CHAPTER XLIII.

SHELLS FROM THE BEACH.

Our summer-house is a cottage at East Hampton, Long Island, overlooking the sea. Seventeen vessels in sight, schooners, clippers, hermaphrodite brigs, steamers, great craft and small. Wonder where they come from, and where they are going to, and who is aboard? Just enough clovertops to sweeten the briny air into the most delightful tonic. We do not know the geological history of this place, but imagine that the rest of Long Island is the discourse of which East Hampton is the peroration. There are enough bluffs to relieve the dead level, enough grass to clothe the hills, enough trees to drop the shadow, enough society to keep one from inanity, and enough quietude to soothe twelve months of perturbation. The sea hums us to sleep at night, and fills our dreams with intimations of the land where the harmony is like "the voice of many waters." In smooth weather the billows take a minor key; but when the storm gives them the pitch, they break forth with the clash and uproar of an overture that fills the heavens and makes the beach tremble. Strange that that which rolls perpetually and never rests itself should be a psalm of rest to others! With these sands of the beach we help fill the hour-glass of life. Every moment of the day there comes in over the waves a flotilla of joy and rest and health, and our piazza is the wharf where the stevedores unburden their cargo. We have sunrise with her bannered hosts in cloth of gold, and moonrise with her innumerable helmets and shields and swords and ensigns of silver, the morning and the night being the two buttresses from which are swung a bridge of cloud suspended on strands of sunbeam, all the glories of the sky passing to and fro with airy feet in silent procession.

We have wandered far and wide, but found no such place to rest in. We can live here forty-eight hours in one day, and in a night get a Rip Van Winkle sleep, waking up without finding our gun rusty or our dog dead.

No wonder that Mr. James, the first minister of this place, lived to eighty years of age, and Mr. Hunting, his successor, lived to be eighty-one years of age, and Doctor Buel, his successor, lived to be eighty-two years of age. Indeed, it seems impossible for a minister regularly settled in this place to get out of the world before his eightieth year. It has been only in cases of "stated supply," or removal from the place, that early demise has been possible. And in each of these cases of decease at fourscore it was some unnecessary imprudence on their part, or who knows but that they might be living yet? That which is good for settled pastors being good for other people, you may judge the climate here is salutary and delectable for all.

The place was settled in 1648, and that is so long ago that it will probably never be unsettled. The Puritans took possession of it first, and have always held it for the Sabbath, for the Bible and for God. Much maligned Puritans! The world will stop deriding them after a while, and the caricaturists of their stalwart religion will want to claim them as ancestors, but it will be too late then; for since these latter-day folks lie about the Puritans now, we will not believe them when they want to get into the illustrious genealogical line.

East Hampton has always been a place of good morals. One of the earliest Puritan regulations of this place was that licensed liquor-sellers should not sell to the young, and that half a pint only should be given to four men—an amount so small that most drinkers would consider it only a tantalization. A woman here, in those days, was sentenced "to pay a fine of fifteen dollars, or to stand one hour with a cleft stick upon her tongue, for saying that her husband had brought her to a place where there was neither gospel nor magistracy." She deserved punishment of some kind, but they ought to have let her off with a fine, for no woman's tongue ought to be interfered with. When in olden time a Yankee peddler with the measles went to church here on the Sabbath for the purpose of selling his knick-knacks, his behavior was considered so perfidious that before the peddler left town the next morning the young men gave him a free ride upon what seems to us an uncomfortable and insufficient vehicle, namely, a rail, and then dropped him into the duck-pond. But such conduct was not sanctioned by the better people of the place. Nothing could be more unwholesome for a man with the measles than a plunge in a duck-pond, and so the peddler recovered one thousand dollars damage. So you see that every form of misdemeanor was sternly put down. Think of the high state of morals and religion which induced this people, at an early day, at a political town-meeting, to adopt this decree: "We do sociate and conjoin ourselves and successors to be one town or corporation, and do for ourselves and our successors, and such as shall be adjoined to us at any time hereafter, enter into combination and confederation together to maintain and preserve the purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ which we now possess."

The pledge of that day has been fully kept; and for sobriety, industry, abhorrence of evil and adherence to an unmixed gospel, we know not the equal of this place.

That document of two centuries ago reads strangely behind the times, but it will be some hundreds of years yet before other communities come up to the point where that document stops. All our laws and institutions are yet to be Christianized. The Puritans took possession of this land in the name of Christ, and it belongs to Him; and if people do not like that religion, let them go somewhere else. They can find many lands where there is no Christian religion to bother them. Let them emigrate to Greenland, and we will provide them with mittens, or to the South Sea Islands, and we will send them ice-coolers. This land is for Christ. Our Legislatures and Congresses shall yet pass laws as radically evangelical as the venerable document above referred to. East Hampton, instead of being two hundred years behind, is two hundred years ahead.

Glorious place to summer! Darwin and Stuart, Mill and Huxley and Renan have not been through here yet. May they miss the train the day they start for this place! With an Atlantic Ocean in which to wash, and a great-hearted, practical, sympathetic gospel to take care of all the future, who could not be happy in East Hampton?

The strong sea-breeze ruffles the sheet upon which we write, and the "white caps" are tossing up as if in greeting to Him who walks the pavements of emerald and opal:

"Waft, waft, ye winds, His story, And you, ye waters, roll, Till, like a sea of glory, It spreads from pole to pole."



CHAPTER XLIV.

CATCHING THE BAY MARE.

It may be a lack of education on our part, but we confess to a dislike for horse-races. We never attended but three; the first in our boyhood, the second at a country fair, where we were deceived as to what would transpire, the third last Sabbath morning. We see our friends flush with indignation at this last admission; but let them wait a moment before they launch their verdict.

Our horse was in the pasture-field. It was almost time to start for church, and we needed the animal harnessed. The boy came in saying it was impossible to catch the bay mare, and calling for our assistance. We had on our best clothes, and did not feel like exposing ourself to rough usage; but we vaulted the fence with pail of water in hand, expecting to try the effect of rewards rather than punishments. The horse came out generously to meet us. We said to the boy, "She is very tame. Strange you cannot catch her." She came near enough to cautiously smell the pail, when she suddenly changed her mind, and with one wild snort dashed off to the other end of the field.

Whether she was not thirsty, or was critical of the manner of presentation, or had apprehensions of our motive, or was seized with desire for exercise in the open air, she gave us no chance to guess. We resolved upon more caution of advance and gentler voice, and so laboriously approached her; for though a pail of water is light for a little way, it gets heavy after you have gone a considerable distance, though its contents be half spilled away.

This time we succeeded in getting her nose inserted into the bright beverage. We called her by pet names, addressing her as "Poor Dolly!" not wishing to suggest any pauperism by that term, but only sympathy for the sorrows of the brute creation, and told her that she was the finest horse that ever was. It seemed to take well. Flattery always does—with horses.

We felt that the time had come for us to produce the rope halter, which with our left hand we had all the while kept secreted behind our back. We put it over her neck, when the beast wheeled, and we seized her by the point where the copy-books say we ought to take Time, namely, the forelock. But we had poor luck. We ceased all caressing tone, and changed the subjunctive mood for the imperative. There never was a greater divergence of sentiment than at that instant between us and the bay mare. She pulled one way, we pulled the other. Turning her back upon us, she ejaculated into the air two shining horse-shoes, both the shape of the letter O, the one interjection in contempt for the ministry, and the other in contempt for the press.

But catch the horse we must, for we were bound to be at church, though jute then we did not feel at all devotional. We resolved, therefore, with the boy, to run her down; so, by the way of making an animated start, we slung the pail at the horse's head, and put out on a Sunday morning horse-race. Every time she stood at the other end of the field waiting for us to come up. She trotted, galloped and careered about us, with an occasional neigh cheerfully given to encourage us in the pursuit. We were getting more unprepared in body, mind and soul for the sanctuary. Meanwhile, quite a household audience lined the fence; the children and visitors shouting like excited Romans in an amphitheatre at a contest with wild beasts, and it was uncertain whether the audience was in sympathy with us or the bay mare.

At this unhappy juncture, she who some years ago took us for "better or for worse" came to the rescue, finding us in the latter condition. She advanced to the field with a wash-basin full of water, offering that as sole inducement, and gave one call, when the horse went out to meet her, and under a hand, not half as strong as ours, gripping the mane, the refractory beast was led to the manger.

Standing with our feet in the damp grass and our new clothes wet to a sop, we learned then and there how much depends on the way you do a thing. The proposition we made to the bay mare was far better than that offered by our companion; but ours failed and hers succeeded. Not the first nor the last time that a wash-basin has beaten a pail. So some of us go all through life clumsily coaxing and awkwardly pursuing things which we want to halter and control. We strain every nerve, only to find ourselves befooled and left far behind, while some Christian man or woman comes into the field, and by easy art captures that which evaded us.

We heard a good sermon that day, but it was no more impressive than the besweated lesson of the pasture-field, which taught us that no more depends upon the thing you do than upon the way you do it. The difference between the clean swath of that harvester in front of our house and the ragged work of his neighbor is in the way he swings the scythe, and not in the scythe itself. There are ten men with one talent apiece who do more good than the one man with ten talents. A basin properly lifted may accomplish more than a pail unskillfully swung. A minister for an hour in his sermon attempts to chase down those brutish in their habits, attempting to fetch them under the harness of Christian restraint, and perhaps miserably fails, when some gentle hand of sisterly or motherly affection laid upon the wayward one brings him safely in.

There is a knack in doing things. If all those who plough in State and Church had known how to hold the handles, and turn a straight furrow, and stop the team at the end of the tiled, the world would long ago have been ploughed into an Eden. What many people want is gumption—a word as yet undefined; but if you do not know what it means, it is very certain you do not possess the quality it describes. We all need to study Christian tact. The boys in the Baskinridge school-house laughed at William L. Dayton's impediment of speech, but that did not hinder him from afterward making court-room and senate-chamber thrill under the spell of his words.

In our early home there was a vicious cat that would invade the milk-pans, and we, the boys, chased her with hoes and rakes, always hitting the place where she had been just before, till one day father came out with a plain stick of oven-wood, and with one little clip back of the ear put an end to all of her nine lives. You see everything depends upon the style of the stroke, and not upon the elaborateness of the weapon. The most valuable things you try to take will behave like the bay mare; but what you cannot overcome by coarse persuasion, or reach at full run, you can catch with apostolic guile. Learn the first-rate art of doing secular or Christian work, and then it matters not whether your weapon be a basin or a pail.



CHAPTER XLV.

OUR FIRST AND LAST CIGAR.

The time had come in our boyhood which we thought demanded of us a capacity to smoke. The old people of the household could abide neither the sight nor the smell of the Virginia weed. When ministers came there, not by positive injunction but by a sort of instinct as to what would be safest, they whiffed their pipe on the back steps. If the house could not stand sanctified smoke, you may know how little chance there was for adolescent cigar-puffing.

By some rare good fortune which put in our hands three cents, we found access to a tobacco store. As the lid of the long, narrow, fragrant box opened, and for the first time we own a cigar, our feelings of elation, manliness, superiority and anticipation can scarcely be imagined, save by those who have had the same sensation. Our first ride on horseback, though we fell off before we got to the barn, and our first pair of new boots (real squeakers) we had thought could never be surpassed in interest; but when we put the cigar to our lips, and stuck the lucifer match to the end of the weed, and commenced to pull with an energy that brought every facial muscle to its utmost tension, our satisfaction with this world was so great, our temptation was never to want to leave it.

The cigar did not burn well. It required an amount of suction that tasked our determination to the utmost. You see that our worldly means had limited us to a quality that cost only three cents. But we had been taught that nothing great was accomplished without effort, and so we puffed away. Indeed, we had heard our older brothers in their Latin lessons say, Omnia vincet labor; which translated means, If you want to make anything go, you must scratch for it.

With these sentiments we passed down the village street and out toward our country home. Our head did not feel exactly right, and the street began to rock from side to side, so that it was uncertain to us which side of the street we were on. So we crossed over, but found ourself on the same side that we were on before we crossed over. Indeed, we imagined that we were on both sides at the same time, and several fast teams driving between. We met another boy, who asked us why we looked so pale, and we told him we did not look pale, but that he was pale himself.

We sat down under the bridge and began to reflect on the prospect of early decease, and on the uncertainty of all earthly expectations. We had determined to smoke the cigar all up and thus get the worth of our money, but were obliged to throw three-fourths of it away, yet knew just where we threw it, in case we felt better the next day.

Getting home, the old people were frightened, and demanded that we state what kept us so late and what was the matter with us. Not feeling that we were called to go into particulars, and not wishing to increase our parents' apprehension that we were going to turn out badly, we summed up the case with the statement that we felt miserable at the pit of the stomach. We had mustard plasters administered, and careful watching for some hours, when we fell asleep and forgot our disappointment and humiliation in being obliged to throw away three-fourths of our first cigar. Being naturally reticent, we have never mentioned it until this time.

But how about our last cigar? It was three o'clock Sabbath morning in our Western home. We had smoked three or four cigars since tea. At that time we wrote our sermons and took another cigar with each new head of discourse. We thought we were getting the inspiration from above, but were getting much of it from beneath. Our hand trembled along the line; and strung up to the last tension of nerves, we finished our work and started from the room. A book standing on the table fell over; and although it was not a large book, its fall sounded to our excited system like the crack of a pistol. As we went down the stairs their creaking made our hair stand on end. As we flung ourselves on a sleepless pillow we resolved, God helping, that we had smoked our last cigar, and committed our last sin of night-study.

We kept our promise. With the same resolution went overboard coffee and tea. That night we were born into a new physical, mental and moral life. Perhaps it may be better for some to smoke, and study nights, and take exciting temperance beverages; but we are persuaded that if thousands of people who now go moping, and nervous, and half exhausted through life, down with "sick headaches" and rasped by irritabilities, would try a good large dose of abstinence, they would thank God for this paragraph of personal experience, and make the world the same bright place we find it—a place so attractive that nothing short of heaven would be good enough to exchange for it.

The first cigar made us desperately sick; the throwing away of our last made us gloriously well. For us the croaking of the midnight owl hath ceased, and the time of the singing of birds has come.



CHAPTER XLVI.

MOVE, MOVING, MOVED.

The first of May is to many the beginning of the year. From that are dated the breakages, the social startings, the ups and downs, of domestic life. One-half New York is moving into smaller houses, the other half into larger. The past year's success or failure decides which way the horses of the furniture-wagon shall turn their heads.

Days before, the work of packing commenced. It is astonishing how many boxes and barrels are required to contain all your wares. You come upon a thousand things that you had forgotten, too good to throw away and too poor to keep: old faded carpet-bags that would rouse the mirth of the town if you dared to carry them into the street; straw hats out of the fashion; beavers that you ought to have given away while they might have been useful; odd gloves, shoes, coats and slips of carpet that have been the nest of rats, and a thousand things that you laid away because you some day might want them, but never will.

For the last few days in the old house the accommodations approach the intolerable. Everything is packed up. The dinner comes to you on shattered crockery which is about to be thrown away, and the knives are only painful reminiscences of what they once were. The teapot that we used before we got our "new set" comes on time to remind us how common we once were. You can upset the coffee without soiling the table-cloth, for there is none. The salt and sugar come to you in cups looking so much alike that you find out for the first time how coffee tastes when salted, or fish when it is sweetened. There is no place to sit down, and you have no time to do so if you found one. The bedsteads are down, and you roll into the corner at night, a self-elected pauper, and all the night long have a quarrel with your pillow, which persists in getting out of bed, and your foot wanders out into the air, feeling for greater length of cover. If the children cry in the night, you will not find the matches nor the lamp nor anything else save a trunk just in time to fall over it, getting up with confused notions as to which is the way to bed, unless there be some friendly voice to hail you through the darkness.

The first of May dawns. The carts come. It threatens rain, but not a drop until you get your best rosewood chairs out of doors, and your bedding on the top of the wagon. Be out at twelve o'clock you must, for another family are on your heels, and Thermopylae was a very tame pass compared with the excitement which rises when two families meet in the same hall—these moving out and those moving in. They swear, unless they have positive principles to prohibit. A mere theory on the subject of swearing will be no hindrance. Long-established propriety of speech, buttressed up by the most stalwart determination is the only safety. Men who talk right all the rest of the year sometimes let slip on the first of May. We know a member of the church who uses no violence of speech except on moving day, and then he frequently cries out: "By the great United States!"

All day long the house is full of racket: "Look out how you scratch that table!" "There! you have dropped the leg out of that piano!" "There goes the looking-glass!" "Ouch! you have smashed my finger!" "Didn't you see you were pushing me against the wall?" "Get out of our way! It's one o'clock, and your things are not half moved! Carmen! take hold and tumble these things into the street!" Our carmen and theirs get into a fight. Our servants on our side, their servants on theirs. We, opposed to anything but peace, try to quiet the strife, yet, if they must go on, feel we would like to have our men triumph. Like England during our late war, we remain neutral, yet have our preferences as to which shall beat. Now dash comes the rain, and the water cools off the heat of the combatants. The carmen must drive fast, so as to get the things out of the wet, but slow, so as not to rub the furniture.

As our last load starts we go in to take a farewell look at the old place. In that parlor we have been gay with our friends many a time, and as we glance round the room we seem to see the great group of their faces. The best furniture we ever had in our parlor was a circle of well-wishers. Here is the bed-room where we slept off the world's cares, and got up glad as the lark when the morning sky beckons it upward. Many a time this room has been full of sleep from door-sill to ceiling. We always did feel grandly after we had put an eight-hour nap between us and life's perplexities. We are accustomed to divide our time into two parts: the first to be devoted to hard, blistering, consuming work, and the rest to be given to the most jubilant fun; and sleep comes under the last head.

We step into the nursery for a last look. The crib is gone, and the doll babies and the blockhouses, but the echoes have not yet stopped galloping; May's laugh, and Edith's glee, and Frank's shout, as he urged the hobby-horse to its utmost speed, both heels struck into the flanks, till out of his glass eye the horse seemed to say:

"Do that again, and I will throw you to the other side of the trundle-bed!" Farewell, old house! It did not suit us exactly, but thank God for the good times we had in it!

Moving-day is almost gone. It is almost night. Tumble everything into the new house. Put up the bedsteads. But who has the wrench, and who the screws? Packed up, are they? In what box? It may be any one of the half dozen. Ah! now I know in which box you will find it; in the last one you open! Hungry, are you? No time to talk of food till the crockery is unpacked. True enough, here they come. That last jolt of the cart finished the teacups. The jolt before that fractured some of the plates, and Bridget now drops the rest of them. The Paradise of crockery-merchants is moving-day. I think, from the results which I see, that they must about the first of May spend most of their time in praying for success in business.

Seated on the boxes, you take tea, and then down with the carpets. They must be stretched, and pieced, and pulled, and matched. The whole family are on their knees at the work, and red in the face, and before the tacks are driven all the fingers have been hammered once and are taking a second bruising. Nothing is where you expected to find it. Where is the hammer? Where are the tacks? Where the hatchet? Where the screw-driver? Where the nails? Where the window-shades? Where is the slat to that old bedstead? Where are the rollers to that stand? The sweet-oil has been emptied into the blackberry-jam. The pickles and the plums have gone out together a-swimming. The lard and the butter have united as skillfully as though a grocer had mixed them. The children who thought it would be grand sport to move are satiated, and one-half the city of New York at the close of May-day go to bed worn out, sick and disgusted. It is a social earthquake that annually shakes the city.

It may be that very soon some of our rich relatives will, at their demise, "will" us each one a house, so that we shall be permanently fixed. We should be sorry to have them quit the world under any circumstances; but if, determined to go anyhow, they should leave us a house, the void would not be so large, especially if it were a house, well furnished and having all the modern improvements. We would be thankful for any good advice they might leave us, but should more highly appreciate a house.

May all the victims of moving-day find their new home attractive! If they have gone into a smaller house, let them congratulate themselves at the thought that it takes less time to keep a small house clean than a big one. May they have plenty of Spaulding's glue with which to repair breakages! May the carpets fit better than they expected, and the family that moved out have taken all their cockroaches and bedbugs with them!

And, better than all—and this time in sober earnest—by the time that moving-day comes again, may they have made enough money to buy a house from which they will never have to move until the House of many mansions be ready to receive them!



CHAPTER XLVII.

ADVANTAGE OF SMALL LIBRARIES.

We never see a valuable book without wanting it. The most of us have been struck through with a passion for books. Town, city and state libraries to us are an enchantment. We hear of a private library of ten thousand volumes, and think what a heaven the owner must be living in. But the probability is that the man who has five hundred volumes is better off than the man who has five thousand. The large private libraries in uniform editions, and unbroken sets, and Russia covers, are, for the most part, the idlers of the day; while the small libraries, with broken-backed books, and turned-down leaves, and lead-pencil scribbles in the margin, are doing the chief work for the world and the Church.

For the most part, the owners of large collections have their chief anxiety about the binding and the type. Take down the whole set of Walter Scott's novels, and find that only one of them has been read through. There are Motley's histories on that shelf; but get into conversation about the Prince of Orange, and see that Motley has not been read. I never was more hungry than once while walking in a Charleston mill amid whole harvests of rice. One handful of that grain in a pudding would have been worth more to me than a thousand tierces uncooked. Great libraries are of but little value if unread, and amid great profusion of books the temptation is to read but little. If a man take up a book, and feel he will never have a chance to see it again, he says: "I must read it now or never," and before the day is past has devoured it. The owner of the large library says: "I have it on my shelf, and any time can refer to it."

What we can have any time we never have. I found a group of men living at the foot of Whiteface Mountain who had never been to the top, while I had come hundreds of miles to ascend it. They could go any time so easily. It is often the case that those who have plain copies of history are better acquainted with the past than those who have most highly adorned editions of Bancroft, Prescott, Josephus and Herodotus. It ought not so to be, you say. I cannot help that; so it is.

Books are sometimes too elegantly bound to be read. The gilt, the tinge, the ivory, the clasps, seem to say: "Hands off!" The thing that most surprised me in Thomas Carlyle's library was the fewness of the books. They had all seen service. None of them had paraded in holiday dress. They were worn and battered. He had flung them at the ages.

More beautiful than any other adornments are the costly books of a princely library; but let not the man of small library stand looking into the garnished alcoves wishing for these unused volumes. The workman who dines on roast beef and new Irish potatoes will be healthier and stronger than he who begins with "mock-turtle," and goes up through the lane of a luxuriant table till he comes to almond-nuts. I put the man of one hundred books, mastered, against the man of one thousand books of which he has only a smattering.

On lecturing routes I have sometimes been turned into costly private libraries to spend the day; and I reveled in the indexes, and scrutinized the lids, and set them back in as straight a row as when I found them, yet learned little. But on my way home in the cars I took out of my satchel a book that had cost me only one dollar and a half, and afterward found that it had changed the course of my life and helped decide my eternal destiny.

We get many letters from clergymen asking advice about reading, and deploring their lack of books. I warrant they all have books enough to shake earth and heaven with, if the books were rightly used. A man who owns a Bible has, to begin with, a library as long as from here to heaven. The dullest preachers I know of have splendid libraries. They own everything that has been written on a miracle, and yet when you hear them preach, if you did not get sound asleep, that would be a miracle. They have all that Calvin and other learned men wrote about election, and while you hear them you feel that you have been elected to be bored. They have been months and years turning over the heavy tomes on the divine attributes, trying to understand God, while some plain Christian, with a New Testament in his hand, goes into the next alley, and sees in the face of an invalid woman peace and light and comfort and joy which teach him in one hour what God is.

There are two kinds of dullness—learned dullness and ignorant dullness. We think the latter preferable, for it is apt to be more spicy. You cannot measure the length of a man's brain, nor the width of his heart, nor the extent of his usefulness by the size of his library.

Life is so short you cannot know everything. There are but few things we need to know, but let us know them well. People who know everything do nothing. You cannot read all that comes out. Every book read without digestion is so much dyspepsia. Sixteen apple-dumplings at one meal are not healthy.

In our age, when hundreds of books are launched every day from the press, do not be ashamed to confess ignorance of the majority of the volumes printed. If you have no artistic appreciation, spend neither your dollars nor your time on John Ruskin. Do not say that you are fond of Shakespeare if you are not interested in him, and after a year's study would not know Romeo from John Falstaff. There is an amazing amount of lying about Shakespeare.

Use to the utmost what books you have, and do not waste your time in longing after a great library. You wish you could live in the city and have access to some great collection of books. Be not deceived. The book of the library which you want will be out the day you want it. I longed to live in town that I might be in proximity to great libraries. Have lived in town thirteen years, and never found in the public library the book I asked for but once; and getting that home, I discovered it was not the one I wanted. Besides, it is the book that you own that most profits, not that one which you take from "The Athenaeum" for a few days.

Excepting in rare cases, you might as well send to the foundling hospital and borrow a baby as to borrow a book with the idea of its being any great satisfaction. We like a baby in our cradle, but prefer that one which belongs to the household. We like a book, but want to feel it is ours. We never yet got any advantage from a borrowed book. We hope those never reaped any profit from the books they borrowed from us, but never returned. We must have the right to turn down the leaf, and underscore the favorite passage, and write an observation in the margin in such poor chirography that no one else can read it and we ourselves are sometimes confounded.

All success to great libraries, and skillful book-bindery, and exquisite typography, and fine-tinted plate paper, and beveled boards, and gilt edges, and Turkey morocco! but we are determined that frescoed alcoves shall not lord it over common shelves, and Russia binding shall not overrule sheepskin, and that "full calf" shall not look down on pasteboard. We war not against great libraries. We only plead for the better use of small ones.



CHAPTER XLVIII.

REFORMATION IN LETTER-WRITING.

We congratulate the country on the revolution in epistolary correspondence. Through postal cards we not only come to economy in stamps, and paper, and ink, and envelopes, but to education in brevity. As soon as men and women get facility in composition they are tempted to prolixity. Hence some of us formed the habit of beginning to read a letter on the second page, because we knew that the writer would not get a-going before that; and then we were apt to stop a page or two before the close, knowing that the remaining portions would be taken in putting down the brakes.

The postal card is a national deliverance. Without the conventional "I take my pen in hand," or other rigmarole—which being translated means, "I am not quite ready to begin just now, but will very soon"—the writer states directly, and in ten or twenty words, all his business.

While no one can possibly have keener appreciation than we of letters of sympathy, encouragement and good cheer, there is a vast amount of letter-writing that amounts to nothing. Some of them we carry in our pockets, and read over and over again, until they are worn out with handling. But we average about twenty begging letters a day. They are always long, the first page taken up in congratulations upon "big heart," "wide influence," "Christian sympathies," and so on, winding up with a solicitation for five dollars, more or less. We always know from the amount of lather put on that we are going to be shaved. The postal card will soon invade even that verbosity, and the correspondent will simply say, "Poor—very—children ten—chills and fever myself—no quinine—desperate— your money or your life—Bartholomew Wiggins, Dismal Swamp, Ia."

The advantage of such a thing is that, if you do not answer such a letter no offence is taken, it is so short and costs only a cent; whereas, if the author had taken a great sheet of letter paper, filled it with compliments and graceful solicitations, folded it, and run the gummed edge along the lips at the risk of being poisoned, and stuck on a stamp (after tedious examination of it to see whether or not it had been used before, or had only been mauled in your vest pocket), the offence would have been mortal, and you would have been pronounced mean and unfit for the ministry.

Postal cards are likewise a relief to that large class of persons who by sealed envelope are roused to inquisitiveness. As such a closed letter lies on the mantel-piece unopened, they wonder whom it is from, and what is in it, and they hold it up between them and the light to see what are the indications, and stand close by and look over your shoulder while you read it, and decipher from your looks whether it is a love-letter or a dun. The postal card is immediate relief to them, for they can read for themselves, and can pick up information on various subjects free of charge.

But, after all, the great advantage of this new postal arrangement is economy in the consumption of time. It will practically add several years to a man's life, and will keep us a thousand times, at the beginning of our letters, from saying "Dear Sir" to those who are not at all dear, and will save us from surrendering ourselves with a "Yours, truly," to those to whom we will never belong. We hail the advent of the postal-card system.



CHAPTER XLIX.

ROYAL MARRIAGES.

There has lately been such a jingle of bells in St. Petersburg and London that we have heard them quite across the sea. The queen's son has married the daughter of the Russian emperor. We are glad of it. It is always well to have people marry who are on the same level. The famous affiancing in New York of a coachman with the daughter of the millionaire who employed him did not turn out well. It was bad for her, but worse for the coachman. Eagle and ox are both well in their places, but let them not marry. The ox would be dizzy in the eyrie, and the eagle ill at home in the barnyard. When the children of two royal homes are united, there ought be no begrudging of powder for the cannonading, or of candles for the illumination. All joy to the Duke of Edinburgh and his fortunate duchess.

But let not our friends across the sea imagine that we have no royal marriages here in this western wilderness. Whenever two hearts come together pledged to make each other happy, binding all their hopes and fears and anticipations in one sheaf, calling on God to bless and angels to witness, though no organ may sound the wedding-march, and no bells may chime, and no Dean of Westminster travel a thousand miles to pronounce the ceremony,—that is a royal marriage.

When two young people start out on life together with nothing but a determination to succeed, avoiding the invasion of each other's idiosyncrasies, not carrying the candle near the gunpowder, sympathetic with each other's employment, willing to live on small means till they get large facilities, paying as they go, taking life here as a discipline, with four eyes watching its perils, and with four hands fighting its battles, whatever others may say or do,—that is a royal marriage. It is so set down in the heavenly archives, and the orange blossoms shall wither on neither side the grave.

We deplore the fact that because of the fearful extravagances of modern society many of our best people conclude that they cannot possibly afford to marry.

We are getting a fearful crop of old bachelors. They swarm around us. They go through life lopsided. Half dressed, they sit round cold mornings, all a-shiver, sewing on buttons and darning socks, and then go down to a long boarding-house table which is bounded on the north and south and east and west by the Great Sahara Desert. We do not pity them at all. May all their buttons be off to-morrow morning! Why do they not set up a plain home of their own and come into the ark two and two?

The supporting of a wife is looked upon as a great horror. Why, dear friends, with right and healthy notions of time and eternity it is very easy to support a wife if she be of the kind worth supporting. If she be educated into false notions of refinement and have "young ladies' institutes" piled on her head till she be imbecile, you will never be able to support her. Everything depends on whether you take for your wife a woman or a doll-baby. Our opinion is that three-fourths the successful men of the day owe much of their prosperity to the wife's help. The load of life is so heavy it takes a team of two to draw it. The ship wants not only a captain, but a first mate. Society to-day, trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic, very much needs more royal marriages.



CHAPTER L.

THREE VISITS.

Yesterday was Saturday to you, but it was Sunday to me. In other words, it was a day of rest. We cannot always be working. If you drive along in a deep rut, and then try to turn off, you are very apt to break the shafts. A skillful driver is careful not to get into a deep rut. You cannot always be keeping on in the same way. We must have times of leisure and recreation.

A great deal of Christian work amounts to nothing, from the fact that it is not prefaced and appendixed by recreation. Better take hold of a hammer and give one strong stroke and lay it down than to be all the time so fagged out that we cannot move the hammer.

Well, yesterday being a day of rest to me, I made three visits in New York.

The first was to the Tombs—an institution seemingly full now, a man or woman or boy at every wicket. A great congregation of burglars, thieves, pickpockets and murderers. For the most part, they are the clumsy villains of society; the nimble, spry ones get out of the way, and are not caught. There are those who are agile as well as depraved in that dark place. Stokes, representing the aristocracy of crime; Foster, the democracy of sin; and Rozensweig, the brute. Each cell a commentary upon the Scripture passage, "The way of the transgressor is hard."

I was amazed to see that the youth are in the majority in that building. I said to the turnkey: "What a pity it is that that bright fellow is in here!" "Oh," he says, "these bright fellows keep us busy." I talked some with the boys, and they laughed; but there was a catch in the guffaw, as though the laughter on its way had stumbled over a groan. It was not a deep laugh and a laugh all over, as boys generally do when they are merry. These boys have had no chance. They have been in the school of crime all their days, and are now only taking their degree of "M.V."—master of villainy.

God hasten the time when our Sabbath-schools, instead of being flower-pots for a few choice children, shall gather up the perishing rabble outside, like Ralph Wells' school in New York, and Father Hawley's school in Hartford, and John Wanamaker's school in Philadelphia! There is not much chance in our fashionable Sunday-schools for a boy out at the elbows. Many of our schools pride themselves on being gilt-edged; and when-we go out to fulfill the Saviour's command, "Feed my lambs," we look out chiefly for white fleeces. I like that school the best, which, in addition to the glorious gospel, carries soap and fine-tooth combs. God save the dying children of the street! I saw a child in the Tombs four years of age, and said, "What in the world can this little child be doing here?" They told me the father had been arrested and the child had to go with him. Allegory, parable, prophecy: "Where the father goes the child goes." Father inside the grates, and son outside waiting to get in.

All through the corridors of that prison I saw Scripture passages: "I am the way of life;" "Believe in the Lord, and thou shalt be saved;" and like passages. Who placed them there? The turnkey? No. The sheriff? No. They are marks left by the city missionary and Christian philanthropist in recognition of that gospel by which the world is to be regenerated or never saved at all.

I wish they would get some other name for that—the Tombs—for it is the cleanest prison I ever saw. But the great want of that prison and of all others is sunshine. God's light is a purifier. You cannot expect reformation where you brood over a man with perpetual midnight. Oh that some Howard or Elizabeth Fry would cry through all the dungeons of the earth, "Let there be light!" I never heard of anybody being brought to God or reformed through darkness. God Himself is light, and that which is most like God is most healthful and pure.

Saddened by this awful wreck of men and morals, we came along the corridors where the wives stood weeping at the wicket-door of their husbands, and parents over their lost children. It was a very sad place. There were some men I was surprised to find there—men whom I had seen in other places, in holy places, in consecrated places.

We came out into the sunlight after that, and found ourselves very soon in the art-gallery at Twenty-third street. That was my second visit. Mr. Kensett, the great artist, recently died, and six hundred and fifty of his pictures are now on exhibition. In contrast with the dark prison scene, how beautiful the canvas! Mr. Kensett had an irresistible way of calling trees and rocks and waters into his pictures. He only beckoned and they came. Once come, he pinioned them for ever. Why, that man could paint a breeze on the water, so it almost wet your face with the spray. So restful are his pictures you feel after seeing them as though for half a day you had been sprawled under a tree in July weather, summered through and through.

Thirty of such pictures he painted each year in one hundred and twenty days, and then died—quickly and unwarned, dropping his magician's wand, to be picked up never. I wondered if he was ready, and if the God whom he had often met amid the moss on the sea-cliffs and in the offing was the God who pardoned sin and by His grace saves painter and boor. The Lord bless the unappreciated artists; they do a glorious work for God and the world, but for the most part live in penury, and the brightest color on their palette is crimson with their own blood.

May the time hasten when the Frenchmen who put on canvas their Cupids poorly clad, and the Germans who hang up homely Dutch babies in the arms of the Virgin Mary and call them Madonnas, shall be overruled by the artists who, like Kensett, make their canvas a psalm of praise to the Lord of the winds and the waters!

I stepped across the way into the Young Men's Christian Association of New York, with its reading-rooms and library and gymnasium and bath-rooms, all means of grace—a place that proposes to charm young men from places of sin by making religion attractive. It is a palace for the Lord—the pride of New York, or ought to be; I do not believe it really is, but it ought to be. It is fifty churches with its arms of Christian usefulness stretched out toward the young men.

If a young man come in mentally worn out, it gives him dumb-bells, parallel bars and a bowling-alley with no rum at either end of it. If physically worsted, it rests him amid pictures and books and newspapers. If a young man come in wanting something for the soul, there are the Bible-classes, prayer-meetings and preaching of the gospel.

Religion wears no monk's cowl in that place, no hair shirt, no spiked sandals, but the floor and the ceiling and the lounges and the tables and the cheerful attendants seem to say: "Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace."

I never saw a more beautiful scene in any public building than on one of these bright sofas, fit for any parlor in New York, where lay a weary, plain, exhausted man resting—sound asleep.

Another triumph of Christianity that building is—a Christianity that is erecting lighthouses on all the coasts, and planting its batteries on every hill-top, and spreading its banquets all the world over.

Well, with these reflections I started for Brooklyn. It was just after six o'clock, and tired New York was going home. Street cars and ferries all crowded. Going home! Some to bright places; to be lovingly greeted and warmed and fed and rested. Others to places dark and uncomely; but as I sat down in my own home I could not help thinking of the three spectacles. I had seen during the day Sin, in its shame; Art, in its beauty; Religion, in its work of love. God give repentance to the first, wider appreciation to the second, and universal conquest to the third!



CHAPTER LI.

MANAHACHTANIENKS.

We should like to tell so many of our readers as have survived the pronunciation of the above word that the Indians first called the site on which New York was built Manahachtanienks. The translation of it is, "The place where they all got drunk." Most uncomplimentary title; We are glad that it has been changed; for though New York has several thousand unlicensed grogshops, we consider the name inappropriate, although, if intemperance continues to increase as rapidly for the next hundred years as during the last twenty years, the time will come when New York may appropriately take its old Indian nomenclature.

Old-time New York is being rapidly forgotten, and it may be well to revive some historical facts. At an expense of three thousand dollars a year men with guide-book in hand go through the pyramids of Egypt and the picture-galleries of Rome and the ruins of Pompeii, when they have never seen the strange and historical scenes at home.

We advise the people who live in Brooklyn, Jersey City and up-town New York to go on an exploration.

Go to No. 1 Broadway and remember that George Washington and Lord Cornwallis once lived there.

Go to the United States Treasury, on Wall Street, and remember that in front of it used to stand a pillory and a whipping-post.

In a building that stood where the United States Treasury stands, General Washington was installed as President. In the open balcony he stood with silver buckles and powdered hair, in dress of dark silk velvet. (People in those days dressed more than we moderns. Think of James Buchanan or General Grant inaugurated with hair and shoes fixed up like that!)

Go to the corner of Pearl and Broad streets, and remember that was the scene of Washington's farewell to the officers with whom he had been so long associated.

Go to Canal street, and remember it was so called because it once was literally a canal.

The electric telegraph was born in the steeple of the old Dutch Church, now the New York post-office—that is, Benjamin Franklin made there his first experiments in electricity. When the other denominations charge the Dutch Church with being slow, they do not know that the world got its lightning out of one of its church steeples.

Washington Irving was born in William street, halfway between John and Fulton. "Knickerbocker" was considered very saucy; but if any man ever had a right to say mirthful things about New York, it was Washington Irving, who was born there. At the corner of Varick and Charlton streets was a house in which Washington, John Adams and Aaron Burr resided.

George Whitefield preached at the corner of Beekman and Nassau streets.

But why particularize, when there is not a block or a house on the great thoroughfare which has not been the scene of a tragedy, a fortune ruined, a reputation sacrificed, an agony suffered or a soul lost?



CHAPTER LII.

A DIP IN THE SEA.

Shakespeare has been fiercely mauled by the critics for confusion of metaphor in speaking of taking up "arms against a sea of troubles." The smart fellows say, How could a man take "arms against a sea?" In other words, it is not possible to shoot the Pacific Ocean. But what Shakespeare suggests is, this jocund morning, being done all around the coast from Florida to Newfoundland, especial regiments going out from Cape May, Long Branch, East Hampton, Newport and Nahant; ten thousand bathers, with hands thrown into the air, "taking up arms against the sea." But the old giant has only to roll over once on his bed of seaweed, and all this attacking host are flung prostrate upon the beach.

The sensation of sea-bathing is about the same everywhere. First you have the work of putting on the appropriate dress, sometimes wet and chill from the previous bathing. You get into the garments cautiously, touching them at as few points as possible, your face askew, and with a swift draft of breath through your front teeth, punctuating the final lodgment of each sleeve and fold with a spasmodic "Oh!" Then, having placed your watch where no villainous straggler may be induced to examine it to see whether he can get to the depot in time for the next train, you issue forth ingloriously, your head down in consciousness that you are cutting a sorry figure before the world. Barefoot as a mendicant, your hair disheveled in the wind, the stripes of your clothes strongly suggestive of Sing Sing, your appearance a caricature of humankind, you wander up and down the beach a creature that the land is evidently trying to shake off and the sea is unwilling to take. But you are consoled by the fact that all the rest are as mean and forlorn-looking as yourself; and so you wade in, over foot-top, unto the knee, and waist deep. The water is icy-cold, so that your teeth chatter and your frame quakes, until you make a bold dive; and in a moment you and the sea are good friends, and you are not certain whether you have surrendered to the ocean or the ocean has surrendered to you.

At this point begin the raptures of bathing. You have left the world on the beach, and are caught up in the arms of experiences that you never feel on land. If you are far enough out, the breaking wave curves over you like a roof inlaid and prismatic, bending down on the other side of you in layers of chalk and drifts of snow, and the lightning flash of the foam ends in the thunder of the falling wave. You fling aside from your arms, as worthless, amethyst and emerald and chrysoprase. Your ears are filled with the halo of sporting elements, and your eyes with all tints and tinges and double-dyes and liquid emblazonment. You leap and shout and clap your hands, and tell the billows to come on, and in excess of glee greet persons that you never saw before and never will again, and never want to, and act so wildly that others would think you demented but that they also are as fully let loose; so that if there be one imbecile there is a whole asylum of lunatics.

It is astonishing how many sounds mingle in the water: the faint squall of the affrighted child, the shrill shriek of the lady just introduced to the uproarious hilarities, the souse of the diver, the snort of the half-strangled, the clear giggle of maidens, the hoarse bellow of swamped obesity, the whine of the convalescent invalid, the yell of unmixed delight, the te-hee and squeak of the city exquisite learning how to laugh out loud, the splash of the brine, the cachinnation of a band of harmless savages, the stun of the surge on your right ear, the hiss of the surf, the saturnalia of the elements; while overpowering all other sounds are the orchestral harmonics of the sea, which roll on through the ages, all shells, all winds, all caverns, all billows heard in "the oratorio of the creation."

But while bathing, the ludicrous will often break through the grand. Swept hither and thither, you find, moving in reel and cotillon, saraband and rigadoon and hornpipe, Quakers and Presbyterians who are down on the dance. Your sparse clothing feels the stress of the waves, and you think what an awful thing it would be if the girdle should burst or a button break, and you should have, out of respect to the feelings of others, to go up the beach sidewise or backward or on your hands and knees.

Close beside you, in the surf, is a judge of the Court of Appeals, with a garment on that looks like his grandmother's night-gown just lifted from the wash-tub and not yet wrung out. On the other side is a maiden with a twenty-five-cent straw hat on a head that ordinarily sports a hundred dollars' worth of millinery. Yonder is a doctor of divinity with his head in the sand and his feet beating the air, traveling heavenward, while his right hand clutches his wife's foot, as much as to say, "My feet are useless in this emergency; give me the benefit of yours."

Now a stronger wave, for which none are ready, dashes in, and with it tumble ashore, in one great wreck of humanity, small craft and large, stout hulk and swift clipper, helm first, topsail down, forestay-sail in tatters, keel up, everything gone to pieces in the swash of the surges.

Oh, the glee of sea-bathing! It rouses the apathetic. It upsets the supercilious and pragmatical. It is balsamic for mental wounds. It is a tonic for those who need strength, and an anodyne for those who require soothing, and a febrifuge for those who want their blood cooled; a filling up for minds pumped dry, a breviary for the superstitious with endless matins and vespers, and to the Christian an apocalyptic vision where the morning sun gilds the waters, and there is spread before him "a sea of glass mingled with fire." "Thy way, O God, is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters!"



CHAPTER LIII.

HARD SHELL CONSIDERATIONS.

The plumage of the robin red-breast, the mottled sides of the Saranac trout, the upholstery of a spider's web, the waist of the wasp fashionably small without tight lacing, the lustrous eye of the gazelle, the ganglia of the star-fish, have been discoursed upon; but it is left to us, fagged out from a long ramble, to sit down on a log and celebrate the admirable qualities of a turtle. We refer not to the curious architecture of its house—ribbed, plated, jointed, carapace and plastron divinely fashioned—but to its instincts, worthy almost of being called mental and moral qualities.

The tortoise is wiser than many people we wot of, in the fact that he knows when to keep his head in his shell. No sooner did we just now appear on the edge of the wood than this animal of the order Testudinata modestly withdrew. He knew he was no match for us. But how many of the human race are in the habit of projecting their heads into things for which they have no fittedness! They thrust themselves into discussions where they are almost sure to get trod on. They will dispute about vertebrae with Cuvier, or metaphysics with William Hamilton, or paintings with Ruskin, or medicine with Doctor Rush, and attempt to sting Professor Jaeger to death with his own insects. The first and last important lesson for such persons to learn is, like this animal at our foot, to shut up their shell. If they could see how, in the case of this roadside tortoise, at our appearance the carapace suddenly came down on the plastron, or, in other words, how the upper bone snapped against the lower bone, they might become as wise as this reptile.

We admire also the turtle's capacity of being at home everywhere. He carries with him his parlor, nursery, kitchen, bed-chamber and bathroom. Would that we all had an equal faculty of domestication! In such a beautiful world, and with so many comfortable surroundings, we ought to feel at home in any place we are called to be. While we cannot, like the tortoise, carry our house on our back, we are better off than he, for by the right culture of a contented spirit we may make the sky itself the mottled shell of our residence, and the horizon all around us shall be the place where the carapace shuts down on the plastron.

We admire still more the tortoise's determination to right itself. By way of experiment, turn it upside down, and then go off a piece to see it regain its position. Now, there is nothing when put upon its back which has such little prospect of getting to its feet again as this animal. It has no hands to push with and nothing against which to brace its feet, and one would think that a turtle once upside down would be upside down for ever. But put on its back, it keeps on scrabbling till it is right side up. We would like to pick up this animal from the dust and put it down on Broadway, if men passing by would learn from it never to stop exertion, even when overthrown. You cannot by commercial disasters be more thoroughly flat on your back than five minutes ago was this poor thing; but see it yonder nimbly making for the bushes. Vanderbilt or Jay Gould may treat you as we did the tortoise a few moments ago. But do not lie still, discouraged. Make an effort to get up. Throw your feet out, first in one direction and then in another. Scrabble!

We find from this day's roadside observation that the turtle uses its head before it does its feet: in other words, it looks around before it moves. You never catch a turtle doing anything without previous careful inspection. We would, all of us, do better if we always looked before we leaped. It is easier to get into trouble than to get out. Better have goods weighed before we buy them. Better know where a road comes out before we start on it. We caught one hundred flies in our sitting-room yesterday because they sacrificed all their caution to a love of molasses. Better use your brain before you do your hands and feet. Before starting, the turtle always sticks its head out of its shell.

But tortoises die. They sometimes last two hundred years. We read that one of them outlived seven bishops. They have a quiet life and no wear and tear upon their nervous system. Yet they, after a while, notwithstanding all their glow travel, reach the end of their journey. For the last time they draw their head inside their shell and shut out the world for ever. But notwithstanding the useful thoughts they suggest while living, they are of still more worth when dead. We fashion their bodies into soup and their carapace into combs for the hair, and tinged drops for the ear, and bracelets for the wrist. One of Delmonico's soup tureens is waiting for the hero we celebrate, and Tiffany for his eight plates of bone. Will we be as useful after we are dead? Some men are thrown aside like a turtle-shell crushed by a cart-wheel; but others, by deeds done or words spoken, are useful long after they quit life, their example an encouragement, their memory a banquet. He who helps build an asylum or gives healthful and cultured starting to a young man may twenty years after his decease be doing more for the world than during his residence upon it. Stephen Girard and George Peabody are of more use to the race than when Philadelphia and London saw them.

But we must get up off this log, for the ante are crawling over us, and the bull-frogs croak as though the night were coming on. The evening star hangs its lantern at the door of the night to light the tired day to rest. The wild roses in the thicket are breathing vespers at an altar cushioned with moss, while the fire-flies are kindling their dim lamps in the cathedral of the woods. The evening dew on strings of fern is counting its beads in prayer. The "Whip-poor-will" takes up its notes of complaint, making us wonder on our way home what "Will" it was that in boyhood maltreated the ancestors of this species of birds, whether William Wordsworth, or William Cowper, or William Shakspeare, so that the feathered descendants keep through all the forests, year after year, demanding for the cruel perpetrator a sound threshing, forgetting the Bryant that praised them and the Tennyson that petted them and the Jean Ingelow who throws them crumbs, in their anxiety to have some one whip poor Will.



CHAPTER LIV.

WISEMAN, HEAVYASBRICKS AND QUIZZLE.

We had muffins that night. Indeed, we always had either muffins or waffles when Governor Wiseman was at tea. The reason for this choice of food was that a muffin or a waffle seemed just suited to the size of Wiseman's paragraphs of conversation. In other words, a muffin lasted him about as long as any one subject of discourse; and when the muffin was done, the subject was done.

We never knew why he was called governor, for he certainly never ruled over any State, but perhaps it was his wise look that got him the name. He never laughed; had his round spectacles far down on the end of his nose, so that he could see as far into his plate as any man that ever sat at our tea-table. When he talked, the conversation was all on his side. He considered himself oracular on most subjects. You had but to ask him a question, and without lifting his head, his eye vibrating from fork to muffin, he would go on till he had said all he knew on that theme. We did not invite him to our house more than once in about three months, for too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

At the same sitting we always had our young friend Fred Quizzle. He did not know much, but he was mighty in asking questions. So when we had Governor Wiseman, the well, we had Quizzle, the pump.

Fred was long and thin and jerky, and you never knew just where he would put his foot. Indeed, he was not certain himself. He was thoroughly illogical, and the question he asked would sometimes seem quite foreign to the subject being discoursed upon. His legs were crooked and reminded you of interrogation points, and his arms were interrogations, and his neck was an interrogation, while his eyes had a very inquisitive look.

Fred Quizzle did not talk until over two years of age, notwithstanding all his parents' exertions toward getting him to say "papa" and "mamma." After his parents had made up their minds that he would never talk at all, he one day rose from his block houses, looked into his father's eyes, and cried out, "How?" as if inquiring in what manner he had found his way into this world. His parent, outraged at the child's choice of an adverb for his first expression instead of a noun masculine or a noun feminine indicative of filial affection, proceeded to chastise the youngster, when Fred Quizzle cried out for his second, "Why?" as though inquiring the cause of such hasty punishment.

This early propensity for asking questions grew on him till at twenty-three years of age he was a prodigy in this respect. So when we had Governor Wiseman we also had Fred Quizzle, the former to discourse, the latter to start him and keep him going.

Doctor Heavyasbricks was generally present at the same interview. We took the doctor as a sort of sedative. After a season of hard work and nervous excitement, Doctor Heavyasbricks had a quieting influence upon us. There was no lightning in his disposition. He was a great laugher, but never at any recent merriment. It took a long while for him to understand a joke. Indeed, if it were subtle or elaborate, he never understood it. But give the doctor, when in good health, a plain pun or repartee, and let him have a day or two to think over it, and he would come in with uproarious merriment that well-nigh would choke him to death, if the paroxysm happened to take him with his mouth full of muffins.

When at our table, the time not positively occupied in mastication he employed in looking first at Quizzle, the interlocutor, and then at Governor Wiseman, the responding oracle.

Quizzle.—How have you, Governor Wiseman, kept yourself in such robust health so long a time?

Wiseman.—By never trifling with it, sir. I never eat muffins too hot. This one, you see, has had some time to cool. Besides, when I am at all disordered, I immediately send for the doctor.

There are books proposing that we all become our own medical attendant. Whenever we are seized with any sort of physical disorder, we are to take down some volume in homeopathy, allopathy, hydropathy, and running our finger along the index, alight upon the malady that may be afflicting us. We shall find in the same page the name of the disease and the remedy. Thus: chapped hands—glycerine; cold—squills; lumbago—mustard-plasters; nervous excitement—valerian; sleeplessness—Dover's powders.

This may be very well for slight ailments, but we have attended more funerals of people who were their own doctor than obsequies of any other sort. In your inexperience you will be apt to get the wrong remedy. Look out for the agriculturist who farms by book, neglecting the counsel of his long-experienced neighbors. He will have poor turnips and starveling wheat, and kill his fields with undue apportionments of guano and bonedust. Look out just as much for the patient who in the worship of some "pathy" blindly adheres to a favorite hygienic volume, rejecting in important cases medical admonition.

In ordinary cases the best doctor you can have is mother or grandmother, who has piloted through the rocks of infantile disease a whole family. She has salve for almost everything, and knows how to bind a wound or cool an inflammation. But if mother be dead or you are afflicted with a maternal ancestor that never knew anything practical, and never ill, better in severe cases have the doctor right away. You say that it is expensive to do that, while a book on the treatment of diseases will cost you only a dollar and a half. I reply that in the end it is very expensive for an inexperienced man to be his own doctor; for in addition to the price of the book there are the undertaker's expenses.

Some of the younger persons at the table laughed at the closing sentence of Wiseman, when Doctor Heavyasbricks looked up, put down his knife and said: "My young friends, what are you laughing at? I see no cause of merriment in the phrase 'undertaker's expenses.' It seems to me to be a sad business. When I think of the scenes amid which an undertaker moves, I feel more like tears than hilarity."

Quizzle.—If you are opposed, Governor Wiseman, to one's being his own doctor, what do you think of every man's being his own lawyer?

Wiseman.—I think just as badly of that.

Books setting forth forms for deeds, mortgages, notes, and contracts, are no doubt valuable. It should be a part of every young man's education to know something of these. We cannot for the small business transactions of life be hunting up the "attorney-at-law" or the village squire. But economy in the transfer of property or in the making of wills is sometimes a permanent disaster. There are so many quirks in the law, so many hiding-places for scamps, so many modes of twisting phraseology, so many decisions, precedents and rulings, so many John Does who have brought suits against Richard Roes, that you had better in all important business matters seek out an honest lawyer.

"There are none such!" cries out Quizzle.

Why, where have you lived? There are as many honest men in the legal profession as in any other, and rogues more than enough in all professions. Many a farmer, going down to attend court in the county-seat, takes a load of produce to the market, carefully putting the specked apples at the bottom of the barrel, and hiding among the fresh ones the egg which some discouraged hen after five weeks of "setting" had abandoned, and having secured the sale of his produce and lost his suit in the "Court of Common Pleas," has come home denouncing the scoundrelism of attorneys.

You shall find plenty of honest lawyers if you really need them; and in matters involving large interests you had better employ them.

Especially avoid the mistake of making your own "last will and testament" unless you have great legal skillfulness. Better leave no will at all than one inefficiently constructed. The "Orphans' Court" could tell many a tragedy of property distributed adverse to the intention of the testator. You save twenty to a hundred dollars from your counsel by writing your own will, and your heirs pay ten thousand dollars to lawyers in disputes over it. Perhaps those whom you have wished especially to favor will get the least of your estate, and a relative against whom you always had especial dislike will get the most, and your charities will be apportioned differently from what you anticipated—a hundred dollars to the Bible Society, and three thousand to the "hook and ladder company."

Quizzle.—Do you not think, governor (to go back to the subject from which we wandered), that your good spirits have had much to do with your good health?

Wiseman.—No doubt. I see no reason why, because I am advancing in years, I should become melancholy.

One of the heartiest things I have seen of late is the letter of Rev. Dr. Dowling as he retires from active work in the ministry. He hands over his work to the younger brethren without sigh, or groan, or regret. He sees the sun is quite far down in the west, and he feels like hanging up his scythe in the first apple tree he comes to. Our opinion is that he has made a little mistake in the time of day, and that while he thinks it is about half-past five in the afternoon, it is only about three. I guess his watch is out of order, and that he has been led to think it later than it really is. But when we remember how much good he has done, we will not begrudge him his rest either here or hereafter.

At any rate, taking the doctor's cheerful valedictory for a text, I might preach a little bit of a sermon on the best way of getting old. Do not be fretted because you have to come to spectacles. While glasses look premature on a young man's nose, they are an adornment on an octogenarian's face. Besides that, when your eyesight is poor, you miss seeing a great many unpleasant things that youngsters are obliged to look at.

Do not be worried because your ear is becoming dull. In that way you escape being bored with many of the foolish things that are said. If the gates of sound keep out some of the music, they also keep out much of the discord. If the hair be getting thin, it takes less time to comb it, and then it is not all the time falling down over your eyes; or if it be getting white, I think that color is quite as respectable as any other: that is the color of the snow, and of the blossoms, and of the clouds, and of angelic habiliments.

Do not worry because the time comes on when you must go into the next world. It is only a better room, with finer pictures, brighter society and sweeter music. Robert McCheyne, and John Knox, and Harriet Newell, and Mrs. Hemans, and John Milton, and Martin Luther will be good enough company for the most of us. The cornshocks standing in the fields to-day will not sigh dismally when the buskers leap over the fence, and throwing their arms around the stack, swing it to the ground. It is only to take the golden ear from the husk. Death to the aged Christian is only husking-time, and then the load goes in from the frosts to the garner.

My congratulations to those who are nearly done with the nuisances of this world. Give your staff to your little grandson to ride horse on. You are going to be young again, and you will have no need of crutches. May the clouds around the setting sun be golden, and such as to lead the "weather-wise" to prophesy a dear morning!

Quizzle.—But, Governor Wiseman, does it not give you a little uneasiness in this day of so much talk about cremation as to what will become of your body after you leave this sphere?

At this point Doctor Heavyasbricks wiped his spectacles, as though he could not see well, and interrupted the conversation by saying, "Cremation! Cremation! What's that?" Sitting at the head of the table, I explained that it was the reduction of the deceased human body through fire into ashes to be preserved in an urn. "Ah! ah!" said Doctor Heavyasbricks, "I had the idea, from the sound of that word 'cremation,' it must be something connected with cream. I will take a little more of that delicious bovine liquid in my tea, if you please," said the doctor as he passed his cup toward the urn, adding, to the lady of the house, "I hope that urn you have your hand on has nothing to do with cremation." This explanation having been made, Governor Wiseman proceeded to answer the question of Quizzle:

No; I have no uneasiness about my body after I have left it. The idea you speak of will never be carried out. I know that the papers are ardently discussing whether or not it will be best to burn the bodies of the dead, instead of burying them. Scientific journals contend that our cemeteries are the means of unhealthy exhalations, and that cremation is the only safe way of disposing of the departed. Some have advocated the chemical reduction of the physical system.

I have, as yet, been unable to throw myself into a mood sufficiently scientific to appreciate this proposal. It seems to me partly horrible and partly ludicrous. I think that the dead populations of the world are really the most quiet and unharmful. They make no war upon us, and we need make no war upon them. I am very certain that all the damage we shall ever do this world, will be while we are animate. It is not the dead people that are hard to manage, but the living. Some whistle to keep their courage up while going along by graveyards; I whistle while moving among the wide awake. Before attempting this barbaric disposal of the human form as a sanitary improvement, it would be better to clear the streets and "commons" of our cities of their pestiferous surroundings. Try your cremation on the dogs and cats with extinct animation.

We think Greenwood is healthier than Broadway, and Laurel Hill than Chestnut street, Pere la Chaise than Champs Elysees. Urns, with ashes scientifically prepared, may look very well in Madras or Pekin, but not in a Christian country. Not having been able to shake off the Bible notions about Christian burial, we adhere to the mode that was observed when devout men carried Stephen to his burial. Better not come around here with your chemical apparatus for the reduction of the human body. I give fair warning that if your philosopher attempts such a process on my bones, and I am of the same way of thinking as now, he will be sorry for it.

But I have no fear that I shall thus be desecrated by my surviving friends. I have more fear of epitaphs. I do not wonder that people have sometimes dictated the inscription on their own tombstones when I see what inappropriate lines are chiseled on many a slab. There needs to be a reformation in epitaphiology.

People often ask me for appropriate inscriptions for the graves of their dead. They tell the virtues of the father, or wife, or child, and want me to put in compressed shape all that catalogue of excellences.

Of course I fail in the attempt. The story of a lifetime cannot be chiseled by the stone-cutter on the side of a marble slab. But it is not a rare thing to go a few months after by the sacred spot and find that the bereft friends, unable to get from others an epitaph sufficiently eulogistic, have put their own brain and heart to work and composed a rhyme. Now, the most unfit sphere on earth for an inexperienced mind to exercise the poetic faculty is in epitaphiology. It does very well in copy-books, but it is most unfair to blot the resting-place of the dead with unskilled poetic scribble. It seems to me that the owners of cemeteries and graveyards should keep in their own hand the right to refuse inappropriate and ludicrous epitaph.

Nine-tenths of those who think they can write respectable poetry are mistaken. I do not say that poesy has passed from the earth, but it does seem as if the fountain Hippocrene had been drained off to run a saw-mill. It is safe to say that most of the home-made poetry of graveyards is an offence to God and man.

One would have thought that the New Hampshire village would have risen in mob to prevent the inscription that was really placed on one of its tombstones descriptive of a man who had lost his life at the foot of a vicious mare on the way to brook:

"As this man was leading her to drink She kick'd and kill'd him quicker'n a wink."

One would have thought that even conservative New Jersey would have been in rebellion at a child's epitaph which in a village of that State reads thus:

"She was not smart, she was not fair, But hearts with grief for her are swellin'; All empty stands her little chair: She died of eatin' watermelon."

Let not such discretions be allowed in hallowed places. Let not poetizers practice on the tombstone. My uniform advice to all those who want acceptable and suggestive epitaph is, Take a passage of Scripture. That will never wear out. From generation to generation it will bring down upon all visitors a holy hush; and if before that stone has crumbled the day comes for waking up of all the graveyard sleepers, the very words chiseled on the marble may be the ones that shall ring from the trumpet of the archangel.

While the governor was buttering another muffin, and, according to the dietetic principle a little while ago announced, allowing it sufficiently to cool off, he continued the subject already opened by saying: I keep well by allowing hardly anything to trouble me, and by looking on the bright side of everything. One half of the people fret themselves to death.

Four months ago the air was full of evil prophecies. If a man believed one half he saw in the newspapers, he must have felt that this world was a failure, not paying more than ten cents on a dollar. To one good prophet like Isaiah or Ezekiel we had a thousand Balaams, each mounted on his appropriate nag.

First came the fearful announcement that in consequence of the financial depression we would have bread-riots innumerable and great slaughter. But where have been your riots? There was here and there a swinging of shillalahs, and a few broken heads which would probably have got broken anyhow; but the men who made the disturbance were found to be lounging vagabonds who never worked even when they had a chance.

Prophecy was also made that there would be a general starvation. We do not believe that in the United States there have been twenty sober people famished in the last year. Aware of the unusual stress upon the poor, the hand of charity has been more active and full than ever; and though many have been denied their accustomed luxuries, there has been bread for all.

Weather prophets also promised us a winter of unusual severity. They knew it from the amount of investment the squirrels had made in winter stock, and from the superabundance of wool on the sheep's back, and the lavishness of the dog's hair. Are the liars ready to confess their fault? The boys have found but little chance to use their skates, and I think the sheep-shearing of the flocks on celestial pasture-fields must have been omitted, judging from the small amount of snowy fleece that has fallen through the air. I have not had on my big mittens but once or twice, and my long-ago frost-bitten left ear has not demanded an extra pinching. To make up for the lack of fuel on the hearth, the great brass handiron of the sun has been kept unusually bright and hot. And yesterday we heard the horn of the south wind telling that the flowery bands of spring are on the way up from Florida.

The necessity for retrenchment has blessed the whole land. Many of us have learned how to make a thousand dollars do what fifteen hundred dollars—

Quizzle broke in at the first opportunity and said, "No doubt, governor, it is easy for you to be placid, for everything has gone well with you since you started life, whereas my mother died when I was little, and I was kicked and cuffed about by a step-mother whose name I cannot bear to hear."

Ha! ha! said Governor Wiseman. It is the old story of step-mothers. I don't believe they are any worse than other people, taking the average. I have often wondered why it is that the novels and romances always make the step-mother turn out so very badly. She always dresses too much and bangs the children. The authors, if writing out of their own experience, must have had a very hard time.

In society it has become a proverb: "Cruel as a step-mother." I am disposed, however, to think that, while there may be marked exceptions, step-mothers are the most self-sacrificing beings in all the world. They come into the family scrutinized by the household and the relatives of the one who used to occupy the motherly position. Neighborly busybodies meet the children on the street and sigh over them and ask them how their new mother treats them. The wardrobe of the youngsters comes under the severe inspection of outsiders.

The child, haying been taught that the lady of the household is "nothing but a step-mother," screams at the least chastisement, knowing that the neighbors' window is up and this will be a good way of making publication. That is called cruelty which is only a most reasonable, moderate and Christian spanking. What a job she has in navigating a whole nursery of somebody else's children through mumps, measles, whooping-cough and chicken-pox! One of the things that I rejoice over in life is that it is impossible that I ever become a step-mother. In many cases she has the largest possible toil for the least reward.

Blessed be the Lord who setteth the solitary in families that there are glorious exceptions! The new mother comes to the new home, and the children gather the first day around her as the natural protector. They never know the difference between the first and second mother. They seem like two verses of the same hymn, two days of the summer, two strokes of the same bell, two blessings from the same God.

She is watchful all night long over the sick little one, bathing the brow and banishing the scare of the feverish dream. After a while those children will rise up to do her honor; and when her work is done, she will go up to get the large reward that awaits a faithful, great-hearted Christian step-mother in the land where the neighbors all mind their own business.