er. It is gathered in and garnered. It belongs
to us no more. No single word can ever be unspoken; no single step
retraced. Therefore it beseems us as true knights to prick on bravely,
not idly weep because we cannot now recall.

A new life begins for us with every second. Let us go forward joyously
to meet it. We must press on whether we will or no, and we shall walk
better with our eyes before us than with them ever cast behind.

A friend came to me the other day and urged me very eloquently to learn
some wonderful system by which you never forgot anything. I don't know
why he was so eager on the subject, unless it be that I occasionally
borrow an umbrella and have a knack of coming out, in the middle of a
game of whist, with a mild "Lor! I've been thinking all along that
clubs were trumps." I declined the suggestion, however, in spite of
the advantages he so attractively set forth. I have no wish to remember
everything. There are many things in most men's lives that had better be
forgotten. There is that time, many years ago, when we did not act quite
as honorably, quite as uprightly, as we perhaps should have done--that
unfortunate deviation from the path of strict probity we once committed,
and in which, more unfortunate still, we were found out--that act of
folly, of meanness, of wrong. Ah, well! we paid the penalty, suffered
the maddening hours of vain remorse, the hot agony of shame, the scorn,
perhaps, of those we loved. Let us forget. Oh, Father Time, lift with
your kindly hands those bitter memories from off our overburdened
hearts, for griefs are ever coming to us with the coming hours, and our
little strength is only as the day.

Not that the past should be buried. The music of life would be mute
if the chords of memory were snapped asunder. It is but the poisonous
weeds, not the flowers, that we should root out from the garden of
Mnemosyne. Do you remember Dickens' "Haunted Man"--how he prayed for
forgetfulness, and how, when his prayer was answered, he prayed for
memory once more? We do not want all the ghosts laid. It is only the
haggard, cruel-eyed specters that we flee from. Let the gentle, kindly
phantoms haunt us as they will; we are not afraid of them.

Ah me! the world grows very full of ghosts as we grow older. We need
not seek in dismal church-yards nor sleep in moated granges to see the
shadowy faces and hear the rustling of their garments in the night.
Every house, every room, every creaking