first old age_, to counterpoise that _second
childhood_ which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by.
The boys had remembered the old man and young father at that tender
period of his hard, dry life. There came to him a fair, silver goblet,
embossed with classical figures, and bearing on a shield the graven
words, _Ex dono pupillorum_. The handle on its side showed what use the
boys had meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of
feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its destination.
Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate, strangling cry,
which marked her first great lesson in the realities of life, the child
took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their children get, tempered
with water, and sweetened a little, so as to bring it nearer the
standard established by the touching indulgence and partiality of
Nature,--who has mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless
food of the child at its mother's heart, as compared with that of its
infant brothers and sisters of the bovine race.

But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rain-water. An air-plant
will grow by feeding on the winds. Nay, those huge forests that
overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the
air-currents with which they are always battling. The oak is but a
foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds
the future vegetable world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves
has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the
spoils of a hundred hurricanes.

Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the
shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
that,--this was all. The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them
with thin, pure blood. Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as
the white rosebud shows before it opens. The doctor who had attended
her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to "raise"
her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--thought there
was a fair chance she would take after her father.

A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white
neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years
and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the
particular persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but
thought it very shameful that everybody else did not belong. Wha