g-off. The Spartans, I suspect, found her out
and kept her selfishly to themselves. She were indeed a goddess to be
worshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!

Endlessness is the order of the day. I ask you to compare Plutarch's
lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts
and zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in
comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine
lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print are
as dust in the balance to those of speech.

We were doing very well in Chesumpscot, but the Lyceum has ruined all.
There are now two debating clubs, seminaries of multiloquence. A few of
us old-fashioned fellows have got up an opposition club and called it
"The Jolly Oysters." No member is allowed to open his mouth except at
high-tide by the calendar. We have biennial festivals on the evening of
election day, when the constituency avenges itself in some small measure
on its Representative elect by sending a baker's dozen of orators to
congratulate him.

But I am falling into the very vice I condemn,--like Carlyle, who has
talked a quarter of a century in praise of holding your tongue. And yet
something should be done about it. Even when we get one orator safely
underground, there are ten to pronounce his eulogy, and twenty to do it
over again when the meeting is held about the inevitable statue. I go to
listen: we all go: we are under a spell. 'T is true, I find a casual
refuge in sleep; for Drummond of Hawthornden was wrong when he called
Sleep the child of Silence. Speech begets her as often. But there is no
sure refuge save in Death; and when my life is closed untimely, let
there be written on my head-stone, with impartial application to these
Black Brunswickers mounted on the high horse of oratory and to our
equestrian statues,--

_Os sublime_ did it!

THE END

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