ongings, and laughter, and tears, have passed over their graves,
what boots it to them, now, that they failed to get all they wanted?
There is indeed snug lying in the churchyard; but the flowers smell as
sweet and the birds sing as merry, and the stars look down as loving
upon the God-hallowed mounds of the lowly and the poor, as upon the
man-bedecked monuments of the Kings of men. All of us, the least with
the greatest, let us hope and believe shall attain immortal life at
last. What was there for Webster, what was there for Clay to quibble
about? I read with a kind of wonder, and a sickening sense of the
littleness of great things, those passages in the story of their lives
where it is told how they stormed and swore, when tidings reached them
that they had been balked of their desires.

Yet they might have been so happy; so happy in their daily toil, with
its lofty aims and fair surroundings; so happy in the sense of duty
done; so happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, with its
noble opportunities and splendid achievements. They should have emulated
the satisfaction told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that an enemy
was inveighing against him, when an alleged friend spoke up and said:
"You should not talk so about the President, I assure you that he is not
at all the man you describe him to be. On the contrary, he is a man of
the rarest gifts and virtues. He has long been regarded as the greatest
orator in New England, and the greatest lawyer in New England, and
surely no one of his predecessors ever sent such state papers to
Congress."

"How are you going to prove it," angrily retorted the first speaker.

"I don't need to prove it," coolly replied the second. "He admits it."

I cannot tell just how I should feel if I were President, though, on the
whole, I fancy fairly comfortable, but I am quite certain that I would
not exchange places with any of the men who have been President, and I
have known quite a number of them.

II

I am myself accused sometimes of being a "pessimist." Assuredly I am
no optimist of the Billy Sunday sort, who fancies the adoption of the
prohibition amendment the coming of "de jubilo." Early in life, while
yet a recognized baseball authority, Mr. Sunday discovered "pay dirt" in
what Col. Mulberry Sellers called "piousness." He made it an asset
and began to issue celestial notes, countersigned by himself and made
redeemable in Heaven. From that day to this he has be