itself, tends to become obscure and to moulder. Everything needs care to keep it fresh. Much of our progress consists in refreshing or renewing things that have grown dusty with age; the question is, How can this best be done? We have then to study the two questions: What is worth preserving? and:—How to preserve it? And I think that if we give a few moments' attention to considering how the well-meaning servant above referred to came to make such a mistake as she did, and what exactly was the nature of her mistake, it may help us to find our way to some of the great principles by which false Reform ought to be distinguished from true.
First, how came she to make the mistake? Well, probably in some such way as this:—Either she herself or some neighbour, when she was young, lived in a room the walls of which were becoming dirty and brown and scratched. By and by it occurred to somebody to whitewash the walls. And everybody who came in said: "How you have improved the place!" And the woman, then perhaps quite a child, got out of the whole affair just this idea: When something is old, and brown, and dirty, and has little holes in it, the way to improve it is to put on it whitewash. When she was grown up and had charge of her mistress's furniture, she neglected the oak chest because she took no interest in it; but all of a sudden it occurred to her that, if any visitors called, it would look discreditable to have the chest so dirty; she did not care about the carving, but she did not want to be disgraced in the neighbours' eyes. The chest was old, and it was brown, and it had holes and marks in which the dust lodged; and it was dirty. The old idea cropped up in her mind, from mere asso-
