when
I saw him marry her to a young man who had won her heart; and in less
than two years afterward he uncovered his white head at her grave, and
endeavored to speak words of consolation to her bereaved friends. The
last time I heard him in the country was at a conference-meeting, on a
summer afternoon, at the little school-house; and well do I recollect
how, as the late twilight drew on, and I was looking out upon the
deepening green of the trees that surrounded the humble building, his
voice trembled with emotion as he read the parting hymn:

'The day is past and gone,
The evening shades appear;
Oh, may we all remember well,
The night of DEATH draws near!

'We lay our garments by,
Upon our beds to rest;
So DEATH will soon disrobe us all
Of what we here possessed.'

"I should like," continued our friend, as we walked away after the
services were over; "I should like to go home to die, when it shall
please GOD to call me away, and have that good old man, the friend and
director of my boyhood, speak a few words over my last remains."

* * * * *

It is a pleasant thing, once in a while, to encounter a man of
imperturbable good-nature; and such a one it was, who recently, at one
of our hotels, after pulling some dozen of times at his bell, which
continued unanswered, all at once said to a friend who was in his
apartment: "I wonder if it's because I keep pulling at that bell so,
that they don't come up! I'm afraid it is, really. Perhaps they're
offended at me!" Even _such_ patience is better than loud grumbling in a
tavern-hall, and vociferous "bully-ragging" of servants.

Somebody--and we know not whom, for it is an old faded yellow
manuscript scrap in our drawer--thus rebukes an Englishman's aspiration
to be "independent of foreigners:" A French cook dresses his dinner for
him, and a Swiss valet dresses him for his dinner. He hands down his
lady, decked with pearls that never grew in the shell of a British
oyster, and her waving plume of ostrich-feathers certainly never formed
the tail of a barn-door fowl. The viands of his table are from all
countries of the world; his wines are from the banks of the Rhine and
the Rhone. In his conservatory he regales his sight with the blossoms of
South American flowers; in his smoking-room he gratifies his scent with
the weed of North America. His favorite ho