e phantom stoops to the beggar; its pale
lips murmur a few airy words, which announce to her the end of her
labors; a peaceful joy comes over the aged beggarwoman, and, leaning on
the shoulder of the great Deliverer, she has passed unconsciously from
her last earthly sleep to her eternal rest.

Lie there, thou poor way-wearied woman! The leaves will serve thee for a
winding-sheet. Night will shed her tears of dew over thee, and the birds
will sing sweetly by thy remains. Thy visit here below will not have
left more trace than their flight through the air; thy name is already
forgotten, and the only legacy thou hast to leave is the hawthorn stick
lying forgotten at thy feet!

Well! some one will take it up--some soldier of that great human host
which is scattered abroad by misery or by vice; for thou art not an
exception, thou art an instance; and under the same sun which shines
so pleasantly upon all, in the midst of these flowering vineyards, this
ripe corn, and these wealthy cities, entire generations suffer, succeed
each other, and still bequeath to each the beggar's stick!

The sight of this sad picture shall make me more grateful for what God
has given me, and more compassionate for those whom he has treated with
less indulgence; it shall be a lesson and a subject for reflection for
me.

Ah! if we would watch for everything that might improve and instruct
us; if the arrangements of our daily life were so disposed as to be a
constant school for our minds! but oftenest we take no heed of them. Man
is an eternal mystery to himself; his own person is a house into which
he never enters, and of which he studies the outside alone. Each of
us need have continually before him the famous inscription which once
instructed Socrates, and which was engraved on the walls of Delphi by an
unknown hand:

KNOW THYSELF.

CHAPTER XII. THE END OF THE YEAR

December 30th, P.M.

I was in bed, and hardly recovered from the delirious fever which had
kept me for so long between life and death. My weakened brain was
making efforts to recover its activity; my thoughts, like rays of light
struggling through the clouds, were still confused and imperfect; at
times I felt a return of the dizziness which made a chaos of all my
ideas, and I floated, so to speak, between alternate fits of mental
wandering and consciousness.

Sometimes everything seemed plain to me, like the prospect which, from
the top of some high moun