"I am enjoying myself very much in a quiet, non-dissipated, tinpot way--walking on the sea-wall and the pier, reading Carlyle and Marion Crawford, and making little vests for Kilburn orphans."
Only a girl could have written that, and of its kind it is admirable.
An idea largely held by girls, in common with women and men who have a witty tendency, is that appreciation is a form of ignorance. It was, be it here called to remembrance, to correct this notion, that Wordsworth wrote, "True knowledge leads to love," and that Browning wrote, "Admiration grows as knowledge grows."
[Illustration: Appreciation a form of ignorance]
It is doubtless the circumstance that unkindness is so often confounded with wit that has led to the fact that of all good gifts the good gift of wit is the one held in least liking by the majority of persons. The truth would seem to be that, with wit, as with everything else not intrinsically bad, the thing of main importance is that it be handled carefully. Like gunpowder, it has its uses to him who knows how to avail himself of them. He who does not, would do well to do what certain savages once did. Having come into the possession of a bag of gunpowder, they carefully preserved it till the spring, when they planted it as they did their corn. It did not burst forth when the corn burst forth; so much the better for the sowers. That gunpowder was very safely deposited, and much wit might with equal advantage be held over till the next planting season.
Another thing. The wit-snapper should always carry about with him a little balm and a little honey. That was a good sword that Cambuscan had; it could heal the wounds it gave. Only the wit-snapper who carries a little balm and a little honey will be as well equipped as was the knight whose story Chaucer "left half-told."
A further point which calls for passing comment is this. Wit and merriment do not always go hand in hand; indeed, they are often sundered wide. Thus, of the world's famous humorists, it is well known that they were mostly melancholy at the home-fireside. Something very similar holds good in the case of girls--and there are many such--who, while witty in society, are deplorably glum in the family circle, in this unlike a girl of girls whom her father called "Minnehaha"--laughing water--so merry was she in her home, beyond which her influence was to be shed so far that she is known to-day from Indus to the Pole as the friend of Indian women.