y story about is dead, and the freckle-faced boy with the
buck teeth that put the rabbit in the teacher's desk, he's dead, too,
and the boy that used to cry in school when they read:

"Give me three grains of corn, mother,
Only three grains o f corn;
To save what little life I have, mother,
Till the coming o f the morn."

well, he studied law with old judge Rodehaver, and got to be Prosecuting
Attorney, but he took to drinking--politics, you know--and now he's just
gone to the dogs. Smart as a steel-trap, and bright as a dollar. Oh, a
terrible pity! A terrible pity. And as you hear the fate of one after
another of the happy companions of your childhood, and the sadness of
life comes over you, they start to tell something that makes you laugh
again. I tell you. Did you ever see one of these concave glasses, such
as the artists use when they want to get an idea of how a picture looks
all together as a whole, and not as an assemblage of parts? Well, what
the concave glass is to a picture, so such talk is to life. It sort of
draws it all together, and you see it as a whole, its sunshine and its
shadow, its laughter and its tears, its work and its play, its past and
its present. But not its future. The Good Man has mercifully hidden that
from us.

It does a body good to get such a talk once in a while.

And there are the young fellows and the girls. This young gentleman in
the rimless eye-glasses, who is now beginning to "go out among 'em" the
last time you saw him was in meeting when Elder Drown was preaching, and
my gentleman stood up in the seat and shouted shrilly: "'T ain't at all,
man. 'T ain't at all!" And this sweet girl-graduate--the last time you
saw her was just after Becky Daly, in the vain effort to "peacify" the
squalling young one, had given her a fresh egg to play with. I kind
o' like the looks of the younger generation of girls. But I don't know
about the young fellows. They look to me like a trifling lot. Nothing
like what they were in our young days. I don't see but what us old
codgers had better hold on a while longer to the County Clerk's office,
and the Sheriff's office, and the Probate judgeship, and the presidency
of the National Bank. It wouldn't be safe to trust the destinies of
the country in the hands of such heedless young whiffets. Engaged to be
married! Oh, get out! What? Those babies?

I kept awake most of the time the man was lecturing on: "The Republic:
Will it Endure?"