eir ancestry, makes them run out their
tongues, and pokes them once or twice in the ribs, to make sure that
they are lively and robust facts capable of making a good fight for
their lives. He never likes to see any one thing too large, as a church,
a party, a reform, a new book, or a new fashion, lest he see something
else too small; but will have everything, as he says, in true
proportion. If he occasionally favours a little that which is old,
solid, well-placed, it is scarcely to be measured to him as a fault in
an age so overwhelmed with the shiny new.

He is a fine, up-standing, hearty old gentleman with white hair and rosy
cheeks, and the bright eyes of one who has lived all his life with
temperance. One incident I cannot resist telling, though it has nothing
directly to do with this story, but it will let you know what kind of a
man my old friend is, and when all is said, it would be a fine thing to
know about any man. Not long ago he was afflicted with a serious loss, a
loss that would have crushed some men, but when I met him not long
afterward, though the lines around his eyes were grown deeper, he
greeted me in his old serene, courtly manner, When I would have
comforted him with my sympathy, for I felt myself near enough to speak
of his loss, he replied calmly:

"How can we know whether a thing is evil until we reach the end of it?
It may be good!"

One of the events I esteem among the finest of the whole year is my old
friend's birthday party. Every winter, on the twenty-sixth of February,
a party of his friends drop in to see him. Some of us go out of habit,
drawn by our affection for the old gentleman; others, I think, he
invites, for he knows to perfection the delicate shadings of
companionship which divide those who come unbidden from those, not less
loved but shyer, who must be summoned.

Now this birthday gathering has one historic ceremony which none of us
would miss, because it expresses so completely the essence of our
friend's generous and tolerant, but just, nature. He is, as I have said,
a temperate man, and dislikes as much as any one I know the whole
alcohol business; but living in a community where the struggle for
temperance has often been waged intemperately, and where there is a
lurking belief that cudgelling laws can make men virtuous, he publishes
abroad once a year his declaration of independence.

After we have been with our friend for an hour or so, and are well
warmed and happy w