ime in silence! Courage, fellow-slaves, our day will come!

Chapter 40--Introspection {276}

The close of a year must bring even to the careless and the least
inclined toward self-inspection, an hour of thoughtfulness, a desire to
glance back across the past, and set one's mental house in order, before
starting out on another stage of the journey for that none too distant
bourne toward which we all are moving.

Our minds are like solitary dwellers in a vast residence, whom habit has
accustomed to live in a few only of the countless chambers around them.
We have collected from other parts of our lives mental furniture and bric-
a-brac that time and association have endeared to us, have installed
these meagre belongings convenient to our hand, and contrived an entrance
giving facile access to our living-rooms, avoiding the effort of a long
detour through the echoing corridors and disused salons behind. No
acquaintances, and but few friends, penetrate into the private chambers
of our thoughts. We set aside a common room for the reception of
visitors, making it as cheerful as circumstances will allow and take care
that the conversation therein rarely turns on any subject more personal
than the view from the windows or the prophecies of the barometer.

In the old-fashioned brick palace at Kensington, a little suite of rooms
is carefully guarded from the public gaze, swept, garnished and tended as
though the occupants of long ago were hourly expected to return. The
early years of England's aged sovereign were passed in these simple
apartments and by her orders they have been kept unchanged, the furniture
and decorations remaining to-day as when she inhabited them. In one
corner, is assembled a group of dolls, dressed in the quaint finery of
1825. A set of miniature cooking utensils stands near by. A child's
scrap-books and color-boxes lie on the tables. In one sunny chamber
stands the little white-draped bed where the heiress to the greatest
crown on earth dreamed her childish dreams, and from which she was
hastily aroused one June morning to be saluted as Queen. So homelike and
livable an air pervades the place, that one almost expects to see the
lonely little girl of seventy years ago playing about the unpretending
chambers.

Affection for the past and a reverence for the memory of the dead have
caused the royal wife and mother to preserve with the same care souvenirs
of her passage in other royal resid