Let me give a few sentences from the inspiring letters that come to me across the distance between that bay window by the Golden Gate, and my “Rest Cottage” by the inland sea:
“If I know myself, I have one regnant wish: To help build up the coming kingdom.” “I desire you to include me in all your invocations for light and guidance.” “We move on in one work, we are co-laborers for a common Master—blessed be His name. We both aim at one thing: character-building in Christ Jesus. I am to speak before the C. L. S. C. at Pacific Grove, Monterey, on the ‘Kindergarten in its Relation to Character-Building.’ I shall speak of temperance. Have tried to help women both north and south who are working in their little towns heroically.” “The Chautauqua of the Coast, energized by desperate, sometimes almost despairing love for their tempted ones.”
The _Independent_ and other leading journals have in Mrs. Cooper a valued correspondent, and her work among the little, ill-born and worse-nurtured children of San Francisco’s moral Sahara has been described by her own pure and radiant pen. It is one of the most potent forces in that city’s uplift toward Christianity. Among the best types of representative women, America may justly count Sarah B. Cooper, the student, the Christian exegete and philosopher, and the tender friend of every untaught little child.
When Napoleon was about fourteen, he was conversing with a lady about Marshal Turenne, and extolling him to the skies.
“Yes, my friend,” she answered, “he was a great man; but I should like him better if he had not burnt the Palatinate.”
“What does that matter,” he replied briskly, “if the burning was necessary to the success of his plans?”
Napoleon’s German master, a heavy and phlegmatic man, who thought the study of German the only one necessary to a man’s success in life, finding Napoleon absent from his class one day, asked where he was. He was told he was undergoing his examination for the artillery.
“Does he know anything then?” he asked ironically.
“Why, sir, he is the best mathematician in the school.”
“Well,” was his sage remark, “I have always heard say, and I always thought, that mathematics was a study only suitable to fools.”