hard, trying things often arise within a single
day, let us rightly estimate the patient well-doing of a man who has
lived a blameless life for a hundred years. When we remember what harm,
what sin, can be crowded into a single moment, let us rightly estimate
the principle that kept him so close to the Golden Rule, not for a day,
not for a decade or a generation, but for a hundred years.

"And now, as we are about to lay his deserted body in the earth, let not
our perceptions be dulled by the constant repetition in this world of
death and burial. At this hour our friend is no longer aged; wrinkles
and furrows, trembling limbs and snowy locks he has left behind him, and
he knows, we believe, to-day, more than the wisest philosopher on earth.
We may study and argue, all our lives, to discover the nature of life,
or the form it takes beyond the grave; but in one moment of swift
transition the righteous man may learn it all. We differ widely one from
another, here, in mental power. A slight hardening of some tissue of
the brain might have left a Shakspeare an attorney's clerk. But, in the
brighter world, no such impediments prevent, I believe, clear vision and
clear expression; and differences of mind that seem world-wide here, may
vanish there. When the spirit breaks its earthly prison and flies away,
who can tell how bright and free the humblest of us may come to
be! There may be a more varied truth than we commonly think, in the
words,--'The last shall be first.'

"Let this day be remembered. Let us think of the vast display of
Nature's forces which was made within the long period of our old
neighbor's life; but let us also reflect upon the bright pageant that is
now unrolling itself before him in a better world."

That evening Miss Maria and her brothers, sitting in state in the little
old house, received many a caller; and the conversation was chiefly upon
one theme,--not the funeral sermon, although that was commended as a
frank and simple biographical discourse, but the great events which had
accompanied Uncle Capen's progress through this world, almost like those
which Horace records in his Ode to Augustus.

"That's trew, every word," said Apollos Carver; "when Uncle Capen was
a boy there wasn't not one railroad in the hull breadth of the United
States, and just think: why now you can go in a Pullerman car clear'n
acrost to San Francisco. My daughter lives in Oakland, just acrost a
ferry from there."

"Well, t