know that
the purple folds behind him were trailing
into a Minturnæan dungeon, nor did Napoleon
read Helena in the welded lines of the iron
crown. Yet perhaps it would be good sometimes
to know the future of our fate. If we
must fall, surely it would be well to fall from
as low a height as is convenient.

I was the youngest of the household; and
this, as every family knows, is the earnest of
kingship. But on the eventful morning of
my change of garb a strange woman brought
into the nursery a mysterious-looking bundle,
and this was baby-brother. Now baby-
brother was a myth and a usurper in one. I
never could understand his existence at all,
nor why he had so suddenly dethroned me
from my royal place. I had been the nursery
autocrat; first attended to because I cried
the loudest; threatening the old nurse and
over-mastering my little sisters; but now I
was suddenly gathered to the world of boys,
and baby-brother reigned in my stead; I was
torn from the loomspun sanctuary of petticoats,
and sorrow, disguised as pride, made
a grip at the coticula.

Again I inscribe the text; coticula, a grindstone
or whetstone. A grindstone maketh