eople to reading and
writing. The temptation of money and fame is too great for young
people. Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr. ----
we won't say who,--editor of the ---- we won't say what, offered me
the sum of fifty cents _per_ double-columned quarto page for shaking
my young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating
vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its
wealth and splendor, but for learning the fact that the _fifty cents_
was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a
literal expression of past fact or present intention.

----Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative
virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all
that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads to
emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more
nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.

----I don't believe one word of what you are saying,--spoke up the
angular female in black bombazine.

I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam,--I said, and added softly to my
next neighbor,--but you prove it.

The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student
said, in an undertone,--_Optime dictum_.

Your talking Latin,--said I,--reminds me of an odd trick of one of my
old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English half
turned into it. He got caught in town, one hot summer, in pretty close
quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of city pastorals.
Eclogues he called them, and meant to have published them by
subscription. I remember some of his verses, if you want to hear
them.--You, Sir, (addressing myself to the divinity-student,) and all
such as have been through college, or, what is the same thing,
received an honorary degree, will understand them without a
dictionary. The old man had a great deal to say about "aestivation,"
as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to _hibernation_.
Intramural festivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a
peculiar form of suspended existence or semi-asphyxia. One wakes up
from it about the beginning of the last week in September. This is
what I remember of his poem:--

AESTIVATION.

_An Unpublished Poem, by my late Latin Tutor._

In candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rances;
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
And dreams of erring on ventifer