illy!"

Yes, smile perpetually! Go to Delsarte here, and learn even from the
mechanician of smiles that a smile can be indicated by a movement of
muscles so slight that neither instruments nor terms exist to measure or
state it; in fact, that the subtlest smile is little more than an added
brightness to the eye and a tremulousness of the mouth. One second of time
is more than long enough for it; but eternity does not outlast it.

In that wonderfully wise and tender and poetic book, the "Layman's
Breviary," Leopold Schefer says,--

"A smile suffices to smile death away;
And love defends thee e'en from wrath divine!
Then let what may befall thee,--still smile on!
And howe'er Death may rob thee,--still smile on!
Love never has to meet a bitter thing;
A paradise blooms around him who smiles."

Death-Bed Repentance.

Not long since, a Congregationalist clergyman, who had been for forty-one
years in the ministry, said in my hearing, "I have never, in all my
experience as a pastor, known of a single instance in which a repentance
on what was supposed to be a death-bed proved to be of any value whatever
after the person recovered."

This was strong language. I involuntarily exclaimed, "Have you known many
such cases?"

"More than I dare to remember."

"And as many more, perhaps, where the person died."

"Yes, fully as many more."

"Then did not the bitter failure of these death-bed repentances to bear
the tests of time shake your confidence in their value under the tests of
eternity?"

"It did,--it does," said the clergyman, with tears in his eyes. The
conversation made a deep impression on my mind. It was strong evidence,
from a quarter in which I least looked for it, of the utter paltriness and
insufficiency of fear as a motive when brought to bear upon decisions in
spiritual things. There seem to be no words strong enough to stigmatize it
in all other affairs except spiritual. All ages, all races, hold cowardice
chief among vices; noble barbarians punished it with death. Even
civilization the most cautiously legislated for, does the same thing when
a soldier shows it "in face of the enemy." Language, gathering itself up
and concentrating its force to describe base behavior, can do no more than
call it "cowardly." No instinct of all the blessed body-guard of instincts
born with us seems in the outset a stronger one than the instinct that to
be noble, one must be brave. Almost in the cradle t