ptations are
serpent-like, but they seldom creep upon a hearthstone kept warm by
domestic affection.

"Parents who are willing to live apart for the sake of their children,
and call it a sacrifice to duty, may not know that they are hypocrites,
but other people know it. Scandal thrives upon such things, and where
scandal thrives domestic happiness perishes.

"The marriage relations are the soul of our social life; relax them,
take away one grain of their holiness, and you blast the blossom from
which wholesome fruit can spring. When love and truth dies out of
marriage, its vitality is gone. God forgive the men and the women who
dare to hold the most beautiful tie that links soul to soul, as a wisp
of flax, to be rent or burned at the will of our most evil passions.

"Can any human being make laws for himself and trample under foot those
which have been for ages laid down by society, without meeting, sooner
or later, with rebuke, and perhaps, ruin? Evil passions arouse evil
passions. The profligacy and power of gold is sometimes most dangerous
in a generous nature. In the hot sunshine of overwhelming good fortune,
fiery passions are sure to thrive and tend to a poisonous growth. War is
the mother of licentiousness. How much that men should avoid, and women
shudder at, has sprung out of the civil war, which ebbs and flows even
yet on the borders of our land! In that war men learned to be daring in
other things than brave deeds, and women learned to be shameless, and
glory in free speech, free actions, and free laws of their own devising.

"These thoughts are forced from me by the violent death of a man who had
the brain and the heart to be an honor to our State, whose capacity and
cordial good-nature might have gained him the love of better men than he
ever knew in his brief and fiery career, and who had the brain to
accomplish great things in the future."

I listened with breathless attention to what Cousin Dempster said. He
spoke with feeling. I didn't think there was so much in the man. He got
up from his chair and began to walk the room.

"I cannot dwell upon this man's wildly brilliant career," says he,
"without a feeling of melancholy. Here existed the capacities of a great
man, perfect health, wonderful energy, struggling aspirations toward the
right--which he might hereafter have reached--generous impulses running
wild, strong affections, and overweaning ambition, all turbulent
ostentations almost barbaric,