hat sentiment that is common to both animals and men of
spirit, a sentiment that has furnished the subject for more than one
canvas in the hands of the true and sympathetic artist, as seen on the
awakening and alert attitude of the worn-out and old decrepit war-horse,
browsing in an inclosed pasture, as he hears from afar the familiar
bugle-notes of his early youth, or some cavalry regiment with prancing
steeds and jingling accoutrements, with bright colors and shining arms,
going past the pasture, restoring for a time to the stiffening joints
and dim eyes the suppleness and fire of bygone times, with visions of
gallant charges and prancing reviews; or, how the same sentiment erects
once more the bowed and withering frame of the old veteran, and once
again fires his soul with the martial zeal of his prime as he sees the
passing colors and active-stepping regiment which he followed in the
bright sunshine and flush of his youth. Aside from these sentiments,
which might possibly have inspired David and the Dutch burgomaster with
an infusion of a new and transient good feeling, it is unquestionable
but that some heated brickbats or stove-lids, curocoa jugs or old stone
Burton ale-bottles filled with hot-water, would have been more effectual
in imparting warmth than either Sunamite or Netherland maids.

It is hard to reconcile the beliefs of some people or nations with their
manners and customs. For instance, there is the Turk; when a Jew becomes
a Mohammedan he is made to acknowledge that Jesus Christ, the son of
Mary, is the expected Messiah, and that none other is to be expected;
they know of Christ's speech on the cross, made to the repentant thief;
they believe in a heaven full of houris, with large black eyes and faces
like the moon at its full, in which all good Moslems are to have
continual rejoicings, and yet they go on performing the most barbarous
and inhuman forms of castration imaginable, which not only deprives its
victims of their virility, but subject more than three-fourths of those
operated upon to a painful death, and the remaining to a life of
continual misery. Have these poor subjects no right to future bliss, or
in what shape will they reach there? If the heavens of these eunuchisers
were like the heaven of Buddhism, or, as the Chinese call it, the
Paradise of the West, where, although all forms of sensual
gratifications are to be enjoyed, no houris are to be supplied to the
saints of Buddhism,--as even