M.
Necker been in it, he might have been killed," she rushed to the
luckless driver, and burst on him with a storm of denunciations,
mixed with expostulatory precautions as to the future. When her
father died, Madame de Stael was plunged into despairing grief, from
which she aroused herself for a vain effort to make the public share
in the profound admiration and love she felt for him. It was one of
her greatest trials that she could not succeed in this fond
undertaking. Perhaps she was not so much deceived in her exalted
estimate of her father as has been supposed. But he lacked that
egotistical dash, those impulsive displays of daring and brilliancy,
which are needed to make a sensation, and to secure quickly a great
and lasting popularity. During the thirteen years that she survived
him, the thought of him seemed constantly present; and she often
said, "My father is waiting for me on the other shore." The touching
words, addressed to Chateaubriand a little while before she crossed
over, in which she summed up her life, were these: "I have always
been the same, intense and sad. I have loved God, my father, and
liberty." The unhappy Letitia Landon found a congenial friend in her
father, the early loss of whom was the first in the sad series of her
misfortunes. She closes her poem of "The Troubadour" with an
affecting tribute to his memory:

My heart hath said no name but thine
Shall be on this last page of mine.

Such examples as the foregoing, showing what a treasure of help and joy
the friendship of parent and child may yield to them, should teach us
to think more of it, and to cultivate with greater fidelity the
conditions of so blessed an experience.

FRIENDSHIPS OF SISTERS AND BROTHERS.

THE next class of friendships consists of those formed between
brothers and sisters. In this relation meet many favorable conditions
for carrying sympathy to a great height, when the blinding effect of
early familiarity and the palling effect of routine are prevented or
neutralized. The organic affinities and heritage derived from their
common parentage, with the memories and hopes they have in common,
are, of themselves, endearing bonds. Then there are differences
enough in the boy and the girl to give their communion contrasts and
zest. Unless they are frigid, selfish, or absorbed in counter
directions, or are the subjects of some unfortunate incongruity, a
rich friendship spontaneously arises between a brother and a siste