t?--Well, I pitied it. It was threadbare and transparent. Yet,
when I looked around, I felt no feminine scorn. They all appealed to me
and said:--

"We have been forty years in your service. We have seen good things and
evil things. Our faces are familiar to you. We have spent ourselves in
your service."

And I vowed that, even under the coming exigencies, when I should have
to put on an appearance of grace and dignity,--exigencies which I
clearly foresaw the moment my curate made his appearance, these old
veterans should never be set aside or cast as lumber, when their
aristocratic friends would make their appearance. And my books looked at
me as much as to say:--

"You're not ashamed of us?"

No, dear silent friends, I should be the meanest, most ungrateful of
mortals if I could be ashamed of you. For forty years you have been my
companions in solitude; to you I owe whatever inspirations I have ever
felt; from you have descended in copious streams the ideas that raised
my poor life above the commonplace, and the sentiments that have
animated every good thing and every holy purpose that I have
accomplished. Friends that never obtruded on my loneliness by idle
chatter and gossip, but always spoke wise, inspiriting things when most
I needed them; friends that never replied in irritation to my own
disturbed imaginings, but always uttered your calm wisdom like voices
from eternity, to soothe, to control, or to elevate; friends that never
tired and never complained; that went back to your recesses without a
murmur; and never resented by stubborn silence my neglect,--treasures of
thought and fountains of inspiration, you are the last things on earth
on which my eyes shall rest in love, and like the orphans of my flock
your future shall be my care. True, like your authors, you look
sometimes disreputable enough. Your clothes, more to my shame, hang
loose and tattered around you, and some of your faces are ink-stained or
thumb-worn from contact with the years and my own carelessness. I would
dress you in purple and fine linen if I may, yet you would reproach me
and think I was weary of your homely faces. Like the beggar-maid you
would entreat to be allowed to go back from queenly glory and pomp to
the tatters and contentment of your years. So shall it be! but between
you and me there must be no divorce, so long as time shall last for me.
Other friends will come and go, but nothing shall dissolve our union
based upon grati