er best is in a foreign land; the one that doubled her small cares
with dolls goes every week to gaze at little gravestones, and the one
that would not stay in bed upon the sun's bright rise now sits in awful
blindness. You cannot rob these hearts of their sweet memories. The
mystic keyword unlocks the gates. The peaceful waters flow; the thirsty
soul is satisfied.

THE LONG AGO.

A lady opens a short epistle from her brother. He is rich, successful,
busy, in short driven, cannot visit her at a certain date, regrets, with
love, etc., all in ten short lines. What does this dry notice tell? It
tells of a buffalo-robe which, by much strategy, can be secured from
father's study; it tells of a daring, rollicking boy who has got the
strategy and will soon get the buffalo-robe. It tells of two boys and
three girls, all gathered in the robe, with the rollicking one as
fireman and engineer, making the famous trip down the stairs which shall
tumble them all into the presence of a parent who will make a weak
demonstration of severity, clearly official, and merely masking a very
evident inclination to try a trip on the same train.

WHERE WAS THIS?

Why at the dear old Home, in the Long Ago. Who was the fireman and
engineer? Why, this great, pompous man of business, whose short note his
sister has just laid down--of course, he was the fireman and the
engineer!

We see the sister of Rembrandt, the painter, traveling weary miles to
the house of the brother whom in youth she shielded from the wrath of a
drunken father, whose rude pictures she concealed from eyes that would
have looked upon them in anger. Now he is the most celebrated painter of
his time. He is rich beyond the imagination of his humble
contemporaries. He never receives people into his stronghold.

TWO GREAT DOGS GUARD THE ENTRANCE.

Into a gloomy portal the aged sister enters, and soon the miser and the
good angel of his past are together. There they sit in the dusk, and
recall, after sixty years of separation, the scenes of the Home which
existed eighty years before! We marvel at a word that comes along a
cable under the ocean. Why should we not also wonder at a little word
that can sound across the awful stretch of eighty years, through

AN OCEAN OF LIFE,

stormy with fearful disappointments, boisterous with seasons of success,
and desolate with the drift, the slime, and the fungus of miserly greed!

Says Dickens: "If ever household affections and