tening effects of advancing age have struck me very
much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just now spoke
of the sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you know that in the
gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the harshest characters
sometimes have a period in which they are gentle and placid as young
children? I have heard it said, but I cannot be sponsor for its truth,
that the famous chieftain, Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby,
in his old age. An old man, whose studies had been of the severest
scholastic kind, used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over
and over to him. One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years
describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I remember
a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became remarkably
gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of his life.

And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their way
of coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human Jargonelles,
and must be made the most of, for their day is soon over. Some come
into their perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and they last
better than the summer fruit. And some, that, like the Winter-Nelis,
have been hard and uninviting until all the rest have had their season,
get their glow and perfume long after the frost and snow have done
their worst with the orchards. Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and
astringent fruit you condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that
which you picked up beneath the same bough in August may have been only
its worm-eaten windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the
roseate Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet-skinned
old Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were swelling
when he ripened.

----There is no power I envy so much--said the divinity-student--as that
of seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don't understand how it is
that some minds are continually coupling thoughts or objects that seem
not in the least related to each other, until all at once they are put
in a certain light, and you wonder that you did not always see that they
were as like as a pair of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous
gift.

[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of the
higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and training.
I try his head occasionally as housewives try e