te lively and
active. Then he told me that he had a little raft afloat on the river
above the dam which he was going to lend me, in order that I might be
able to look back, in after years, upon having done so, and get great
pleasure from the recollection. Now, I have a friend of my own who will
forego present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the
sake of manufacturing "a reminiscence" for himself; but there was
something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker found in
making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or unselfish
luxury can be imagined. After he had unmoored his little embarkation,
and seen me safely shoved off into mid-stream, he ran away back to his
hats with the air of a man who had only just recollected that he had
anything to do.

I did not stay very long on the raft. It ought to have been very nice
punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting moored to
an overhanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I was bound in
gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and cherish its
recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure into a duty. Be
that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon wearied and came ashore
again, and that it gives me more pleasure to recall the man himself and
his simple, happy conversation, so full of gusto and sympathy, than
anything possibly connected with his crank, insecure embarkation. In
order to avoid seeing him, for I was not a little ashamed of myself for
having failed to enjoy this treat sufficiently, I determined to continue
up the river, and, at all prices, to find some other way back into the
town in time for dinner. As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with
admiration; a look into that man's mind was like a retrospect over the
smiling champaign of his past life, and very different from the
Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment into the dark
souls of many good, many wise, and many prudent men. I cannot be very
grateful to such men for their excellence, and wisdom, and prudence. I
find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, full
of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and dangers, quite a
hard enough life without their dark countenances at my elbow, so that
what I want is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly
corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and
contentment.

ANOTHER

I was shortly to meet with an e