rand smash-up. I shivered at the thought, and asked
an _employe_ of the road, with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few
minutes old, why there should not be a collision of the expected train
with this which was just going out. He smiled an official smile, and
answered that they arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision did
occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least eleven
persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed and
crippled!

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse. The expected
train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see it on the
track. Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look around us.

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain;
there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many
cities.

"How are you, Boy?"

"How are you, Dad?"

* * * * *

Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us
Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those
natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime-Minister of Egypt, weep
aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard,--nay, which
had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell
on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the
women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with
sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a
drop or a film of moisture.

These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or
griefs. I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice
addressed me by name. I fear that at the moment I was too much absorbed
in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time I should have
yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this meeting might
well call forth.

"You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you once
in Boston?"

"I do remember him well."

"He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown. I am carrying his body back
with me on this train. He was my only child. If you could come to my
house,--I can hardly call it my home now,--it would be a pleasure to
me."

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a "New
System of Latin Paradigms," a work showing extraordinary scholarship and
capacity. It was this book which first made me a