g, or saw the bright blue eyes. When I knew him
both were young. I become young as I think of him. And this morning he
was alive again in this room, ready to laugh, to fight, to weep. As
I write, do you know, it is the gray of evening; the house is quiet;
everybody is out; the room is getting a little dark, and I look rather
wistfully up from the paper with perhaps ever so little fancy that HE
MAY COME IN.--No? No movement. No gray shade, growing more palpable, out
of which at last look the well-known eyes. No, the printer came and took
him away with the last page of the proofs. And with the printer's boy
did the whole cortege of ghosts flit away, invisible? Ha! stay! what
is this? Angels and ministers of grace! The door opens, and a dark
form--enters, bearing a black--a black suit of clothes. It is John. He
says it is time to dress for dinner.

*****

Every man who has had his German tutor, and has been coached through the
famous "Faust" of Goethe (thou wert my instructor, good old Weissenborn,
and these eyes beheld the great master himself in dear little Weimar
town!) has read those charming verses which are prefixed to the drama,
in which the poet reverts to the time when his work was first composed,
and recalls the friends now departed, who once listened to his song. The
dear shadows rise up around him, he says; he lives in the past again. It
is to-day which appears vague and visionary. We humbler writers cannot
create Fausts, or raise up monumental works that shall endure for all
ages; but our books are diaries, in which our own feelings must of
necessity be set down. As we look to the page written last month, or ten
years ago, we remember the day and its events; the child ill, mayhap, in
the adjoining room, and the doubts and fears which racked the brain as
it still pursued its work; the dear old friend who read the commencement
of the tale, and whose gentle hand shall be laid in ours no more. I own
for my part that, in reading pages which this hand penned formerly, I
often lose sight of the text under my eyes. It is not the words I see;
but that past day; that bygone page of life's history; that tragedy,
comedy it may be, which our little home company was enacting; that
merry-making which we shared; that funeral which we followed; that
bitter, bitter grief which we buried.

And, such being the state of my mind, I pray gentle readers to deal
kindly with their humble servant's manifold shortcomings, blunders, and