buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple. It
takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and
writing. The temptation of money and fame is too great for young
people. Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr.----
we won't say who,--editor of the--we won't say what, offered me the
sum of fifty cents per double-columned quarto page for shaking my
young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating
vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its
wealth and splendor, but for learning that the FIFTY CENTS was to
be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal
expression of past fact or present intention.

--Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative
virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from
all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads
to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the
more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.

--I don't believe one word of what you are saying,--spoke up the
angular female in black bombazine.

I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam,--I said, and added softly to
my next neighbor,--but you prove it.

The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student
said, in an undertone,--Optime dictum.

Your talking Latin,--said I,--reminds me of an odd trick of one of
my old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English
half turned into it. He got caught in town, one hot summer, in
pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of
city pastorals. Eclogues he called them, and meant to have
published them by subscription. I remember some of his verses, if
you want to hear them.--You, Sir, (addressing myself to the
divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college, or,
what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will
understand them without a dictionary. The old man had a great deal
to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one
might say, to hibernation. Intramural aestivation, or town-life in
summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or
semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the
last week in September. This is what I remember of his poem:-

AESTIVATION.

An Unpublished Poem, by my late Latin Tutor

In candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames