girl has for a young man who feels lonely. It is true that these
dear creatures are all compassion for every form of human woe, and
anxious to alleviate all human misfortunes. They will go to
Sunday-schools through storms their brothers are afraid of, to teach the
most unpleasant and intractable classes of little children the age of
Methuselah and the dimensions of Og the King of Bashan's bedstead. They
will stand behind a table at a fair all day until they are ready to drop,
dressed in their prettiest clothes and their sweetest smiles, and lay
hands upon you, like--so many Lady Potiphars,--perfectly correct ones, of
course,--to make you buy what you do not want, at prices which you cannot
afford; all this as cheerfully as if it were not martyrdom to them as
well as to you. Such is their love for all good objects, such their
eagerness to sympathize with all their suffering fellow-creatures! But
there is nothing they pity as they pity a lonely young man.

I am sure, I sympathize with her in this instance. To see a pale student
burning away, like his own midnight lamp, with only dead men's hands to
hold, stretched out to him from the sepulchres of books, and dead men's
souls imploring him from their tablets to warm them over again just for a
little while in a human consciousness, when all this time there are soft,
warm, living hands that would ask nothing better than to bring the blood
back into those cold thin fingers, and gently caressing natures that
would wind all their tendrils about the unawakened heart which knows so
little of itself, is pitiable enough and would be sadder still if we did
not have the feeling that sooner or later the pale student will be pretty
sure to feel the breath of a young girl against his cheek as she looks
over his shoulder; and that he will come all at once to an illuminated
page in his book that never writer traced in characters, and never
printer set up in type, and never binder enclosed within his covers! But
our young man seems farther away from life than any student whose head is
bent downwards over his books. His eyes are turned away from all human
things. How cold the moonlight is that falls upon his forehead, and how
white he looks in it! Will not the rays strike through to his brain at
last, and send him to a narrower cell than this egg-shell dome which is
his workshop and his prison?

I cannot say that the Young Astronomer seemed particularly impressed with
a sense of his