her word than _grief_
or _care_; it is _joy_. My friend, could your history be truthfully
written, and printed in the old style, are there not many passages that
would shine beautifully in golden letters? I say truthfully written; for
we are so apt to forget our joys, while we remember our griefs. Perhaps
this is because joy and its effects are so evanescent. Leland talks
beautifully of 'the perfumed depths of the lotus-word, _joyousness_;'
but in this world we only breathe the perfume. Could we eat the
lotus!... The fabled lotus-eater wished never to leave the isle whence
he had plucked it. Wrapped in dreamy selfishness, unnerved for the toil
of reaching the far-off shore, he grew indifferent to country and
friends.... So earth would be to us an enchanted isle. The stern toil by
which we are to reach that better land, our _home_, would become irksome
to us. It is well for us that we can only breathe the perfume.

Then, too, the deepest woe we may know--not the highest joy--that is
bliss beyond even our capacity of dreaming. Some one, in regard to the
ladder Jacob saw in his dream, says: 'But alas! he slept at the foot.'
That any ladder should be substantial enough for cumbersome mortality to
climb to heaven, was too great an impossibility even for a dream.

But read for yourself the faces that swirl through the streets of a
city. Now and then there is one on which the results of all evil
passions are traced. Were it not for the _brute_ in it, it might be
mistaken for the face of a fiend. Though such are few, too many bear the
impress of at least one evil passion. Every passion, unbitted and
unbridled, hurries the soul bound to it--as Mazeppa was bound to the
wild horse--to certain destruction.... But I--as all things hasten to
the end--will mention one word more--the _finis_ of the prophecy--the
_stamp on the seal_ of the record--_Death_.... We will not dwell on it.
Who more than glances at the _finis_, who studies the plain word stamped
on the seal?

Yours, MOLLY O'MOLLY.

X.

I have read of a young Indian girl, disguised as her lover, whom she had
assisted to escape from captivity, fleeing from her pursuers, till she
reached the brink of a deep ravine; before her is a perpendicular wall
of rock; behind, the foe, so near that she can hear the crackling of the
dry branches under their tread; yet nearer they come; she almost feels
their breath on her cheek; it is useless to turn at bay; there is hardly
time to m