man who has
never known the want of money cannot know the sorrows and struggles of
the poor. Each must go his own way, the poor man to his pallet of straw;
the rich man to his bed of down.

In the world of dreams all are equal. It is an unreal world, true, but
to many it is the happiest. In it there are no distinctions. The woman
who is old and wrinkled and gray, who has known nothing but hard work
and sorrow in this world, in the land of dreams finds pleasure she has
never known. In spirit, she is in pleasant places, carried back perhaps
to scenes she loved in childhood, to the old home; sees pleasant faces
of the almost forgotten dead, is carried above and beyond the world of
reality into the dim shadowy land of dreams. Then comes the waking, and
with the waking the regret of what "might have been."

In this land of dreams the rich may travel with the poor, may revisit
the same old scenes, see the same faces of the dead, leave all that is
"earth earthy," and the spirit or soul wander abroad, over land and seas
and in dreams kneel again at a mother's knee repeating the prayer she
taught and which has long since been forgotten, to awake with regret to
the cares which riches bring.

There is one more journey which the rich and the poor take together and
that is down and through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

It is a curious study to watch the faces one meets in a large city or
town. Every face has a history, every life a story, if we but take the
trouble to read. The face is but an index of the heart, and even in the
heart of the happiest the "muffled drums are beating."

As Longfellow so beautifully expresses it in "Hyperion" "and then mark!
how amid the chorus of a hundred voices and a hundred instruments--of
flutes and drums, and trumpets--this unreal shout and whirlwind of the
vexed air, you can so clearly distinguish the melancholy vibration of a
single string touched by the finger--a mournful sobbing sound. Ah this
is indeed human life! where in the rushing noisy crowd, and sounds of
gladness, and a thousand mingling emotions, distinctly audible to the
ear of thought, are the pulsations of some melancholy string of the
heart, touched by an invisible hand."

An Optimist, a pleasant, sweet faced woman, with a voice like the chime
of silver bells, is saying:

"It is only to morbid and diseased minds that existence looks colorless.
People who live too much within themselves, whose imagination becomes
diso