sadly
shake their heads, like the Jews at the sight of the second temple,
remembering the glories of that which it replaced.

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not
charm, a weary soul, and such a vacant hour there was on this same Friday
evening. The "opera-house" was spacious and admirably ventilated. As I
was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to cast
my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window a
bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It was a strange
intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces. I
called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, but "Bones" was
irresistibly droll, and Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the blazing
luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed uncared-for
down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York. Mr.
Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad,
had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious look on his
face which implied that he knew how to do me a service and meant to do
it. Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found a couch spread for
the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New York with no visits,
but those of civility, from the conductor. The best thing I saw on the
route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I am not quite
sure. There was more genius in it than in any structure of the kind I
have ever seen,--each length being of a special pattern, ramified,
reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown. I trust
some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me, to go with
the view of the spires of Frederick, already referred to, as mementos of
my journey.

I had come to feeling that I knew most of the respectably dressed people
whom I met in the cars, and had been in contact with them at some time or
other. Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us, forming a group
by themselves. Presently one addressed me by name, and, on inquiry, I
found him to be the gentleman who was with me in the pulpit as Orator on
the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem, one delivered at New Haven.
The party were very courteous and friendly, and contributed in various
ways to our comfort.

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand people in
the world, who keep going round and round behind the scen