f the globe,
he set out for Melbourne himself, intending to take England by the way
for medical advice. At Paris he visited the Exhibition, and the next
day, at his hotel, he fell senseless to the floor. In three weeks he was
dead, at the age of fifty-one years, in the very midst of his career.

"For him," writes one of his friends, "life consisted of but one
thing--_art_. For that he lived; and, almost in the midst of it, died.
He could not have conceived existence without it. Always and under every
circumstance, he was thinking of his work, and gathering from whatever
surrounded him such information as he thought would prove of service.
In omnibuses, in railway carriages, and elsewhere, he found
opportunities of study, and could always reproduce a likeness from
memory of the individuals so observed."

I do not copy these words as commendation, but as warning. Like so many
other gifted men of this age, he lived too fast and attempted too much.
He died when his greatest and best life would naturally have been just
beginning. He died at the beginning of the period when the capacity for
high enjoyment of life is naturally the greatest. He died when he could
have ceased to be a manufacturer and become an artist.

WILLIAM B. ASTOR.

HOUSE-OWNER.

In estimating the character and merits of such a man as the late Mr.
Astor, we are apt to leave out of view the enormous harm he might have
done if he had chosen to do it.

The rich fool who tosses a dollar to a waiter for some trifling service,
debases the waiter, injures himself, and wrongs the public. By acting in
that manner in all the transactions of life, a rich man diffuses around
him an atmosphere of corruption, and raises the scale of expense to a
point which is oppressive to many, ruinous to some, and inconvenient to
all. The late Mr. Astor, with an income from invested property of nearly
two millions a year, could have made life more difficult than it was to
the whole body of people in New York who are able to live in a liberal
manner. He refrained from doing so. He paid for everything which he
consumed the market price--no more, no less--and he made his purchases
with prudence and forethought. As he lived for many years next door to
the Astor Library, the frequenters of that noble institution had an
opportunity of observing that he laid in his year's supply of coal in
the month of June, when coal is cheapest.

There was nothing which he so much abhorred