banquet. He who helps build an asylum or gives healthful and
cultured starting to a young man may twenty years after his decease be
doing more for the world than during his residence upon it. Stephen Girard
and George Peabody are of more use to the race than when Philadelphia and
London saw them.

But we must get up off this log, for the ante are crawling over us, and the
bull-frogs croak as though the night were coming on. The evening star hangs
its lantern at the door of the night to light the tired day to rest. The
wild roses in the thicket are breathing vespers at an altar cushioned with
moss, while the fire-flies are kindling their dim lamps in the cathedral of
the woods. The evening dew on strings of fern is counting its beads in
prayer. The "Whip-poor-will" takes up its notes of complaint, making us
wonder on our way home what "Will" it was that in boyhood maltreated the
ancestors of this species of birds, whether William Wordsworth, or William
Cowper, or William Shakspeare, so that the feathered descendants keep
through all the forests, year after year, demanding for the cruel
perpetrator a sound threshing, forgetting the Bryant that praised them and
the Tennyson that petted them and the Jean Ingelow who throws them crumbs,
in their anxiety to have some one whip poor Will.

CHAPTER LIV.

WISEMAN, HEAVYASBRICKS AND QUIZZLE.

We had muffins that night. Indeed, we always had either muffins or waffles
when Governor Wiseman was at tea. The reason for this choice of food was
that a muffin or a waffle seemed just suited to the size of Wiseman's
paragraphs of conversation. In other words, a muffin lasted him about as
long as any one subject of discourse; and when the muffin was done, the
subject was done.

We never knew why he was called governor, for he certainly never ruled over
any State, but perhaps it was his wise look that got him the name. He never
laughed; had his round spectacles far down on the end of his nose, so that
he could see as far into his plate as any man that ever sat at our
tea-table. When he talked, the conversation was all on his side. He
considered himself oracular on most subjects. You had but to ask him a
question, and without lifting his head, his eye vibrating from fork to
muffin, he would go on till he had said all he knew on that theme. We did
not invite him to our house more than once in about three months, for too
much of a good thing is a bad thing.

At the same sitting we