race, which was not born when they
lay down and died.

When travellers over far-reaching deserts are lost in the great waste
that shows no friendly, guiding sign, they sometimes find, half buried
in the shifting sands, the bleaching bones of some poor creature which
has fainted and fallen, left to its fate by the companions of its
journey. Then, taking heart, they cheerier move along, secure in the
forgotten path these silent relics show. Thus over life's drear desert
do we move, seeking the path that leads us on direct, and often guided
in our wandering way by the chance sight of lost and fallen ones, whose
sad remains our errant footsteps cross. Not always clad in soft, warm,
beating life do our bones perform their noblest purpose. Beauty may lure
to ruin, but, the witching charm removed, decay may waken sober thought
and high resolve. Poor Yorick might have set King Hamlet's table in a
roar and been forgot, if, from his unknown grave, the sexton had not
brought him forth, to teach an unborn age philosophy.

My dear Madam, I am really getting too serious, philosophic, and
melancholic. I had no idea, when I asked you down to the Natural History
Society rooms to see the great Megatherium, that I was either to bury or
resuscitate you in imagination. But I must have my moral, if I draw it
from such a lean text as crumbling bones. Let us hope that what we leave
behind us, when our journey over the drear expanse of mortal life shall
cease, may serve to guide some future wanderer in the devious way, and
lead him to the bright oasis of eternal life and rest.

AN ENGLISHMAN IN NORMANDY.

A tour in Normandy is a very commonplace thing; and mine was not even a
tour in Normandy. In the six weeks which I spent there, I did not see as
many sights as an ordinary English tourist sees in ten days, or an
American, perhaps, in five. Going abroad in need of rest, I rambled
slowly about, sojourning at each place as long as I found it agreeable,
then moving on to another, avoiding the railroads, the tyranny of the
timetable, the flurry of packing up every morning. My time was divided
between some seven or eight places; and I stayed longest where there was
least, according to the guide-books, to be seen.

Travelling in this way, you at all events see something of the people;
that is, if you will live among them and fall in with their ways.

Normandy--at least the sequestered part of it in which most of my time
was passed--is